#and shadow. shadow is not a son he's an experiment he's a lab animal he's a test subject he's the key to A CURE which may very much get

[eternalwished]

I try to give more significance to the time shadow had with gerald after gun took them both prisoners cuz. I think it's a very interesting period of time even if it was pretty short. Gun took them both alive so that gerald could continue his work on shadow & turn him into the most desired military weapon, so there must have been a time between his imprisonment & being put into stasis when shadow was awake to train, get tests & challenges, beat up gun machineries to pieces, kill some soldiers while he's at it (out of his own will), and just have a general really hard time down there on prison island.

Gerald, being a familiar face, taking care of him and grounding all his confusion, anxiety & troubled mind VS gerald constantly reminding him that all humans deserve nothing but destruction for what they've done and what they're doing to both himself & shadow at that point of time. One thing tho, gerald never mentions maria.

"A broken heart is a survival instinct", but after observing what has happened to Shadow's mind & memories after the events at the ARK, he realized that giving sentience & emotions to a being that's supposed to be perfect might have been a big mistake. A mind can weaken & break just like gerald's own was only deteriorating underneath all the loss & grief & injustice, "a heart is a heavy burden!" But it's not like he had time to fix this newfound problem, instead he cld only hide what ate away at Shadow's psyche, leaving out all the pain & tragedy of losing maria and letting only the anger & hatred towards the concept of the crime itself fester, ultimately leading Shadow to become much MUCH more ruthless & cruel compared to his past kinder pacifist self at the ARK.

[thegayhimbo]

Stranger Things The First Shadow Review

Synopsis: Following a horrific incident from their previous life in Nevada, the Creel family relocates to Hawkins, Indiana in an attempt to make a fresh start and instill a sense of normalcy in their son, Henry Creel. However, Henry is anything but normal, and harbors a dark secret of his own that scares both himself and his family. When a series of gruesome animal killings takes place, attracting the attention of a group of teenage outcasts and a Doctor with his own agenda, Henry realizes his secret is about to be exposed, and is forced into a reckoning that will change the course of his life, and of Hawkins, forever.........

Observations:

FINALLY!!!!

I've been waiting for MONTHS to see The First Shadow. As far back as January, we got tickets and made plans to travel to London specifically for this. Last Thursday (June 20, 2024), we were able to view it on-stage.

Was it worth it? Short answer: YES.

This is going to be divided into several parts. The first bit will detail my experience at the play, and the remaining parts will contain SPOILER HEAVY analysis of the story, the characters, and plot revelations tied directly to the mythology of the show. There's a lot to speculate on where the Duffer Brothers will take the final season from here.

Part 1: My Experience

In terms of production value, this was top-notch. I loved the set designs, from Hawkins High School, to the classic 50s Diner the characters hang out at, to the gothic Creel House, to the cold white rooms of Hawkins Lab, to the hellish landscape of Upside Down, and so on. The 50s aesthetic works well, and there were multiple shots that conveyed the sense I was watching an episode from the show.

The special effects were spectacular. Huge shout-out to the way they choreographed the mutilation of both animals and humans. It actually looked like bones being snapped and limbs twisted around. There's even a disturbing scene where Hopper and Bob are digging up the carcass of a butchered cat, and the prop they used for it looked realistic (combined with dirt and blood for nauseating effect). The lighting also helped elevate the creepiness of it all.

The music was also great. They had a nice selection of 50s songs, but they also brought back familiar themes from the show. One of my favorite musical cues was the use of Philip Glass's "Window of Appearances" which is heard when Vecna's origins are revealed in "The Massacre at Hawkins Lab" (Season 4, Episode 7). They also use it in the climax of this play:

The actors brought their A-game, but the two performances that really stood out for me were Isabella Pappas as Joyce and Louis McCartney as Henry Creel. Pappas does a stellar job combining Joyce's world-weary "I'm sick of everyone's bullshit" attitude with the fierceness that makes Joyce stand out as a character. It reminded me a little of Natalia Dyer's performance as Nancy Wheeler, especially with the "take charge" attitude that both of them have.

As for McCartney, he was the show-stealer. I didn't go into this play expecting to feel any sympathy for Vecna, but the emotional depth McCartney brings to his performance elevates the character to a 3-dimensional complex tragic villain, which makes his eventual fall to evil all the more heartbreaking.

The audience I was with was fully immersed. Most of the jokes got a laugh, there were a few screams when jump-scares occurred, and there was a standing ovation at the end when the cast came out to give a bow. Even during intermission, everyone was chatting happily about the play, and I heard nothing but compliments.

My only regret is, due to a scheduling conflict that day, we ended up missing the first 5 minutes, and they wouldn't let us in the theater until the title cards came up. We did see parts of the beginning on a TV screen in the lobby (and one of the patrons was gracious enough to fill us in on what happened), but I wish I'd been in the theater for the beginning. My advice is GET THERE EARLY if you plan to see it. The theater fills quickly, and they may not let you in at certain points.

The only minor nitpick I have about the quality of the play is there were a few moments I had a hard time understanding what certain characters were saying. This was mostly in the scenes with Henry/One/Vecna when he was either screaming or alternating to his demonic voice. I was usually able to figure out what was going on, but I wish the dialogue had been clearer.

Overall, this was a fun experience, and I even brought back memorabilia from it:

Part 2: Characters/Story (MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD!)

It's pretty much advertised in the synopsis, but the play takes place in 1959 when Joyce, Hopper, and Bob are in high school during the time the Creel family moves into Hawkins. The story is largely centered on Henry Creel's villain origins as he becomes more unhinged due to the power he possesses. This leads to a series of pet killings in Hawkins that catches the attention of Hopper, who ropes in both Joyce and Bob to investigate and find the culprit. All the while, Joyce is struggling to put on a play at Hawkins High School (i.e. The Dark of the Moon), which coincidentally happens to have Henry/One/Vecna as the main star! :)

These three arcs sound like they shouldn't connect at all, but to the Duffer Brothers credit, they manage to thread them in a way that's believable and engaging. Joyce's exasperated attempts to get The Dark of the Moon off the ground provide some light comedy to what is essentially a grim story, and it was a nice way for the audience to see all the adult characters from the show (i.e. Ted Wheeler, Karen Wheeler, Al Munson, Lonnie Byers, Sue Sinclair, Charles Sinclair, etc) as they were during their teen years.

The investigation of Hopper, Joyce, and Bob into the pet killings hearkens back to the old-fashioned dynamic the Party had in the first season when they were looking into Will's disappearance.

As for Henry/One/Vecna, his arc was well executed and horrifying on so many levels:

The way a young Henry Creel was portrayed in this play was oddly endearing. I mentioned earlier that McCartney brings a lot of emotional depth to the character, and by that, I mean he portrays teenage Henry as awkward, shy, creepy, funny, and even sympathetic at times. He's a kid who doesn't feel comfortable in his own skin, who has a hard time interacting with other people, and has powers that frighten him with the added side-effect of NOT knowing how to control them yet. Victor Creel mentioned to Nancy and Robin in S4 that Henry was a "sensitive child" and it turns out that was meant literally: Lights go on or off (or even explode) whenever Henry's mood fluctuates (making Henry constantly jumpy), he can unknowingly tune into the radio with his powers and mistakes it for voices in his head, he can read the thoughts/moods of other people, he can create illusions (similar to Kali/Eight), and whenever he tries experimenting with his powers, it ends in disaster. In short, he's someone who's terrified of his own shadow, and almost everything in his environment sets him off. At the same time though, there are some relatable qualities to him, such as his love for comics like Captain Midnight (which he eagerly shares with Patty), and there is an internal struggle he deals with for most of the play to genuinely be a good person in spite of the demons (both literal and figurative) that threaten to overwhelm him. He reminds me of Will Byers in some ways, and I am dead sure that parallel between these two characters was intentional on the Duffer Brothers part.

Contrary to what's implied on the show, it turns out Henry had his powers long before he moved to Hawkins. Previously, he lived in Rachel, Nevada until an incident between him and another boy resulted in said boy ending up in a wheelchair. It's ambiguous whether Henry deliberately attacked the boy or if it was an accident (it could have been either one), but it was enough to force his family to move. His parents (particularly his mother) are insistent on pretending everything is normal and that Henry will eventually get better, all the while putting more of an emotional strain on Henry as he tries (and fails) to conform.

We get a little more insight into Henry's parents, and it's not pretty: Victor Creel was already established on the show as a war veteran with severe trauma and PTSD over killing innocents during a raid, and the play depicts him the same way, with the added effect of being so wrapped up with his own issues that he fails to see his own son spiraling. The sad thing is there are scenes indicating he does love Henry (and also defends Henry's relationship with Patty, referring to it as "puppy love") but he isn't able to convey that in a way which makes Henry feel safe.

As for Virginia Creel, I don't know if this was intentional in the narration, but I found her unlikable. Putting aside the unsettling 50s Stepford Wife persona she projected, her treatment of Henry bordered on emotional abuse. She likely didn't intend that, but everything, from her attempts to keep Henry isolated from the one relationship that brings him any happiness, to constantly treating him like a time bomb waiting to go off, to pretending everything is okay when it isn't.........all of this causes whatever mother/son relationship she has with Henry to deteriorate. There's even one nasty scene where she smacks him, though she quickly regrets it when Henry lashes out in anger and forces his mom to witness a vision of herself being covered in spiders when she was locked in the closet by her abusive parents as a child. In some ways, it reminded me a little of the Norma/Norman Bates relationship from the Psycho series (minus the incest subtext) in how unhealthy it is. It was deeply uncomfortable seeing her attempt to force Henry to be something he wasn't just so she could maintain the image that she and her family were perfect. And when she realized she couldn't do that, she finally tried to wash her hands of Henry the moment Dr. Brenner showed up and offered to take Henry into his care ("Lock him up and throw away the key" to paraphrase one of her comments). I get that this is set in the 50s where there's plenty of values dissonance with how parents raised their kids at that time, and there is some context behind why she was scared of her son and his behavior (because there were times Henry wasn't acting okay), but she still handled this situation poorly and contributed to Henry internalizing his trauma and insecurities until they exploded out of him in the worst possible way. It was bad enough that Henry was dealing with something he didn't understand, but she needlessly added on to those problems.

Alice (Henry's sister) is also in the play, but she only appears in a few brief scenes, and sadly doesn't get a lot of characterization beyond being the "cheerful child" in the family. It's implied she knows that something is wrong with her brother, but doesn't look closely at it. Interestingly, they portray her like she's Henry's younger sister, even though the show established that she's supposed to be older (There's a news article in S4 that claims Henry was 12 and Alice was 15 when the Creel murders happened). Other than that, there isn't really much to say about Alice.

The three main characters (Joyce, Hopper, Bob) have their familiar quirks that will follow them into adulthood: Bob is nerdy, smart, good with technology (which comes in handy in their investigation) and the host of a radio show. Hopper is the disgruntled son of the Chief of Police who's trying to make something of his life. Joyce is high-strung, in a dead-end relationship with Lonnie, and trying to find a balance between optimism and pessimism. In a way, I'm reminded of the Steve/Jonathan/Nancy dynamic we briefly got in the S1 finale, with Joyce having similarities to Nancy, Bob to Jonathan, and Hopper to Steve. This was clearly set up as a love triangle between the 3 of them, and I have to question if the Duffer Brothers deliberately did this to foreshadow what could end up happening between Steve/Jonathan/Nancy in S5. In any case, Joyce, Hopper, and Bob investigate the animal killings when they start to happen, and while they come close to figuring out who it is, they ultimately miss the mark and pin the crime on the wrong person (Poor Victor Creel). Sadly, by that time, it's too late, and both Virginia and Alice Creel are dead.

There is a new character introduced named Patty Newby who plays an important role. She's the adopted sister of Bob and was revealed to have been taken in (or stolen as a child, as Henry later claims) by Bob's father, Principal Newby. Despite his misanthropy and awkward nature, Henry takes an interest in Patty, and the two of them develop genuine affection for one another. When Patty auditions for Joyce's play, Henry helps her with her lines (which leads to both of them getting cast as the main leads), and later feels comfortable enough to share his secret powers with her, including giving her a glamorous vision of starring and singing in a Las Vegas show. Against all odds, I actually found the relationship between Henry and Patty to be cute. Not only did it humanize Henry, but the way it was presented made sense: Both of them are outcasts with deep insecurities that they're trying to work through. Patty feels like an outsider in her family and at school due to her race (which isn't helped by people like Dustin's father making disgustingly bigoted comment towards her during class) and her complicated relationship with her adopted dad, who treats her coldly. Since Henry also feels like an outcast in his family, he's able to empathize with her, and both of them try to encourage the best in one another. In a moment of genuine kindness, Henry helps Patty locate her biological mother (who coincidentally is also a singer), and Patty returns the favor by trying to encourage Henry into believing that he is a good person and that there are positives with his powers.

I know some fans will complain about how Patty was never mentioned on the show even though she's supposed to be adopted siblings with Bob, but I'm not bothered by that. Nothing about her existence contradicts anything on the show, and it was nice to see a redeemable side to Henry that proves he wasn't a complete monster to begin with. The only thing that's harsher in hindsight is that, because Patty and Bob were close growing up, and because of Henry's affection for Patty, it makes what he does to Bob in S2 (i.e. siccing the demodogs on Bob) a lot more vile.

Finally, there's Dr. Brenner himself: If there was ever any doubt that he saw Henry and the other special kids like El as a means to an end, this play erases that. He is at his absolute worst here. Manipulative. Cruel. Determined to push Henry over the edge. Egging Henry into murdering a convicted prisoner, even though Henry fights back against doing that, all so Brenner can test him. Hurling verbal abuse at Henry, and then playing up the "Loving Papa" persona in the same way he would do with El years later. It really says something that he is the most loathsome character in the play, and that he doesn't see Henry as a person so much as a tool.

This was already a given on the show, but I still remember fans who kept making apologies for Brenner's behavior in S4 while insisting he really did care about Henry and the other kids in spite of his abuse of them. 🙄 I always maintained those were garbage apologies, and this play only reinforces that. Even though Henry is ultimately responsible for the choices he makes (regardless of the negative influences in his life), there is an argument to be had that Brenner bears responsibility for destroying whatever remaining goodness Henry had left in him until Henry became the cold, calculating monster with a plethora of rage and a deep hatred for humanity to accompany it.

Part 3: Revelations

For a while now, I've held theories that the powers El, Henry, and the other special kids have had were connected to the Upside Down. These theories were even talked about in my reviews for Stranger Things Six, Stranger Things The Other Side, and Stranger Things Suspicious Minds. I've also speculated on the idea that the Mind Flayer might be its own entity, and that Henry/One/Vecna didn't create it so much as gave it a form when he found those black particles in the Upside Down decades later.

This play confirms those theories: Not only is the Upside Down connected to their powers, but it's revealed in this play that the Mind Flayer acted as a malevolent corrupter to a young Henry, which would later lead to him becoming the monstrous Vecna.

At the beginning of the play, there's a flashback to 1943 where the U.S. military was experimenting with a new technology on the USS Eldridge to create a force field to hide the ship from the Germans during WWII. Interestingly, this bit was based on a real life experiment called "Project Rainbow," and the pamphlet I bought gives more details about it:

In the play, the technology caused the ship to end up in the Upside Down, where most of the crew was slaughtered by Demogorgons. The sole survivor turned out to be Dr. Brenner's father, who came back to the real world with altered blood in his system. He ends up dying, but passed on his secret to his son, kick-starting Brenner's scientific pursuits for the military. In other words: Brenner was aware of the Upside Down long before El banished Vecna to it in 1979.

Fast-forward a few years later. Henry is in Rachel, Nevada, playing in one of the caves with a spyglass when he encounters a rogue scientist who worked under Brenner in Nevada. Brenner had spent years attempting to replicate the experiment on the USS Eldridge in Nevada, and one of his scientists had stolen key technology and fled to the caves. When Henry discovers the technology, it transports both him and the scientist to the Upside Down. The scientist is killed, but Henry gets exposed to a malevolent entity (The Mind Flayer) before he is transported back to this world. Just like with Brenner's father, his blood is altered, and so is his personality. Brenner would later be able to track Henry down due to the spyglass he dropped in the caves after his exposure. In spite of escaping the Upside Down, Henry was now connected to the Mind Flayer, who spends the majority of the play acting as a malicious influence driving Henry to kill, and chipping away at his personality bit-by-bit:

It's not really a spoiler to say Henry is behind the pet killings in Hawkins (since he was shown killing animals on the show), but the difference here is the play makes it ambiguous how much control Henry has over his powers and actions. The Mind Flayer certainly uses Henry as a vessel, but there are moments Henry was shown to be capable of resisting it, indicating there was some manner of agency on Henry's part. In some moments, he chose to drive off the monster, whereas in others (like the deaths of Virginia and Alice Creel), he allowed the monster to work through him.

Like I said, these are theories I've held for a while now, so it felt gratifying to see them validated. While Vecna's monologue to El in 1979 implies that he was always a sociopath with powers who acted on his own accord with no outside influence, it's important to note that Vecna in that scene is an unreliable narrator twisting past events to paint himself a certain way to El. Part of it may be that he doesn't want to admit he was a victim of the Mind Flayer and that he made his own choices (Which is true: He DID have choices and the ability to reject the Mind Flayer, which we see in one scene when the Mind Flayer attacks Patty's father, and Henry intervenes on Patty's behalf to save him). Part of it may be that he's been under the hold of the Mind Flayer for so many years that, by the time El meets him, he's come to believe he and The Mind Flayer are one in the same.

Either way, regardless of what happened, there were a lot of elements stacked against Henry that makes me pity him: The Mind Flayer's influence, Brenner exploiting Henry's powers for his own selfish scientific desires instead of genuinely helping him, his parents trying to force Henry to be normal and shove down his issues instead of taking the time to deal with them..............the only positive thing Henry had going for him was his relationship with Patty. Her determination to see the good in Henry and his powers, and her belief that Henry could rise above the darkness gave some brief salvation for him. Unfortunately, that wasn't enough to save him, and the darkness won in the end.

There is a slight change I was okay with: In the show, Henry mentions that he fell into a coma after killing his mother and sister. While that is true to some extent, he actually wakes up a few hours later and flees the house to go find Patty at the school. He encounters Joyce in the basement (after the power gets knocked out) and, in a scene that's both creepy and sad, he acknowledges that Joyce is a good person and warns her that the world will punish her for it while taking away everything she holds dear. There's a dark irony to his words considering he would later be responsible for the disappearance of her son, the death of Bob, and most of the problems Joyce would later deal with on the show.

Following his encounter with Joyce, Henry finds Patty on an elevated stage platform, and begs her to run away with him. She is basically his last hope at this point, and even that is taken away when Brenner manages to track him and Patty down. There's a whole "Good Angel/Bad Devil" exchange that occurs as Patty (the Angel) implores Henry to fight against The Mind Flayer while Brenner (the Devil) snarls that Henry is already a monster and he might as well accept it. All of this cultivates in Henry using his powers on Patty, having finally surrendered to the Mind Flayer's influence, and throwing her from the rafters, almost killing her. Henry passes out after this, and Brenner takes him back to Hawkins Lab, where he will spend the next 20 years as Brenner's prisoner. Patty manages to survive the fall and, thanks to information Henry gave her earlier, she's able to locate her biological mother in Las Vegas and reunite with her. The last act of redemption Henry would ever have.

These revelations help give context to the mythology of the show. They explain what motivated Dr. Brenner for so many years. They explain the Mind Flayer was well aware of this world, and that Brenner was aware of the Upside Down long before El opened the gate in 1983. They explain Henry already had troubling aspects to begin with, and that his encounter with the Upside Down and the Mind Flayer only amplified those problems. They explain how and why Henry became disillusioned, nihilistic, and angry over the next 2 decades, and how he would project that onto his enemies once he became Vecna. They explain why Henry/One/Vecna takes an interest in certain characters on the show, from El (whose upbringing and struggles are similar to what Henry went through as a child) to Will (who shares similar traits with him as an outcast and a nerd) to even Billy (with both of them projecting their rage onto the world), and went as far as to target them. And, most importantly, it explains how Henry and other special kids like Kali and El got their powers.

This does raise interesting questions that I hope S5 will explore more of:

Since Will was kidnapped and taken to the Upside Down in S1, does this mean his blood type has been altered as well due to his exposure to the Mind Flayer? Does he now possess some kind of power similar to El that we haven't seen yet but might be unveiled in the last season?

And what about the Upside Down freezing in time in 1983? Considering the Upside Down remained consistent as a hellish environment (even after El banished Vecna to it in 1979), this gives the impression that what happened there was an anomaly. I still maintain Will's disappearance had something to do with the altered environment, and I have provided theories for it in my review of Stranger Things The Other Side, but it's still a question that remains unanswered by this play.

And then there's Patty: She does survive, and last we see of Patty is her reuniting with her biological mom, but it's also mentioned she disappeared and that Bob (her adopted brother) misses her and plays songs over his radio podcast in her memory. Did Bob ever find Patty following this, or did he die before that could happen? Does she even remember Bob or Henry, or did the fall (which injured her badly enough that she now walks with a cane) cause her retrograde amnesia? Is it possible S5 might bring her back, and she could have some role in reaching out to Henry/One/Vecna? Is she still alive at this point?

So many questions that I'm hoping S5 provides answers for.

Part 4: Themes

It's no coincidence that the play Joyce produces for the school holds parallels to the tragedy of Henry and Patty's relationship. The Dark of the Moon is a ballad about a "witch boy" named John who falls in love with a human girl named Barbara Allen. He is given a human form on the condition that she remains true to him. Through a series of tragic events (including the death of their child at the hands of religiously-crazed townsfolk), Barbara ends up betraying John, causing him to lose his humanity and become a part of the fog from the place he came from.

If we're drawing direct parallels, it's pretty obvious Henry is John, the "witch boy" embedded with special powers who falls for the human girl, Barbara/Patty. The difference is that the "humanity" of Henry is more metaphorical than literal: He attempts to not give into the monstrous influence of the Mind Flayer, and Patty recognizes this and is determined to help him through the love she gives him. However, the key difference is Patty isn't the one who betrays Henry. If anything, she remains a loyal friend and confidant to Henry (even AFTER Brenner tells her that Henry killed his mother and sister) and desperately tries to convey to Henry that she believes in him and that he can fight off The Mind Flayer. Unfortunately, that proves insufficient, and it's Henry who inflicts the final betrayal on Patty, destroying their relationship, and causing Henry to become prisoner of Dr. Brenner at Hawkins Lab. He is the "witch boy" who returned to where he came from.

It should be noted that the ballad this play is based on contains these final lyrics:

They laid poor Barbra by the old church gate,

With the wild, wild rose growin' nigh her,

And witch boy roamed the mountain high,

'Til mountain fog became him.

And then one morn, before the dawn,

The fog rolled down that mountain,

It came to rest nigh Barbara's rose,

and watered there a briar.

The rose and briar climbed the old church gate,

'Til they could grow no higher,

And there they tied in a true love's knot,

The rose wrapped 'round the briar.

And so a witch and human gal,

Had conquered death eternal,

And 'neath the darkness of the moon,

Their love's entwined forever.

Could this be foreshadowing that, as evil as Henry/One/Vecna has become, there is still a chance at redemption for him through Patty? That whatever love he held for her could bring back Henry's humanity and allow him to overcome the Mind Flayer one last time? They did a similar thing with Billy Hargrove in S3 (with the platonic love he had for his mother), and since love is one of the key forces that's been shown to repel the Mind Flayer, it could work again in Henry's favor if he chooses to take it.

However, a lot of this is tied to whether Henry is capable of remorse or empathy at this point, and considering what we've seen on the show, it's a safe bet to say whatever humanity he had left in him is now gone. I'm doubtful that even if Patty shows up in S5, it'll be enough to redeem Henry. There are some things you can't come back from, and regardless of the negative influences he was dealing with, Henry still had choices, and he chose to hurt others.

In a way, Henry's story reminds me of Coriolanus Snow's arc in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes: Despite the relationship he has with Lucy Gray Baird, it wasn't enough to cancel out his negative personality traits (narcissism, entitlement, etc) and whatever love he may have had for her isn't enough to redeem him, or prevent him from becoming the tyrant we all know and loathe by the events of The Hunger Games.

Another theme present was the exploration of the adult characters and how the personality traits they had as teens continue well into adulthood. It's been speculated before by various groups of people that, internally, there's a certain point where you stop growing mentally and remain the same age, and that definitely seems to be the case here with some characters. The problem is that while these qualities might have been excusable when they were teenagers, they become less appealing as time goes on:

Ted Wheeler, for example, is depicted in the play as a dumb jock who's clueless most of the time. Fast-forward to the 80s, and he's now an apathetic father who still remains clueless. Not only is this not cute anymore, it's frustrating to his wife and those around him.

Karen Wheeler is depicted in her teens as interested in her youth and beauty and dating Ted BECAUSE he's a hot jock. By the time she's an adult, she's still into that (though she does make more of an effort to be emotionally available to her kids unlike Ted) and her desire for youth and a passionate relationship almost leads her to sleeping with Billy despite the inappropriate age difference between the two. 🤮

Jim Hopper is a younger man with a fractured relationship with his abusive father, and a lot of his motivation is rooted in trying to stick it to his dad and prove that he isn't the loser his father thinks he is. It's why he takes an interest in the animal killings around Hawkins and conducts an investigation similar to how police would do it. It's also why he joins the Vietnam War later (as he would later tell Enzo/Dmitri in S4). Even later becoming the Chief of Police on the show likely has its roots in this. Years later, long after his dad is likely dead, he's still trying to prove him wrong.

Lonnie Byers is depicted as a douchebag, even as a teen, who isn't really interested in making something of his life, who's coasting off other people, and really doesn't have any desire to improve himself. Come Season 1, and is it any surprised he's a deadbeat dad who's divorced from Joyce and still making shitty decisions down the line?

Same goes for Al Munson: The play depicts him as an improv actor who's deeply self-centered, who isn't as good as he thinks he is, and is someone who just annoys everyone around him with his antics. Anyone who's read Flight of Icarus knows he doesn't get any better as an adult, and it has completely wrecked his relationship with his brother Wayne and his son Eddie.

And then there's Dustin's father: "Asshole" is the best term I can use to describe him. He's very belittling and not well-liked (even among his peers), and it doesn't surprise me that Mrs. Henderson (who's also shown to be a cat-lover as a teenager) would eventually split with him and raised Dustin on her own.

There are a few positives though: Both Charles and Sue Sinclair come out of the play as decent people, and Sue is shown to be a loyal friend to Joyce, helping Joyce to get her play organized. I can see why they ended up together, and I maintain both Lucas and Erica are lucky to have them as parents.

The overall point is, like with Henry (who also never really grew up, and is now an angry kid trapped in the body of a 30-something adult), there is a theme that change is a process you have to work on. All of these characters (including Henry) have their own flaws they have to work through, and it is a choice about whether you put in the hard work of overcoming those flaws, or you surrender to them and let them dictate your life and stilt your growth. It's always an uphill battle, and it's never easy, but when the alternative is hurting the people around you, I would argue it's worth the effort for their sake.

Final Thoughts:

While there is some leeway between how events in the play can be interpreted, there is one tiny retcon that was hard to ignore: Henry's age. In the show, it's specifically mentioned in the newspaper article that Nancy and Robin look up that Henry was 12 when Virginia and Alice Creel were killed. However, this play retcons his age to being 14 years old. My guess is this was likely done so that Henry would be a freshman, and therefore able to attend Hawkins High School with Joyce, Hopper, Bob, and the other characters. While I don't mind this retcon for story purposes, it still sticks out like a sore thumb, and I wish the Duffer Brothers would take better care with details like that, especially after what happened in S4 with Will's birthday being forgotten.

There is a pamphlet for 10€ that they sell at the Phoenix Theater that gives more information about the play, its cast, and the central ideas behind the story. You can even see it in the picture above with the other memorabilia I collected (next to the t-shirts I bought). If you're going to see the play, I highly recommend purchasing it. It's worth the money.

Overall, this was a well-written play that I'm willing to accept as canon. I hope the events in this play are referenced in S5, and have a role in how the show's story unfolds. I highly recommend getting a ticket for anyone who is a Stranger Things fan! :)

[twinhood-2dot0]

A Shallow Dive Into: Batman’s Rogues Gallery Part 2

Here, part 2. The first one somehow got 7 likes??? I barely even put any effort into it. This one is also gonna be pretty low effort :P I started writing another post yesterday and I wrote 1360 words and I’m only like only a ⅓ finished??? And I kinda spent the whole day watching an anime start to finish 💀.Anyways, let’s get into some more that I missed.

The Al Ghul’s

Ra’s al Ghul (Raysh-Al-Ghool or, Raas-Al-Ghool. Even DC writers can’t agree, although I’m more accustomed to Raysh, I think that was how it was pronounced in the DCAU and the Arkham games. It’s Arabic for “Head of the demon”) is a man born around 700-450 years ago, who discovered the powers of the Lazarus pit, which has the power to bring people back from the dead and used it to prolong his life. (Yeah, this how pretty much most of the dead Batfam characters came back to life. Jason Todd, Kate Kane (Batwoman), who died for like one issue a few meters away from a Lazarus pit, Riddler, as mentioned before, when he got cancer and took a dip in the pit and figured out Batman’s identity.) Ra’s al Ghul, in his long life, played a part in like a lot of historical moments, and later comes to resent humanity and becomes an environmentalist. I’m not very familiar with the character unfortunately, with all of my experience being the Batman Begins version, the kinda weird role he played in Arkham City, and JLA: Tower of Babel where he takes down the entire Justice League using Batman’s countermeasures for his own allies, and the Injustice series, which I don’t remember much of except that he has like a nature sanctuary with various critically endangered species and he was besties with Animal Man.

Talia al Ghul is the daughter of Ra’s al Ghul, on-and-off love interest for Batman, and mother of Batman’s biological son, and also on-and-off ally of Ra’s al Ghul. She also played a part in Jason Todd’s resurrection and consequent training.

Ra’s also has one other daughter, Nyssa, but I honestly didn’t even know she existed until I played Arkham Knight. She has much less appearances than her sister.

Lady Shiva, while not a member of the family, has relations to the League of Shadows, so I thought I’d group them together. Lady Shiva is among the best martial artists in the DCU, able to best even Batman. She’s also the mother of Cassandra Cain, the other best fighter, although more so because of her procognitive abilities. 

Man-Bat

Wow, the realisticness makes him so much scarier.

Dr. Kirk Langstrom is a zoologist cursed with deafness, and in an effort to cure his deafness, creates a serum with the help of bat DNA but it goes horribly wrong and is turned into a giant bat. In recent publications, he’s more of a sympathetic villain acting more on primal rage than malice. His interpretation in Arkham Knight was done really well. Although Arkham Knight is not a horror game, there’s a ton of jumpscares. While just gliding and grappling to different buildings, the player may be randomly met with the shrieking face of the Man-Bat, and you have to go to his lab and piece together what he has done and create an antidote.

Mr. Freeze

Dr. Victor Fries’s (pronounced “Frees”. Yeah, DC names are often very on the nose, just look at E. Nygma and Harleen Quinzel.) wife Nora Fries is afflicted with a terminal illness, and is cryogenically preserved by her husband in hopes that a cure might one day be discovered. While working, he’s trapped in an accident that made him unable to survive outside of sub-zero environments, forcing him to wear a cryogenic suit, and he turns to crime to find a cure.

Mr. Freeze was originally just another bank robber with a freeze ray, but Paul Dini changed his origin story to the current iteration in an Emmy Award winning episode of Batman: The Animated Series titled “Heart Of Ice”. Scott Snyder, as much as I loved his stories, controversially retconned this in the New 52 reboot and made Fries a man who got obsessed with a cryogenically preserved woman named Nora Fields.

The Court Of Owls

A newer addition to the Batman mythos, appearing first in Scott Snyder’s Court Of Owls and City Of Owls arcs that kicked off the New 52 Batman series. The Court Of Owls are Gotham’s own Illuminati. A secret society made of the wealthiest and most powerful citizens of Gotham, they have existed for centuries, controlling the city from behind the shadows, along with the help of immortal assassins named the Talons.

Batmen of The Dark Multiverse

Scott Snyder’s 2017 crossover event named Dark Nights: Metal introduced us to the Dark Multiverse, a multiverse where everything that can go wrong, does go wrong, and is doomed to destruction. We’re introduced to the Batmen (and Batwoman) of The Dark Multiverse, who are all different versions of Batman with some drastic changes.

Joker 

A fan favorite, and the leader of the Batmen, is The Batman Who Laughs. This Batman gave into the urge of killing Joker, after he killed all his rogues, thousands of Gotham citizens and Jim Gordon, and is infected with a version of the Joker toxin that turns him insane, making him a Joker with the brain and physicality of Batman. He tricked the Batfamily and killed them all, and hid in his Batcave for a week, emerging to kill the Justice League, and he turned Damian into a mini-Joker and recruited the children affected by the Joker toxin as his “Rabid Robins”. This guy is freaking horrifying in all of the stories he appeared in.

Superman

The Superman of Earth -1 goes on a killing spree, even killing Lois Lane, leading Batman to decide to use lethal force. After his attempts with a Kryptonite spear doesn’t work out, he ingested a version of the Doomsday Virus (Doomsday is the monster that killed Superman in The Death Of Superman, the virus causes people to develop features like it.) aiding him in killing Superman, but after his victory, the virus spread and he could only watch helplessly as it destroyed his world.

The Flash

After all of the Batfam dies, Batman is compelled to take extreme measures, and tries to get The Flash to give him access to the Speed Force too, and when he refused, he used all the weapons employed by his Rogue’s Gallery to defeat him, chained him to the Batmobile (merged with the Cosmic Treadmill, it’s a treadmill that Flash uses to time travel accurately and stuff), and drove both of them into the Speed Force, absorbing The Flash and his powers, with Barry forced to watch as Batman murders each of his villains.

Aqua(wo)man

In a universe where everyone is gender-swapped, Bryce Wayne’s lover Sylvester Kyle (bleugh) is killed by metahumans, and starts killing every metahuman. After killing all of them on land, she meets Aquawoman, and peace negotiations turn into a conflict, and then she steals her trident, and kills her with her own weapon, and in retaliation, the Atlanteans drown Gotham City and a large part of the world, leading her to perform surgery on herself to give herself Aquawoman’s powers and designed an underwater army called the “Dead Waters''. Does that qualify as a navy?

Okay, there are a few more, like Cyborg Alfred Batmobile Batman, Ares Batman, Killed all of Green Lantern corps as a kid with a Green Lantern ring Batman, but I’m lazy, sorry. Maybe next time, cya, I gotta go finish Chainsaw Man.

[didilysims]

Pine Lake Farewell: Ruben

Silas became a highly successful business-sim, yet was always bitter that he had never made it into Science. He built a lab in his basement, but never had as much time to pursue it as a hobby as he would have liked, due to his other commitments with career, family business, and army of children.

Sarah was also in business, but quit to focus on raising her children. With her staying home full-time, Silas saw no need for a Servo anymore, and had Tik-Tok dismantled.

Nathaniel the animal lover spent most of his free time over at Auntie Sophronia’s and eventually took a job as her assistant until taking over the shelter as an adult. He and Erika Swain had mutual crushes but never acted on them, and he wound up dating Francesca Jane Worthington-Rai instead.

Sebastian grew up quietly in the shadow of his much friendlier brother, and was quite happy for Nate to get all the attention. Somehow he caught the eye of the far more outgoing Elise Frost, and the unlikely pair are going strong. Silas wishes his son would find somesim more prestigious like his brother did, but isn’t excessively vocal about the situation.

Roderick grew up to be very business-minded and plans to study economics. Although the family business is promised to his sister, he doesn’t mind, and is excited at the prospect of starting something new to build from the ground up.

Josephine is the tinkerer and most interested in machines, much like her grandmother, Jane. She also inherited her great-uncle’s athleticism, though and an interest in history learns her toward exercising in martial arts and ancient weaponry. She found the scrap-pile of the family’s erstwhile Servo and has been trying to figure out how to put him back together.

Uncle Josh died peacefully at the seniors home, mercifully before seeing Tik-Tok disassembled. He was mourned by friends and family, but especially his girlfriend Eowyn.

Martin lived slightly longer than his older brother, making sure to visit his grandchildren regularly, and be sure that they were all taking their vitamins and a healthy dose of comfort soup during flu season.

Cordelia moved into a suite of her own and turned to serial dating to—in her words—make up for lost time and experiences. She suffered a major demotion at work, followed shortly by a breakdown and general feeling of unfulfillment. She took a vacation to Takemizu Village and met a mysterious old man who advised her to discover herself first. Coming home, she swore off dating for one season and saw a therapist. That season led her to find out more about who she was on her own, which led to another season of singleness and self-awareness...although she did adopt a puppy to keep her company. She moved to the city and found a new position at a bigger publishing house, eventually working her way up to senior editor. She occasionally called up her siblings to say hello but never visited Pine Lake again.

Sophronia happily remained at the animal shelter all her life. Even when her nephew took over running the place, she worked part-time to make sure every furry, feathered, and finned friend got plenty of love and attention. Dating somesim new remained her number one source of off-hour fun, and even in her old age she managed to find plenty of first-datees. She occasionally visited her daughter, when remembering her existence, and always laughed when William tried to lecture her.

[midnightcreator12]

Playing around with a TMNT Star Wars AU.

Still VERY much a WIP but atm, BUT he’s what’s rattling in my brain so far for the story.

The Kraang are a race that are set up in wild space. They do experiments based more in genetic modification and mutation to make soldiers (like Kaminoans, but muating instead of cloning) They had planed to swoop in with an unstoppable army of mutant super soldiers and wipe out both the Separatists and the Republic and take the system for themselves.

Splinter was originally a human Jedi Shadow who was captured by the Kraang. They extracted DNA samples from Splinter to use in other experiments before splicing Whomp Rat dna into Splinter. The idea was to test if it would be faster to have force sensitive soldiers via mutating animals or mutating already trained Jedi.

As for Splinter’s DNA samples, they were spliced into two young turtles (loggerheads, since that’s the closest species I can find that is similar to the only canon turtles in star wars) These two would become Leo and Mikey.

Prior to Splinters capture, Raph and Donnie were mutated from normal turtles using Zabrak DNA. This makes Raph and Don the older siblings of the turtles.

At some point, Splinter manages to escape and to cause chaos, he pretty much opens all the doors in the lab and lets the mutant rampage. During his escape he come across the turtles. He can sense Leo and Mikey’s connection to the Force and Raph and Donnie are curled protectively over their baby brothers. So, Splinter scoops up all four tots and takes them with him.

By the time Splinter escapes the Empire has already risen to power, so the Hamato Clan hunkers down (either on an outer rim world or go place to place on a ship dubbed The Lair.) And when the boys all get to their teens they basically bully Splinter into letting them join the rebellion.

More Random Bits;

- All four turtles have high Midi-chlorian, but Leo and Mikey are the only two that can easily access the Force. This is, obviously, a point of tension sometimes.

- Roughly, Raph and Don are about two years older than Mikey and Leo and it took Splinter a year post mutating to escape. So when Splinter gets the kids, Raph and Donnie are about 3 and Leo and Mikey are about 1.

- Splinter has never even considered being a dad so he messes up a lot. Mostly in regard to the amount of attention each child gets. Leo and Mikey get the majority of his attention in the early days when he’s still figuring out how to dad. Unconsciously, he favors the two kids who are connected to him the most. Raph and Donnie but heads with him a lot in early days, Raph because of his anger and gun-ho attitude and Donnie because of his heavy reliance on tech.

- Splinter is a very traditional Jedi, despite his rank as a Shadow. He tries to impart the same traditions and ideals on his sons. It works fine for Leo but the rest have personalities that contradict the jedi orders ways strongly. Raph is angry and passionate, emotions on his sleeve type of guy. Mikey is in the same vain, only his passion is more rooted in a lust for life and love. Donnie’s scientific and analytical mind meshes poorly with the more spiritual sides of the Jedi Order and his lack of the Force doubles his resistance to it.

- There is no official leader to the group. Donnie and Raph don’t know which on of them is older so they trade off who is oldest depending on the situation. But when they join the rebellion they unanimously vote Leo as the leader of their team and Raph as the second in command.

(fyi, Splinter is NOT a bad dad in this AU. He struggles at first but he’s mostly worked out the kinks in his parenting by the time the turtles join the rebellion)

[ambrial-blog]

Ezra Valentino: The Conquest for the perfect son.

Meet our Hero: Ezra Valentino. A lone wolf raised upon the upper crest.  His parents want a perfect son. but are they willing to sacrifice the vey core of their son?.  

Full Name:   Ezra Valentino.  Nicknames: Cupid Boy,  Quote/Motto:  If I give up now, then I'll become a failure. To my friends, my family, and myself. So I'm never giving up! Never!”  Born:  June, 7th 1998  Age: Fourteen years old.  Location:,  (Minnesota, Urban District ) Designation: Lost Boy, human experiment.  Hair color: Fiery Orange Eye Color: Citrine yellow Main Series: The Detective Archives.  Book: Enter the Black Mumba. Height: 5.1 1/2 inches Fears: Dying Alone, Spiders.  Strengths: :biochemistry, cooking, and reading hieroglyphs. Weaknesses: unable to see in the dark very well, and close hand to hand combat. * Likes: chocolate chip waffles with bacon. Hanging out with blitzo and Drake. strawberry lemonade.  Favorite music: Rock/Country. Favorite Bands, Blues Saraceno,  The White Buffalo . Greg Holden  Dislikes: Striker, someone trying to hurt blitzo, someone trying to hurt drake, and spiders. Personalty:  Witty, curious, noble, and kind. Signifgant other:  none Favorite food: Steak Least favorite food.  Chicken Favorite color:  Light Blue  Favorite animal: Orange/white tabby Cat:  named Klinger. * Status: Active  Family: Apollo Valentino: (Biological father: A handsome  devil with a fiery passionate soul, Icy blue eyes.  He completely disowns his son after his wife's sudden Sucide , one autumn night. He is  married to Morgana-Le-Fey, Sister to  Corbin De-Le-Fey and his beautiful wife. Morgana De Le Fey-Valentino: Sister to Corbin De-Le-Fey, Aunt to Jake De-Le-Fey:  She has short dark hair, auburn eyes. slender build with an angelic face. Mother to Ezra Valentino. Drake Tabious Darling.  (adoptive father/Mentor figure.  Rescues him from Maddox labs. Julius Malphas Darling  (adoptive Uncle,  Drake's older brother, oldest Darling brother) Blitzo Vanitas Kolchak ( adoptive father/ mentor figure.  (who is currently suffering form amnesia thanks to Bastian Tybalt. Derringer Darling: (adoptive uncle, Drake's brother)                                      

Best Friend: Andrew Everheart. Worst Enemy: D.H.O.R.K.S,  Director Bastian Tybalt. Allegiance:  *The Nasty Darlings.  Affirmations  > The Nasty Darlings > Misfits of Misfortune (Founder/leader)  > Articles of the Outcasts  >  D.H.O.R.K.S. Organization > The Rift:  (Unknown) > I.M.P./Homicidal Husbands   (Undercover mission)  > Devlin Chuck/ the Occultist:  

Job Title:  The Founder of  the Misfits of Misfortune :Goals:  to obtain/create  the perfect family/ he is Obessed with finding the perfect family. Skill set :knowledge on biochemistry, Excellent sharp-shooter, Cooking Ezra’s Story: The Conquest for the perfect Son. Part One: Chapter One:  The Conquest for the perfect son. Morgana De-Le Fey and, her gallant knight in shining armor: Apollo Valentino.  Both fell into the occult.  They both  are avid followers of Bastian Tybalt's insidious work.  Apollo and Morgana began track him down through various tabloids. Morgana and Apollo stumble across Blitzo's conglobed past. His hidden affirmations with the secretive organization  known as D.H.O.R.K.S.  And the mystery surrounding the abrupt death of the director's nephew Ephraim Kyles.    They had skimmed across the documents.  The Goat man appearing in one of the many issues of  Articles of the Outcasts.  A few tales of the cryptids, and the haunting tales of  wondering spirits, ghoulish ghosts. impish creatures. and a sudden spike in deaths.  it was unnerving but that didn't stop them from pursuing the director of D.H.O.R.K.S who had promised a swift course of action.

Ever since Ezra was little he was raised upon fables and folklore. Fairytales of impish little creatures. of goat men, Skinwalkers. wendigos, faceless specters,  shadow people. Of gallant knights in shinning armor beautiful princess locked in spindly towers that jutted up out towards the skies and far away kingdoms.  As his parents grew more invested into Bastian's Tybalt's unorthodox  methods.   Ezra became the center of their conversations. he felt removed from his family. his parents started looking at him different: Like he had sprouted another head.  Everything changed when he was nine years old.  His parents began to chastise him. comparing him other children.  It was as if the nine year old hand stumbled into the twilight zone.

The Sudden turn was a frightful one. Alarming the boy even more was how strict his mother had become.  The boy missed his loving parents, and wanted to wake from this living nightmare.  But knew there was no waking from this harsh reality.  Ezra did everything he could think of to appease his parents. He served them breakfast in bed, studied hard. But nothing seemed to be working. anything he did, someone would do better and then he was back to square one.

In their eyes  he never amounted to anything. Their perfect son was a myth.  They would pick him apart.  and the weight that rested upon his shoulder, and the uneasiness that settled into his chest. tormented his mind and became unbearable.  At night he'd cry himself to sleep missing the warmth and comfort of his mother. How she'd once sooth him at night was only now a cold and distant memory.

The final straw that broke the camels back was when they  compared him to Bastian himself.  The successful director of D.H.O.R.K.S. who had a few skeleton's in his closet. He tried, for years to get Ephraim to hand over the  he tried and failed to figure out  a solid reason why he was never good enough for his parents. There were three life altering changes that stuck out like a sore thumb.  Haunting Ezra and molding him into the man he was now.  The first was the day he gave up, losing all hope of pleasing his parents.  it was the day his parents morphed and became parodies of themselves. Becoming mindless followers of the cause and corruption. He refused to call them by their parental titles. instead, he began  addressing them with their God-given names.  his mother acted as if he stabbed her with pointy pike, to the heart and his father would reprimand him with a curt- cutting tone. He couldn't win, he never did. why he continued to try was beyond him. he just knew he had to hang in there a little longer. that one day he'd be rewarded. His punishments were wide ranged, from being locked in the basement, starved. belittled.  but behind closed doors, it worsened. no one saw the bruises on his skin, the dark circles around his eyes. in school, his teachers and coaches barely acknowledged his existence.  he withdrew into himself.  Then came the day,  Morgan and Apollo  invited Bastian  into their quaint little  home in the suburbs.   For a meeting disguised  as a late supper and a discussion about their son.  It was supposed to be adults only. They had fed Ezra earlier on in the day and sent him off to his room. Ezra crept down the winding staircase. Crouching low so that he wasn't seen as he listened into their conversation.  His ear tingled and burned with the low murmur of boisterous voices.   The low baritone of the director's voice reverberated through the room. "My nephew took in a stray off the streets one cold winter night close to Christmas. it was neither a cat, nor dog or any animal I've ever seen before. It was small: a bit malnourished and barely clinging to life. His skin was tinted blue: but held a red crimson hue to it. his eyes were burning brightly with a fever.  it held an impish quality and ordinary isn't the term I'd use for him either he said while sipping his coffee.  He set his mug down and continued his story. "It was but a small imp, in ratty clothing. A child who had lost his parents, It was only because it was season greetings I was able to meet this biblical wonder" "Imagine Ephraim keeping something like this a secret"   "It was a biblical find, and Ephraim wanted nothing to do with me as I proclaimed my intentions. I wanted to disect him at first, see what all the fuss was about. but my nephew wouldn't let me get near him without a solemn vow that I wouldn't hurt the poor boy."  

Naturally, he called me and I came as fast as I could. Ephraim named the poor thing too, and took him wherever he went. he loved that child: to the marrow of his bones. And, upon his untimely death I inherited the child.  "I've spent three years getting to know the scamp, pinning the murderous on nameless agents.  I continued to instill life lessons into him. Strong, hard instrumental lessons. Then I uncovered a secret, to longevity of life. the answers laid within him. everything I needed all wrapped up in a tight little package.  I had poisioned his mind, kept him under thumb for years.  I had other experiments to contend with.  he was treated like he was one of us, had the free range to do anything he wanted.- except to  leave the compound. He was strictly prohibited from leaving Maddox labs.

Then one day, we made the mistake of having the specimen, and the experiment on the same grounds.  Experiment ninety nine. "Miss Kino Sung-Li: a reject sentenced to death. had somehow gotten into his head that their were others like him. "God, If I could've dispatched her then I would've...   "Little by little she'd undue everything I worked so hard for- he started asking questions, started back talking. "Why, Why, Why.  it was when the specimen was seventeen things started to get out of hand.  He was testing us.  he protected that abomination. We nearly had them too.   When Kino took to the skies.  I lost many men that day.  I had no other choice to hunt them down.  it was a man hunt spanning over several years.  in those years  I opened  up a corrections institute in my nephew's name.

I transformed A church cathedral into a mockery of its former self. and its still here in Minnesota" I believe" The director informed. "Did you ever find him? Morgana asks.   Do you think it could help Ezra?" Apollo adds. " It could" the director answers.   "Your son has a bright future,  he has that raw hunger we're looking for. Untapped potential dying to be cultivated and molded into  the perfect son.  if you allow me, I could cultivate that untapped potential into something akin to a super solider. The specimen was found. we had to wrangle him down. he spent months in Maddox labs. subjugated to intense procedures.  he recovered in  Belphegor manor. money is no option and I can be very convincing spoke the director.

"I'll even  extend a private invitation to Maddox labs. Where the experiments reside. And if your lucky you might be able to see the living  specimen. Your son will  be taught precision, manners among others thing. He will be molded and shaped into  your ideal of the perfect son.   "All at little expense to you, in return he will be deployed and used to recapture. A lost experiment. one that I failed to put down many years ago." "But I thought you said you put them both down!"  Ezra's voice barreled  down the stairwell. "Quiet boy! his mother shushed him. a silent rage building in her eyes "I thought we sent you to your room for the night?. she quarried. "Listen to your mother son"" his father's voice spoke up.  his icy blue eyes and firry hair stood as a stark contrast.  to the volatile monster that laid inside. ”Go on, Apollo urged the doctor.  “as you can see we have our hands full with this one, whatever he does, he does wrongly, he is a huge disappointment  but, if you say, that St. Michaels   is where we need to take him, to correct his behavior I’m all in, and who knows we might get the son we’ve always wanted.

But Ezra is right, I’m afraid. Ephraim called him Blitz: I put him  through the exact same trials, I plan on putting your son.  I put something down that night,  something I saw only in my nightmares, it stood over six feet tall, it had hooves and claws.

It was oddly dressed too, like it was part of a circus.  I’ll never forget those burning molten amber eyes: Bastian says with a cool shudder.   He wanted something that night, no- it was more like someone. "I was unwilling to hand him over,  Blitz was the last remnant I had of my nephew" The anguished howl that filled the night still haunts me and I can't be certain he isn't still out their prowling the woodland areas  relentlessly searching for a way inside" " And our boy, will learn how to track these sort of creatures, and nail them!” asks Apollo.  ”It is the first listen we teach, at Saint Michael's  Tybalt reassures.  And, with the right training  he well become, everything you’ve dreamt of him becoming. “Good grades, polite manners and one hell of a marksmen and as soon as I reclaim, my little experiment I will send home to you” It was like they weren't paying attention him anymore, they were hanging off the director's every word.  Ezra grimaced and slunk back up the stairs.

The second incident  was on he didn't like to dwell on.  Ezra recalled the day his mother finally succumbed to her depression. It raining, cold and wet. he had just returned home from school.  the house was ominously quiet. his mother worked from home so he expected her to be in her office. Finishing her novel. she was an established writer and an entrepreneur.   Long ago, she was once his pillar of light: a beckon of home, snuffed out.  She had lost the struggle with her demons.  She wasn't perfect but before Bastian got his talons into her she used to wipe the tears from his eyes.   Ezra peers out, through the window: the rain was coming down in silver sheets. pelting the ground. He closes his eyes and he is once again taken back to the night he lost her.  He might've not been the best son, or even a good one.  but it was those little thing she did to make him smile.  The moment Bastian crept into their lives everything  came to a standstill. The mother he had loved was shrouded in a vail of bitterness. she became self depreciating and  his father blamed Ezra because he was never good enough. Nothing made Morgana happy. She often spoke about slitting her wrists. her heart ached and throbbed. She became Obessed with meeting this biblical wonder.  She told Ezra, that this Blitz would be worth living for if she ever got to meet him. but it was obvious to Ezra that Bastian had no intentions of letting such thing to happen.  Ezra suspected that Blitzo was no longer in his custody and that was one of the reasons why the director was helping out the Valentinos.  

That was the nail in the coffin.  the evening he came home: the house didn't feel the same. it was strange eerily quiet: as if it was a funeral parlor.  He knew something was wrong. he could feel the sudden urgency to run up the winding staircase grip him filling him with awful dread.  and as he was  running up the staircase calling to his mother.. his voice cracking in pain.  deafening silence filled his ears  as he stood  stoically  in the open doorway. his hand flew to his mouth as he tried to stifle a cry.  His legs felt like wet noodles as he fell to his knees gripping his chest, tears spilling from his eyes. She was hanging from the rafters by a noose, her wrists slit and bleeding onto the wooden flooring.   Unpaid bills lay scattered across the floor. Ezra could feel a numbness stir within him as he stared up into her cold dead eyes. "Why, why weren't you good enough!, look what you did" they screamed at him. her glossy eyes staring straight through him. A good son would know what to do, he wouldn't be frozen in fear.  A good son would cut her down and try to breath life back into her body. But he couldn't seem to move.  Instead all he could think was that this was somehow his fault. Ezra stood there for what seemed like hours.

[mtjester]

So, back on the BNHA Steampunk AU bullshit train, here’s what I’m thinking:

Basic premise: Midoriya is an poor, unacknowledged engineering/inventor prodigy who lives in the mountains on the outskirts of a small town, working usually as a sheep herder for the town’s wealthy landowning family (the Bakugous) while he tinkers with his stuff. One day, an airship crashes on a nearby peak, and Midoriya find a sole survivor -- Yagi Toshinori (All Might). He and his mother don’t know who he is, but they rush him back to their house and take care of his wounds. He remains in a coma for a while. Midoriya finds an odd contraption near Toshinori, and he starts to tinker with it. He begins to unlock its potential. Toshinori eventually wakes up, sees Midoriya’s progress with the odd contraption and therefore his potential, and invites him to join him at U.A. Academy of Sciences in the Big City.

Once there, Midoriya finds Bakugou, the son of the wealthy landowners in his small town, whom Midoriya knew well growing up. Toshinori goes to attend to his own business, Bakugou begrudgingly shows Midoriya around, and it comes to everyone’s attention over time that some nefarious Science is happening in the criminal underground. Human experiments, a la Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Where science doesn’t have answers, horrendous experiments take place to find out. What’s the goal? Immortality? The Ultimate Human Weapon? A new step in human evolution?

Midoriya and Bakugou along with others in the academy who seek to uphold the honor of Science for Good go to join Captain Aizawa’s airship in the hopes of catching the perpetrators of the Evil Science.

Character Stuff under the cut!

The Academy:

Midoriya: He grew up in a small town setting and is overwhelmed by Big City Life. The contraption he finds near Toshinori is the AU’s version of OFA, and it’s a multipurpose machine that can meld to the body, enhance strength, increase mobility, shoot out tethers, etc. Toshinori was only able to unlock the first of these abilities in his tinkering. Now Midoriya, an otherwise underwhelming guy, is a force to be reckoned with.

Bakugou: The only son of a wealthy land-owning family in the same small town Midoriya came from, Bakugou was used to be being a big fish in a small pond. Now the pond his very large, and he’s the same size. He pursues his studies in explosives at the academy, and he has little clue how much of his research is directly responsible for fueling the Empire’s war machine. If he did, he would be horrified. He is adamant that the future will not be Steam but Diesel. He’s putting his stocks in the combustion engine.

Ochako: Ochako is going to be the first person in space! Supposedly. She’s working with all of her colleagues to create a rocket ship that will break through the Earth’s atmosphere, and she spends a lot of her time training for zero gravity in a gyroscope. She is studying gravity and magnetism. When asked how either works, she replies confidently, “I have no idea!”

Todoroki: Todoroki is the youngest son of a prestigious family in the city. His father is captain of one of the airships and has been on multiple expeditions into the Unknown. Todoroki himself is working on thermodynamics at the academy. He is rather fond of steam technology and has his doubts about the rise of diesel. He is considered one of the more successful and promising up-and-coming researchers there at the moment.

Iida: Iida is working on combustion engines and works closely with both Todoroki and Bakugou. He agrees with Bakugou that the future will be Diesel. Like both of them, he is from a well-to-do family, which boasts a long line of pilots. He has trained from a young age to be a pilot as well and has a natural knack for it, but he’s actually rather air-sick. He prefers to stay on land and work on moving vehicles faster more effectively.

Momo: Momo is from a prominent family and knows everything. She has read the entire library, so the rumors say. Her studies focus on the nature of matter, and her research has been inspired by everything from ancient books on alchemy to the most contemporary experiments. She hopes to create an Everything Machine. She is another of the more successful and promising up-and-coming researchers.

Denki: Denki is involved, not surprisingly, with the newer technology of electricity. He is attempting to harness its power more successfully and to figure out new ways to create bigger currents. Like Ochako, he doesn’t actually know what’s going on most of the time, and his experiments are trial-and-error.

Jirou: Jirou works with sound, and she has revolutionized the gramophone industry with her work. She is also working on devices that can pick up sound from miles away. On the side, she does jazz. 

Aoyama: Aoyama is working on light technology. He envisions a future when a beam of light can be used to cut through anything. Nobody puts much confidence in his experiments, and he’s often forgotten. He gravitates to Midoriya, the new guy, for this reason. Midoriya doesn’t brush him off, and he often shows up to help Midoriya off, acting more like a lab assistant than a researcher in his own right.

Sero: Sero is one of many standby engineers who help the researchers out. His preferred tool of the trade is his own tape (patent pending). It is surprisingly effective.

Mina: Mina is another standby engineer with a penchant for welding and chemicals. She is an aspiring chemist, but nobody will agree to help her with her research because of the haphazard way she handles caustic chemicals. Nevertheless, she is well-liked and popular.

Satou: Satou is a standby engineer whose brawn comes in handy. He is an academy favorite because he spends the time he’s not working creating lovely baked goods. In fact, most researchers call for his help last, since they would secretly rather he be baking sweets.

The Experiments:

Tsuyu: Tsuyu was rescued from a freak show, and the freak show discovery is the first step to uncovering the Bad Science. She is the result of a genetic modification experiment. She doesn’t remember what it’s like to not be frog-like, and she doesn’t really mind. But she is grateful to not be in a freak show anymore, and she’ll cooperate with the investigation to the best of her abilities! She becomes Ochako’s lab assistant.

Shoji: He was rescued from the freak show at the same time as Tsuyu. Like her, he doesn’t remember much of his previous life. He remembers more of the facility than Tsuyu does, and his recollection is a big help in the investigation.

Koda: He was rescued from the freak show at the same time as Tsuyu and Shoji. For a long time, he only speaks to animals. If he remembers much, he won’t (or can’t) communicate to the investigation team.

Hagakure: Another freak show rescue. She’s invisible. Sometimes the investigation team forgets she’s there. She’s quick to remind them, and she’s ready to put her sneaky abilities to good use!

Tokoyami: Tokoyami remembers his time in the facilities well. The experiments haunt him. He doesn’t remember the escape from the facility where he was “created” because Dark Shadow did most of the heavy lifting. He has been in the shadows, working as a vigilante for a while now. When the call goes out for people willing to help with the investigation, he shows up, ready to join Aizawa’s crew.

Kirishima: Kirishima and Ojirou are not found until later, when the investigation team uncovers an illegal underground fighting ring. Kirishima’s skin is tough as rock, and he can take a beating. He also has incredibly sharp teeth, and he has been outfitted with a muzzle for that reason. He doesn’t usually bite, but the harsh world of human fighting has made him somewhat more snappy. He does remember the facilities, but he would prefer not to. It seems that whatever the Evildoers were attempting to accomplish with their experiments came a bit closer to fruition through Tokoyami and Kirishima.

Ojirou: Ojirou, like Kirishima, was rescued from the underground fighting operation. Ojirou’s powerful tail gives him an advantage over his opponents, and the martial arts skills from his life before the facilities also give him a good edge. He survives the fighting operation with more of a level head than Kirishima, thanks to his previous training. It spares him the muzzle. 

This is already a lot, so maybe I’ll just stop at the 1-A group for now!

[baby-grayson]

Dirty Little Secret| Intro | Ethan

Word Count: 1.4 k

Summary: Felicity, an otherwise plain girl with hopes of being a great writer, does one bold thing at a music festival. The thrill of her one bold thing comes back to bite her the next morning.

She was aroused by the wet cold of the bathroom sink against her bare thighs. His hands ran hungrily up and down her thighs, from the skin that her skirt exposed: the flimsy fabric riding up as she straddled him from the counter. His thumbs sank into her, as if trying to pin her down in front of him. From outside, the sound of guitars and screams were muffled by the sound of his hot breaths against her neck.  She craned, exposing more skin and letting him have access to her collarbone from under her thin tank top. His kisses were wet, he pressed his tongue against her skin like he was licking sweet honey: trying not to let a single drop escape from his lips. His hands pulled her closer: wrapping around her thigh and the small of her back to press her chest along his torso. She pulled at his hair, whimpering into his ear. Making desperate, low, sexual sounds. She didn’t usually do this so soon after meeting someone: much less on the counter of a public bathroom at the Semester Kick Off Music Festival. 

For a second, she felt a shadow of guilt as she tried to remember his name. Evan? No. Ethan? Yes, definitely Ethan and it felt very good to have Ethan’s tongue gliding down her neck and teasing the top of her cleavage. If her mind was clouded by idea the idea that hooking up with a stranger was wicked, all of her thoughts were swept away in the bodily storm that was Ethan. She dropped her hands down, hanging them from his back pockets as he leaned further into her and started his tongue back up to her mouth.  She took it gladly, welcoming his tongue by sliding her own across his and feeling nothing but naughty pleasure at the sensation of the hard bulge in his pants resting near her thigh. She pulled back from their kiss, his lips swollen and pink. He was heaving ever so softly and looking down at her: a single tank top strap had fallen to the side of her shoulder in his embrace. She licked her lips and darted her eyes down to his package. She played with her tongue in her mouth for a moment while his swollen lips turned into a smirk. 

Who knows what would have resulted, had a body not barreled through the bathroom door and wretched into a toilet stall.

Something about a stranger puking three feet away from her really ruined the mood of the one sexy tryst of her college career. 

She unhooked her hands from Ethan’s back pockets and sat up straight on the bathroom counter, erecting her posture. Ethan’s smirk turned into a small frown as she reached to pull up her fallen strap and realign her top to better cover her chest. She ran a hand through her hair, feeling the mess under her fingertips and looking up at him. 

He knew the moment was ruined. He knew he wasn’t getting it back. Despite everything that he wanted. His face tied strings of disappointment and frustration into a neat package of a gentlemanly facade.

She pushed forward on the counter and he stepped back, giving her enough room to dismount the sink and straighten her skirt. He looked in the mirror to analyze his own disheveled hair and the tease of his underwear peaking through wear she pulled his pants low. 

“That was uh--” she cursed herself for not having more experience, “that was good.” She mentally kicked herself, feeling awkward and unprepared for this moment. She wished desperately for an understanding of the feminine mystique, but instead she was only grossed out by the water from the bathroom floor seeping into shoes shoes.  “Yeah,” he moved in the mirror to fix his hair, “That--” she didn’t hear him finish his sentence as she swiftly pushed through the bathroom door..

She quickly found a trashcan to lean on, not minding the nauseating smell of vomit and booze in her delirious state. She felt a rush move through her, something invigorating. She felt like she had obtained the unobtainable for a girl like her: plain, average, and oh so blasé.

Making out with a stranger in the bathroom at a music festival was the most daring thing she’d done in 20 years. Not just any stranger, a hot stranger. She bit your lip and nearly moaned thinking back to it: she must have looked like intoxicated by something strong to a passing stranger.  “Felicity--Hey Felicity!” her friends called out from across the pavilion, worried by her sudden disappearance half an hour earlier. She darted her head up to find them, knocking her out of her trance. She shook her head, trying to find reality again from wherever her mind had wandered to when she was with Ethan. She bounced back to them, giggling and swaying with her dirty, little secret. 

She wore the high of the moment under her skin as a secret veil of confidence on the first day of school. After years of fading into the background, she’d done one bold thing. The feeling of his hands on her skin felt like too real a memory throughout the day. If she closed her eyes, she remembered what his voice sounded like against her neck. She remembered finger tips dragging along her inner thighs and his warm mouth at the start of her cleavage. She got goosebumps waiting in line for her morning coffee.

There was something addicting about feeling desirable.

The burn of the hot coffee on her tongue didn’t bother her as she nearly soared to the first class of her senior year in college. She flipped through her phone, scrolling across Instagram pictures of her friends on their first last day—she made a mental reminder to take a photo with the school mascot for fun. She considered searching “Ethan” blindly into the social network maze; if he was at the semester festival then he surely went to school with her, might even have some friends in common. But no, she decided not to search up her illustrious , seductive Ethan: he was best as a naughty, dauntless memory.

Looking down at a picture of her old lab partner and his roommates, her phone pinged with the first email of the semester. Her boots clacked against the pavement as she proceeded to stroll to class. She opened the email and read:

“Dear EN 4121: Shakespearean Rhetoric;

I am both sorry and elated to inform you that last night I went into pre-term labor. My newborn son, Matthew, and myself are doing wonderfully. But on account of my hospitalization, I have asked your TA to instruct today’s course-- and future courses hitherto. They will give you details, but I am expecting you all to pair up in preparation to critique each other’s very detailed analysis. I’m unsure of how long my maternity leave will be (likely at least the first half of your semester) but I am sure you are in trusty and faithful hands. I can’t wait to see all the excellent work that you do.

Regards,

Professor Clarissa Barnes”

She wondered if this was a good email or not. Barnes would supposed to be the toughest teacher around, but she was allegedly a hoot in class— acting out plays and using stuffed animals for props. She was weighing the development in her mind when she opened the classroom door and found a seat next to her  friend, Jasmine.

Jasmine immediately started chattering about her boyfriend Rowland and plans for the semester. Felicity brought her laptop out of her back and rested it on the desk, settling herself in and nestling her coffee cup at the edge of the table. She nodded along happily to Jasmine’s excited chatter. But Jasmine’s quick paced tone halted immediately when she noticed Felicity’s face, “are you alright?”

Her face has gone pale and she breathed in an unsure breath. Her left eye twitched. There was no way—this had to be a dream...or a nightmare. 

As Ethan turned around from writing “TA- Ethan Dolan” on the whiteboard he immediately found her in the crowd. His jaw formed a perfect o shape and he pushed his shoulders back, trying to feign professionalism. She was sure he recognized her when he muttered, “Oh God”

[messinwitheddie]

Wee need more on Loralei. Please share with us Loralei stuff! Howd she meet Dib? What's her dream job? Childhood memories? Share with us your Human OC!

Lorelai and Reg are my only two human ocs. I'm not as confident with my human oxs as I am my Irkens.

She comes across as a "bitchy ex" in the few times I've explored her character; which is really an injustice to her. She's not a bitch. She just has a lower tolerance for bs than most and bs has been steadily dumped at her feet her whole life.

Her design I've struggled with for a while, but I love drawing her. (Excuse her twists; lack of drawing skills on my part. I'm trying ^^;)

Lorelai von Verminstrasser

Granddaughter of Countess von Verminstrasser; the de- louser. Daughter/ youngest child of Prof. Arnd von Verminstrasser, (German super-scientists/ heir to the V.V. genetics lab/ nature reserve located somewhere in the depths of the Black Forrest) and Prof. Youmna Abdelsalam; (a master architect/ architectural history major from Cairo.)

There's a lot of fan lore behind Lorelai's character involving the von Verminstrasser family; which in my au, is an old, wealthy family of scientists/zoologist/biologists/ cryptid hunters dating back to the 12th century. In modern years their research has been less focused on hunting and more about documenting/ preservation.

Lorelai grew up on her family's nature reserve. She was homeschooled until she was 15. Her parents are loving and encouraging, but also can be eccentric, strict and often hold her to high standards; especially concerning her grades. Growing up, her family heavily involved her in their research/ experiments. Countess often included Lorelai on cryptid hunts. She was taught a long list of wilderness survival skills, an in depth understanding of animal biology/ behavior and unlimited access to von Verminstrasser tech.

Despite consistent displays of competency; she often found herself in the shadow of her older brother/ cousins.

She met Dib on the swollen eyeball network under the name “agent Khonsu" when they were 13. She originally only joined to troll her older brother, who often trolled the SE message boards. She and Dib never exchanged personal information beyond that of their SE names. She came across a lot of nonsense among the organizations, but was intrigued by what seemed legitimate. She and Dib had many heated debates. Their biggest argument was actually not over Zim, but over her theory that prof. Membrane was an alien or cryptid... and over who built the pyramids, but mostly her "Prof M. is an alien theory).

She and Dib met in person when she was 14. She had joined her parents and “oma" Countess to a trip to America. Her father was to assist Prof. Membrane on a major project/ guest appear on his show.

Lorelai seized the opportunity to gather evidence on her theory. She managed to infiltrate Dib's house and explore Prof. Membrane's personal lab.

Her theory was disproven upon further investigation. She immediately apologized for her accusations/ intrusion, which Dib reluctantly accepted. She admitted to him that her theory about the professor was faulty, but she desperately wanted a way to be noticed; on the SE network and by her family. She found a kindred spirit in Dib. They became close friends and continued to discuss (more civilly) paranormal science with him in the SE message boards. She later helped Dib infiltrate Zim's base one last time before he left Earth.

The two dated via video chat and the occasional visit until they were 19. With her family's blessing, Lorelai transferred colleges/ moved to Dib's city to live with him/ earn her degree (s).

The two of them went on a world paranormal hunt when they were twenty (behind their parents' backs). Their son, Reg was born soon after.

Lorelai has many fond memories exploring her family's nature reserve as a child. Some of her fondest memories are exploring haunted/ or paranormal sites with Dib. She loves rock climbing, hiking and tracking animals.

Now that she has had opportunities to explore who she is as a separate entity from her family and a world outside the V.V nature reserve, she would eventually like to take on the responsibility of running it/ protecting it. (She cannot trust it to her brother and cousins who have little interest in maintaining the reserve.)

Since her breakup with Dib she has returned to her ancestral home to help manage the facility. Her biggest goal as of late (beyond furthering her studies/ being a good mother to Reg) is to prove the existence of the Wolptertinger.

I glossed over so much and there's still so much text.

I realized after going through my tags I've spelled this poor oc's name wrong since the beginning. ><

[kikithegeek]

An Amateur Review of Ridley Pearson’s Super Sons

Please be aware: This will contain some spoilers for the Super Sons graphic novels written by Ridley Pearson. If you do not wish to be spoiled on plot or character development, please stop reading this and come back once you’ve read through the books yourselves. Otherwise, enjoy this amateur review.

INTRODUCTION

As someone who grew up reading comics from Marvel, DC, IDW, and Archie, it was always fun when legacy characters were introduced or focused on. Characters that were students or the children of characters that my parents grew up with always felt nice to me, and even relatable when they were introduced or shown to be growing up in a similar or the same time period as my friends and I. Taking this into account, it’s no wonder that by the time I was in high school, some of my favorite comics involved Damian Wayne/Robin and Jonathan Kent/Superboy. Yes, I was definitely older than them by the time their series came in, but some of the problems they faced, even the small ones, seemed familiar to my own. Problems such as Jon’s reluctance of moving away from Hamilton County to Metropolis where he’d be leaving behind people he’s known for years into what is essentially a foreign environment for him, or both characters having to live up to the examples their parents have set; something I’m sure many of us can relate to as children are always compared to their parents or successful family members. The growing friendship between them was always a highlight no matter what type of adventure they were on.

In 2019, Ridley Pearson and Ile Gonzalez released the first book in their 3-part series starring Jon and Damian in a sort of rebooted universe. Fan feedback at the time was mixed, with some fans unhappy and others just happy they were getting more content featuring their favorite duo. Personally, I wasn’t paying attention all that much; I was in the middle of college and my focus had drifted away from comic books that year to focus on my studies, but with the recent pandemic and more time to read I’ve fallen back into the rabbit hole of super heroes and villains. I remember there being an outcry against the books when the previews began to be released, but after they did release and finished their run, I didn’t hear anything. No one really actively talked about what the books were about and most of what I heard seemed to come from people who read a handful of pages, if at all, and then never finished it. So, I decided to put my two cents in and read them. I’ll be looking at them as someone who has been a fan of their main-like counterparts for years, and as someone who also acknowledges that this isn’t canon to it and is an alternate universe (or alternate Earth in the cases of the DC comics multiverse), if anything to look at it from a neutral perspective.  

It should be noted that this isn’t the first time I’ve read through Ridley Pearson’s work. In middle school and even through high school, I couldn’t get enough of Kingdom Keepers and Peter and the Starcatcher, even getting tickets to see the touring cast of the latter’s theater adaptation when they came to my state. I’ve read a few interviews on his work with the Super Sons before going into the books themselves, and he doesn’t neglect to say that this series isn’t connected to the normal DC canon (whatever that is these days; any comic book reader knows that reboots, especially for DC in the last decade, usually happen quite a bit). Okay, that’s probably a given, and it makes things easier considering the main target demographic are kids aged 10-14. There’s a lot of content to go over when it comes to everything connected to Damian and Jon, even more so for Batman and Superman, so this makes it less difficult for kids who don’t have much experience with DC outside of the occasional tv show and movie to get into it.

But what about the story itself?

THE STORY

(The majority of the story spoilers are beyond this point since I summarize the books. This is your last spoiler warning.)

The story itself takes place in an alternate future. America is called Coleumbria and the global climate crisis has gotten to the point where it’s a race to find a way to stop the rising temperatures and constant flooding. While Batman and Superman spearhead the projects set to stabilize and then reverse the Earth’s temperature, their sons are moved from Metropolis to a city called Wyndemer with other refugees looking to find somewhere safe from the floods. This causes tensions in the city to heighten as refugees, called “flood runners”, are harassed by locals. Without going too in-depth into the books (otherwise, we’d be here all day), I’m going to summarize them. Certain characters and events might be omitted, but hey, at least it gives you a reason to read them even if I tell you what they’re about.

The first book introduces us to this crisis and shows us how this world’s Jon (who still goes by Superboy in this) and Damian (who is going by Batkid) meet. While there’s some animosity between them at first, with Jon having a not-too-hidden bias against Bruce Wayne, the two eventually start to work together when they realize their individual investigations are connected. Jon and his classmate, Tilly, have been looking into a mysterious illness that’s hospitalized Jon’s mother among many others, and Damian has been investigating sabotages against Wayne Tech dams. They also meet a girl named Candace who is trying to uncover a mystery that’s plagued her since her mom’s passing. After finding clues at a food company called Sage Foods, the group is attacked and manages to escape after Jon is told their attackers were sent by a woman named Arvyc. After finding out that Candace and Damian had set Jon up earlier in the book to be attacked by a few gang members, the group have a short fight before they go to the train station to stop Arvyc’s gang.

The second book opens with the boys helping Candace make it to a boat while escaping a group of girls called The Four Fingers. While they didn’t have as much of a presence in the previous book, had been shown as adversaries of Candace’s. Continuing into their investigations into the virus, Jon and Tilly learn that it was man-made as Candace’s visions lead her toward Coleumbria’s capital. The Four Fingers, meanwhile, are adamant about finding Candace, so they’ve taken to stalking her friends, until they realize they’re “dead ends”, so they choose to follow their own leads. It is revealed that The Four Fingers and Candace all have powers that connects them to certain species of animals; with Candace, she has a connection to birds and she states her grandmother was the same. Tilly comes up with her own vigilante persona, Puppet Girl, and stays behind in Wyndemer as Damian and Jon leave to go to Cinapolis to find the virus’s source. However, the boys get captured and Tilly decides she needs to help them. Candace in the meantime has found an anointing oil her mother had left clues for her to find, which is the key to the throne of Landis, the country she and The Four Fingers come from. It ends with the Super Sons and Tilly saving Candace and helping her get on a boat back to Landis while Arvyc escapes from prison.

The third and final book opens with Jon, Damian, and Tilly trying to track Arvyc down and it’s obvious that they’ve been at this for some time now, but they soon become the hunted. Candace makes it back to Landis and finds one of the rebels her mom had led before she was arrested. As Candace continues on her journey, Jon, Damian, and Tilly are sent by Batman to a LexCorp lab to retrieve a virus sample, only to find it isn’t there. They decide to go to Landis since The Four Fingers were heading there with the virus (and Candace had gone with intentions to stop them), but Tilly needs to stay behind again. The boys and Candace continue their respective journeys through Landis, however a man who’s been pulling the strings from the shadows for the last two books, Sir Reale, has decided to send Arvyc after them along with Talia. Talia and Arvyc attack the boys who manage to outsmart them for the moment, and are reunited with Candace who has been tracking the virus with two warriors named Kizuka and Archer. Tilly, back in Coleumbia, is sent out to retrieve Damian and Jon by Bruce’s assistant, Patience. After meeting up with Tilly, the group find a lab where The Four Fingers have been preparing vials of the virus in order to release it via bombs, and a battle ensues where they learn that sunlight can kill the virus and that Talia is Damian’s mother. Learning that they couldn’t stop all of the shipments, the group gathers the people of the local town to help them in storming the factory. They succeed in killing the remaining virus, save for a vial to be used to create a cure. With Superman’s mission a success and Batman working on a cure, the book ends with Candace being crowned the new Empress of Landis, Jon’s mother waking up, and Batman making Damian Robin.

MY THOUGHTS ON THE STORY

All in all, the story was okay. Personally, I felt like it was rushed in some places, such as how we’re brought from one character or scene to the next with little to no transition or breathing space. The endings were also kind of abrupt, which I feel really brought down the ending for the final book. We don’t really linger on whether or not Superman’s efforts to reverse global worming worked or have a moment where Jon and his dad are able to reunite with Lois. I was also disappointed to see they didn’t go anywhere with the whole “Talia is revealed to be Damian’s mother he had never met before and barely knew anything about” sub plot they had going in book three. People who know me know that the League of Assassins and any character associated with them are among my favorite villains in the Batman mythos, and to see it be brought in only for it to not have anything done with it was disappointing. Heck, you could have taken Talia out of it and the story would have been the same minus Damian being momentarily shaken before getting back to business. At the very least, an ending scene where Bruce confirms she’s his mother would have been nice enough closure for it. This might have been due to there being a page limit (each book was roughly 151 pages long) which lead to things being cut out, but it’s still disappointing nonetheless, especially since I did find myself enjoying parts that had pacing problems.

Pacing and unresolved plotlines aside, some of the things I did enjoy though involved Candace’s story arc. She’s one of the characters made for this series, and watching her figure out her past and come into her own with her powers was really enjoyable. I also felt like small snippets of character interactions between the boys, Candace, and Tilly were really well written. They actually felt like kids.

THE CHARACTERS

Since there are a lot of characters in this series, I’m only going to focus on the four main characters since we’re with them the entire time.

Jonathan Kent is probably the one out of him and Damian who’s the closest to his original counterpart, and I don’t just mean in looks. While he doesn’t have as many powers as he’s come to have in the main DC canon, he does have some of the powers he has early on in his appearances, such as super speed, super hearing, x-ray vision, super strength, and being able to jump high/far. He’s a bit older here though, 12 instead of 10 making him closer to Damian’s age and allowing him to go to the same school as him and Tilly. He holds his dad’s lessons close and seems to be apprehensive about seriously hurting people, mainly in the beginning. Being older though, he’s a bit more mature than his counterpart was before he was aged up, and I feel that this version of Jon is a good blend between the two.

Damian Wayne on the other hand was given the most changes in terms of backstory and how he acts, which goes hand-in-hand. In the original continuity, he was raised by Talia and the League of Assassins, making him spoiled and a literal killer in the body of a child. Here, he was raised by Bruce (how or why, I don’t know. Talia wasn’t brought up until book 3 so I can only assume she gave him to Bruce as a baby and they agreed to never tell him for whatever reason) and Bruce refuses to let him be Robin, leaving Damian to become Batkid (which is a good reference to past incarnations of Batman’s son in older Elseworlds stories). He’s still arrogant and looks for a fight more than he should, but it doesn’t seem like he wants to kill. Beat up a guy who is already out of the fight, yes, but not kill. One thing people who’ve read the books will notice is I’ve been calling him Damian. Well, that’s out of habit; in this series he is pretty adamant about everyone calling him Ian. Why? Again, I don’t know, and part of me is bothered by it because we never find out why he hates his name. I can only assume Pearson had things planned that would explain this a bit more but had to cut them out due to page constraints.

Tilly is one of the characters made for this series, taking the name Puppet Girl as her secret idenity. She’s Jon’s friend and classmate, and is a computer expert, allowing for her to help the team from home until they need her to fly one of Bruce’s machines to them. She hangs around Jon a lot due to going to the same school and because both of them are interning for the Daily Planet. In all honesty, she reminds me of Kathy from before it’s revealed she has powers and is actually an alien since she acts as Jon’s best friend who isn’t Damian, as well as a girl who Jon might have a crush on or vice versa. The blond hair and the purple-pink outfit scheme doesn’t help.

Candace is our final main character and the second character made for this series. We meet her in the books before we meet Jon and Damian, and her story plays a huge role in the overall plot. Candace has been following a string of clues her mother left her shortly before her death, and we learn as the comic goes on that she’s meant to be the next Empress of her home country, Landis, but was forced to flee to Coleumbria when her family was usurped by a general. Over time, she unlocks her power to communicate and control birds, and later to control the weather. I found myself enjoying her story just as much, if not more than the plots that surrounded the title characters, which helps since her story is intertwined with theirs. If I had to compare her to an existing character in the DC canon, I’d say Wonder Woman due to her super human abilities and her being royalty.

THE ART

The art is also good, definitely better than what I can do. However, a complaint I do have is that the characters feel stiff and rigid. It might be the art style, but something felt off at times, mainly with the posing. Again, it’s still better than what I can do, but I feel like it could have been better. I did like how the backgrounds were vibrant and you could tell where the characters were just from a look, and the art is more detailed in general compared to other young reader graphic novels DC has been putting out. Art is pretty subjective, so I’m not going to go into this too much and a lot of these are my own opinions.

The art has come into debate as well, though not for the reasons I mentioned above. When previews for the first book started to be released, a lot of people were critical toward Candace and Damian, particularly toward their skin color. In the preview images, Candace was shown to have a blue-ish-gray tint (you can probably see why this didn’t go over well) and Damian was shown to be paler than Jon (Damian is shown in the original DC canon to be half Arabic and even though he was sometimes shown to have pale skin like Bruce’s, he was also shown to have a tanner complexion due to his mother’s side. Most fan interpretations as a result more often than not have him with tanned skin). After fan outcry, this was fixed with Candace getting a more natural skin tone and Damian’s being brought down to a darker shade than Jon’s. With Damian’s it’s more apparent in the second and third books since in the first one I did notices there were a few panels where his skin tone would be lighter than in others which makes me wonder if it was a last-minute recolor for the first book’s release.

FINAL THOUGHTS

All in all, I’d say it’s okay. It’s not great, it’s not bad; just okay. I honestly think that if Pearson and Gonzalez hadn’t been given a page limit then it could have been better since the pacing wouldn’t be as big of an issue and they would have been able to get through all of the mini arcs they had set up. They obviously wanted to tell a bigger story but were only given so much room to work with.

It’s obviously not for everyone, and it’s definitely not the Super Sons people like me have grown up with, but that’s okay. Some of the kids I used to babysit who fall into the range of “I’ve never really read DC comics and only ever saw a cartoon episode on TV” read these books too and they liked it. Same thing for the few kids who did have prior experience with the Super Sons. What dragged them in was the climate crisis and (for the ones who read them after the world went into a lockdown) the fact the characters were trying to find a cure for a virus that was similar to the flu. Yeah, and these were written way before 2020, so that’s actually an achievement on Pearson’s part.

You don’t have to like them; heck, I didn’t really have any interest in them because of the backlash from people like me until my friends started asking me to make this review. But maybe give them a chance. Find a kid in your family or friend group and see if they’d be interested, maybe you can read it together once the craziness of the last year’s calmed down.

[bigowlenergy]

heat + horror

next chapter of How to Raise the Dead!

x

Maddie stands at the door to the basement, hazmat tied down around her waist, staring into the green dark. To her left, the cicada scream en mass. The refrigerator hums at her back. The portal buzzes below. The cold air that swirls up the steps is incredible against the summer heatwave. Maddie. Wants to go down. Hesitates, still.

Danny is down there.

Maddie loves her son, but she loves her daughter, too, and knows better than to bother Jazz when she’s trying to finish a paper and watch the finale to her latest K-drama at the same time (again) and expect anything but getting snapped at and increasing her stress. The experience is just new, with Danny. He was always the relaxed one, but once it hit 80 degrees in the house, the basement became his domain, with the same low tolerance for interruption. With an extra edge of physical discomfort and medical concern. Maddie just doesn’t want to upset him further. It feels like she does that all too often, but Danny just won’t say anything when she does. It’s hard to understand him. She wants to, but he’s pulled so far away from them already...

“Hey, mom.” Jazz stands in the entryway, kicking her flip flops off, two bags of gas station ice slung over her shoulders. “He moved yet?” She asks.

“No, I don’t think so. I was just about to check,” Maddie offers, stepping in to take the second bag from Jazz. She’d stepped out to get some water. Hadn’t gone back. Condensation from the ice leaks down her shoulders, sticks her hair to her neck. Instant relief.

“Alright.” She says. “You coming down? It’s cold.”

And Maddie hesitates at the mouth of the threshold, for just a moment.

“Sounds nice,” She tells the stairs, hidden under the clanging of Jazz’s steps.

At the bottom, all she can see is the ring of lawnchairs and the little blow up kiddie pool that Jazz is dumping her bag of ice in. The clear vinyl tubing of the cheap outdoor furniture catches every refraction of green light from the open portal. An oversized alien dollhouse in Maddie’s lab. The smell of squeaky fresh plastic overwhelms the ectoplasm. The basement has always been climate controlled, and underground besides, so the downright frosty air that the open portal adds to the mix creates the strange atmosphere of a sauna in winter. Inverted.

But the chilliest thing by far is Danny.

Maddie finally gets a good look at him when Jazz collapses back into her own chair, sticking her feet into the pool with a great heaving sigh. Maddie appreciates her running to the store for them. It’s nearly 110 out. She goes to dump her part of the ice in and nearly fumbles to keep from pouring it straight over Danny’s head. He’s buried up to his chest, now. What she thought were odd shadows from the portal are actually his folded knees, the only other part not under ice. His eyes are glazed and dull, staring sightlessly into the green vortex, his head pillowed on the wet plastic rim of the pool. Soaked hair drawn back by one of Jazz’s headbands drips slowly onto the concrete floor. Maddie frowns at that. They specifically asked the kids to make sure nothing in the lab was exposed to water. Should have put a towel down.

She probably can’t blame Danny for lack of foresight. He doesn’t look good.

“Hi, sweetie,” Maddie whispers, tucking the ice in around his legs instead.

His blank expression doesn’t change as he belatedly mouths ‘hi’ back to her.

“Drink your slush,” Scolds Jazz, kicking at the ice idly. Danny’s buried hands slowly tip the half melted slushie toward his face. The straw rests in his mouth for a while, but Maddie’s fairly sure he doesn’t drink any. Her poor baby. Jazz had picked it up for him the first time she went to the store, nearly three hours ago.

Maddie pulls her hands from the ice and wipes them on her shirt. Goes to the monitoring station set up on the side of the portal. The nodes taped to Danny’s neck are probably the only things keeping him from fully submerging himself. His oxygen levels are lower than his usual terrifying baseline of 87%, hovering in the 84-86% range, and his heartrate is just short of clinical death. Most worryingly, his temperate is reading at nearly 80 - a deadly fever, considering his normal 71.3.

Maddie wishes they knew how to really help him. This feels strangely like a - not like a test, not really, but like something is being withheld from them. Like Danny knows what to do, but is still too scared to tell them. Like it’s something he doesn’t want them to know, another little secret on the pile. A tiny declaration of loss of trust.

Or he’s afraid of them knowing.

Not that he could tell them, right now. He’s been basically unresponsive to even the most drastic of stimuli since his internal temp hit 75 an hour ago. Jack had driven out for the lawn furniture around that time, helped wrangle Danny out of the bathtub and into the lab for better monitoring, then disappeared again a few minutes ago. Maddie has an inkling of what he’s up to, so she’ll just hold down the fort and see what happens.

But Danny. Looking at this array, she has the clinging idea that this would be easier for him if he was a ghost. But even now, he’s so hesitant about letting them see him. Has never, in word or deed, trusted them with that. It’s an open secret. What he is.

Who he is.

Jazz knows; Maddie knows she known for some time now. Maddie knows. Does Jack? Maddie knows. She tries to imagine that alien presence in this little family tableau. More green in the air. An extra buzz of static under the portal. White hair, dripping. Maddie knows, but it feels like she knows less than she did three weeks ago.

She’s seen Phantom with her own eyes. Seen him fly and fight and snarl like an animal. Seen him bounce and smile and joke. How does he do it? Maybe Maddie just isn’t ready for the perfect intersection of those things yet. Does - does Danny’s ghost leave his body?

Is Maddie really ready to face her sons’ corpse and his ghost at the same time?

Jazz splashes suddenly, feet shifting, head tipped back dramatically off the edge of her seat, hair in a huge bun, wearing her only pair of shorts. Little embroidered ghosts on the hem. Would he electrify the pool, if he changed?

Maddie sucks in a breath and drags her eyes back to the monitor. Maybe it would be better if he did. Actually. The shock might be what he needs to stabilize his heart. He’s obviously reliant on cold temperatures to facilitate stronger conductivity of his electrical impulse based neurology. Like any other ghost. He’s losing stability of consciousness. Unable to rely on the physical, chemical reaction based impulses of the li - of humans. Maddie’s trying not to think about it. She doesn’t want to think about it. The monitor won’t tell her anything else.

Danny, the ghost, Danny, her son, is suffering from mild destabilization and his human body is too close to brain dead to keep him from -

God, Maddie is glad she doesn’t know.

Jack, bless that man, saves her from her thoughts by clambering down the stairs.

“Icecream!” He calls, voice pitched less exuberantly loud than usual. In deference of the small lab space, empty of the usual noise of running machines, or in deference to Danny. Or her own nerves. Jack hands Jazz a pint of strawberry pistachio and a spoon, sets a bag near the pool and then appears at Maddie’s side. Kisses her cheek. Glances at the monitor.

“How’s he doing?” He asks, handing her her own pint and a fork. Pecan Caramel soymilk.

“Not much worse. But we don’t know beyond his baselines, so it could mean anything. Temperature’s been stable for the last twenty minutes.” Maddie digs out the first pecan she sees and keeps it in her mouth to cool her sensitive teeth. Offers nothing else. Jack can read the screen. If he arrives to the same conclusion, then they’ll talk about it upstairs. Away from the kids. Hopefully, Danny’s too busy barely existing to overhear, if it comes down to it.

Jack nods, bullshooter blue eyes sweeping over the monitor. One huge, extremely hot hand rests on her back, goes to rub soothingly, but Maddie shoos him with her fork.

“You’re cold!” He says delightedly, sticking his hands on the folds of her turned down hazmat. He spares her a smile, then snaps his attention back to the screen. Lingers on Danny’s oxygen levels. “Well,” Jack says, straightening up, “Let’s try to get his internal temperature down a bit, then. Come on, Danno!”

He unties the cloth bag and pulls out a full gallon of icecream. There is no room in the freezer for that.

“Okay, buddy, I got us a real treat, straight from the farmer’s market creamery, you know, the people with the ecto-infected cows we helped out last spring? Got us a discount! Anyway, it’s custom. Chocolate icecream, fudge pieces, cacao nibs, coconut shavings, sprinkles, cookie bits, and those little soft dough chunks -” He cuts off, leans in closer to the pool, watches Danny intensely for a few seconds. “Yep! Extra cookie pieces. Wanna try some?”

Jack sticks two spoons in the open gallon and sets it aside. Gently eases the mostly ignored red slushie out of Danny’s hands and passes it off to Jazz. She doesn’t hesitate to pour some of it over her icecream. Maddie shudders. Bites her pecan. Takes a seat.

Jack pulls a shop towel out of his shorts pocket and soaks it in the pool, then wipes his face with it before slinging it around his neck. Takes a tiny spoonful of the icecream and starts to set it in Danny’s direction.

“Just try a bit, Danno. I’ll let you drink dry ice again,” He cajoles. Maddie whips her head up to glare at him. Jazz shrieks with her mouth closed, prevented from yelling properly by a well timed frozen strawberry. Jack ignores them both. He’d better have a damn good reason and some damn good results.

He gets Danny to eat a little, at least. He’d refused dinner last night, and it’s almost 7 PM, now. After a while, Jack leans in again. All Maddie can hear from a bare few feet away is a quiet, wet little rasp.

Jack beams his most reassuring grin at their son. “Of course it’s got ectoplasm in it; it’s for you, Danny-boy!” He says. And. That might be the first time any of them have put it to words. Admitted it out loud. It should feel like a taboo broken, but somehow, it eases a little relief into the atmosphere. A confession they all share.

Then Jack frowns a bit. Eyebrows drawn down in concern when he says “Is it not enough?”

Danny shakes his head, a light tremble of motion. The wet plastic squeaks under his neck. Lies still. Jack sits back, looks up to Maddie. Jazz is leaned back in her seat, staring down at Danny with a sharp frown of disapproval on her face. A fierce set to her eyes that tells Maddie everything she needs to know.

“We’ll get you more, sweetie,” Maddie tests the waters carefully, kneeling down across from Jack, sets a hand on Danny’s drying hair, keeps Jazz in her sights. Danny closes his eyes and shakes his head again, turning further into her palm and sighing quietly. A low, tired sound of dismissal. Not for Maddie. Jazz looks away, guilt and worry plain on her face. Bites her lip. Lids her icecream and mumbles an excuse of a goodbye, looking a bit mutinous as she leaves.

Maddie has to wonder if she should step back from this. Let Jazz do whatever needs to be done that Danny is hiding from them. But she can’t. These are her children; they shouldn’t need to be providing something for themselves. It’s her duty to care for them.

But. She is also an ectobiologist. Knows damn well what ghosts need. Has done in-field observations on this sort of thing for at least a decade.

It’s not the amount of ectoplasm that matters. It’s the source.

They can’t provide what Danny needs from the lab.

Sure, they’ve never seen Phantom feeding, but he’s so rarely seen at all. Elusive. Non-normative behavior. Maybe -

An incomplete hypothesis has never sat well with her. Her son being miserably sick while she has the power to help him is not sitting any better.

“Danny,” She says firmly, gently taking his cold face in her hands and wincing at the mincing slowness of his pulse under his jaw. “Please, just tell us what’s wrong, honey.”

Something thumps upstairs. What is Jazz doing? Maddie had assumed she left the house. To get. Something. Bring something back? Get a ghost they know to help?

Maddie’s seen ghosts negotiate and willingly feed from each other. The statistically significant ratio of mutual encounter to violent attack was one of the things that tipped the scales for Maddie and Jack on whether ghosts have the capacity for civilized society or not.

If Danny has some sort of pact or agreement with a local ghost, then Maddie is intensely interested in learning every detail of it. As both his mother, and as an ectobiologist. Jazz probably has extensive notes.

Upstairs, something drags across the floor. Maddie jumps at the noise.

“I’ll go check,” Jack offers, glancing guiltily back to Danny before heading up the stairs.

Maddie turns her attention back to Danny and actually feels her heart skip a beat when she finds him staring up at her with dull, glazed eyes. His face too-still and eerie in the green light of the buzzing portal. It dyes him colors he shouldn’t be. She takes in a breath, and calms herself, confused by her own reaction. She’s been exposed to high levels of ectoplasm for nearly two decades. Maddie lost her innate terror-reaction to ectoentities years ago. This is completely unfamiliar to her.

But the way Danny’s too blank face flashes into guilt as he flinches and tries to pull away is not. It’s the same reaction as Jazz earlier.

Guilt. Something withheld. Upstairs, something drags against the wood floors again. Slow, deliberate.

“Danny -” She starts, concerned. He squeezes his eyes shut tight and turns away from her. Mouths something that she reads as sorry. A creak on the stairs. The lights flicker. Maddie jolts back in a crouch immediately, hand falling to where her weapons should be. One hand on Danny. Assuring his location. Her other hand closes on nothing. Of course not. Maddie doesn’t wear her weapons around Danny. Not any more. There’s nothing there. She forces herself into a more relaxed stance with some difficulty.

What could they have upstairs for this? Surely there’s not another ghost living in their house? Maddie would like to think that a second instance would be ridiculous. Maybe a hidden freezer of ectoplasmic samples? She looks down at the human ghost in her lab. Maybe he needs a rare type of ectoplasm, due to his unusual biology? His half human biology.

Half human. Needing ectoplasm and emotion, but also needing food. Maddie’s heart picks up uncomfortably, sits high in her throat. At the other end of the room is the wall safe with the Nightingale journals. The myths and accounts and legends of violent ghosts. Hunted for their danger to humanity. Their hunger. Maddie and Jack have long discounted or disproved those old folk tales.

But then again, they’d also disproved the existence of something like Danny.

“Danny -” She tries again, watching the way he’s turned away from her intently. Mouth pressed in a thin, unhappy line. Every ounce of him tense, entombed in ice.

Jack bounds down the stairs. Maddie jolts to her feet. He’s got the bulky old TV from the sitting room in his arms. Maddie’s heart is pounding, her mind blank.

“We’ve got the cure, Mads!” He cries. Jazz follows, carrying the DVD player and a stack of DVDs.

In the pool, Danny shudders strongly enough to stir the ice. Moans out “No,” loudly enough to be heard.

“Shut up, Danny.” Jazz says firmly. “You need this.”

Jack finishes plugging the makeshift entertainment center together. Jazz sets the DVDs down and sticks one in the player. Maddie’s seen every title on the pile, but doesn’t recognize them from anywhere in the house. All horror films, many classic. Monster movies. Slasher flicks. It’s so disingenuous from where her mind had been that she’s left frozen.

“They’re from Sam,” Jazz explains. “For when somebody runs out of juice.” She spares Danny an annoyed glare and hits play.

Oh. Oh. Maddie looks down at the miserable little ghost in the pool, her shadow cast long over his morose, guilty expression. He’s so pale. The colors from the TV flicker against the vinyl and ice and ectoplasm in surreal flashes. Some loud sound blares from the old speakers with more static than usual and Maddie jolts again. All her senses on high alert, an undercurrent of unnatural fear flooding her cerebellum. An artificially induced state of terror. The buzzing she’s been ignoring with all the ease of overexposure is Danny’s aura, set to 18 hz.

There hasn’t been a ghost attack in nearly a week. All the local specters retreating to the other side of the portal as the heat wave rages on theirs. Danny hasn’t been able to emphathically power himself in a week. Maybe longer.

Ghosts feed on fear.

He’s been overwhelmed with the heatwave, unable to patrol his territory, probably not physically fed in a while, and emotionally weakened. Of course he’s destabilizing.

Maddie lets out a breath of relief. This is something easily remedied, at least. She leans in and kisses Danny’s forehead. In apology. In absolution. Feels guilty for her distrust of him with such an irrational idea. Feels the rekindled instinctual hyperawareness of a ghost near to her vulnerable human throat. Ignores it. Helps Jack finish moving the chairs closer to the pool. Sets her icecream back on her lap. Settles in and lets herself overthink the timing of the next jumpscare. Watches her little ghost relax slowly as he draws strength from their shared, controlled fear. Wonders if he has a vomeronasal organ, with the way his mouth is a little open. If it helps with emphathic filtering, or if it’s psychosomatic. Wonders if he feels better. Fishes his hand out of the ice and holds it tight until he squeezes her back.

It’s been a while since they’ve had a family movie night.

[secret-engima]

*screeching* What do you reckon would generally happen if Verstael meet Cloud!Prompto?

*squints* Not to be obtuse but which one? Do you mean the Verstael of that verse or my good guy Besithia of Future’s Blurry?

Gonna assume you mean Cloud’s Besithia and like- ohhhh boy.

So first the only way they meet is if Besithia tried to have his goons capture Cloud after FINALLY poking his head out of his lab long enough to hear about Cor Leonis’s scrawny kid who can bench press a car and outrun a coeurl and goes “AH-HA” because he still remembers that missing lab baby that got stolen that had been showing the most fascinating reactions to the Scourge. So Besithia sends forth his goons and I ... don’t entirely see Cloud getting CAPTURED so much as surrounded while Besithia himself shows up to inspect the capture and to brag.

Prompto looks and hears Besithia going on a mad rant about finding his “wayward creation”. Hears Besithia talk about tests and diagnostics and further experiments in order to replicate his “wayward subject”. He hears and knows that this man is talking about him, is going to drag him back to the labs again and break-him-mold-him-carve-him-open-stitch-him-up-wrong-.

And

Prompto

F A L L S.

Aranea and Tifa might be the ones to find him if he was in Niflheim when this happened, or if Besithia deigned to fly all the way to Lucis, then its the Glaives who find him.

Lets go with the glaives.

The glaives find the aftermath and at first aren’t sure WHAT they’re seeing. The area is ... shredded. Toxic almost in the levels of destruction. There isn’t a single living plant or animal in the area, just husks of MT units torn apart and downed gunships and mecha suits. It’s a war zone, but not one of their making. They are alarmed.

Captain is FRANTIC. He is the only one to look around the field and figure it out first, to spot what is ... left of Besithia’s personal division and put the pieces together and he RUNS through the ruined field, frantically searching.

They find Cloud lying on the ground not far from ... what is left of Besithia. Cloud’s fusion sword is buried point first in the ground not far away, still slick with engine oil and blood and MT sludge. He’s not moving, and Captain gives a strangled cry as he skids to a stop on his knees next to Cloud.

Cloud’s okay. Physically. Nothing that a few elixirs (freely given by the glaive and Captain) won’t fix. But his eyes are open and vacant and his limbs are trembling faintly like he's too cold. Captain bundles up Cor’s son and they rush back to base with him, where they call Cor. It takes an entire day for Cloud to snap out of it, to crawl out of the haze of labs and running and sour mako and Zack-here-Zack-fighting-Zack-gone-gone-gone and register his real surroundings, sitting curled up tight against Seph’s side while Zack paces worriedly back and forth and Cor sits on Cloud’s other side holding his hand with a grim expression.

They notice he’s finally aware again and fuzz like crazy. Cor demands to know what happened, which Cloud manages to choke out ... most of the story.

Seph and Zack flinch in sympathy and understanding the moment he admits he lost track of what happened when he realized Besithia intended to take him back to the labs.

He goes home to Insomnia with them and spends a while there recovering, but there is a moment, quite and private, when it’s just Cor and his son, that Cloud admits- more to the window he’s staring out of then the father in the nearby chair, that he thought he’d feel ... better. For having killed him. He can’t touch him anymore. He doesn’t have to worry about the labs. Doesn’t have to flinch from the phantom lurking in the shadows of the room or the corner of the mirror anymore. 

And yet ... he still dreams of them.

He doesn’t think he’ll ever stop dreaming of them. The labs are inside him, and he doesn’t know ... how to pull them out.

Cor abandons his book and gently hugs his son without a word.

[maswartz]

RWBY: After Salem (concepts here are free for anyone to use, just give credit)

In the final battle with Salem the heroes combine the power Ruby’s silver eyes with that of all four maidens to purge her of the Grimm essence and manage to get her to admit that she’s moved on from her daughters deaths resulting in her losing her immortality. Aging thousands of years in seconds she was soon dust. However before her defeat Salem managed to unite the four relics. The Brothers had returned. Displeased by the conflict still existing they were about to judge humanity as irredeemable when the heroes convinced them that humanity was not that far gone. Listening to their argument the Brothers agreed that humanity was neither worthy of them returning nor did they deserve extermination. Thus they returned to the stars. Before leaving however the God of Darkness left a gift. One in every five hundred babies born after this day would have the gift of magic. In time the four maidens would create the Seasons Academy to teach these new magic users how to use their gifts. Magic users have weaker semblances so the scales are not too unbalanced. Magic users are given the title of Wizard or Witch and act like Huntsmen, protecting the people of Remnant from the always present danger of the Grimm. The Huntsmen Academies lowered the age requirements after Salem’s final plan involved destroying many of the minor academies. In the following years much has changed. One such change is that Menagerie is now an official kingdom. Technology has advanced at a rapid pace, trains using anti gravity technology connect most cities. As a result trips that would have taken days now take a matter of hours. Due to this more and more cities rise outside the kingdom borders. The heroes of team RWBY and JNOR and their allies have all begun new lives after the fall of Salem.

Ruby and Oscar are married with four children. Ruby now runs a weapon repair and modification store with Nora while Oscar writes books about the past Ozes. Maria Pine-18 Lyme Pine-16 Sunny (M) and Luna (F) Pine-12 year old twins. They don’t possess magic or have silver eyes but their parents have made it very clear they love them all the same. Especially after they learned about Maria’s insecurities. Sunny and Luna have reached the phase where they want to be individuals instead of just one half of twins. Recently they unlocked their semblances. Sunny can sense aura and Luna can read body language. Based on Apollo and Artemis. Blake and Yang are married with two adopted children. Blake works to help Faunus equality across Remnant while Yang helps design and test new vehicles for the SDC. Tawny Belladonna-Xiao Long-18 Vivi Belladonna-Xiao Long-17 Weiss and Jaune are married with three children. Weiss took over SDC and is working to undo the damage done by her father while Jaune teaches combat at a local academy. Nichole Schnee-19 Maple Schnee- 13- Named in honor of Pyrrha. She inherited her mother’s singing voice and has a huge love of music. In fact she wants to enter the music industry rather than become a Huntress. To her relief her parents told her they’d support whatever decision she made. William Schnee- 10- A curious young boy with an interest in science. He loves touring the various SDC research labs with his mother. Ren and Nora are married with three children. Ren is the mayor of a rebuilt Kuroyuri while Nora runs a weapon repair and modification store with Ruby. Lie Balder-17 Lie Nezha-16 Lie Sif-15 The headmasters remain a part of Oscar’s inner circle however with the fall of Salem their mission is now to continue to guide all of Remnant into everlasting peace and preventing future disasters. Beacon- Glynda Goodwitch Haven- Ghira Belladonna, took over informally after the battle of Haven and made official around a year later. Shade- Otto Dune, A dog faunus, friend and ally of Professor Theodore, he took over after Theodore retired. Atlas- Robyn Hill, after the fall of Ironwood Robyn was placed in charge of Atlas Academy allowing her to lead a new generation away from the military and teach them how to act like proper Huntsmen. The current Maidens Spring- Raven Branwen- After the battle of Haven Raven lost everything, her tribe lost all respect for her, Taiyang rejected her, she had nowhere to go. Eventually she decided she needed to redeem herself and began spying on Salem’s forces delivering vital intel to the heroes. Summer- July Storms- When the heroes arrived in Vacuo they befriended sisters June and July Storms. They soon discovered that June was the Summer Maiden. During a battle with Cinder June stayed behind to buy the others time to escape. Once they were safe she called down a bolt of lightning to kill her before the powers could be stolen. Her sister was the last one in her thoughts so July gained the powers and has been the Summer Maiden ever since. Autumn- Emerald Sustrai- In a fit of rage Cinder revealed that she never truly cared for Emerald as anything more than a pawn. Broken Emerald fled Salem’s fortress with Mercury. They joined the heroes to save their own lives from Salem and Cinder’s wrath. During a battle Emerald used her semblance to distract Cinder long enough for Ruby and Jaune to kill her. Her last thoughts were of Emerald so the power of Autumn went to her. Winter- Penny Polendina- After the fall of Ironwood many Atlesian soldiers who were loyal to him and the ideal that “Atlas Will Prevail” deserted and formed an underground cell known as the Frozen Soldiers. Lead by Harriet now known as Snow Hare (the only Ace-Op who refused to surrender) they will stop at nothing to bring down the other Kingdoms. Penny has devoted much time and effort into stopping their plans. Beacon Staff Headmistress- Glynda Goodwitch- The first headmistress of Beacon. Once Beacon was rebuilt the decision to name her headmistress was unanimous.  History- Dr Bartholomew Oobleck- Still his energetic self always eager to share knowledge with anyone willing to learn. Grimm Studies- Peter Port- Still bombastic and passing on his wisdom and experience. Head of Security- Gordon Ryder- Gordon’s semblance allows him to create orbs of aura that act as his eyes and ears. He is capable of creating multiple orbs and has them placed around the boundaries of the campus. However while keeping track of them he often loses track of what’s happening around his own body. Origin- The Headless Horseman Combat Instructor- Paulina “Babe” Bunyan- A bull faunus, her semblance allows her to spot the weak point in things or people which allowed her to help her lumberjack father when she was a child. Origin- Paul Bunyan Airship Piloting- Skye Gale- When he was younger his hubris caused an airship crash that nearly killed him. After recovering he set forward to teach others to learn from his mistake. Origin- Icarus. Wilderness Survival - Forest Mann- The son of explorers who perished during a jungle expedition his semblance and basic wilderness training allowed him to survive. His semblance allows him to copy the traits of nearby animals. After making it back to civilization years later he began teaching others how to survive the wilderness. Origin- Mowgli/Tarzan Beacon Teams Fourth Year Team MNTY Maria Pine- Growing up Maria couldn’t help but feel like she was in the shadow of heroes and legends and as a result she grew insecure. Her desire to prove herself “worthy” eventually results in her being injured on a training mission. After that she admits her insecurity to her parents and her team who help her grow past it and see her own self worth. Like her father Maria can use magic. Appearance: 18 years old. 5ft 8in- Brown hair to shoulders Hazel eyes Outfit: Light red top with maroon corset. maroon shorts. Light red tights with green vine design, roses on knees. Maroon fingerless gloves up to elbows. Green vine design on gloves. Maroon boots. Half length version of Ruby’s cloak in maroon. Emblem: Three roses on a single stem, one white, one red and one maroon Emblem Location: Back of cloak Aura Color: Maroon Semblance: Stat Boost- Allows Maria to boost a single stat (speed, strength, stamina, etc) Weapon: Rose’s Thorn- Kusarigama with extending chain. Gun built into the end.  Partner: Nautica Waves Origin: Rose Red Nautica Waves- The daughter of fishermen she grew up on the water most of her life. Resourceful and daring, she won’t give up until all options have been exhausted. Appearance: 19 years old. 5ft 6in. Short dark blue hair. Blue eyes. Shark Faunus- Shark gills allowing her to breathe under water. Outfit: Teal wetsuit with wave pattern, armor plating on shoulders, elbows, knees, torso. Optional flippers. Emblem: A series of waves descending in size Emblem Location: Shoulder armor Aura Color: Teal Semblance: Hydrokinesis- Can control water as long as it’s in liquid form. Can even shape weapons out of it. The more water she controls the more aura it takes. Weapon: Ebb and Flow- Twin pistols modified to shoot water. Using her semblance she can boost the power of the water to the point it can cut through metal. Carries a dagger called Shark’s tooth as a back up. After a few missions begins using a harpoon as her main weapon to conserve on water. Partner: Maria Pine Origin: The Little Mermaid Theo Schwartz- Due to a less than stellar home situation he attempts to defuse tense situations with humor. He believes in being prepared and carries many tools and items in his hat including a set of throwing knives, tents, medical kits, food and water. Not to mention his team’s ammo. Appearance: 18 years old. 5ft 9in. Short black hair. Green eyes. Cat Faunus- Cat whiskers. Outfit: Black pants. White shirt with black dress coat. Red bow tie. Tall hat with red and white stripes. Emblem: A hand reaching into a hat Emblem Location: Back of coat Aura Color: Ebony Semblance: Hat Trick- A pocket dimension inside his hat where he can store and retrieve any inorganic item he wants. Weapon: Cat’s Cane-  A hook style cane with a built in grappling hook and gun. Partner: York Letterson Origin: The Cat in the Hat York Letterson- A firm believer in the phrase “Knowledge is power” York is almost always reading. He is eager to learn and teach as much as he can and often volunteers to tutor other students. When he has free time he can often be found in the library. Appearance: 18 years old. 5ft 5in. Long green hair reaching down his back. Often in twin ponytails. Green eyes. Outfit: Dark green pants. Light green button up top with a pocket on the upper left breast. Dark green armor over the shirt with light green pads on arms and legs. Pair of reading glasses. Emblem: A head of lettuce Emblem Location: Shirt pocket Aura Color: Green Semblance: Prehensile Hair- Can control and use his hair as weapons or extra arms. In a pinch can even shoot strands like darts. If the hair is cut it will regrow to normal length within days due to all the aura inside it. Weapon: Close Shave- A pair of blades with gun barrels in the tips. Blades can be combined into a scissors form. In scissors mode it can be thrown like a boomerang. Partner: Theo Schwartz Origin: Rapunzel Team NGHT Nichole Schnee- From a young age her parents made sure she knew that her name made her no more important and no better than anyone else. She is kind and generous and always looking for ways to help others with the Schnee fortune. She’s very aware there’s still plenty of damage to undo from her grandfather. In battle she will often target powerful or unique Grimm to add to her semblance. Appearance: 19 years old. 5ft 10in. Long light blue hair in double ponytails. Light blue eyes. Outfit: Light blue dress with white fur pattern trim. Dress ends little above knees. Blue and white stripped stockings. Light blue boots. White gloves. Armored breastplate, armor on lower arms and shins. All armor is ice themed. Emblem: Schnee snowflake with a sword resembling the sword part of Crocea Mors Emblem Location: Knee and elbow armor Aura Color: Light blue Semblance: Grimm Aspects- She summons pieces of Grimm to use herself. She can call on the wings of a Teryx or a Nevermore, the claws of a Sabyr, the armor of an Arms Gigas, punching power of a Beringel. Like normal summons if they receive enough damage they’ll dissipate. Weapon: Cyros- Icicle themed javelin that doubles as a rifle. The shield part of Crocea Mors. Partner: Guile Widows Origin: Christmas Elf Guile Widows- A cunning strategist who excels at using his enemies own actions against them. He prefers to lure targets into his webs and let them tire themselves out trying to escape. Appearance: 19 years old. 6ft. Black hair with eight dreadlocks, four on each side. Brown eyes. Outfit: Black cargo pants with a mild webbing pattern. Gray shirt with black straps from backpack forming an “X”. Fingerless gloves. Emblem: Eight eyes, top pair are farthest apart and bottom pair are closest together. Emblem Location: Bandana Aura Color: Black Semblance: Aura Webs- Webs that can catch, contain, or even act as nets. Weapon: Spider’s Bite- Twin curved swords with guns in the hilts. Partner: Nichole Schnee Origin: Anansi Hunter Python- Strict and serious he considers being a huntsman too serious to joke about. To his dismay his partner Tawny has made it his mission to get him to laugh at least once a day. Hunter is very reluctant to use his semblance due to its nature. However if lives are at stake he will do so with frightening effect. Appearance: 18 years old. 5ft 11in. Brown hair. Snake Faunus- Snake eyes, yellow with green pupils. Outfit: Green boots with a snake skin pattern. Yellow-green cargo pants. Yellow shirt under a green hoodie. Yellow-Green armor with scale pattern over hoodie. Emblem: Stylized snake head Emblem Location: Pockets of pants Aura Color: Yellow-Green Semblance: Hypnoeyes- Can command people to do things. Stronger commands require more aura and concentration and a command too far removed from what the subject would normally do will not be followed. When activated his eyes glow green. Requires full eye contact Weapon: Serpent Staff- Staff that can separate into chain linked segments. Can also shoot from the mouth of the serpent. Partner: Tawny Belladonna-Xiao Long Origin: Kaa Tawny Belladonna-Xiao Long- Adopted when he was 6 years old. Hyperactive, full of energy, eager to make new friends. Inherited Yang’s love of puns. Appearance: 18 years old. 6ft 2in Scruffy orange hair, brown eyes. Tiger Faunus- Tiger tail. Outfit: Orange sweatpants and orange top with baggy sleeves. Black patches stripe all along outfit. Armor on knees and elbows. Emblem: A tiger pouncing Emblem Location: Back of shirt Aura Color: Orange Semblance: Rebounce- Allows him to jump, leap, and bounce incredible heights and land from any height without injury. Weapon: Tora Tearors- Clawed gloves with guns built into the hand guards. Partner: Hunter Python Origin: Tigger Third Year Team VLET Vivi Belladonna Xiao-Long- Adopted when she was 5 years old. Very self conscious about her appearance after bullies at the orphanage convinced her that her birth parents abandoned her because she was ugly. Her mothers and brother spent years trying to get her to understand that she is beautiful on the inside and the outside. After being named a team leader she gradually gains self confidence. Appearance: 17 years old. 5ft 11in. Long dark black hair. Purple eyes. Outfit: Long purple robe with a hood she uses to cover herself up. After she gains self confidence she switches to a more streamlined version without a hood. Emblem: A pair of wings overlapping each other. Emblem Location: Back of robe Aura Color: Purple Semblance: Energy Ripple- Sends a burst of energy in a direction. Weapon: Tempura- Staff with fire dust on one end and ice dust on the other. When used with her semblance she can create waves of flame or frost. Partner: Terry Braun Origin: The ugly duckling Lie Balder- Though serious around most people when he’s with family and friends he opens up and loosens up. As a child his parents would call him their little Sunshine. Appearance: 17 years old. 5ft 9in Dark orange hair with a pink ribbon tied in it. Blue eyes. Outfit: Sleeveless green robe with golden sash. Magenta pants. Both have a sun pattern. Emblem: A stylized sun Emblem Location: Back of robe Aura Color: Golden Semblance: Light Burst- Absorbs natural light and discharges it. Depending on the amount of light stored it can stun or temporarily blind. Weaker grimm may even be destroyed by a strong enough burst. As he evolves his semblance he can direct the burst instead of releasing it in all directions. Even storing it in the form of light armor. Weapon: Stormbringer and Stormbreaker- Twin hook swords with guns built in. Partner: Alison Eirian Origin: Balder Alison Eirian- An optimist often lost in a daydream, her mind wanders easily. She enjoys seeing the bright side of even the darkest situation. However she does take her duties as a Huntress seriously. Tries to get Terry to smile more. Appearance: 18 years old. 5ft 10in Blonde hair in a ponytail, blue eyes. Outfit: Long cobalt dress with silver armor plating on the front. White stockings with blue shoes. Silver gloves. Emblem: A mirror Emblem Location: Back of gloves Aura Color: Cobalt Semblance: Reflection- Allows her to enter any reflective surface. Inside the reflection is totally silent. She can travel to other reflections as long as there’s no obstacles in the way. Weapon: Full Deck- sword that appears to be made of a deck of cards, shifts into gun mode. Also carries reflective cards to use as emergency reflections. Partner: Lie Balder Origin: Alice in Wonderland Terry Braun- Growing up on the streets led him to adopt a tough cynical persona. His new friends convince him that there’s more than one kind of strength. Very protective of those younger than him. Tries to get Alison to be more realistic. Appearance: 17 years old. 5ft 11 in.Scruffy brown hair. Brown eyes. Outfit: Brown boots, brown shorts. Brown t-shirt with torn vest. Emblem: A howling wolf Emblem Location: Back of vest Aura Color: Brown Semblance: Howling Wind- Can create powerful wind with his breath. Weapon: Howling Hatchets- Twin axes with guns built into the handles. Can combine to form a shotgun. Partner: Vivi Belladonna-Xiao Long Origin: The Big Bad Wolf Second Year Team JNGL Jim Peaches- Analytical and strategic he is highly skilled at coming up with plans that utilize the strengths of his teams. He has a fondness for insects and is known to talk to them when he thinks he’s alone. Appearance: 16 years old 5ft 5in. Short brown hair, pink eyes. Outfit: Tan pants with peach shirt. Tan shoes. Peach longcoat. Pink tie with insect designs (grasshopper, centipede, ladybug, spider, earthworm, glowworm) Emblem: A peach with a bite taken out of it Emblem Location: Belt buckle Aura Color: Peach Semblance: Peach Protection- Creates forcefields over himself. Can extend to include other people. With practice he learns to create smaller ones to throw as projectiles. Weapon: Peach Pit- Mace with detachable head. Gravity dust built in allows him to launch and recall the head. Partner: Lie Nezha Origin: James and the Giant Peach Lie Nezha- Eager and impatient he’s often the first to race into a battle. He enjoys moving fast and hitting hard. As a child his parents would call him their Moonbeam. Appearance: 16 years old. 5ft 6in. Short black hair. Pink eyes. Outfit: Amber sleeveless vest and dark orange cargo shorts. Armor plated elbow and knee pads. Orange goggles Emblem: A burning wheel Emblem Location: Knee pads Aura Color: Amber Semblance: Speed Rails- He creates rails of aura in the air to run on boosting his speed as he pleases. Only Nezha can interact with the rails, all others will simply pass through them. Weapon: Stormlillies- Twin chakram that turn into shurikens. Partner: Jim Peaches Origin: Nezha J.J Grayson- He is used to people mocking or underestimating him due to his weight and bulk. However he isn’t bothered by it because he knows it’s mostly muscle instead of fat. His teammates all find him awesome. He’s the powerhouse of his team and will put himself between them and danger if it keeps them safe. Likes to call Lyme “Sprout” Appearance: 16 years old. 6ft. Bulky build. Mostly muscle instead of fat. Short gray hair. Elephant Faunus- Elephant Ears. Outfit: Necklace with a black feather on it. Gray boots. Gray baggy shorts. Gray sweatshirt. Emblem: Elephant head Emblem Location: Front of sweatshirt Aura Color: Gray Semblance: Flight- Can fly as high or as fast as he wishes. Weapon: Stampede- Spear that turns into rifle, spear tip splits to reveal barrel. Partner: Lyme Pine Origin: Dumbo Lyme Pine- Calm and caring he enjoys nature in all its forms. A love of plants lead him to study botany, he can even use plants and herbs to create medicine in a pinch. He acts as his team’s medic. Likes to call J.J “Big Guy” Appearance: 16 years old - 5ft 3in. Short blackish hair, silver eyes. Slight tan from extended time outdoors. Outfit: Green overalls over a light green top. Brown gloves with floral pattern. Dark green boots. Emblem: A pinecone wrapped in vines Emblem Location: Front of overalls Aura Color: Lime Green Semblance: Aura Vines- Can create vines made out of his aura. These can be used for extending his reach or in combat. As his semblance grows he can add thorns to the vines. Weapon: Harvester- Pitchfork with guns built into the points. After running out of ammo during a training mission he has Harvester upgraded to a rail gun with two settings, small beam (the two middle prongs charge it) and large beam (all four prongs charge it) Partner: J.J Grayson Origin: Jack and the beanstalk First Year Team SNST Shiro Shishi- When Shiro was a child his uncle a crime boss named Kuro Shishi decided to cut loose ends. After personally stabbing Shiro’s father Kin Shishi in the back he sent a trio of assassins after Shiro, leaving the boy for dead. Fortunately a pair of drifters rescued the boy and helped him recover. The pair were retired huntsmen and they trained him until he was accepted to Beacon. Patterning himself after ancient warriors he read about as a boy Shiro is honorable, courageous, and a great leader in battle. He does however have a bad habit of starting inspirational speeches when they aren’t required. Appearance: 15 years old. 5ft 2in. White hair and golden eyes. Lion Faunus. Lion’s mane. Outfit: White samurai armor with golden accents. Armor has a lion theme. Emblem: A roaring lion head Emblem Location: Center of chest armor Aura Color: White Semblance: Power Roar- Creates an omnidirectional shockwave. Weapon: Lion’s Pride- A katana with a lion’s head on the hilt. Can shoot from the lion’s head. Partner: Lie Sif Origin: Kimba The White Lion/The Lion King Noah Rhythm- Growing up in a family of traveling musicians taught him two things, one was the importance of music, the second was how to ward off the creatures of Grimm. After arriving in a village for a show only to discover the villagers slaughtered by the Grimm he swore on the spot to become a huntsman. Appearance: 15 years old. 5ft 3in. Light purple hair and eyes. Outfit: Dark purple shoes. Light purple tunic. Purple cape. Light purple alpine hat with dark purple feather. Emblem: Flute surrounded by music notes Emblem Location: Back of cape. Aura Color: Light purple Semblance: Animal Melody- Can use music to communicate and command animals. No effect on faunus. His flute isn’t required to use his semblance but it amplifies it. Uses it to ask animals for intel when arriving in new places or to get a bird or squirrel to give Tomi a ride. Weapon: Pay the Piper- His flute shoots blasts of sound like Flynt’s trumpet Partner: Tomi Tumbleweed Origin: The Pied Piper Lie Sif- Curious and always eager to learn new things once she gains an interest in a subject she won’t stop until she knows everything about it. As a child her parents would call her their Shining Star. Appearance: 15 years old 5ft. Long light orange hair in ponytail to her left side. Blue eyes. Outfit: Dark pink dress with dark green accents. Armor on legs and along left arm and shoulder. Green quiver on back. Emblem: A green lily within a pink circle Emblem Location: Shoulder armor Aura Color: Magenta Semblance: Alliance- the more friends and allies fighting by her side the stronger her aura. She channels the extra aura into her arrows Weapon: Stormpiercer- A bow and arrow. The bow splits into twin daggers based on her grandfathers and her arrowheads are infused with dust. Partner: Shiro Shishi Origin: Sif Tomi Tumbleweed- The child of tailors they grew up helping their parents with the sewing. They love to keep up with latest fashions even if they know they could never afford any of them. Despite some initial confusion their team fully accepted the fact they’re non-binary. Appearance: 15 years old. 4ft 11in. Short blonde hair. Yellow eyes. Outfit: Tan shoes with yellow socks. Yellow shorts. Tan shirt with yellow suspenders. Emblem: A needle and thread Emblem Location: Buttons of suspenders Aura Color: Tan Semblance: Shrinking- They can shrink to a minimum of one inch high. Their strength remains the same as when they are full sized. Weapon: Needle point. A rapier that can shoot from the point. Partner: Noah Rhythm Origin: Tom Thumb/Thumbelina

[pokemon-legends-and-legacies]

Misc. New Fankids

A few minor new fankids I’ve recently added/created.

Fiorino “Rino” Fay - Rino is the son of two of the very minor Performer characters from the anime, Sara Lee and Concetta. I remembered when the two of them made a cameo at the airport in Kanto during the SuMo anime series and, at the time, thinking it’d be cute if they were a couple. I then forgot about them for a while, and the re-remembered the ship idea, and thought “hey! I could give them a fankid who’d be a Performer and a friend to Colette (Aria’s daughter)”, so Rino was born. All I know about him so far is, like I mentioned, he’s a Performer (as there’s no gender restriction in L&L due to how the verse is) and Colette’s bff, and also has green hair.

Danzou Koga - Inspired by chats with @pkmnomegaverse about ninja fankids, so while she went with Aya (Koga’s younger sister) marrying the middle of the three Kalos ninja bros, I went with Aya having a fling with the eldest (and clan heir/clan head), Ippei, resulting in an accident baby. Danzou grows up both in Kanto and Kalos with both of his parents’ families, but mostly stays in Kanto at first, which is where he befriends Kestrel (Janine/Falkner’s eldest daughter), who’s his cousin. He’s like an older brother to her, and one of the few people she gets along with. He also befriends Leith (Brock/Misty’s eldest son and Kes’s love interest) and the trio form a little friend group. Then he moves to Kalos due to some stuff relating to his father’s family (maybe related to dad being the clan head? who knows), which causes some friction with his friends/family back in Kanto. Fun stuff!

Zwei Hourai - The newest fankid. The result of, again, pkmnomegaverse and I chatting, this time about Colosseum and how weird the Cipher admins were, if they were maybe human experiments, etc, and how the scientist in the game, Ein, reminded us of Hojo from FFVII. Then I commented it’d be funny if he had a son who was similar to Sephiroth, to further the parallels, and then we realized that Nascour has silver hair and weird powers ... and the two had a ship name on neverendingromance... the rest was history. Zwei was an accident from a fling of sorts and is born sometime after the end of Colosseum (where Ein escapes, I think, and Nascour is arrested). Due to one dad being a science experiment or augmented person or having superpowers or whatever’s going on with Nascour, Ein kept the baby to study as a test subject sure that the union of his brain and Nascour’s powers would be spectacular. (The name Zwei is sort of tied into that. Ein is “one”, so his son is “two”, since is just the second version of him... or something.) Zwei is raised in some secret underground lab and trained in his powers with the goal of making more shadow pokemon or reviving Cipher or whatever. This backfires spectacularly when the first time Zwei is sent out to the “real world” on his own on a mission or something he runs away and never looks back. So much for loyalty to his family (that’s what raising your son as a science experiment gets you). Zwei ends up becoming a coordinator of all things and does his best to pretend like his upbringing never happened and he’s just a normal guy. It... sort of works. Or more like I’m still working on his story. He interacts with Gal a fair bit (maybe as a coordinating mentor?) for Reasons related to Ethan’s backstory. 

[atamascolily]

lily watches fma:b, eps. 37-40

I can only watch 2 episodes at a time because I keep having to pause and write angry screeds in a text document. I suppose this is what is called “engaging with the source material” in media studies.

Cut for extreme length and also me ranting about Hohenheim because FUCK THAT DUDE. Also, worldbuilding stuff I don’t understand.

Ed reciting the periodic table to get his mind off his boner for Winry is just perfect.

Meanwhile, Winry's nerding out over combat automail and Kimblee's just sippin' his coffee watching the whole thing

Kimblee got Winry to like him by saying he admired her parents, argghhh

Pride is revealed to be Selim Bradley and harasses Hawkeye because he's a little shit... also it conveniently allows Buccaneer's tunnel team to escape. Why is Pride simultaneously in Central AND Briggs? I guess we'll find out.

Hawkeye going home and seeing her shadow and realizing just how fucked they are is PERFECT.

Kimblee tells Ed he'll give him a Philosopher's stone if Ed helps him find Scar and Marcoh and finish the job at Briggs (i.e., kill everyone to make a stone). Ed asks--very reasonably, I might add--why Kimblee is going along with the homunculi and his answer is basically "for the lulz". (Oh, and they let him kill people instead of locking him up for war crimes.)

(although I'd argue the homunculi only let him do so when it's personally convenient; they have no qualms about keeping his ass in jail otherwise)

(also: please note kimblee ISN'T in jail for war crimes against Ishval, he's in jail because he murdered some Amestrisian guards so no one would know he has a Philosopher's Stone.)

Ed's like, "so Winry, you're a hostage for my good behvior and I might have to comnit mass murder, fyi" AT LEAST HE FINALLY FOUND A WAY TO TELL HER

love how winry forces her way into the convoy and kimblee just goes with it because he's too busy to argue.

(meanwhile, the end credits still have her at the atelier in Rush Valley, lol)

Yoki's flashback in the 1920s film style is HILARIOUS (if biased) account

Scar and Kimblee face off. I'm reminded of the 2003 anime where iirc Scar sacrifices himself to utterly destroy Kimblee halfway through. no such luck here.

I'm still not happy that Scar killed Winry's parents in this version. It was much more interesting when it was the Amestrisian military--specifically, Roy Mustang, one of the so-called good guys.

(It's not that it was morally okay for Scar to kill the doctors who saved his life--or anyone--just because of their race but it's a whole 'nother ballgame when the murder cover-up for a military dictatorship and the perpetrator is a character the audience has come to root for vs. misguided revenge)

What IS interesting here is Scar confronting Miles, asking him how he can serve in the same institution that killed his family. Miles says he's trying to change minds from the inside; Scar is highly skeptical but claims to be glad there are people like Miles in this world (who aren't so consumed by hatred and grief that they can do that kind of work, instead of becoming a vigilante).

one of Miles' troopers has a backpack that's a phone. Okay... WHAT? I guess if they have automail they can have extremely bulk cellphones, but... I don't understand the tech in this world.

brief detour for Al to lecture the chimera prisoners, okay

Yoki actually has a good idea for once!

I don't understand the chimeras saying they want their bodies back - it seems like they can shift from human to their other form and back (they do it a few minutes later) so... I get that they've been experimented upon and it's horrible, but they're not quite in the same desperate straits as Al, who doesn't have a body at all, or Nina Tucker *sob*. Or am I missing something obvious here??

...okay, I think they were moved to DIFFERENT human bodies than their original forms? It's kind of unclear from context.  

Just as I was admiring Winry's piercings for the bajillionth time, a random dude tells her they'll cause frostbite so she takes them out and gives them to Ed as a token. And probably also so Kimblee will suspect the ruse later if/when he notices that detail.

Scar's like, "man, why'd I have to kill the FAMOUS doctors, sigh"

Al has a vision of his body and it's SO FREAKING CREEPY, YO (I like the detail that his nails are really long)

Cut to Father playing with little mini versions of Ed and Al on a transmutation circle in his lair OH YEAH THAT'S CREEPY - he needs 5 people to complete the circle. Ed, Al, and Hohenheim are each little skull-people, Izumi is "a possibility," and that leaves one more... probably Roy.

I love Hawkeye and Roy's verbal codes, Roy hitting on Olivier, Olivier straight up admitting to Bradley she offed Raven, Roy's apparent shift into the flower business, etc, etc.

TIME FOR A FLASHBACK.FINALLY SOME EXPLANATORY BACKSTORY.

Okay, so we meet Slave 23 in an alchemy lab - his master used his blood to make a creepy blob in a flask that is talking to him and names said slave "Van Hohenheim" (because he didn't want to be "Theophrastus Bombastus", lol.) There's a time skip and Hohenheim becomes a skilled apprentice alchemist thanks to the blob's interference and education.

Note: I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS ABOUT ALL OF THIS. Also, WHY.

(but let's be real, I am distracted by the fact that young!Hohenheim, like old!Hohenheim, is extremely hot.)

The King of Xerxes summons the blob to ask it about immortality. I can already tell this is going to end well.

The blob tells the King the secret - cut to laborers digging a giant circular "irrigation canal". also, people start dying in coordinated attacks at specific geographic points just like in amestris.

I still don't understand how this works, though. In the 03 version, you just need a bunch of people to die all at once aftermaking a few preparations. It was city-scale, not country-scale.

also apparently, there's been a time skip because Hohenheim is significantly older than before (his job is to carry the blob in its flask around, I guess?). He's so excited about the immortality thing yet seems to have NO IDEA what it entails.

The blob made the actual center of the circle where Hohenheim was standing so everyone else dies. I'm not sure how that works because it's only a few meters off--is it really that precise?--but okay, whatever, sure.

Also, the blob regards Hohenheim as "blood kin" because it was made from his blood and... it's not WRONG.

the gate opens, the flask is shattered, Hohenheim is now immortal, and everyone in Xerxes is dead, and... Hohenheim was totally an innocent bystander who just HAPPENED to be caught up in it all?

not gonna lie: I'm not thrilled about this development.

I preferred the 03 version where Hohenheim was actively a bodysnatching jackass who decided to DO BETTER BY NOT DOING THAT. somehow the fact that he ends up immortal without trying here just sticks in my craw.

oh, no, but this means that HE KNOWS EVERYONE IN HIS PHILOSOPHER'S STONE PERSONALLY, DOESN'T HE? AHHHHHH

Father takes on Hohenheim's human form because they have the same blood and it's convenient?(also:hot, though I doubt the blob is interested in sex appeal.)

Father: Isn't it great? immortality, amirite? Hohenheim: *through gritted teeth* Thanks, I hate it.

Father and Hohenheim each got half of Xerxes' population, aka half the power.

turns out this was all a dream-flashback and Hohenheim is actually asleep on a train in the present and Izumi wakes him up.

have they met before? signs point to no because Hohenheim doesn't seem to know her. I'd ask how Izumi recognized him, but Hoheheim looks JUST LIKE ED so it's not like it's *hard*.

most awkward parent-teacher conference ever? but actually izumi starts coughing up blood and Hohenheim realizes she's performed human transmutation and opened a gate and uses alchemy to help her.

he can't restore the lost organs (I'm not sure WHY not - he has a philosopher's stone, that's like the whole point) but it helps.

AND THEN HE JUST COMES OUT AND SAYS HE'S A PHILOSOPHER'S STONE IN HUMAN FORM, ARRGGHH, WHYYYYYY, I don't get why he can't just fix her!!

sig decks hohenheim and I'm so thrilled, even if it doesn't actually take. THANK YOU SIG, I LOVE U.

Also: if Hohenheim had stuck around, he could have healed Trisha and she probably wouldn't have died and his sons would never have lost their bodies trying to bring her back, so FUCK YOU HOHENHEIM, THIS IS LITERALLY ALL YOUR FAULT. (And apparently, the homunculi are too, at least indirectly). FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU.

[dolcetters]

🍰, 👾, 🙉!

character flaws .

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

🍰 what’s my muse’s guilty pleasure?

opportunities to poke fun/tease the other members of the nest whenever they would exhibit behaviors influenced by their animal parts. 

this is a guilty pleasure because it’s usually done more out of spite than “playful fun” (like it may have initially been toward him), and his jabs are usually harsher than they need to be. 

there’d be a brief rush of “haha, not so fun when you’re in the hot seat now is it??” before he kind of realizes “...wow, that was a dick move” and quickly begins to feel shitty about what he said. he’ll apologize within 12 hours and will likely never make whatever specific comment he made again. 

👾 what was my muse’s childhood bogeyman?

the loons that nested in the lake not far from his family’s farm would be one. 

for those who don’t know, loons are nocturnal water birds who’re best known for their haunting calls which are sometimes mistaken for a woman screaming or laughing. as a child, dol thought that there was a scary shadow lady outside his window (nearby tree shadows cast by moonlight never helped) and thought the distant call of the loons was her trying to talk to him. most nights, he’d just lie awake and frozen under his blankets and be super drowsy and skittish the following morning. 

maddalena quickly picked up on her son’s lack of sleep, packed some fresh apple cobbler, and took him out to ‘picnic’ by the lakeside one night while augustus stayed behind with baby chris. when the loons started calling, she taught him about them and assured him they were harmless, and that their calls were just their way of finding their loved ones in the darkness and fog.

he’d go on to pass this comfort to chris and josie as they heard the loons at night. 

🙉 what are two things that make my muse uncomfortable in conversation

001) asking too many questions about him. dol doesn’t mind “surface” questions, like an off-handed “what’d you do today?” or “what’s your favorite ice cream flavor?” or passive things like that. it’s when a conversation becomes more angled at actually learning about him as a person that he’ll quickly become uncomfortable. strangers can rarely get to this point in conversation (he keeps people at an arm’s length the best he can), but once you’ve gotten to the point you can talk to him at length and things take that turn, he’ll start avoiding eye contact, actively try to chance the subject, or give vague, seemingly uninterested answers. this is not just due to the lab/military-induced paranoia but he also... sometimes... doesn’t even know the answers to those questions. dol lives more for other people than he does himself. and while that’s what he’s used to, he’s also kind of aware that others might consider that weird or sad or... off-putting. 

002) detailed discussion of sexual experiences. having worked in the devil’s nest bar, he’s USED to some level of bragging/gossip/chatter (from girls, gays, and theys) and will at the very least listen to it or give you a passive thumbs up. this is, of course, if you’re at the friendship level--if you’re a stranger he’s either going to walk away completely or just let himself zone out while you “talk to him”. he’s much more comfortable listening or giving input if the other party has a concern or something (this is much more in the case of very, very close friends) than he is talking about himself or his own experiences. greed and sakura are basically the only people he’d ever go to about that, and probably more sakura than greed. but he’s going to be EXTREMELY uncomfortable and possibly even ashamed during the conversation and then disappear into a hole for a day afterward. he craves the grave.