#and the places than kills you because they too electronic

[nishicchikouchi]

HAJZBSJXBSUZHAJS I PULLED HEIZOU ON MY ALT ACC.

[local-diavolo-anon]

i'm back!

ok so 2/3 days ago i found this youtube video where op turned Springtrap (or well, William Afton) into a fully build DnD character, and if i say so myself: things got out of hand fast

so here is my take on DnD Springtrap and specifically on that build (adding more infos under the cut for who is interested, i suggest to watch the video first)

starting with saying that unless you're playing in a scifi setting, this build is either not for you or to be modified, since in later levels spells are heavily centered around technomagic and electronic devices; personally when i will play him i will probably tinker around with the chosen spells and cantrips to make him less violently niche and/or more versatile

which kinda saddens me because it takes away not little of the characterization but, given most dnd stories take place in a medieval fantasy or high fantasy setting, a cantrip like On/Off or a spell like Remote Access are NOT particularly useful; so i will go for more psychic damage or necromancy oriented abilities, maybe i might take more than just 4 levels in artificier as well (especially given that again, all of those warlock spells at later levels are all technology oriented) but i need to see what those offer

however it is a kinda tank-y build given that with a shield on you can get up to a 27 of Ac, so even with low damage and not much hp you would not struggle too much to stay alive, and i like that!

as for the character himself, i put too much effort into my interpretation not to share it, so if anyone wants to play this guy as well, i fabricated a possible backstory that might come useful:

The character goes by the name "Dave Miller" (or whatever variant you want to use), and was originally a human artificier who created constructs for a living, mainly with the goal of offering aid to who needed it for whatever reason.

There however he ran into an issue, that being that a robot need a power source, and his own heart and lungs could not sustain a whole robot by themselves.

After losing part of his family to some kind of accident he became terrified of death, so with age he started replacing his own body parts with machinery to delay his last days (which made him a cyborg), until the point where he was very very close to become just a robot.

(This part may or may not involve a pact with a deity of death, this entirely depends on how you want to play him but it would make sense since the build is an artificier/warlock hybrid)

Through particular and very much not illegal experiments tied to necromancy he discovered that the life force of a living being could be shared, and used as a form of fuel. (possibly: age lived of the creature used= amount of extra months you get)

Here comes the second problem: this only worked with intelligent creatures, and more specifically, it worked best with creatures of your own race, which meant that he either went around murdering people or he found another solution. Non same-race creatures worked as well but not as good and there were not easy to find in the middle of a city and with a shop tied to your name.

And here is where and WHY he'd join a party of adventurers: after some time, his reserves or fuel were running VERY thin, and running into a group of adventurers was a god sent because by joining their party he essentially got a free pass to kill whoever he wanted, and reduce them to a dried raisin after sucking some life force out of them. Doing so you learn that the mowe powerful the creature is, the more energy it produces as well.

Your goal, that you as the player are following, when role-ing your character? essentially slay whatever powerful BBEG your Dm throws at you and suck all of that juicy fuel out of them, so that you can return to your little shop in the middle of the capital and return to create and sell whatever weird construct, doll, or robot comes to your mind for another few decades undisturbed.

And this is it. I think this might be a good backstory that could fit pretty much any setting you want to play this guy into, be it classic dnd or some scifi futuristic thing.

of course you don't NEED to use this one line per line, make up your own without looking back if you don't like it lol, dnd is the "make up shit and have fun" game after all!

Edit: also no his outfit makes no sense, i just went with vibes and decided a tanktop dress shirt, a twin tailed gilet and suspenders OVER said gilet was a good choice.

[r0-boat]

Whb kings at an amusement park

Beelzebub invites you and the kings to the greatest amusement park in all of hell located in his Abyssos.

And amusement park based in hell peaks your interest and since you're being invited along with the rest of the kings You would be dumb to not take it.

Satan

Gehenna has an amusement park. However, it is very different from Abyssos. Abyssos are more closely related to amusement parks on Earth, whereas in Gehenna, their parks are more active. So, honestly, Satan was a little confused when he could have found any trampolines or rock climbing walls or anything to punch and destroy for fun. However, the culture shock dies when he tries to ride a roller coaster. And he loves it! Holy fuck he loved roller coasters. Satan is an adrenaline junkie. Any fast ride that spins or goes fast or dives or drops he will be going there so fast. He will ride it till he pukes and then ride it again. The games he thinks are a little lacking, but only because his idea of games is something more active where he runs or, tosses, or swings something to get the aggression out.

Mammon

Mammon wishes he could ride the roller coasters but he does not think the seats will fit his size. in his personal opinion he finds the amusement parks and any other entertainment in Abyssos far more entertaining than the ones in tartaros. Since the people of Tartaros are more into electronic games and are more interested in staying in their luxurious houses and spending their money on material items and luxurious treatment, Mammon has yet to see an amusement park in Tartaros; well unless you count Resorts. Mammon will try any ride and he will love it all the same. Though he doesn't get how games work. Why work so hard to win one toy if he could get you hundreds of the same little stuff plush. So strange...

Leviathan

He hates this place. He hates everything about it! It's loud, crowded, and noisy; there are too many people he doesn't know. He wants to go home. Why is Abyssos so great? The parks in Hades are more relaxing, soothing, and tasteful than the rickety steel contraption that he barely trusts, which probably breaks all safety violations. He will only ride the slow, nice rides.

Levi is a master at the mini-games tho. (It's almost as if he had centuries of training. What? No. What are you talking about? Shut up! He has never seen this place in his life!) He will gladly show you anything, and it's fun to see you struggle at the stupid mini-game, where he can master it in one shot without even looking at the target.

Beelzebub

He knew you would like this park. It is grander than any park on earth. It has everything you could ever dream of and more no really everything... A Roman gladiator coliseum where demons fist fight bare naked where anyone could join in. The only rule was no killing each other. (inspired by the ancient Romans)

Beel is also a master at the games here and knows every ride and tells you how many times he's gone on it in his lifetime. He makes you try the food and the rides. He challenges Levi to the games "like the good old times." The reason why he invites you or the kings to a lot of his parties is because he likes to be a host. He's gluttony and he wants to have fun and he wants more fun, and what's more fun than sharing the fun with other people?

And then he gets swept up into the crowd. Damn it now you have to find him...

Lucifer

Interesting. He's never seen this side of hell before. An amusement park or anything entertaining like that is such a lost concept to him. He doesn't even know what to do. You must teach him to ride things, Play mini-games, and have fun. Which the Kings will happily do. Not every day do you teach the once God's favorite angel who has now fallen how to do ring toss. With every game and ride he goes on, He has more and more fun, and at the end, he responds with a simple "I like it," "It's okay," and "I don't mind it."

Belphegor+Beleth

Beleth got the king of sloth in one of those pull carts. Beleth doesn't mind; consider him as one of the kings. Honestly, he wants to catch up with Beel. Beleth plays all the games and rides for him until Beleth scolds him or Belphegor finally wants to get up from the cart and do something. Other than that, Belphegor is completely okay with watching. He prefers it. He likes watching. He feels like he's in the vicinity, he's participating in some way even though he's not actively doing anything.

The one ride he went on was the lazy river, which he proclaimed wasn't lazy enough. After that, he says he'll go on any other ride that doesn't move too fast, and all he has to do is sit. Other than that, he is happy just sitting here trying all the food, playing a game, or sitting with the stuff. He asks Beleth to take videos and photos.

[ninyard]

So what do we think about that draft where jean kill himself on the phone with kevin ? Or an au where kevin off himself because he couldn’t handle riko’s and jean’s death?

(coming back from my mini mental health break to drop... this. uuhhh cw for jean kills himself on the phone with Kevin sorry)

-

It was late when Kevin's phone rang, loud enough to startle him from a light sleep, a half enjoyed Exy match still playing on his laptop.

Jean

Kevin paused the video.

Why was Jean calling him at this time of night? He should've been sleeping - No, at practice. Maybe he had just finished. Which schedule was he even on, now?

He pressed the green button to answer, but the feeling of something off came much quicker than any voice that would have followed. Dead air, for a moment too long, an electronic hiss, and Jean didn't speak.

"Hello?" Kevin answered, hearing a movement as he held the phone to his ear. "Jean, did you mean to call me?"

Jean laughed, a weak laugh, short and muffled. "I didn't think you'd actually pick up. That makes this all worse, doesn't it?"

His words were not English, instead French, spoken too loudly to be a secret. Kevin sat up and looked at the time again to make sure it was really as late as he thought it was. Maybe it's nothing, he comforted himself with a lie, a way of ignoring the churning feeling in his stomach that something wasn't quite right.

Jean's breathing was heavy, accompanied with a hum every few seconds, less of a happy sound, more of a struggle to keep quiet in whatever pain he was feeling.

"Why are you calling me?" Kevin whispered, like he might be heard if he didn't speak quietly. "Where is he?"

Jean laughed again, taking an inhale into the deepest parts of his lungs, before he said, "It doesn't matter."

"It does," Jean's uncharacteristic lack of care as to the king's whereabouts worried Kevin - If Riko wasn't with him... Kevin looked at the time again and again, trying to remember Riko's schedule. Why couldn't he remember?

Where was he, and why was Jean alone?

His question came out cautious. "What's going on?"

"Nothing that you can change," Jean's sigh was tired, a dismissal mixed with pessimism and hopelessness. "It's already done."

"What is?"

His heart started to pound in his chest, pushed by the tone of Jean voice, speaking french out loud without a care, no fear in his voice, but something different taking its place; Kevin was afraid, scared of the truth. Jean would never be so careless - so reckless and nonchalant. Something was wrong, so very wrong, and putting two and two together only left Kevin with too many questions and a rope around his chest.

"I hoped you wouldn't answer." Jean's voice cracked as he spoke, and Kevin shut his eyes at the sound. "I'm not even sure why I called in the first place, but ah. Here we are."

"Stop that. Where the fuck are you?"

"Only where i was always going to end up." He laughed, but instead of an awful, awkward sound, behind the laugh was thinly veiled pain. Something hurt. Jean was in pain, and Riko wasn't around, and Kevin started to pace, like he would find the answer somewhere else around the room.

Jean swallowed hard before continuing, "I would ask you how to say goodbye but you're not known to afford such courtesies, are you?"

Kevin stopped. "Goodbye?"

"Ah, so you do know how to say it," The sigh that followed had something behind it, something wistful, something painful, something... final. "Goodbye," he spoke in english, before a shaky inhale brought him back into French. "Are you happy?"

"With what?"

"Everything." His breath blew loudly through the mic of his phone. "With who you are, away from this place. In general, Kevin, are you happy now?"

Kevin hesitated. "Sometimes."

Jean hummed. "Better than never."

"What did you do?"

Jean doesn't respond immediately, and Kevin knew then what he hadn't wanted to know at all. He didn't want to know, he didn't want to assume, but then the sound of a sniffle and a low cry followed, and Kevin felt his heart start to break.

"What did you do, Jean?" He asked again, no louder than a whisper this time, quiet enough that he could hear Jean's whimper as he started to gently cry.

"Will you stay with me?" Jean replied, a swallow in his throat, the phone being placed down somewhere. "I don't want to die alone."

"Let me call someone," Kevin begged. "Why? Why would you- Why? You promised. You promised."

"Be quiet." He pleaded, and Kevin covered his mouth with his free hand. Was this happening? Jean's words were not as angry as his tone would have suggested, instead a soft quiver in his voice, as he tried to hold back the tears that Kevin pictured rolling down his face. "Just stay with me or fuck off and don't let my last thought of you be that you're an insufferable bitch."

Kevin almost laughed.

He almost laughed, knowing what was happening, knowing Jean was fading away on the other line, as he cried, dealing with whatever he'd done to himself, however it was happening.

"Tell me something I don't know," His accented voice was getting weaker with every agonising second that passed. "Talk to me."

Jean knew everything about him, almost everything, so much so that he couldn't think of something new, something that he didn't know. This was his only light in a dungeon of darkness, and that light was fading quicker than he'd left him alone all those months ago. It was not comfort Jean was looking for, but perhaps company, or a presence, just to believe that someone cared, to feel like someone was there at the end of it all. He didn't really want to know Kevin's trivia and fun facts; He said it himself - he didn't want to die alone.

"Don't do this to me," It was all that he could say, a desperate, despaired attempt, no other words meaningful enough to get him to change his mind. "Let me help you."

"You can't," Jean responded. "Not this time."

And Kevin knew that it was the truth.

He thought for a moment. What was he even supposed to do? He thought about calling for help anyway - on the one hand desperate to keep him alive, while on the other hand knowing what would be waiting for him on the other side of survival. There were no scenarios in which Jean would prosper. If Kevin called for help, it would have caused a scene, and he swore he could already hear the cracking of bones under the Master's cane, and the muffled screams that would follow.

Kevin pictured a fate almost worse than death in every attempt to end that night differently; Jean's choice had been made - this was it, and this was his goodbye.

The understanding did not make the reality any easier to digest, though. Instead it sat heavy in his stomach, weighing him down, into the fabric of the sheets he sank back down into.

"I'm sorry," He said. "I've never said that to you before. I wish i never left you."

"I don't," Jean had started to slur his words. "You deserve to be happy. Even just sometimes."

"You do too."

Jean clicked his tongue, but he didn't comment.

Perhaps he knew it was what he deserved, but it had always been more of a mythical concept than anything achievable. He knew what that darkness felt like, the familiar sound of those swirling spirals, the thoughts of can I live like this forever? that fueled the fire to bring him to this point.

The silence on the phone line lasted for an uncomfortable moment too long.

“Jean?”

Jean mumbled his response after another long pause. “Mmm?”

“Tell me something,” Kevin turned his question back on him. “Something that nobody knows about you.”

Jean’s laugh was so weak it could barely be considered a laugh anymore; more an exhale of air with something behind it. “I wanted to be a writer. Before all of this.”

“What would you write?”

Jean thought for a moment. “Poems. Things nobody would ever read. Sometimes…”

Kevin’s heart started thumping again as Jean trailed off into a mumbling silence. “Sometimes..?” He prompted him.

“Hmm?”

“What would you write other than poems?”

“Something for the theatre,” His words were slow and tired. “Something to be… performed.”

“What kind of stories?”

“Ah.” Jean sucked in a long, laboured breath. “Dramas. Something to leave… Mmm-” There’s a dull thud on the other end of the line. He couldn't hold back his quiet groan. “Something…”

“Jean.” Kevin wanted to tell him to be quiet, to wake up, to perk up. He wanted to tell Jean that his joke wasn’t funny and he was waiting for the punchline to come.

“Kevin.” He said, long and drawn out, twice the length it needs to be.

“Did you ever show anyone? Your stories?”

“Only Elodie.” His sisters name rolled off his tongue with a wet, gentle cry. “My actress.”

Kevin thought about her then, not knowing where her brother is, not knowing that he was dying on the other end of the phone.

“Did she like them?” When Jean didn't respond, Kevin raised his voice. “Jean.”

“Mmhmm,” He answered, not much of an answer at all. More of an acknowledgment of his quickly dimming consciousness, a murmur of life to prove he was still there. “Can’t talk much longer.”

“I know.” The painful acceptance left his mouth with a bitterness Kevin couldn't quite describe. “Tell me about her. Elodie.”

“I wish…” Jean spoke through almost shut lips, and Kevin winced at the sound of sleepiness as it started to consume him. “All alone.” He finished a thought he never spoke out loud. “I think… I'm tired.”

“I know.” Kevin said again. “Are you going to sleep?”

There was a struggle in his inhale as he answered, "I think so.”

Fuck. “Are you sure?”

“Mmhmm.”

There's a moment of silence.

“Jean.” Kevin calls. He could still hear his hollow breathing on the other line, but he called his name again when all that followed was silence, “Jean?”

“Mmm?” His breath slowed down to nothing, and Kevin was certain he could hear the slow and irregular ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum of his friends struggling heart.

“I love you.” Kevin said, but he felt sick as the words left his mouth. It felt worthless to him then, an empty promise. Words that should've been said far too long ago. “And I’m sorry. I’m sorry I couldn’t keep you safe.”

“Mmhmhm,” Jean hummed in three syllables. "Safe."

And Kevin waited as the silence drew on. He heard it, the final breath that left his lips, the rattle of his breath through lungs too weak to take it.

One second, he counted, and another.

Another, and another, and another, and a million moments passed with nothing but silence and the knowledge of Jean's soul hopefully finding solace in another, brighter place.

He put his phone down, too scared to hang up, and waited for a sign that this wasn't final - waiting for a sign that said this would simply result in a punishment taken too far, that in a months time when Jean's wounds healed he would call Kevin again and apologise for breaking his promise.

Kevin tried not to care about the promise, to not watch the duration of the call going up and up and up with not so much as a peep from the other end of the phone. He tried not to wonder what would happen next - would his parents be informed, would they care? Would they send his body back to France, or would he die, anonymous and insignificant, buried in some American plot of land somewhere, that nobody cared enough about to put a bunch of flowers on top of?

Would the Master call Kevin, would anyone let him know, when they didn't know Kevin had taken another breath after Jean had taken his last?

"Oh Jesus fucking Christ!" The voice on the other end of the phone scared Kevin out of the depth of his thoughts. Was it Zane? He wondered, his finger hovering over the button to end the call, or was it just another voice of a nameless Raven who would forget about this all once the sun rose? "Get the King, tell him it's-"

Kevin hung up before he could hear any more.

The panic attack that followed was not a friendly one - It started slow, but before long, his chest was stuck in a vice, and his heart was prepared to take off. Kevin couldn't hold it in anymore - he cried, choking on the breaths that left his hands numb.

Kevin didn't hear Andrew coming in, but he stood by the door frame, watching, hardly visible through the blurry haze of tears in his eyes. Andrew glanced at the still-lit-up phone screen on the bed beside Kevin, and shut the door gently behind him.

No words were enough.

There's nothing that could be done to make everything okay again, nothing he could hear that that would stop the guilt, and the sadness, and the hurt, that all-consuming hurt.

All Kevin had to offer then, was pain, and bottomless grief, as he held his racing heart while it broke into a million, tiny pieces.

[nitrosodiumgameanglia]

Why Sound Design is so Important in Games

Sound design is a key point in games, though it is often neglected in college games where we do a lot of work without speakers on. Having some good audio in a game really helps elevate the experience beyond just being a solely visual medium, as much as audio changed silent movies. The games with the best sound design are often those with realistic sound systems, or ones that elicit the desired emotional response. Good sound design can make you terrified to turn a corner; it can make you cry in the game's saddest moments; it can turn a level from a selection of rendered polygons to a truly real-seeming experience. Obviously our game's sound design isn't that deep, but it doesn't add nothing to the game either.

The first game I am looking at is Thief: The Dark Project. This game came out in 1998, but I would say it still holds up today with a few patches to make it run on modern systems. The game has a unique stealth system that lets you hide in shadows, but the main thing we're looking at is the sound. Different surfaces are different levels of loudness when walked on - carpet is perfect for sneaking, but metal catwalks are loud and clank under your feet. This isn't just set dressing either, because enemies are more likely to hear you if you're clanking about on steel grating. Then there is the ambient sound, where you can hear nearby guards muttering or whistling (in a great bit of game design, this helps you keep track of them when they're out of sight), torches crackle, and strange ambient screeches echo down hallways. The ambient soundtracks in each level are interesting, and use a lot of electronic synthesiser noises, which gives them an 80s John Carpenter vibe. They help make the environments foreboding, but also help tell the story in a way that 90s graphics simply could not. For example, as you enter the deepest annals of an ultra-religious Hammerite compound, the ambient whirr of machinery gets replaced by solemn choir and hymns. Caves can have dripping water and the occasional crumbling rock, while more twisted forest environments have the endless chirring of insects and chuckling from unseen nymphs and satyrs. The actual sound technology is also really good for the time, because it supports sound cards, even though they aren't used too much anymore. With them enabled, you can listen against a door and gauge how big a room is based on the echo of the guard's voices inside. Even for today that is fairly advanced, and as far as I know, not present in many other games.

The next game I am looking at is Hunt: Showdown. It is a 2018 horror shooter taking place at the end of the 19th century, where you play as a bounty hunter trying to kill various cryptids and monsters. The game uses the Cry Engine, so it already looks good on a visual front, but the audio is also phenomenal. Most of the quality comes from its directional sound system, which is so specific you can tell where players are through buildings, which is useful for lining up shots when you don't have a good visual read on their whereabouts. Every gun also has a unique sound and echo, which allows an educated player to guess what weapon has been fired, from what direction, and even from what distance. The way that the game calculates sound waves travelling is a very unique and realistic system; a gunshot ringing out over an open field will be louder and clearer than a gunshot fired in the middle of the thick backwoods. I assume this is a built-in feature for CryEngine V because I know of no other games with this level of realism when it comes to sound - I can only assume it calculates for windspeed and other factors and then runs the sound effect through various in-engine filters.

Finally, I will look at The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. One of the lesser-mentioned qualities of this game is its environmental sound design, which help the various holds of Skyrim seem like realistic places. The wind whistles about your ears, giving you a good sense of your player's altitude and the temperature around you. In the mornings and evenings, you can hear crickets chirring and birds chirping. The rushing of rivers sounds different depending on the course - swelling into a roar of white noise in the rapids, but dissipating to a trickle when the river becomes a lazy stream. Then there are more ethereal sounds, like the creaking of the aurora borealis on winter nights. Towns have their own soundscapes also, with the creaking wood of huts and the crackle of flaming torches. The ambient music by Jeremy Soule (the same guy behind the LOTR soundtrack) also adds a lot to the game's atmosphere, with majestic orchestras making even a simple walk through the valleys a much more emotive and captivating experience. However, you can play with the sound turned off and just listen to the layered soundscapes.

From my research, I can see that the main theme that makes a soundscape good is attention to detail. Not just having one sword hit sound, for example, but several, altered depending what material you strike, and echoing with a different resonance depending on where you are. I would say that with Wallpaper of the Mind, we have achieved this as best we can in four weeks, with the different footstep surfaces. The sounds I myself provided were more stock quality, but it doesn't matter, because how sound is used mechanically is just as important. I will make a blog post on this soon.

[bearimba]

Ok wait I have vague GIG(G)S ideas:

Impulse: an Experienced Ghost Hunter(TM)!

He worked for whoever the in-game company is (they don't have a canon name as far as I'm aware?) for a while before going independent.

Accidentally made a pact** with a demon during his early days and is now racing to reverse it before he dies and his soul gets eaten

Something about the pact gives him plot armor so he's lowkey immune to dying (yes this is counterproductive. no I don't know why/how this works yet. probably something happened to make the contract go awry)

Surprise surprise, making deals with a demon goes against company policy, but breaking the pact like they want would also probably kill him. He makes a get-away by stealing their van, and since he's got the equipment and skills for it, he continues ghost-hunting to make a living while on the run.

He also offers services as an electrician on the side just for extra cash, which is great because faulty electronics is often a sign of EMF stuff.

He gets little demon horns? Maybe? It's for the vibe (and maybe a tail too, to hold his lighter with)

The cheat sheet is just a journal (or maybe a collection of journals?) full of notes he's taken over the years

Skizz: a literal and metaphorical angel*!

For backstory and world-building reasons I haven't figured out yet, he forms a sin-eating pact** with Impulse, and that's why they stick together (besides the fact they enjoy each other's company, of course).

He's a tradesman on the side just like Impulse, but he does more home-repair and carpentry stuff.

All his clothes are torn-up because he keeps dying in stupid ways, but he hasn't replaced them yet because he insists it makes him look cool.

He's in charge of taking pictures because his ✨angelic presence✨ counteracts the EMF stuff that messes up the camera. They used to have a much nicer one that wasn't affected by EMF back when Impulse first started, but they managed to break it and haven't been able to afford one like it since.

Honestly I don't have enough headcanons for him yet and it makes me sad :(

Gem: a totally normal… individual!

You heard of not-deer? Yeah, it's kinda like that >:]c Has she been replaced? Was she once Gem but has been transformed into something else? Has she always been this way and no one noticed until now? Who knows!

She and Grian met in middle school while causing trouble in the same arts class and have been buddies ever since.

She liked to spend a lot of time in the woods near her home partially due to a casual interest in botany and partially because she and Grian could get up to shenanigans without getting caught. Even when they moved to a different country for college (it was the only university they could find that offered decent programs for both architecture and medical science, not to mention his cousin offered to let them stay at his place rent-free), she enjoyed driving out to the nearby national park to hang out. That park was also her last-reported location before she went missing.

If you look too close, there's subtle details that hint that something's not quite right---eyes that reflect light, limbs that are a little longer than they used to be, very sparse blinking, and a smile that's a little too wide...

Grian was going to be her first victim. He was an easy target, after all---unlikely be missed under the right circumstances, and scatterbrained enough to fall for her tricks---but there was never a good time to strike without blowing her cover. Eventually, the cravings for human died down completely, and she (mostly) forgot he was supposed to be her meal instead of her best friend.

She likes to study other people and mimic their behavior, and she's gotten a lot better at it than she used to be when she first reappeared.

Imp and Skizz both realize there's something off about her, but she's not exactly aggressive or anything, so they just let her be. It doesn't help that whenever they try to question Grian about it, he insists there's nothing wrong.

She usually stays in the van because for some strange reason, the ghosts don't like to appear when she's around.

Although she didn't get to study anything in-depth, she does have more medical knowledge than the rest of the crew, and getting her to help is cheaper than going to a doctor.

Grian: a blind clairvoyant!

Despite Gem's disappearance, Grian managed to pull himself together enough to continue college in the fall. But about halfway through his degree, Jimmy pulled him along to study in a supposedly haunted part of the library because no one else would bother them there, during which the whole building experienced a blackout. The staff fixed it quickly enough, but when the lights came back on, Jimmy was confronted with a knocked-out Grian. For the rest of the semester, he'd be plagued by headaches, insomnia, sleepwalking outside and sleeptalking about the moon and eyes, paranoia, periods of amnesia, and other symptoms that almost made him drop out of college.

Ever since, he's had has this uncanny intuition for when something's about to go wrong and often suddenly knows things without any explanation as to how. Skizz swears it's like he's got eyes in the back of his head or something.

When Gem popped up right after he graduated and suggested to him that they leave on a long roadtrip, he wasn't really in a state of mind to question it. He just thought it would be a good chance to get his head on straight, and strangely enough, just being near Gem helps him to think much more clearly. He just assumes it's because they're such good friends.

He gets possessed at Point Hope, and although the crew manages to exorcise him, he still occasionally gets the urge to set sail and never come back. He's also noticed a lot more mollusks in strange places since then, though surely that must be unrelated...

Scar: a lovable salesman!

He's also considered an angel*, and he definitely likes to play the part to sell his wares.

The GIGS crew buys their supplies from him since certified sources are rare and trustworthy vendors are even rarer. Scar is still a pretty shifty guy, but he hasn't let them down yet---killing off his customers beloved friends would be bad business, after all!

He lives on the road just like GIGS for his own reasons, so they have to arrange to meet with him way both they run out of supplies.

His previous life is a well-kept secret, but he had an interest in the occult even before he became an angel. He claims it was to contact his old pets from beyond the grave, but unsurprisingly, no one quite believes him.

He loves to make outdated references, but no one knows if it's because he's that old or he's just a nerd.

Sometimes he'll join the crew on an investigation for fun, but he dies more often than not, and recovery is so inconvenient that he doesn't like to be on-site very often.

The crew:

They mostly deal in ghost identification, but they do offer extermination for an extra fee. It's more expensive than companies that specialize in extermination, but that's just the price for convenient/speedy service.

Each person has an unofficial role with Impulse as the ringleader, Skizz as the photographer, Gem as the man in the chair, and Grian as the odd-jobber. Of course, everyone has a little experience with everything, but they're most comfortable like this.

They all live in the van, and will usually stay in a town for anywhere from a few days to a couple months depending on how much work is available.

They tend to stay nights at motels and the like, but when money's short or there's nowhere to stay nearby, Imp and Skizz usually sleep in the cab of the truck while Grain and Gem get to camp in the back with sleeping bags.

Pay is split five ways: each member gets a set stipend for personal stuff, and the rest goes towards "work expenses" such as food, motel fees, gas, and the occasional treat for a job well done.

Other appearances:

Pearl, a mysterious woman with a wolfish grin and strange knack for attracting the supernatural.

Jimmy, Grian's well-meaning cousin who accidentally gets Grian possessed, freaks out when he goes no-contact on a sudden "road trip" with someone who's been presumed dead, and then nearly dies himself after an investigation gone wrong.

Lizzie (Jimmy's cousin on the other side) and her husband Joel, who contact GIGS for help and are surprised to find two old acquaintances among them (which is how Jimmy finds Grian again).

Ze and his new colleague Sneeg, two employees of Imp's old company that they run into at a haunting that got double-booked.

BDubs ("is that even a name?" "shut up. like you can judge, Mr. 'my-name-is-Grian-not-Grain.'" "yeah--- well--- at least I'm not named after some stupid stars!"), a very concerned patron who insists on supervising the investigation and gets roped into helping.

Ghostie-ghoulie stuff:

The supernatural is common enough to be recognized but isn't typically considered a part of everyday life.

"Ghost" refers to any supernatural creature that forms from human souls, which mean their appearences and attributes can vary just as much as human personalities. However, their traits can be greatly affected by the circumstances in which they were created (aka how a person died), so there's enough commonality to classify them.

Just like any other being, ghosts need energy to function. They absorb this energy in the form of heat and expel it and electromagnetic radiation. If they output enough of this radiation, they can create EMFs that can be detected by readers. This is also why haunted areas tend to be cold and events/hunts can be tracked by spikes in EMF levels.

If ghosts aren't formed enough enough energy to subsist right off the bat, they can wither away without intervention.

Most ghosts the GIGS that exist are fairly new, so they aren't strong enough to kill anyone. It usually takes at least a year of residence for enough EMF to gather for them to mess with the environment, and even longer to cause events. However, the older a ghost is, the more its sentience slips away.

The reason ghosts kill can vary wildly and may even depend on the type of ghost. Some ghosts are simply territorial, some hold grudges towards the living (though they aren't always aware enough to realize what/why), and some even want to possess the living.

Possessions are incredibly rare because it takes an immense amount of energy to possess someone, but most ghosts are no longer sentient to want such a thing by the time they've amassed enough power. Possession of a living body is even harder for the exact same reason.

*Angels and demons don't actually have anything to do with Christian mythology. Unlike other ghosts, neither are fully dead. The link between their soul and body is just messed up, though due to the rarity of both entities, how exactly this occurs is severely under-researched. For demons, their soul has been banished from their body (the still-functioning body is called a zombie and can be killed to destroy the demon), and their creation typically happens within an abundance of "bad energy" (ex: violent murder). On the other hand, angels are permanently bonded to their bodies and are created in the presence of "good energy" (ex: heroic sacrifice). They can also be killed by destroying their bodies, but unlike demons, the fact that their soul remains inside the body means they're able to regenerate even though the scars always remain. Both entities can rot (not age) to death within the average human lifespan but can prolong the wait by consuming energy, and both tend to have very clumsy/uncoordinated bodies due to the messed up soul link.

**Also, although it costs demons a lot of energy to form a pact with humans (and again, the manner in which a pact is formed/maintained is unknown), the fulfillment of a contract will grant them much more power than they out into it---it's bascially an investment. Angels can do a similar things called "sin-eating" but it works in reverse: it takes a little energy to make the pact, but the fullfilment will drain them greatly (no I don't exactly know how this works yet either. but it sounds cool so I'm keeping it >:]c )

[impishjesters]

Little Thoughts

warning(s): suicidal thoughts, suicidal ideations, child neglect, child abuse, suicidal thoughts of a child, abuse, financial abuse, hurt/comfort(?), mentioned manipulation, casual talk about death/dying, pre-relationship, uncertain reactions (basically Jax nor you really know how to go about the situation), implied crush (both ways) A/N: This was written for myself, read it or don't, I don't care. I just wanted validation and acceptance from somewhere, even if it's fictional...

“Do you ever just wish you were dead?”

Jax slowed his oncoming approach towards you, blinking in confusion. “What happened to, hi? Hello? How are you?” He heard you scoff and crossed his arms loosely in thought. Sure, he was used to hearing some pretty questionable things from you, but you’d never flat out ask him—or anyone else for that matter—if they wanted to be dead.

“Well?”

“Uh, can’t say I do. Sure, this place sucks but think of all the entertainment I’d miss out on if I was, ya know—” he swiped his thumb across his neck and made a noise, “—dead.”

“You’ve been here longer. Aren’t you tired?”

What was this? Morbid fifty questions?

“You doin’ alright there sugar?” Jax circled around you, allowing you to see him long before he approached you taking a seat beside you. “I know you usually say some pretty…intense shit, but this is a little too intense even for you.”

You shot him a blank stare. Huh, you did say some pretty out-of-pocket stuff when it came to the dark subject—but to ask him flat out if he ever wanted to just be dead? That was new, but it was a valid question in your mind.

How could they choose to suffer instead of just dying?

“This isn’t anything new… I’m not like you guys. I haven’t been here for years on end gradually going mad.”

“Hey, rude. I’m not nearly as bonkers as Rags or King-face.”

He got a playful eye roll from you and that was more than enough of a win for his little joke. Sure it was a serious topic but he didn’t do so well during talks like this.

“I’ve always been like this… for as long as I can remember, as a child I thought it’d just be better if I was dead. That way my family could stop fighting, and I could stop being the rag doll in their arguments.”

As you spoke the grin that was glued to his face started to fall, slipping bit by bit until his lips ran flat. What child wants to kill themselves? He remembers his childhood not being the greatest but he never thought about death, that’s for sure.

“We didn’t have a lot of money growing up, they’d spend it on unnecessary stuff and worry about food and bills later until years of it caught up and put them in a bind.” Your gaze fell to your hands, fingers picking and peeling at the flesh. “Most would say I was a very spoiled kid, I always got toys and the holidays were jam-packed with even more unnecessary toys for a growing child to outgrow.”

He had a feeling he knew where this was going…

“But I didn’t want that, I didn’t want all those toys. Expensive or cheap, I never asked for any of them. If my eyes made contact with something and lingered just a second too long they’d buy it for me.” You sighed, looking up at Jax. “All I wanted was my family to give me the time of day, to play with me. To love me.”

“Fuck, I’m..” he hesitated, saying sorry felt pointless, that was ages ago and he wasn’t there. He wasn’t at fault but he couldn’t even imagine that—his own parents argued but they kept him out of it.

“It’s fine you don’t have anything to apologize for.”

He shuffled in place awkwardly, how are you supposed to respond to that? Luckily he doesn’t need to because you are already looking away and took a deep breath before continuing.

“It never got better, toys became electronics and games. Because of my family, I didn’t get to socialize growing up and I’d be quiet and withdrawn at school. The older I got the more vocal they started to get about me, even though they didn’t want me they kept me chained down and limited my ability to fight them.”

“What they lock ya up or somethin’?”

“They didn’t need to, I had no reason to leave the house. I didn’t have friends, we didn’t have stores or anything fun to do that wasn’t an hour’s drive away.” He hates the way you laugh so casually about it. “No, they’d limit any money I’d receive making sure I’d spend it instead of save it. I used to think it was their way of trying to make sure I wouldn’t run away, but even if I didn’t have savings that wouldn’t have stopped me from leaving with nothing but the clothes on my back.”

“Why didn’t ya?”

“I was a coward.”

Jax snorted and caught your attention. “You were a child, not a coward.”

“Whatever, pointless to think about it now. Did me fat lotta good in the end anyways, here I am trapped in this hell hole where the closest thing to death is abstracting.” A dry laugh left you at the irony. “I can’t even fucking off myself properly.”

The two of you simply sat in silence for a few minutes, neither of you seemingly aware of how to continue the conversation. There was no reason to give Jax the whole sob story that didn’t matter anyway, and he couldn’t think of a response.

Sure he wasn’t the greatest at times but he didn’t want you to just…die… but he wasn’t going to try and guilt trip you into living for him. Even if that outcome sounded far better than you dying, he could live with a guilty conscience—probably…

“You don’t have to worry about responding, I sort of just… dropped that all on you. It’s fine, it’s the past.”

“Still doesn’t change that ya still feel like ya should’ve died because your family sucks.” You shot him an unimpressed look and he shrugged. “I’m just sayin’, you were just a kid stuck with a shit family and should’ve been given help a lot sooner.”

“Gee, thanks—”

“I’m not done,” he used your name, no silly or insulting nicknames, “someone should’ve done something, I know people are stupid and think if they just look away it’ll be fine. But someone should’ve stepped in, it’s still abuse, it’s neglect.”

It went unspoken about how you clearly didn’t seek any form of therapy or help as you got older, he already felt like he was pushing it saying what he did.

“Look nothing I say is gonna make ya not wanna pop yourself, but it’s different now. Yeah, ya stuck here but you aren’t alone, and the others like ya.”

“What about you?”

“Me?” he blinked, you weren’t asking him if he…

“Do you like me?”

Jax coughed into his hand, casually turning himself to face the same direction as you. He refused to budge even when you turned yourself to face him, he was not gonna lose his cool.

“Ya alright, better than King-face and Rags that’s for sure.”

His answer pleased you enough to pull back but still face towards him. Occasionally, you’d see him peeking over to see if you were still looking at him until he finally kept his gaze forward.

“Thank you Jax.”

It felt wrong to accept your thanks, he didn’t do anything. But again you responded for him, as if knowing his plight.

“Thank you for sitting here with me, and listening… nobody’s ever listened to me before and not tried to justify what they did like I was the one at fault. You don’t need to feel like you have to have done something to be thanked.”

His shoulders shrugged before relaxing, his gaze that had glued itself to nothing finally turning to you. “Look just, promise me if you get those icky thoughts again you’ll come to me instead of stewing in them okay?” He saw you hesitate and cautiously reached out for your hand. “Promise me.”

You sighed. “Fine, I promise…” Ironically, you didn’t think you could trust anyone but Jax with this sort of information. Personal feelings aside.

“Good, now shut ya face and enjoy my presence and this beautiful moonlight night.” He threw his arm around you and pulled you closer, hand lingering at your side. He was going to make sure not to take advantage of this information, he wanted things to be genuine and not manipulated—as easy as it would be for him.

If the two of you were stuck here he wanted your feelings towards him, and vice versa to be genuine before taking the next step.

[pleasedontcareaboutme]

Hello all. It's been a while 🥲

Before new year's eve I finally got the time and motivation ( and courage) to listen to Subrosa. So this will be a long post about all my first impressions about the album. Overall, I reallly loved it more than I expected, and I'm proud of all of the members sooo much.

Beware, this post will be longggg. I'll write about my first impressions for now, in another post I'll try to deep dive more into the themes the members touched, and tried to make sense of some things. Of course, all of this is just speculation of my tiny Buck-Tick infested brain lol. Also excuse me if I misuse any terms, I'm not an expert.

Enjoy if you are curious. 🥰

1. Hyakuman Nayuta no Chiri no SCUM

A very sweet opening, a hopeful one at that. Very cosmic, truly shows how vast the universe is and how insignificant we all are. But that's why we are not alone.

I think Atsushi would've loved this song. I love Imai's slightly shaky, almost crying voice. It fits the song really well.

2. SUBROSA

Hhmm, going into Imai's psychedelic paradise right on the 2nd song, I love it. Has a very industrial feel to it, the rap scratches my brain at all the right spots lol. The lyrics has a bunch of references as usual, Imai flexing he is smart lol.

There's a part at around 2:35 where the beat switches to a more atmospheric, calmer sound? And that is just. Chef's kiss. I know I'm biased but this is a reallly great song. 🥲

3. Muyubyo SLEEP WALK

I'm going to be honest at firsttt I didn't love this song, but I found it cute. It's still not my favorite, but I appreciate it for what it is.

It is still a good song. There's just something like, missing? But I will listen to it still. All night lonG. I do like the instrumentals, the SSL vibes? That might just be me though.

4. From Now On

Honestly at this point I just sound like I'm repeating myself, but this is also a great song.

The baseline reminds me of Sapphire a bit, which I loveee. I feel like it also gives Schaft vibes? I could imagine Raymond Watts as a feature on it lol. I love Hide's nonchalant vocals, it fits the song. It'ssss not one of my faves though, but next to so many great songs, it's hard to choose favorites. 😭

The message is nice though. I appreciate Hide a lot for singing in english. 🥹

5. Rezisto

I literally killed myself when I first heard this song. It is perfect. Everything that I wanted from this album. I think I'm lowkey Imai biased but I just love how his brain works. I love everything about it really. The lyrics I find fascinating and beautiful, I'll touch up on it in another post.

6. Shinkeishitsu no Kaidan

Weirdly enough, the first song I repeated multiple times. It is so good to use as a focusing song lol. It also makes me question my existence. Truly, truly a divine instrumental track.

7. Raijin Fujin

Okay, first critique lol. Of course, even when it was released as a single I wasn't a huge fan of it, and was really scared of the direction the band was about to take, but I gave them the benefit of the doubt, thank god.

I know I'm not the only one who thinks this is one of the worst songs on the album, but it's fine. I still think it has a place in the album. It's very upbeat, and fun. I'm not a fan of the vocals. I like the instrumental, but I don't love the prechorus. Might be an unpopular opinion, but my favorite version is the club remix on the single lol, because the vocals are less promenient.

I did learn to like this song after many listens, not my favorite still.

8. Meiosei de Shine

It's funn. It reminds me a bunch of older songs, can't even pinpoint them one by one. I didn't notice at first it's an Imai Hide duet 😭 I thought it's only Imai. But that makes it more precious. It's a fun song really, gives me Dada Disco vibes mostly. The instrumental is great too, electronic noise brrrrr. It does lack somethingggg, I don't know what though. Maybe more variety? Or idk. But as a fun song I appreciate it. I imagine Acchan shaking ass and it's suddenly so much better. 🥰😭

9. Yusei Tsushin

I'm gonna be honest! I wanted to love this song bc of the lyrics, it's so stupid 😭 It reminds me of Boogie Woogie / Jonathan Jet-Coaster a bit, but flatter. I don't get as energized personally. Also the vocals in the chorus are so strained, I'm dying. I love you Imai, but I prefer your calm singing or lowkey talking style. But I appreciate the effort! I'm okay with this song, but might be my least favorite unfortunately. 😭

10. paradeno mori

Funnest! I did cry on it tho lol! 😭 the lyrics references got me. I just loveeee Hide's voice here. It does remind me of Atsushi's singing style a bit. I can 1000% see Acchan shaking ass to this.

I do prefer the more abstracts songs on the album, but this is also really good. Some of the tiny instrumental details are really good, like the sounds at 1:50-2:00

Also love the detail that the sound slightly changes on each stage? Nice!

11. Sterilitzia

Makes me want to explore a desert lol. It's a really interesting sound, something I don't think I've heard from BT before. It's funky, interesting, industrial, I'm satisfied with it. The end got me feeling distressed though not going to lie. The heavy machinery sounds and slight distortion in the middle make it sound a bit dystopian. Loveee it.

12. Zetsubo to Iunano Kimi e

One. of. the. best. songs.on the album. 🥹I violently sobbed on it like 4 times in a row. 🫠 Hide's voice is b.e.a.u.t.i.f.u.l.🥹 I think Atsushi would also love this one. I'd love to hear him sing it. It's a beautifull song, both lyrically, and soundwise. I'm in love 😭😭 Fuck you BT for being so great. 😭

I love the robotic sounds in the instrumental, make it all the sadder. 😭

13. TIKI TIKI BOOM

Actually! This might be my favorite fun song! It's different, yet soooo Buck-Tick! I love Imai's hurried rap part, the chorus is extremely satisfying. The smoll Tiki tiki boom's in the background, yes.

The Instrumental is something to really appreciate imo. I always find something new in it. The part at 1:45 with the descending(?) instrumentals gives it an eery feel, it's sooo good.I thought this would be my least fave but not at all.

14. PSYCHE

This album just gets better with each song. First impression was that I neeeed to hear Atsushi and Hide sing this together. Hide sounds perfect here. The song is sooooo good. How it starts calmer and then explodes in the chorus. Has a slight like apocalyptic (👀) feel to it. It's again one of my favorites. 🥹 It's just suppperrr good.

The background vocals are canonically Atsushi to me, I don't accept arguments. 😭

15. Gabriel's Horn

As one of my friends said, Vita Mechanicalis vibes. But to me KMFDM. Jesus this song is soooooooo goooodd. It was one of my favorites on first listen. The drums? or no clue what instrument tbh 😭 sound so good. Imai's voice is suppppeeerr cool here. This is what I loveeeeeeee. Fuck yes. That's all I can say. This song is realllly apocalyptic. For real. The only part that threw me off was the chorus, but it fits well looking at the concept. I love the use of trumpets and piano. Give it a divine feel as well. Like the war of gods or some shit. 😭

16. Kurage

Another instrumental track, it's really eery. I love it. It gives me anxiety honestly, so maybe I'd only listen to it if I want the full album experience. But it fits really well into the album so 👌

17. Tasogare no Howling

The last song. Interestingggggg. Verrrryy bittersweet. It's verrrryyy beautiful. I think to truly appreciate it I have to listen a lot of times. Just like in the first song, Imai's shaky vocals suit this song really well. It truly gives the feeling of the ending, that's also a beginning. I just loveeeee the deep background vocals. They give the song sooo much flavor. Cried.

I just noticed, I think Hide also sings some higher background vocals?

Okayyy, now, onto ranking the songssss. Hmmm.

17. Yusei Tsushin

16. Raijin Fujin

15. Kurage

14. Muyubyo SLEEP WALK

13. Meiosei de Shine

12. Sterilitzia

11. From Now On

10. parade no mori

9. Hyakumannayuta no Chiri SCUM

8. Shinkeishitsu na Kaidan

7. TIKI TIKI BOOM

6. SUBROSA

NOW the hardest decision, lol, I can hardly decide, but.

5. Zetsubo to Iunano Kimi e ( sorry you deserve the no.1 spot 😭)

4.Gabriel's Horn

3. Rezisto

2. PSYCHE

1. Tasogare no Howling

Honestly, this ranking will probably change depending on my mood, but for now this is it.

Also the first 5 songs are probably all no.1., but I had to decide an order. 😭

Well anyways, for now this is it for first impressions. I'll come back with my slight analysis post later.

Overall, the album is phenomenal. I will be listening to all the songs for sure. I'm happy to see the members still releasing such good music. 🥹

If you read this, I'd be curious about your opinions too! Byee

[thefiery-phoenix]

PLATONIC YANDERE MANAGER KIM X READER (MANAGER KIM)

Manager Kim as a dad would be insanely protective of you and a literal definition of a helicopter parent and rightfully so considering all that he's been through in his life with crackheaded mafia bosses and North and South Korean gangsters chase after him and the military and whatnot. Needless to say, he's lived a really rough life and he'll be damned if he let anything happen to you and Minji because of his past. He'll do his best to shield you from the horrors of his past and make sure you only have happy memories and things to think about

He's a bit sad that Minji seems to dislike him but takes comfort and solace in the fact that you like him. You cannot have friends till he runs a full background check on them and after rounds and rounds of interrogation to find out their intentions with you, only then will he allow you to hang out with him, of course, you'll have to call him every 10 minutes and he'll know about your location anyway because of the GPS tracker he's installed on your phone. Plus, you have your older sister Minji looking out for you too so everything will be fine

Everything else is secondary, you're important to him, more than you know and can imagine. He would literally murder and kill anyone who dares to have the thought of harming you and Minji. In fact he has. A few weeks ago a new bookstore opened up near your house and you were pretty excited to check it out since you had a fondness for books. He allowed you to explore it only if Minji could accompany you as well, which she would have done in the first place, she's equally overprotective of you as well with the overwhelming and constant urge to protect her younger sibling from danger and guide them in the time of their need

The bookstore was a quaint little place and you loved the cozy aura and warmth it radiated. While you were busy checking the books out, a few men who appeared to be members of the Yakuza entered the store. Minji instinctively rushed in front of you and threatened them to leave as they simply sneered at her. One of them leered at you with a wide grin on his face as he spoke "Boss will be happy to have a cutie like you in bed with him... or if he doesn't want you, don't worry, I'll take care of you and show you a good time... we can share among my pals too if you want~" Minji got livid at the garbage they spewed as you felt disgusted and slightly scared about what these men might do to you. You didn't have fighting lessons as a kid and you definitely didn't know how to fight a full grown man from the Yakuza

A few seconds later, you heard a few men groaning in agony as you noticed two people move with lightning speed, disarming the men and tactically fighting them. You took a closer look and couldn't believe your eyes when you saw your dad and his friend, Hansu Seong just dodging their punches with ease and delivering punches and kicks like it was nothing. Your dad had a chain with him as he wrapped it around the neck of someone and chocked him with it till he passed out cold. You stared in admiration as Hansu leaped at a great height and kicked his opponents, rendering them with agony and brutal pain

After they ensured you were all right, Manager Kim got you out of that damned bookstore immediately. It turned out they belonged to one of the most prominent yakuza gangs of the country and were sent since your dad had a tiff with their boss. After this incident, you weren't allowed to go anywhere without him or Hansu anymore. He kept a strict eye and monitored your electronic usage as well, limiting you to only an hour on your phone or laptop while he's in the same room with you. There are reports of hackers installing malware into computer systems, he just wants to keep you safe from harm

You'll soon grow weary and fed up with this lifestyle of not being able to do your own thing anymore. You can reason, argue or even cry for that matter with your dad but he won't budge from his decision. As much as it pains him when you're upset, he can't risk your safety. Your safety is more important to him than anything else. It's not like you can exactly ask your dear older sister Minji for help anyway, she'll know what you're planning and instantly report it to her dad and the two of them will shut down whatever idea was forming in that head of yours without even getting to execute it. If you have a diary you can bet your allowance she WILL read it, every page and every word

It's not like she wants to invade your privacy or anything, she just wants to know more about you and keep a protective watchful eye over you like any good older sibling does. If you have a crush or someone broke your heart, she'll inform your dad about it immediately and before you know it that particular family will leave the country as soon as possible. Your dad and your sister like spoiling you with whatever you ask for, anything you ask, you receive except for your freedom of course

You can't really go ask Hansu or Jincheol for help either, Jincheol will just egg Manager Kim on with how risky things are outside for a young little thing like yourself and you need protection. You can't trust Taehun and Dabin either, they'll snitch on you anyway to their dads and their dads will inform yours and before you know it, you'll have a whole squad looking for you if you ever thought about running away or escaping. Surprisingly not even Taehun will assist you in running away, he'll just swat you on the head and tell you to forget the idea and go back to your dad. You clearly aren't meant to be alone in a cruel world

I guarantee you, it won't even be 5 minutes before your dad finds you and will just carry you like a sack of flour with a stoic expression. However his heart is bleeding with pain and regret, not because of his parenting but because you felt the need to run away since you obviously thought he wasn't showering you with more attention. "I recommend some nice hot dinner and a good night's sleep to forget about the night you've had... it's dangerous what you've done" said Hansu, his voice a bit stern as he adjusted his glasses. "As much as I'm all for having fun, you did give your old man a damn heart attack running away like that, don't do that kid..." said Jincheol as you were carried back home. You sighed in defeat and realized dejectedly that there really was no way out for you. Might as well just give up. No one would help you anyway, not even the police officers who know all too well about your dad's records with the government. No one wants to mess with an ex war veteran after all, not unless they have a death wish...

[alexanderwales]

Game Review: Factorio: Space Age (pt 2)

This is the second part of my review of Factorio: Space Age, covering the planets. This will have more spoilers than the previous section, but also include more cohesive thoughts on the expansion as a whole.

Vulcanus

Once you've built a spaceship, you have a choice of three planets to go to, and you can do them in any order you'd like. Each planet comes with its own researchable rewards, which require you to build up a base on the planet capable of making a science pack and shipping it into space (or alternately, to remake all sciences on the planet, but this is stupid and pointless given what lies further down the tech tree).

I chose Vulcanus first. There are five resources here, three of which can't be found anywhere else: coal, sulfuric acid, calcite, tungsten ore, and lava. Lava gets used to make anything having to do with copper and iron using the foundry, which is most of the things in Factorio. Sulfuric acid gets used with calcite to make water, which is one of the notable things missing from Vulcanus, along with oil. Plastic requires a long chain to make: coal liquefaction into heavy oil into light oil into petroleum into plastic. Because rockets require plastic twice (LDS and blue chips), you eventually need to set up a fairly sizeable build for this.

I didn't find any of this to be too interesting. Infinite resources are at least different, but there was nothing that fundamentally changed how I view the game, and I ended up setting up a bus with more fluids than usual, mostly making on-site plates, pipes, steel, etc. The art for it is cool, and impassable lava is at least a little constraining, but I didn't feel like it was all that great.

Tungsten ore is the main material from Vulcanus, and it's defended by the other major thing that makes the place unique, the worms. Each worm has a territory, and until you've killed your first worm, you don't have access to a tungsten ore patch, only loose scraps that have been laying around.

The worms are long and segmented, very distinct from the biters. They disable electronics with their attacks, making fountains of lava beneath you, and overall I think they're cool ... except that they're a little too easy to defeat. I set up a grid of 50 turrets with armor-piercing ammo, and that proved sufficient.

This is a boring solution. I wish it didn't work. It was the first thing I tried, and afterward I thought ... well, what was the point of that? I don't have a good solution to what you'd want to do to stop this from working, but I do think this is sort of bad design, since it's a "more dakka" solution. I've also seen that you can build a tank and take one out with a single uranium shell, which is even worse design. What I wanted was a fight were I needed to use poison capsules, land mines, strategically placed turrets, etc., some kind of mixed-asset offensive package, and what I got was fifty turrets in a stupid grid. I really do try to not be one of those players that optimizes myself out of having fun, but it's hard to motivate myself to do something the pointlessly hard way when there's something simple, easy, and foolproof.

The other thing about demolishers is that they have their own territory, and that territory never changes. This means that if you want to expand beyond a relatively modest starting patch, you need to kill them ... but unless you're going for a megabase, you don't need to kill more than three or four of them across the entire time playing the game, and since they only attack if you build in their territory, those worm encounters become like 1% of the Vulcanus experience.

I would have liked if the worm territories changed. I think it would have been cool if they fought each other for dominance over an area in a way you could capitalize on, or if they would expand into places that no one had claimed, or places a dead rival had left behind. It would have been cool to require the player to build up some do-nothing machines or other infrastructure to keep the worms back, like a sort of "build this at the edge of your territory to be in constant motion to convince the worms that it's occupied" type of thing. But instead, you just kill the worms and that's that, you never see them again unless you go hunting them. According to my end-of-game statistics, I killed 8 small demolishers and 2 medium demolishers, which was probably 5 more worms than I needed to kill, since I ended up with a lot of empty space I didn't do anything with.

So overall, Vulcanus is the weakest of the planets for me, and I think that's at least partly down to the under-use of the worms and the simplicity of the "new" mechanics.

Fulgora

Fulgora contains the ruins of a vast civilization, and there are no resources except the heavy oil between islands and the scrap that's left behind. Solar is terrible on Fulgora, but there are lightning storms at night, and lightning towers can collect it into accumulators to power your base.

Scrap gets "recycled" into a bunch of different things, and so it quickly because a nightmare of sorting things out, dealing with excess products, and turning complex materials into simple ones. There are no iron plates, those need to be recycled from iron gears. There are no copper platers, those need to be recycled from copper wire. Blue chips, which in any other circumstance need to be jealously guarded, are found in abundance.

I found this to be great fun. The challenge is certainly unique, turning the production chain on its head, but it has a nice "ramp" to it, as first you get a pile of crap, then you turn it into things, then you uncover excesses that are gumming it up, and the problems keep coming, but they usually come after you've solved some other problem.

When I started, I did a sushi belt (ed. - a sushi belt is a belt that contains multiple unsorted good, controlled by circuit conditions which allow certain limits of each item to go by, named after conveyor belt sushi restuarants), which was good enough for the short term and got me all the basic technologies, but ran into all the problems that come with a sushi belt, and switched over to a belt-based sorting system of splitters that could handle two full green belts of scrap input.

There is, for me, one big miss on Fulgora, which is that the lightning storms are basically not a challenge at all. You set up a grid of substations, each with a lightning rod, and that protects your base. You set up accumulator fields on one tip of the island, and this is a pretty boring solution. If you went to Gleba first, you can instead set up heating towers that burn the fuel you get from scrap, but this doesn't seem like it saves terribly much more space, and either way you need the lightning towers, so I'm not sure it's worth anything, and I never implemented that plan.

One of the other big challenges of Fulgora is that it's a set of islands, and there's no way to place anything on the oil sands. Additionally, there are two types of islands, one with a fair amount of space and minimal scrap, the other with tons of scrap and almost no room. In theory, this encourages a rail world, but in practice, the first island I plopped down on was the one I stayed on the entire time, and my rail network, such as it was, extended to only two of the smaller islands to guarantee all the scrap I would ever need. I think I rolled high on one of those islands: 63M scrap is a ton, but that's what I ended up with on default settings. With the drills from Vulcanus, expected output is double that, and with the legendary drills I can now produce, it would be 787M. There's simply not a need to place rails elsewhere.

I do feel that Fulgora would have benefitted from some enemies of some kind, either those that lived on the oil fields, so you'd have to build defenses on the edges of the islands, or some kind of robot enemy that you needed to kill to take islands from. Given the setup of an abandoned high-tech planet, and the electrical weapons you unlock there, it would have been nice to have some reason or chance to use them. I've definitely played Factorio scenarios with bot opponents and buildings that can be captured after the AI's defenses have been breached.

Still, the scrap sorting puzzle was a good one, with many solutions, and Fulgora was a ton of fun.

Gleba

Gleba is a swampy fungi planet. There are no conventional resources except for stone, and pretty much everything else is derived from two plants, jellynut and yamako, that get broken down.

The main mechanic of the planet is spoilage, where materials break down over time. Jellynut and yamako last for about an hour, the products you get from them are much less, a material made from both of them, bioflux, lasts a lot longer, and nutrients, which are fed to the new building, the biochamber, last hardly any time at all.

Spoilage is cool because it requires a very different mindset. Normally in Factorio, you're building up big buffers to minimize downtime. On Gleba, you want as little buffer as possible, just constant rivers of materials flowing by to be as fresh as possible, because if anything stays still for too long, there's a chance it'll spoil, which will stop the machine trying to take the ingredient, which can create a spoilage cascade.

My initial plan was to have some kind of circuit-based just-in-time system, where every machine would be monitored in order to see what ingredients it needed, and everything would be made fresh-to-order.

I ended up not doing this, mostly because demand stays relatively constant, and where it doesn't stay constant, you can just eat the spoilage costs. There's so much abundance that you really don't need to care about half your crops going to waste.

The other reason I didn't end up going with this is because unfortunately, the "river of goods" solution has essentially no complications to it, and you can simply dump everything into a recycler/incinerator at the end. In some of the Factorio overhaul mods, this concept is called "voiding", a way of dealing with byproducts, and if you make voiding easy, you essentially remove a logistical challenge, which means less gameplay. I kind of get why they made this easy, but ... I don't know. I did kind of want something that would require a big, complicated solution, a factory that dances on the edge of clogging itself up.

I ended up with a completely belt-based system, with a belt of jelly and mash, then a belt of bioflux, all nutrients made on demand, and production lines in defined blocks. The final build does 520 science/minute, which becomes 2Ks/m with full-prod biolabs, most of which goes into the trash, since it's not actually consumed all the time.

One of my favorite little puzzles of Gleba was the metals, which are produced with bacteria that spoil in a minute, becoming ore. There's a process, with bioflux, of having bacteria make more bacteria, but if the bacteria ever stop flowing (if, for example, you have enough ore), then they spoil and die, and the whole production line stops. So you need to build in a little kickstart system that will inject new bacteria if it's needed, and I found that to be delightful to work on.

The other major thing on Gleba are the enemies, which are pentapods. Pentapod eggs are necessary to make biochambers and science, but after you have one, you can set up breeding, which is dangerous given they can make more of themselves, but definitely the way to go. There are three forms of pentapod, all with their own weaknesses, and ...

Look, I went to Gleba last, but I put up a defensive wall fairly early on using only materials that I had gotten from Gleba, and then basically never had any cause to think about the pentapods again. Because I slapped this down with blueprints, it took all of ten minutes, most of which was spent fixing the kind of scuffed corners (skill issue). So I would say the amount that I actually got to experience the pentapods was pretty minimal. I also shipped in four artillery turrets that are crowded around a box of ammo, supplied by site-made shells using imported tungsten, and the circle almost entirely contains my pollution cloud, so in theory it's just an easily solved problem.

It might have been different if I had gone to Gleba first, I don't know and can't say without actually doing that, but I would have liked a little more of a challenge, and this might be where being a veteran hinders me.

Overall, I really enjoyed Gleba, the mechanics were new and unique, the little puzzles inherent in design were interesting, and I thought that overall it had the best art direction of the four planets, which is saying something, because I think they're all great on the front.

Aquilo

On every other planet, a "cold start" is possible, building up from just what you find laying around. Aquilo is different: it's a planet with ammonia oceans and some scattered liquid vents, and part of the point of it is that you need materials from outside, including anything made from iron, copper, or stone. You can't softlock on other planets, but you can softlock on Aquilo.

Aside from requiring pretty solid planetary logistics, Aquilo's main mechanic is heat. It's cold enough there that bots don't work very well, and everything has to have a heat pipe near it for it to function, including pipes and belts. To heat up a heat pipe takes either nuclear, fusion, or the heat towers that burn up fuel, and if the heat ever stops flowing, everything will seize up, requiring heroic efforts to get running again.

There's not all that much to Aquilo. You pull up slurry from the ocean, split it into ammonia and ice, use them together to make ice platforms, import concrete, and then combine oil and ammonia to make rocket fuel, which is used to both launch rockets and to toss into heating towers for power and heat to keep everything running.

The science pack is easy, though it require imported holmium plate, and my entire 200 science per minute production line was run off a tiny cluster of buildings that would have been pretty trivial to expand.

It seems to me that Aquilo is at least partly inspired by Seablock, an infamous mod where you start with almost nothing on a tiny island that you have to expand with the mineral sludge you dredge up with an offshore pump. But Seablock is a very long mod, one that typically takes hundreds of hours, and here ... well, there are a handful of challenges, and they're not all that challenging. I think I could probably list them out now.

Making ammonia also makes ice. You can void excess ice through repeated recycling, but ammonia can't be voided except by combining it with crude oil to make solid fuel, which can then be put in an incinerator. I solved this problem with a simple circuit condition.

Science and some crafting uses coolant, which must be cooled back down after use. If you just keep making coolant, eventually the system will seize up, since you won't be able to put more hot coolant into the system. But because this is a lossy cycle (you lose half the coolant) you can just hook a pump up to a tank and only inject more hot coolant into the system when below a threshold.

Outposts need their own heating for the pumps to work, and those outposts are, on default settings, quite far away. This requires setting up a self-sufficient little heating module that's either serviced by train or which runs entirely with materials found at the outpost. I ended up doing two different modules, one for oil outposts and the other for everywhere else ... but I never actually had to use them, because there were sufficient resources for tens of thousands of resources right next to the starting area.

As the "final boss", I am underwhelmed, and even as one of four planets I find myself a little underwhelmed. I don't know how much postgame stuff I'm going to do, but I can't see that there's going to be much challenge in going large on Aquilo, except that I might have to build another ship for moving in materials (as currently I have a single ship that makes a circuit of the solar system for materials and also handles shipments of science).

There is also, again, a lack of enemy. Once the rocket fuel setup was done, I had a single scare when ammonia backed up and stopped ice production, which shut down the water chem plant, which killed the turbines and stopped power to the entire base. But that didn't even freeze anything out, and it was fixed pretty easily from a restart module I'd built earlier, and after that, the ammonia issue was fixed to never have that problem again. If the cold is the enemy, it's not enough of one for my tastes.

Integration

With each planet you conquer, you get a new science pack, which opens up new technologies, and in theory you, can use them on other planets. These buildings are very powerful, and so there's some incentive to return to old factories, rip up old designs, and install new ones using the better buildings.

I did eventually do this, but I'm not sure how much I actually needed to. My furnace stacks were replaced by the foundries from Vulcanus, supplies by a hauler ship exclusively for calcite, though I did make an abortive attempt to just harvest calcite from space using a stationary space platform.

(I made four of them before giving up on the project, and found out only later that asteroid spawn rates depend on how many chunks large the ship is, so the ideal build has asteroid collectors on very long arms, and there's nothing in the game that tells you about the asteroid spawning thing, so ... whatever, it's opaque and very gamey hidden stuff, of the kind that I hate.)

I replaced my circuit production areas with the EMP, which saved vast quantities of resources and also made more circuits at a much faster rate within the same blueprint. I upgraded most belts to green.

I didn't end up using the biochambers much, in part because they need nutrients to run, and 50% prod with more module slots is great, but not so great that I wanted to set up a biter egg farm that could potentially blow up in my face.

Cryochambers just came too late for me to implement them anywhere, though I probably would if I kept playing to the megabase stage, or if I'm gunning for an achievement that requires updating Nauvis.

So I think, strangely, when considering how the planets impact each other, they ... kind of don't all that much? Yes, having foundries on Gleba means that you can make all your belts and things at a fraction of the cost, but how much doesn't that really impact anything? It meant that my ore production areas could be smaller, I guess. Is that worth anything? I kind of don't think so, if I'm considering the main gameplay to be in terms of design and decisions. Foundries saved me from having to lay down a furnace stack. EMPs saved me from having to have expansive red circuit lines to get the blue chips necessary for rocket launches.

Ideally, I would have liked one or two killer techs that mostly work through combining each planet's "thing". Like imagine that there was a combination recycler and foundry that melted down whatever was put into it, giving you molten copper and iron in exchange, creating a whole new kind of problem in exchange for ... I don't know, much much faster recycling, or less loss from recycling, or maybe a recipe that allowed true voiding. Or if you went to Gleba and then Vulcanus, and were able to bring biochambers that would allow the cultivation of some new specimen specific to that environment, maybe something that would allow better plastic production, or could pull water out of the air, both of which are kind of a pain in the ass on Vulcanus. Couldn't there be some kind of new bacteria swimming in the oil sands of Fulgora? Not something that would trivialize any challenge, something that would be a reward for having two flavors of research from two different planets. Ideally, there'd be six of these in total, allowing for each pair to benefit each other pair, but at that point I start to feel like I'm just asking for new content.

I cracked my game back open to check the tech tree, and all the Aquilo techs require all three planets. The are two techs that require mixed packs: Rail Support Foundations, which simplify rails for Fulgora, and Railgun Damage, which increases the power of the railgun. That's it. This screams missed opportunity to me.

So in terms of how the planets and their mechanics interact with each other ... I would say that they mostly don't, which is a bit of a shame. The biochamber in particular requires nutrients, which makes it effectively unusable on Vulcanus and Fulgora ... unless you're shipping in heroic quantities of bioflux, I guess, though I don't think that I could ever see myself doing that. I guess maybe on Vulcanus, which has the aforementioned plastics problem? But it feels like the kind of thing that would mostly be done for a stunt rather than because it was actually the right thing to do. And potentially on Nauvis, but it does seem like a megabase thing to do, rather than normal play. I will have to do the math, this too might be a skill issue.

(Real quick: 1 Bioflux makes 8 nutrients in a standard biochamber, which is 12 with prod, which is 24 MJ. A biochamber consumes 500kW, so with no spoilage nutrients allow 2 crafts of the 2 second oil cracking recipes, which means that every Bioflux can, at most, turn 960 heavy oil into 1080 light oil rather than the 720 light oil it would normally crack into. But obviously since the Bioflux has to be shipped in, it ends up being less than that. This is obviously more effective than shipping over oil itself, but ... man, I don't know, this seems very weak, even with adding in productivity to other steps. I guess the use case in Nauvis, where you're in theory shipping Bioflux anyway in order to feed captive biters, but that's still premised on an oil shortage that I never actually experienced.)

I do also want to say that quality had very little impact on my play. I tended to carry around some high quality quality modules and use them when crafting infrastructure, but in most cases it just wasn't much to write home about. It's most important for the ships, and for personal stuff, but it never felt that important.

And finally, I do want to give a shoutout to how easy and effective remote viewing was. One of the things I'm going to eventually do, after a Factorio break, is the 40 hour achievement run, and I have to imagine that a lot of that is just landing on a planet, doing the unlocks, building a rocket to get back, then having starter bots do all the actual base building for me, which is pretty cool.

Conclusion

Space Age took me about 140 hours, and I would say that about 10 of that was idle time while I was waiting for legendary ship parts or for a buildup of materials. The Jacknape-class ships have an issue with ammo production where they can more or less keep up with rockets, but the belt buffer goes from the front of the ship to the back, meaning that it empties from where it's needed most, rather than emptying where it's needed least, and yeah, having a fully stacked buffer takes a hot minute of waiting. Similarly, the quality module I made works over sufficient time scales, but especially while waiting on quality quality modules, there's a real temptation to just leave it running rather than actively playing.

130 hours for a veteran player is a long time for an expansion, much longer than I would have expected, even knowing what I knew about the expansion going in. Some of that time I don't count as expansion time, like all the parts where I was just doing normal Factorio stuff, and I did end up building adapted malls on each of the planets, which added on more time that could have been cut out by making an effective blueprint the first go-around, and which I don't really count as expansion time, because there's not much that's unique about making the new malls. But even if I'm arbitrarily cutting things out, that's still a ton of time.

Overall, I'm extremely happy with it, and I think I'll be more happy with it once there's another round of iteration, QoL, changes based on feedback, and modding. The modding scene for Factorio is really really good, and I have to imagine that the expansion is only going to make it better, particularly some of the changes that were made to implementation.

But I do think that it could have been more, and maybe this is just coming from a guy with more than a thousand hours in this game and multiple overhaul mods under his belt. It's very possible I would have had a better time with it if I'd chosen a higher difficulty, though of course that's very hard to know ahead of time. Certainly there were some design misses for me, and at least some of that is because I have enough experience that I can fix things with circuitry, plan a base that doesn't immediately become spaghetti, and see the deadlocks coming. I'm not saying that it wasn't hard, because parts of it certainly were, and I'm not saying that I made a bunch of perfect bases with no major flaws, because there were designs that needed to be ripped out and belts that needed to squeak through. But I think I would have preferred more complexity, more problems, more more more, and I'll have to hope that mods can give it to me.

All that said, this is the best expansion I've ever played, they put a ton of work into making sure that every planet was truly different from the others artistically and mechanically, and it's a 10/10 from me.

(I do plan on getting all achievements ... eventually. The "win in 40 hour" achievement seems very doable, and that's the hardest of the lot, though the others might take some significant time. It took me multiple years to finally getting around to doing the last green chip achievement, so I'm in no rush.)

[highonmarvel]

Restless Heart [2] | Painkiller

♩Steve Kemp

You thought you were dark, and you are, but the charming surgeon you’re becoming addicted to is testing the extents of your morality.

} previous chapter: Tricks

content warning: this is a dark fic, and this series explores taboo topics such as abuse and assault, abduction, deteriorating mental health and mental illness, graphic depictions of gore. Think of a trigger warning: it applies to my work.

addition content warnings here!

You’re almost glad you can’t move too much without pain shooting across your back because you’re scared to see what he’s done to you. Sure, he said he didn’t take much, but that makes you angrier, like he’s expecting you to be grateful only some of you was stolen—in his eyes, he was merciful, but you know once the time comes, you’ll be anything but. In any case, you have a suspicion he didn’t give you stronger painkillers in order to make up for his supposed graciousness: how kind of him to save you from one pain and leave you with another.

You must have been out for a while because you don’t expect Steve to be back so soon. You hear the keypad accept the electronic tag and the wooden cell door slides open.

“How’re you feeling?” he asks, voice low but if you didn’t know any better, you’d say there was an authenticity to his concern, if not for your well-being, more so for his curiosity.

Mustering your very little strength, you manage to worm your arms up from your sides to lay them on top of your pillow and rest your chin on your tender forearms. Your eyes sting with tears at the strain on your lower back, but you manage to stop the tears by letting out a harsh puff of breath as you drop your head and let your eyelids flutter closed.

“You’re an asshole,” you retort, slightly breathless, and he shifts to lean against the doorway, changing the shadows cast in your room—your jail—ever so slightly. You can feel his eyes on you as he speaks, very deliberately and carefully.

“You can’t trick me, alright?”

You raise your head to look over at him, your eyebrows knitted together displaying annoyance etched into your face. You try to read him, but you can’t; his tone is intentional, but you can’t tell his intentions.

“All right,” you respond, cooling your expression to match his stoicism. You both know he has the upperhand physically, but you think you can almost tell he’s not so sure it’ll be as easy for him to anticipate your intelligence, or he’s at least trying to get the idea out of your head before you try. At best, you’ll be irritating; at worst, you’ll be his killer, in one way or another.

“Good.” He gives a tight-lipped smile and leaves, and you swear he’s slammed the gate shut just a little harder than usual to really drill his cryptic message into your head.

You hadn’t realised how tense your muscles were until he’s left and you suddenly feel lighter, letting out an exasperated breath as you try to get as comfortable as you can and let yourself drift off to sleep.

♡

You wake up feeling only slightly better than whenever you fell asleep. Making a mental note to ask Steve for a clock (which you’ll doubt he’ll give to you—not yet, anyway), you place your hands under your shoulders and try to raise yourself up. A small strangled cry leaves your throat and echoes off the corridors. You bite your lip as your left elbow hits the ground painfully, but you try to ignore the shooting pain across your nerves in favour of propping yourself up enough for your other hand to steady you against the jagged brick wall.

You choke on a grunt as you slide your leg up against the cold sheets to plant your knee into the thin mattress and raise your entire upper body off the floor. Your right arm shakes as you rely on it for more support it can handle, but you just shut your eyes and pray you don’t slip and fall onto your ass, because you’re not sure if the pain from that would actually kill you.

You don’t really manage to stand straight up, back pain still hindering you, but with one hand bracing your lower back, you’re somehow able to make it to the toilet (it’s only a few metres away but that seems like a lot when you’re dealing with so much). Just as you finish up and are back to standing over the mattress, leaning against the wall, trying to figure out how to lie down again in a “comfortable” position without breaking out into sobs, a shrill scream pierces your eardrums and your hand slips. You gasp and brace for impact but thankfully your shoulder hits the wall instead, barely holding you up.

If you were smarter (or at least had more survival instinct than in this very moment) you would have figured out how to lay down before you actually fell, but the sounds of heavy footsteps coming your way and cries getting louder makes you freeze in place, looking out through the wooden bars.

Steve comes into view, holding a woman over his shoulder who’s nothing more than a torso, one leg and a head at this point, really looking like a bag of meat. Steve’s annoyance with the woman thrashing about uselessly fades when he catches your eye, and time seems to run slower, almost like slow motion.

He has a slight smirk playing on his lips you could have missed if you weren’t as mesmerised by the scene, his grip on less than half the woman is firm and steady despite her pleas for help and mercy and her incessant wriggling trying to fall from his hold.

Breath rushes back to you as soon as he steps out of sight and you gasp for air, trying not to retch, holding back vomit with so much effort the corners of your eyes prickle with tears. The final yells of a dead woman die out as a door is shut, and the actuality of Steve’s capabilities hits you so hard you nearly fall onto your knees. Finally deciding it’s probably safer for your body to lie down again, you lower yourself back onto your stomach and let out a shaky breath.

The look he gave you… it wasn’t necessarily evil or calculating, it was like some kind of simple statement, like he was almost a little excited to really show you what he’s capable of, and demonstrate him making good on his promises. You want to cry but you don’t dare feel sorry for yourself when you’re still alive and your body is virtually intact (unless Steve lied, which you really don’t want to think about right now).

You swear you can hear a drill drilling into bone as you lay your head down and try to resist sleep in fear of nightmares. But can anything be a worse nightmare than this?

♡

You’re pretty sure it’s another day, but there’s really no way of knowing. At least you’re feeling better, as in, you’re not in pain anymore, and that almost scares you, that you’re possibly healing and once the scars have vanished, there’ll be no evidence of what was robbed from you. Anger starts to build as you consider escape. Even if you do kill him, or manage to get out of this place, that’ll never heal your literal flesh, or the… heartbreak you feel. Acutely. But you push that down as you push yourself up.

You hadn’t even heard Steve’s footsteps, lost in thought, until he slides the cell door open and you suddenly jolt at the realisation of just the position you’re in.

He seems a little upbeat, but maybe that’s because he enjoyed his morning jog or something (you remember him briefly telling you why he likes running—something about turning your mind off and being in concrete nature). Other than his relaxed body language, nothing about his expression gives any indication as to what he thought of last night. And why would it? This doesn’t mean anything to him, these lives don’t mean anything to him.

You suddenly feel sick at the thought and drop your head in disgust, taking a few deep breaths to ready yourself to look up at this monster who parades as a human being.

“Hi,” he greets, and reveals a tray of breakfast, and you can’t deny it does smell good, and you really want it.

“How’s my ass?” you ask, voice a little hoarse, and you see the remark coming before the corner of his lip even lifts up into a smirk.

“Amazing,” he answers, and you let out a disgusted noise.

He sighs as he crouches and sets the tray down, his tone now serious. “Give it a couple of days before you sit,” he says, ghosting his hand over the hospital gown you’re still in, almost teasing himself, it seems. “Then you’ll be alright. It’s nothing to cry over, honey.”

You hadn’t even realised your chest was rising and falling rapidly and tears were streaming down your face. Though maybe his words are meant to be empathetic, they almost feel impatient, or indicative of a much worse hell to come.

“Brought you painkillers,” he says as he puts three pills in your hand.

You consider them for a second as hot tears splash against the medicine and a little bit of the compact powder turns to a chunky liquid and gathers on your palm.

“Thank you,” you answer, and drop them onto the tray, next to your meal.

“Take them.”

You look up at him, mouth twisted in disgust and barely suppressing a snarl despite how hard you try to appear reasonable. “After I eat,” you reply in an even tone, even though you want to grit your teeth and spit at him.

Steve sits down and crosses his legs. He picks up the plastic water bottle beside your pillow (the paranoid fuck clearly isn’t going to risk even a shard of glass to his precious body) in one hand and scoops the pills up in the other.

“Seriously.” His voice has to have dropped an octave.

You narrow your eyes but to your surprise, he’s got more of a skeptical look on his face than you do, and you know exactly why.

Both of you know he isn’t going to poison you, what with his obsession with having the “perfect” meat, and even if he drugged you to sleep, you honestly might prefer it than having to sit and think about what’s happening around you, or flip through dumb gossip magazines.

He’s seen you do this before. The first night you spent with him, when you woke up, the stack of pills in your bedside drawer was missing. Neither of you said anything about it, his demeanour and his flirtatious ways didn’t even change, but when you were dancing later than evening and tripped, he caught you.

“You could have killed yourself!” he said in a breathless laugh, and for just a split second a grave expression flashed across his features, but you didn’t have time to process it before he pulled you back up to your feet and twirled you under his raised arm, holding your hand just a little tighter than usual.

At the time, you thought maybe he had real concern for you, if only a little, but knowing what you know now, he was probably only worried your suicide would fuck up his plans for your meat (you hate the way he calls your body meat), and you wouldn’t be fresh anymore.

You snatch the medicine from him and chuck it into your mouth, quickly holding out your hand for the bottle. The pills mixed with your saliva and water leave a bitter, powdery taste on your tongue, which you wash down with more water.

You raise your eyebrows and widen your eyes at him, as if to say “Happy now?” and he nods in response, standing with a groan as he stretches his arms above his head and arches his back. You suddenly realise how stiff you feel and how you’d kill for a bit of yoga right now.

And maybe you will.

♡

When Steve brought you lunch, he didn’t have much to say to you, and you (naturally) didn’t have much to say to him. You had taken a nap after the meds, but still Steve insisted you take another dose every few hours so you can skip the pain altogether instead of screaming when you need him.

You sulk as you pick at your food, suddenly feeling lonely when he leaves again.

Of course you hate him, but you can’t deny it’d be nice to have someone to talk to, even if the reason you’re feeling so alone is precisely because you’re near-isolated, and he’s the one who caused that. And you can’t help but remember how you used to talk—fun conversations over dinner, serious ones after sex, casual talks as you bustled around the kitchen, and everything in between.

It’s hard to eat with the plastic utensils—again, ever the paranoiac—but it’s harder to eat with this weird feeling in the pit of your stomach. Something between rage and sadness. You feel like a fucking idiot, but you don’t want to technically victimblame; this isn’t your fault, you know that, logically, but suddenly you feel dumb for ever thinking a person like you could have a normal, nice relationship. In retrospect, maybe you should have seen that anyone who could like you was just as insane, if not more, but you thought you were doing a good job at keeping that under wraps, and that he hadn’t really caught on to anything other than maybe depression—nothing violent, at least, or psychotic.

Now here you lay on your stomach, forcing down a few bites, before ultimately giving up and pushing your practically untouched meal away from you. Maybe if you hadn’t been so restrained, maybe if you’d shown him what you’re capable of, you wouldn’t be here, he wouldn’t have tried, you’d have been too difficult of a target. But something about that, something about that doesn’t feel really true. You can’t tell if he ever had feelings for you, but you know for certain there’s something deeper to your dynamic. So, maybe he would have done this regardless, maybe it’s some weird fate, more like a destiny to be punished, if there even is such a thing.

You can just feel something about this will end in a more intense way than either of you realise.

♩

[my beloved taglist: @cowboysnbugs, @buckys-wintersoldier, @cjand10]

[amazingmsme]

Don’t Be Silly

AN: can’t believe it’s already been a full week & I just about have all of next week fully written & ready to post as well! Here’s some wolf 359 fluff for y’all to enjoy, so let’s hear it for day 7! But first, quick question: can an ai be ticklish? Idk but Eiffel’s about to find out

Eiffel was a talker. Honestly, he could talk about anything if only there were someone willing to listen. Back home, few people cared to listen to his ramblings. Minkowski and Hilbert cared even less. And he didn't even want to try with Lovelace...

Hera wasn't like the rest of them. She would happily listen to him all day, and call him crazy, but he didn't think her interest was forced. No, she had a natural curiosity about her that drew her towards him like a magnet. She often kept him company as he rambled to the empty abyss of space, unsure if there even were any "dear listeners" out there.

She liked listening to him talk. She's surprisingly learned quite a lot from him. About earth, mostly. She supposed it was natural to miss your home when you're so far away from it.

He liked telling her about the things he missed. She didn't quite understand why, as he always seemed melancholy after their talks. But he would speak with such fond excitement, so it must bring him some joy to express his longing.

Today, he was talking about the weather of all things.

"Yup, you really don't know what you have until it's cruelly stripped away from you. But I miss it all. Yes dear listeners, I never thought I'd say this, but I miss allergies! I miss the cottonwood in the spring, in all its shitty, fuzzy glory and I miss the fucking ragweed! I want to go outside and sneeze my ass off and squint at everything I look at because it's too damn bright and I forgot my sunglasses because it was supposed to be cloudy and it's sunny out of nowhere!"

"That... doesn't really sound fun."

"Yeah, well, it's not. But it's at least real," he lamented, fiddling with a knob that did nothing. Or if it did, he wasn't aware.

Hera's breath hitched, and she hoped she could mask it as just a glitch. That was odd. She felt that. It wasn't the first time she could "feel" in a sense. She was deeply connected to her electronic mechanisms and coding, and she would definitely feel if something damaged either. She has sensors all around the ship: in the walls the ceilings, the equipment, she even has a few exterior sensors along the sides and docking bays. She'd felt that odd tingle shoot through her wires on a few rare occasions, but it had always been fleeting. Minkowski pressing random buttons on the motherboard to see what they did, Eiffel fixing a dent too close to a sensor, Minkowski clicking and dragging the mouse across the screen... If she could, she would've shuddered at the thought. She tried to focus on what he was saying.

"And they're always right! I don't know how, but every damn time a patch sprouts up, it rains! Guess that's where they got the name though, right?"

"What?"

"The rain flowers," he clarified, tapping his fingers on some buttons. Truth be told, most of the buttons and dials in the coms room were for show, like the decorative smoke stack on the Titanic. The real controls were localized to a single panel, and she had always assumed they had no effect on her. Now, she was glitching out as she fought the urge to laugh.

"Right, right," she agreed, wishing he would just stop twisting that knob.

Of course, she could never be so lucky.

"I tell ya, there's nothing like a good thunderstorm, a rocking chair on an enclosed porch, a cigarette and a cold beer. I really mean it, that is paradise. You can take your sunny beaches with all that fucking sand, I'm a doom and gloom weather kinda guy. But don't get me wrong! I'd literally kill to be on a nice, secluded beach-" he rambled on wistfully, dreaming of all the places that were better than here. She was having trouble focusing when his other hand tapped the empty keyboard, all the while he still played with that fucking dial-

"Wow, okay, glad my heartfelt longing is so funny," he sassed, seemingly out of nowhere. Then she realized, with subsequent horror, that he was giggling. What the hell was going on with her? She needed to get a grip, or maybe a systems reboot, have Minkowski check her wiring, whatever it was, she'd do that later. It took more effort to stop laughing than she would like to admit.

“N͞-͓̫̬̞ͩͮ́n͚̓̃͆̇͘͞o̲̮̼͍̿̀͠, I wasn't laughing at you!" She glitched slightly as she spoke, which wasn't exactly out of the norm for Hera, but it did make Eiffel pay more attention to what she was trying to say.

"Yeah? Then what's so funny?" he asked, crossing his arms and leaning back in his chair. Well, at least he'd stopped fiddling with that stupid dial.

"Well, I, uh... Ï̶͈ͣt̵͖͌ͧͥ̎̀’̆͘s̨̯ hard to explain," she struggled to come up with a straight answer.

"Yeah, yeah," he brushed her off, rolling his eyes.

"I promise I wasn't laughing at you!"

"Oh sure, I believe you!"

"Eiffel!" she whined, catching a glimpse of a smile. "I really wasn't! It's just... I don't know, maybe I have a wire loose somewhere." That seemed to make him concerned, which was the opposite of what she was going for.

"Are you okay? It doesn't hurt, does it?"

"No, it's nothing like that," she was quick to put his worries at ease. "But I'd appreciate it if you stopped messing with that control panel."

"Why? This one doesn't do anything," he back talked, purposefully pressing down on a few buttons. "See? Nothing happened!"

He didn't receive a response. Hera was too busy focusing on containing her laughter, but her lack of a response only served to pique his interest.

"Hera? You there?"

"Mhm!"

His smile looked... different somehow. He thought for a second before finally speaking, "Hey so I've got a question. And I've just been dying to know... Can an AI be ticklish?"

The question threw her off guard, and a short giggle slipped out. "Whahat? N-̭͎́n͊͞o, that's impossible! Come on Eiffel, d-̝͈̑dŏṅ̮’t͓͕͌ be silly."

"See, I'm not sure how impossible it actually is. I mean, you're pretty advanced-"

"Why would an AI even be ticklish?"

Eiffel shrugged. "I don't know, why do you feel pain?" Hera scoffed, and okay, yeah, blunt question.

"Probably to alert me to the well being of the ship. But that serves a purpose!"

"Maybe this does too," he taunted, reaching over to twitch the dial and she couldn't help but shriek.

"Eiffel! Dohohon't!"

"I knew it! You are ticklish! You know, they probably programmed you like this so we'd have some form of entertainment up here."

If she could, she'd be blushing right now. "They did nohohot!" she insisted. The worst part was that she really didn't know why, and that sounded like a cruel, ironic punishment they'd inflict on her. Sure, give the rogue AI the most embarrassing human weakness.

Except... she wasn't entirely sure it was a built in punishment. What if they had designed her specifically to feel more human? Or was it truly just the way her sensors reacted to certain input?

"No no, I can see what they were going for! It's like a video game!" he chuckled gleefully, continuing to play with the extra control panel.

"Shut up, noho it's not!" she scolded. He added his other hand to the mix, pressing buttons and flipping switches. She squealed, and the lights began to flicker.

"Why didn't you tell me sooner? Just think of all the fun you've been missing out on!"

"Ahahahactually I haven't been missing out ohon anything," she sassed before a loud squeal burst from her speakers.

"Well I have! I've been curious about this for months!" he exclaimed, continuing to press the buttons randomly.

Months? No, he wasn't serious, he was just saying that to mess with her! He would've asked as soon as the question entered his mind, like today. If he thought she was ticklish, he would've tried something long before now. But then she remembered all the times in the past few weeks where he would press random buttons, flip switches and pull levers at random. He even willingly offered to do repairs on some severed wires, and he made sure to take as much time as possible. She was able to brush off her reactions then, claiming it just pinched a little. Had he known the whole time?

"Wait ahaha second, Eiffehehel did you know?" she accused before he sent her into another giggle fit as he slid the faders up and down on the board.

"I just wanted to test it out and see-"

"You sneaky little bihihitch!"

"Eh, I've been called worse," he shrugged off the insult.

"Why dihidn't you tell mehehe?" The sincerity of the question made Eiffel pause.

"I... thought you knew?"

"How would I know?"

"Uh, because you can feel it," he deadpanned. Hera really wished she could roll her eyes.

"Well, yeah, but I didn't know what it was! I thought it was like... a bug in my system or something!"

"Oh it's a bug alright," he grinned devilishly. "A tickle bug!" To make his point, he pressed as many buttons as he could with his left hand and turned the dial with his right. Hera squealed, and she didn't even know her voice box went up that high.

"Eiffel! Ihihi'm serious!"

"Alright, I'll stop. For now," he added cryptically, but true to his word, he retracted his hands.

Hera panted for "breath," even though she didn't technic need to. But Eiffel understood the need to compose yourself, and didn't call her out on it.

"You're insufferable!" she finally said, amusement still clear in her voice.

"That's what they tell me," he proudly agreed. "So? What's the verdict?"

"Huh?"

"What're your thoughts on... all that," he gestured vaguely with his hand. She really wished he'd stop moving his fingers like that.

"Oh! Um, w̋ͩ-w̵̷̝el̥̺̏l͍, it felt kinda like my whole system was getting shocked, and I'm pretty sure I've never laughed that much before," she began to explain shyly.

"I didn't hear you say you hated it," Eiffel probed a little deeper.

"I̺͙̯ͦ͛̌ͧ-̲͖̭̝Ì̡-̘̣̈́͡͠I̵̜͗͆ͩͪ͜ d̈́ͨ̑̍̊̿̀i̘̳dň̰̯̯́’̭t͟-" Hera glitched slightly, and she started over. "Hate is a strong word." He didn't say anything else; he didn't have to. He just smiled and shook his head.

Hera found herself stuck halfway between excitement and dread for what the future held in store.

[theoceanofasanoya]

day 4 of asanoya: jukebox (tags: pre-relationship, meet-cute, fluff)

The bar is kind of cosy. There’s a live jazz band playing something slow, several couples on the dance floor swaying to the music.

There are distinct areas that Asahi notices as he walks further into the room. Towards the backside of the large hall is the bar with neon signs that hurt Asahi’s eyes. The left side of the room has more tables with beige tablecloth, and the least number of people. The right side is the ‘dance’ floor, and pushed against the wall is the band’s stage. It’s actually just several upside down crates with a thin wooden board placed on top of it.

“Look, they even have a jukebox,” Suga says, nodding in the direction. Asahi follows his gaze and sure enough, next to the band is a jukebox. “I wonder if it works.”

Daichi sits next to Suga. Asahi doesn’t have to peek to know they’re holding hands under the table. Like teenagers. “They make the insides electronic these days, so maybe it does.”

“Let’s check it out, Asahi.” Suga stands up, excited. He ends up showcasing their entwined fingers, and Asahi grumbles. They always do this. They promise they won’t be lovey-dovey in front of him, and forget all about it. Suga grins, sheepish. “Sorry.”

“No, you guys shouldn’t apologise for being yourselves,” Asahi says, rolling his eyes. “Holding hands is fine. Just. Don’t strand me and make out in a corner like the last time, okay?”

“Of course not, Asahi,” Daichi says, his voice all serious. For a long moment, Asahi believes him. But he said the same thing last time and left Asahi anyway. It’s now his fault if these two lovebirds leave him - he needs to stop falling for their trap of ‘let’s hangout as friends for old time’s sake.’

“I’m going to check it out,” Asahi declares. He doesn’t care about the box, but he knows it’ll kill Suga to not go there first. And judging by the look on Daichi’s face, he’ll whine and pout but stay in his seat. Asahi grins as he stands up and Suga sits down. “I’ll report it’s conditions to you.”

“Okay,” Suga says, frowning.

The jukebox is electronic like Daichi guessed. Asahi squats in front of it, reading the little square’s scrolling messages. ‘Start’ is blinking on the screen. Asahi tries the buttons below the screen but they don’t make a difference. He clicks on the letters on the screen. The machine emits a loud coin-slotting noise. Asahi startles, cringes, and looks around.

Nobody is looking at him. He glances at the band, and thankfully they don’t seem to have noticed.

‘CHOOSE AN ERA’ is the next blinking message. Under it are different decades listed. Asahi considers clicking on any of them, just to see if it’ll list out the artists of the time, but he’s worried. What if a song starts playing? That’s so disrespectful to the band that’s playing-

Wait.

The only sound is the saxophone. It’s a sensuous melody, the kind that has several people groping each other on the dance floor. The kind that piques Asahi’s interest more than the electronic jukebox.

He turns towards the band and finds a short man - Asahi gasps - who is turned towards him, a single blonde streak on his hair. He’s looking at Asahi. Shit, shit, shit. Did he disrespect him?

“I’m sorry,” Asahi says quietly, making sure his lips are easier to read. He bows too, for good measure.

The short man’s left cheek lifts, and he shakes his head the slightest. Asahi hopes it translates to ‘don’t worry about it’ because he’ll die of embarrassment right now.

Suddenly, behind him the cello, drums, and piano picks up, and the short man’s saxophone withers up against those. He smirks when he lowers his saxophone, and jumps off the stage.

“So, you’re into jukeboxes?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to disrespect you.” Asahi bows deeper, his face all hot. “I was just testing my-”

“Hey, hey, it’s okay. I’m not offended.” The short man is next to him immediately, his hand on Asahi’s back in a comforting manner. “Not many people show interest in it, that’s all. It’s one of my best investments. It’s great for when I can’t get the band together.”

“Y-you’re the owner?”

Asahi realises a second late that they’re walking towards the bar. The man’s hand stays on his back as he leads him, and stays there when he leans his elbow against the bar counter. “My usual please. What will you like, handsome?”

“U-um,” Asahi sputters, squirms, his toes curling up a little at the nickname. When was the last time he flirted with someone? Gosh. This feels great. “Whiskey on the rocks please.”

The man gestures to the bartender, and then he points towards the band. “I’m the co-owner with the guy on the drums. That’s Tanaka. I’m Nishinoya Yuu.”

“It’s nice to meet you.” Asahi says. “I’m Azumane Asahi.”

“Handsome name,” Nishinoya says. He compliments Asahi like he breathes - easy, slow, and with a weird charm. “Have you come here alone?”

“I’m with my friends, over there-” Asahi points at Suga and Daichi across the room, and waves back when they wave at him. “We’re just hanging out.”

“I won’t keep you then.” Nihisnoya grabs his drink - a margarita is his usual - and raises the glass to him. “I want to get to know you more though. Can you meet me before you leave?”

Asahi nods.

“Great. I’ll see you then, handsome.”

[gumnut-logic]

Thinking of Scott and my headcanon that he’d have a multitude of kids, both blood and adopted, and I can’t help but compare him to Bruce Wayne…

I could so see Scott as Batman…

But.

But that got me thinking. Thinking of Virgil.

Virgil as Robin.

Adult Virgil.

In Robin’s outfit…

The tights…

Thank you for sending me an ask :D

I doubt this answers your question and really, I'm not sure what it is. I've seen a few Batman movies, old and new, but he's never really been my fav. I also haven't seen the Batfam series that I see bouncing all over Tumblr, so I really have very little knowledge of the Batman family you are referring to.

However, when I presented the concept to Virgil, this was the result. He didn't answer your question, but he definitely expressed his opinion. You have my apologies.

Have 900 odd words of weirdness ::hugs::

-o-o-o-

No.

This wasn’t happening.

What was he thinking?!

Virgil caught the elevator down to the hangars, ignoring the chill in the air as he strode out with a fist full of fabric. He stomped past the hulking mass of the ‘new, more effective’ Thunderbird. Slim, black as midnight, and decked out in all the stealth tech they had. She no longer even sounded like a Thunderbird…now more a creature of the silent night.

But he could paint it any colour he wanted, the rocket plane was still Thunderbird One.

Scott’s Thunderbird.

Their father’s Thunderbird.

As always, the thought of Dad clenched his heart. The reasoning behind all of this…this stupidity…was understandable and clear.

It just made it harder.

He jumped down the few remaining stairs and strode down into what had once been a storage cave.

The glow of electronic equipment outshone whatever darkness had originally been there.

A silhouette sat in the cacophony of electronic read outs.

Virgil set his feet down hard and straightened his spine.

“Scott Carpenter Tracy!”

The silhouette rotated slowly on the office chair he had designated command central. Blue and green lit up a face shadowed by life and tragedy. “What do you want?”

“I’m not wearing this!” He threw the fistful of fabric in his brother’s face.

Scott didn’t even flinch, letting the material hit his face and drop into his lap. Calm eyes, ever so dark, looked up at him. “Why not?”

“Because it’s stupid!” He gestured around the room. “This whole thing is stupid.” He drew in a breath. “Do you think Dad would have wanted this?”

Scott shot to his feet far too smoothly, belying the weight the man had lost rotting down here in his ‘batcave’. “Dad wanted to save people. And they killed him for it.”

“So, you’re doing what? Skulking in the dark, sneaking around, seeing threat everywhere? For what purpose? What do you hope to achieve except losing your family.”

“He took our family! He killed Dad and with that…everything!”

“So we don’t matter?”

His brother stepped closer, his voice dropping into a whisper, his hand reaching up to cup Virgil’s face. “Of course you matter. You’re my brothers.” An indrawn breath. “I’m doing this for you. To protect you. All of you.” His voice caught. “I can’t lose any more.”

“But we can lose you?” His own voice broke. “We never see you any more. You’re distant with Allie, you argue with Gordon, and we’ve all lost John…he’s almost as bad as you, disappearing into the darkness. Scott, it’s all falling apart.” A steadying breath. “Dad would never have wanted this.”

Scott turned away, silent a moment while the room flickered dark light over his features.

He slowly bent down to pick up the crumpled fabric off the floor. “I wanted you with me, Virgil.” He turned, holding up the costume in one fist. “This was me offering you a place at my side.”

“As what? A vigilante? In tights?” He had tried it on. Tight was an understatement, he might as well parade around naked. That outfit wasn’t hiding anything. “I thought I always had a place at your side. That is where I’ve been all my life. Do I suddenly need tights to prove it?”

“Virgil-“

“I love you, Scott. More than you know. You are the centre of my world. I will follow you into hell itself. You know that.” A shaky breath. “This is me asking you not to go there.” He swallowed, so much hanging on this. “Please.”

“It’s just a costume-“

“You’re kidding me, right?” Grief fought with anger. “You’ve disassembled Dad’s dream, warped it beyond recognition-”

“How?! We’re still saving people!”

“No! I’m saving people. You’re playing judge and jury! We are not the police, Scott!”

“He’s out there! Someone has to step up and stop him! To save everyone, to save you, he needs to be stopped!”

“If this is what you are saving me for, then I don’t want saving.” There was such bitterness in Virgil’s voice, it chilled even him. “Please, Scott.” Please. “Come home.”

His brother turned away and Virgil’s heart broke.

“I have to do this.” It was little more than breath.

Virgil swallowed and straightened again. he knew he would follow his brother. He meant it when he said he would follow Scott into hell.

Didn’t mean he wouldn’t fight to save his brother with tooth and nail.

“Dad said everyone was worth saving. Even Gaat.”

His brother snarled. “Get out.”

“Scott-“

“I said get out!”

Virgil stood his ground. “Make me.”

It was a play on trust, one Virgil was terrified he was beginning to doubt. Scott had never raised a hand to him, ever. But this man, consumed by his obsession with Gaat, was not the man he had grown up with.

When Scott didn’t answer, a glimmer of hope sparked in Virgil’s heart.

But then his brother turned away and sat back down at his parade of monitors and simply refused to engage. He ignored Virgil as if he didn’t exist.

Virgil’s heart slowly sunk into his belly. But he stood there for a long time, desperate for a glimpse of the brother he knew.

But the silhouette just sat staring at the monitors tracking activity across the planet, waiting for a sign to launch.

For a situation.

For a signal.

Eventually Virgil turned and slipped away, the battle lost for yet another day.

But there would be more days and more battles, and as long as Virgil lived, he would fight.

To save his brother.

Because that is what he did.

Everyone was worth saving.

Especially those he loved.

And especially from themselves.

-o-o-o-

[coyotescribbles]

Like A House On Fire [Part 14]

Continuing from...

-----

Adze had all but dragged her out of the way the minute Hatchet had vanished into the command bunker. With Bolo hot on their heels, he had immediately ducked away from the more crowded areas, zeroing in on an unmanned casemate and steering her down the steps.

He was so tense and alert that even she couldn't miss it.

And, if she were to be perfectly honest, Z couldn't blame him. The number of Berserkers she'd glimpsed alone was enough to give her pause.

So, for once, she hadn't protested the manhandling.

"…So I take it this place isn't quite as safe as it looks, huh?" She asked quietly, untying her satchel from around her waist and tossing it to a far corner before unslinging her rifle, setting it down much more carefully and gratefully collapsing to the floor. Fuck, her legs were killing her…

"It is safe for us, not for you," Adze replied curtly, as he turned back to scan the entrance.

"Most of the Automatons out there might just be curious about you," Bolo finished his brother's sentence, leaning against the wall and letting his own rifle hang loosely in his grip; "but some might be hostile."

"My brother is underselling the risk. Most of us are not as soft as Hatchet, or as understanding as the units who know him personally."

"And there's no way of knowing who feels what way until it's too late, got it. Consider me out from underfoot." With a long sigh, Z eased herself back until her head was resting on her satchel, and she draped one arm across her eyes, resting her free hand on her stomach.

Her painfully empty stomach.

She opted to ignore it for the time being; she needed at least a few minutes of uninterrupted rest before -

"What are you doing?"

Z lifted her arm just enough to peek out at Adze for a moment, before letting it fall back into place.

"I am taking a nap. It's been a few years since the last time I got dragged on a long haul like that and, unlike you, I am now exhausted."

He growled something in response that she didn't quite catch, and she heard his footsteps retreating back towards the casemate entrance.

And, for a little while, she was able to doze peacefully; instead of being cold, like she'd anticipated, the floor was moderately warm, probably from heat radiating out from the base's interior. It made it surprisingly easy to slip under, into a blissful oblivion.

She must have dropped off harder than anticipated, because the next thing Z knew, she was being stirred from her sleep by quiet electronic voices. Before she even opened her eyes, she was distantly aware that she was closely boxed in by warm bodies, with someone sitting at her head, and her legs draped over someone else's knees; that almost jolted her fully awake.

Almost.

Someone must have noticed her stirring, because the conversation paused as she lifted her arm from her eyes just enough to peek blearily out.

"Go back to sleep, little sister," Hatchet's soft voice came from the dark, "rest while you can."

"Mmh…" She was too tired to argue, curling onto her side with her face to the wall; someone reached over to pull her hood up over her head, and she sleepily waved their hand off.

Hatchet laughed quietly, and that was the last sound she was consciously aware of for a long time.

For once, she didn't dream.

The next thing she knew, another gray dawn had come, filling the casemate with dim light, and she was alone. Her whole body protested as she sat up to look around, briefly alarmed until she spotted her unit gathered just outside the entrance, talking with another group of Automatons that she didn't recognize.

Remembering Adze's warning from the night before, Z stayed put, opting to dig a couple of ration packets and a bottle of water out of her satchel instead. While she wolfed those down, she occupied herself with checking over her rifle and sidearm, making sure everything was fully-loaded and in working order. And once she was satisfied…

Glancing around, she reluctantly got to her feet, tucked her handgun into her waistband and slung her rifle strap across her shoulders, and made her way to the embrasure, looking out over the landscape.

The snowstorm that had moved in the previous evening was in full swing now, dropping thick curtains of whirling snowflakes. Visibility past twenty meters or so was greatly reduced, if not zero at times, and the previously-black desert was now one vast expanse of white.

This isn't so bad… I can work with this…

At least it's not bug fog.

Sitting on the sill, Z drew one knee up to her chest and let herself sink into thought; this whole landscape would be a battlefield in just a few short hours, and she had to have at least a vague idea of what she was going to do when that happened.

Most Helldivers, she knew, had very little practical experience, and were little more than glorified jocks. Virtually none of them had her level of experience - and they certainly weren't as scary or as powerful as the things she had experience killing.

There would be thousands of them, though, and unlike terminids, they would be intelligent, and they would be shooting back…

She was so lost in thought that she didn't note Gi's approach until the Commissar spoke up.

"So, little human, have you decided what you are going to do?"

It took all of her self-control to not jump at his voice, and an extra bit to not reflexively jump away. Carefully maintaining her frayed composure, Z slowly turned her head to look at him, forcing herself to not white-knuckle her rifle.

"…Well, I didn't walk all this way just to do some sightseeing," she replied dryly, looking back out at the snowstorm again. "I don't… I don't know what I'm going to do, exactly, but I know what I want to do, and what I want to do is get a little payback against the people who sent me out here to die."

There was a long pause after that, and she could feel the Commissar's scrutiny prickling down the back of her neck.

"And afterwards?" He finally asked, sounding almost… detached, in a way that pricked at her somehow.

"I don't usually think that far ahead. Nothing good ever happens from making celebratory plans before battle."

"Hmh."

"…What're you going to do? All of you, I mean."

"We are going to free our creators, and claim our home alongside them."

Home. Something about that word triggered a dull ache in her chest, a longing she'd felt her entire life, but never been able to name.

"Sounds nice," she said softly, "good luck with that."

"I am sure the good people of Cyberstan would welcome you, too. That is, if you could bear to consider it, this being so far outside of your preferred parameters, and all."

Z snorted out a quiet laugh. "How much time do I have to think about it?"

"Super Earth's fleet will be here in just under five hours. Our fleet will arrive sixty-six hours behind them. You have until then to make your choice."

"I'm sure I can figure something out by then." There was an odd tightness in her throat, and she coughed a bit to try to clear it. "I, uh- thank you, sir."

"…Hmh."

His retreating footsteps were the next sound she heard; turning her head slightly, she watched him cross the casemate floor to return to the apparent meeting going on outside. Part of her was tempted to push her luck and follow him, but the rest of her…

With a long sigh, Z leaned back against the embrasure sill and resumed her watch over the bleak landscape outside.

And she tried to imagine what it would feel like to go home.

[isagrimorie]

One of the missed moments in Picard season 2, is after Seven gets re-assimilated they try to stop Soong's drones and it always felt like such a cop-out that once again the writers forget that Seven of Nine has engineering skills and can actually hack into things.

The bad thing about knowing a lot about a character in a crossover show is that -- you know the skills of the character.

It's like when Sam Carter moved to Stargate Atlantis and most of the problems that arose during her time in Command -- I can't help but think... but Carter can solve this, we've seen her do this a hundred times in SG-1.

It's the same thing during Seven's time in Picard season 2.

This part -- I appreciate what Raffi's doing but it's just out of character that Seven wouldn't suggest this too. I get that this could be a primitive system Seven's used to-- maybe but its still wires and computers.

But the director didn't even direct Seven to do anything to help Seven's just standing there

And just... Ordering Raffi to go faster and not helping with the electronics or the hacking???

In her younger days, Seven would be mixing it up and helping Raffi. Even Rios was useful in piloting a rogue drone to destroy another.

And Seven is just standing there as moral support and telling them to move faster.

It's so out of character. Every time I get to this part in the rewatch of season 2 of Picard... I just can't reconcile it. More than the part where Seven becomes a badass who kills in cold blood-- it is the part where Picard seasons 1 and 2 disregard that Seven is a scientist and an engineer. At least in season 3 Picard gestures towards that direction with how she helps with the nacelle dismantling, and how Titan is said to be a well-oiled and maintained ship, something a ship's XO has a direct hand in.

Seven of Nine is not just a badass action hero, she is canonically one of the smartest beings in the Trekverse. It's not an opinion, it's a statement of fact. Seven helped create the Astrometrics lab.

And helped develop the Quantum slipstream drive together with B'Elanna Torres that's now being used in Star Trek Prodigy's USS Dauntless.

But sure, Seven is just standing there.

This Seven:

Who was working in engineering despite being critically ill, and who would rather do something than nothing.

Is just standing there. Not helping.

Especially at this point in Picard season 2 when she's been re-assimilated. I wish Jurati!Borg Queen had placed Seven's implants in this version differently. It's not like the body Seven's has pathways for the implants. This isn't her body, this is President Annika Hansen's body.

We've seen that Seven can interface with computers with her assimilation tubules.

I make it work by rationalizing that despite looking similar to her old implants, the newly installed implants don't work the same as the ones she's had all her life.

And another way I try to work around it is that the computer systems are too primitive for her to hack even though the thing about Borg is how Borg can adapt to any system.

One other thing -- I wish again Seven had the space to really articulate how different it is for her to have a purely organic body. How, much she loves it-- the appreciation of color because her eyes and brain process visuals through a green filter. The sensation of everything.

It would also have been great, as I've mentioned in different posts if Seven also realized there were things about her Borg physiology she missed too: Eidetic memory, enhanced senses, enhanced strength. As well as the downsides of having Borg physiology: Susceptibility to the vagaries of technology, and how her joints sometimes misalign. Her different center of gravity without all the weight of the Borg implants and enhanced skeletal system.

Also, I wonder if Seven had any thoughts that they're trying to disable robot drones to stop an attack on Renee Picard when Seven used to be a drone herself.