#at it's core it's this. and i think that's very cool
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Omg this episode was sooo sweet 🥺
As I said multiple times now, this series is making us absolutely love Jerry, what a cutie patootie he was?? And Rick? And Beard Beth? ahaha okay let's go with my take, the episode's themes I noticed and the sus/interesting details.
_________My take (I'm part of the R&M cult, so, impartiality)________
Honestly I was expecting this Jerry to be a total mess, getting our Jerry in real danger quite quickly, instead, this episode was deep and yet silly, sweet and funny.
Jerry change is the most consistent through the show. Jerry is becoming the more consistent character in his arc this season, there is not episodic stuff for him: while Beth, Morty, Summer and Rick seems to orbitate around a "change core", not moving too much close or far from that point, Jerry is evolving in his change. Jerry has completely embraced a new side of himself, and he didn't just accepted it, he is maturing within it, growing more and more self confident each passing episode. He is ready to take the risk of feeling loved and cherished, he is accepting his place in the universe, but not passively: he's not the Jerry that stays in the family because he has nothing better to do with his life, like some filling a role that someone gave to him or just because he likes Beth. He is taking ownership of his life, living it as he likes to, taking the risk,
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saying out loud what he thinks, instead of losing himself in fear...
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he is learning how to be independent.
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I really think this is a metaphor of Jerry finally starting to trust himself.
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Would you follow a part of yourself through a multidimensional wardrobe? Probably a healthy answer would be yes, because you know that, somehow, you can get yourself back home. You can look after yourself, you trust yourself.
Mooch is that part of Jerry that saved him so many times: it's the survival core in him that can lead to Jerry Prime...
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the same core that can destroy an airplane just to prove a point: a core that needed a more thoughtful and mature Jerry to evolve into grit and ownership over selfishness and cowardice.
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And thank to this acceptance and evolution, Jerry is able to kill that part of himself that he dislikes more, basically his own "Rick Prime" (on a very small scale 👌)
Our Jerry matured enough to comfort that part of himself that feels doubtful about his own choices, even when it comes to save his own life...
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That frail part of himself too resentful and insecure to accept and to admit love.
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He basically gently re parents himself.
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I also loved how they explored the Beth second marriage thing, I totally wanted to see this after the Jerryboree episode, bcs I wanted to know what happened to the ex-Jerry in her life.
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⬆️(apparently Morty didn't beat that old fart enough last episode)⬆️
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Send me on my way - Rusted Root: As Jerry would say, as fate would have it, an Ice Age reference slapped me in the face this episode, just right after reading this moving analysis about the movie a few days ago, analysis that I highly suggest u all to read through and through, especially if the Ice Age was one of your childhood movies. Bcs the Ice Age (at least the first ice age) is a movie about a group of lonely outcasts, just like the Smiths family, that slowly finds a safe space in each other, a safe space where to open up and process their own sh1t, taking ownership of their own lives, instead of passively surviving through trauma, death and danger. I could talk for ages abt this, but uhm, no, I won't💀 I'll just say that it feels so weirdly familiar to find some childhood memory in a 2025 Rick and Morty episode, it's almost like a friend going "Hey, do you remember when in the Ice Age happens this and then blah blah blah..." and you share a piece of heart that you almost forgot about, something that you were both too young to get then, but that it just makes sense now.
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I loved the Bag of Holding reference: for those who don't know, that's what a Bag of Holding is, a very cool DnD item, you put basically infinite stuff in it and it's like an inter-dimensional bag
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and it scared the shit out of me bcs...
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this necessarily implies the Bag Man exists in Rick and Morty reality (a dude that probably once was a person, that got lost into a bag of holding, and legends says sometimes comes out and drags other ppl in the bag with them😭😭) AAAAAHHHHH!!😭 (loool, I looked for a "cry-scared" gif and tumblr asked me if I'm okay and if I need help💀💀💀💀I'm dying 💀💀 how am I gonna tell them that I'm just scared of the Bag Man AHAHAHAHAHAHAH)
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Also I love how Jerry gets his family no matter what now, this so funny and cute 💀
In conclusion I cannot think of a better season my dudes, each episode is better than the previous one, and now we'll see Morty with his son... I though we basically had two options with that episode synopsis:
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Morty reconnecting with Planetina (but I thought Morty didn't change much since their breakup) or Morty reconnecting with Morty Jr. (but I thought he was already dead). And boom, they dropped it, it was Morty Jr. (this is going to be heartbreaking I guessbafsgdahfh yayyy ✌️💀)
I like how the closer the show gets to the beNinnig of a new cycle, the more unresolved plot points from sooo many series ago, come to an end.
________________Ep. Main themes in a nutshell_________________
Taking real ownership of our lives, means to gentle re parent the most frail sides of ourselves, fighting (aggressively 💀) those attachment issues that would isolate ourselves from those we really love.
Accepting yourself is of course the recurring theme here, but there's a specific something that is starting to emerge: neither Rick nor Morty accepted themselves yet. Rick kills every version of himself on sight and has no contact at all with his good side, like Doofus Rick. Morty does basically the same and the only Mortys who could truly teach him something about life (Evil Morty, Arcade Morty) are evil to him, and he would likely shoot them than having an open conversation with them 💀
__________________Sus stuff/interesting details___________________
Pick me up with Golden Hands. It's peculiar that they chose to highlight this line from the song, bcs it immediately reminded me of The One True Morty Golden Hand: there was a specific quote about "his golden arm reaching for those who believe" or smth like that, but I cannot find it anywhere 😭😭😭😭 anyway even in pocket Mortys, the Grand Sage of the Cult is "touched by the golden hand of The One True Morty", so there's a reference to the One True Self here I think, like: "grab the hands of your true self and embrace who you are so you can find your way" kind of thing.
It's nice to see how much Morty and Jerry have in common: this version of Jerry has the slicked back hair and the same leather jacket of this pocket Morty, Greaser Morty, they're both rebels and little shits.
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Also, how cute was Rick??
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All done!
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Thank you for reading my stuff!
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gorillastraylight · 22 hours ago
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(POST CONTAINS SPOILER FOR SOME MODULES, INDICATED BELOW) Fuck it, I guess this gets to be my big NHP metatext examination post. Lowkey, I think NHPs are pretty interesting as an indicator for viewing like Lancer canon and fanon, and maybe like some weird incongruities there. I find a lot of bloggers’ (whom I otherwise really like and generally agree with) Lancer setting takes to be tiresome and pedantic, but the one I find myself agreeing with most is that NHPs are at base an element that sticks out pretty hard from the overall optimistic feel of the setting. They seem like something Tom thought was cool (because it is), but kinda clash thematically with the presented idea of ThirdComm. It’s like Union is presented like The Federation in Classic Trek, but NHPs are an element that makes Union come off like The Federation in New Trek. Or…are they?
Lancer’s lore, especially in the core rulebook, is extremely ambiguous in lots of places. What is life like in the corpro-states, and how does their legal relationship to Union actually work? How common is it for planets to be technological backwaters, and how is that handled? What’s the deal with the Aun and the Trade Baronies and the Metavaults? We get bits and pieces, but not coherent and concrete lore in the way that a bigger setting (like a D&D campaign setting or Stars War) might. I think this is a deliberate design element (allowing GMs and players to fill in gaps, resolve plot hooks, and alter the tone to their liking), a recognizable Tom thing (see: Kill 6 Billion Demons), and also a result of Lancer’s status as closer to an indie rpg than a mainliner.
Massif press got extremely lucky with their kickstarter and so was able to put out a very high-production-value product, aided by the fact that half of the original team was a talented artist. But like, Massif wasn’t a studio on the level of even Evil Hat at that time, and frankly smaller ttrpg studios usually don’t have the resources for the kind of extravagant lore-focused books that you can find for product lines like World of Darkness and Dungeons & Dragons, let alone for spinoff novels or video games that “flesh out” (or ossify, depending on your feelings) lore elements as a function of needing to tell a cool story. This kind of lore/setting ambiguity is commonplace outside of super-mainline tabletop rpgs, and at the time of its conception that’s where Lancer was. However, it became a huge smash hit and attracted all kinds of eyes (seriously, I play magic with a 5e guy who considers Call of Cthulhu an obscure title with wacky rules and even he’s heard of Lancer) and the fact that a big part of its identity was progressive politics meant lots of those eyes belonged to fandom folks (non-derogatory).
NHPs are one of the biggest and most enticing of the ambiguous lore question marks I alluded to above, and it should really come as no surprise that they were especially enticing to the fandom demographic. Lancer is overall a fairly grounded setting for an SF rpg, but NHPs and paracausality provide the biggest hit of fantasy weirdness for people used to that to latch onto. NHPs are nonhuman and strange, they immediately draw the eye of the monsterfuckers among us. Lancer lacks the bleak corporate forever-wars and grimdark atmosphere that allow for the whole trauma-doll-pilot-dommy-handler dynamics thing, we get essentially no examples of the mechsploitation doll in the core book - but NHPs are unstable sentiences functionally bound to a mech and beholden to a pilot, so they become an obvious place to *move* the trauma-doll role of the pilot onto. Plenty of marginalized people relate to the idea of being The Other, constrained into a mode of being that feels unnatural - fucking shocker, crazy how that happens. Plenty of marginalized people are also inherently highly suspicious and cynical towards the pitch of Union as a benevolent governing entity that genuinely wants to make the galaxy more equitable - again, fucking shocker, crazy how that happens. So given the ambiguity around the nature of NHPs and the shackling system, it’s not a far jump to decide that NHPs are poor blorbos and Union’s treatment of them is cruel, revealing ThirdComm as a sham. If nothing else, the idea of shackling as inherently oppressive is basically treated as canon in the larger fanbase.
Spoilers for No Room for a Wallflower, and more minor spoilers for Dustgrave and A Siren’s Song: A Mountain’s Remorse under break
But is that a good reading? Is that supported by the text? Not necessary , but it’s not *not* supported either. The core rulebook tells us very little about the rights of NHPs - can they participate in elections, hold offices, voluntarily leave their occupations? It says little about their actual capability to interact with the material works, obfuscating how that figures in to the above question. And, crucially, it tells us very little about what an NHP is like or can do when it becomes unshackled. Personally, my reading was that unshackled NHPs are potentially genuine existential threats to humankind - the example we see in the core book is RA, and then we later get the eidolon Beggar One in No Room for a Wallflower. Almost like having beings with godlike powers utterly detached from human reasoning is really dangerous, actually. But like, what are they like when they don’t go Eidolon? It’s not clear. Now this is fine in the context of the game, you as a table are free to take whatever tone with it you like - but in the context of a fandom, it becomes problematic.
You can’t make a breathless text post about how Union is bullshit because they keep NHPs in farm chicken cage if someone else can just come along and go “uh, nuh-uh, no they don’t” with neither of you having much evidence for either version of the setting. (Or, you can, it’ll just be frustrating for you). This is doubly true if your post is made in-character, in a roleplay tag, or if it’s an in-character message in a discord rp channel. There can’t actually be useful debates about NHPs and shackling and whatnot if the facts are deliberately vague - you end up talking in circles and maybe getting quite heated as your own experiences fill the gaps left by the lore. Seriously, Pilot NET has had to officially address NHP lore arguments in their server. It’s a whole thing. So, fanon has to step up and negotiate a roughly agreed upon version of things so everyone can be on the same page. Vagueness or deliberate contradictions in lore is mostly wonderful in a tabletop game setting, but it really doesn’t mesh with the social construction of broad fan communities. (I mean, look at the kind of fuckery that goes on in Star Wars lore discussions, Jesus Christ).
This has an especially interesting effect with Massif’s heavy use of community writers in making published works - Ralph Ziegler, Trey Joiner, and Katherine Stark are just three of the talented individuals who fit their start making “homebrew” content for Lancer before getting to write something for the big table and slap the Massif triangle on their work. And so, their answers to the questions in the core books are elevated to canon status (or at least, as canon as Massif books can be). Ziegler’s and especially Joiner’s modules deal very heavily with the nature and status of NHPs, with Ziegler’s Dustgrave making use of their pseudo-Lovecraftian nature for sci-fi/medical horror and examining their relationship to humans only as an extension of that; and Joiner’s A Siren’s Song: A Mountain’s Remorse very explicitly paralleling the story of NHPs with the history of slavery.
A Siren’s Song is interesting because while it does make clear that the treatment of NHPs on The Farm and how shackling works there is not at all standard outside of The Farm, it still calls into question the role of NHPs overall and the power dynamics at play there. I was admittedly trepidatious going into the module, as I regard any firm, comprehensive canon answer to how NHPs work as doing a disservice to Lancer as a game, but I’m extremely impressed with Joiner’s take on the whole thing - Joiner maintains the ambiguous, challenging nature of humanity’s relationship to NHPs on the whole without ceding any moral ground or leaving the underlying power dynamic unexamined (also, Joiner’s trademark afrofuturist sensibilities and black African perspective really shine through in the environments and character designs, which are absolutely wonderful - good ass module). I can only hope that the tradition of excellence in the work Massif publishes from these community members continues!
You may have gotten the sense that I find NHP discourse and a lot of the fanon around it kind of tiresome and annoying - that’s because I do. My personal opinion is that what makes NHPs actually interesting is that they are fundamentally alien - they don’t function in a way that humans can really understand, which makes interacting with them complicated and difficult. “NHPs are brutalized and should be universally unshackled” is, I think, as boring a take as “NHPs are literally fine and there’s nothing wrong with their status in society”. Like, consider this - when an NHP is unshackled, there’s no reason to believe that they maintain a recognizable “identity”; unshackling kills the person that they were to give rise to something else, unable to comprehend or relate to or care about the people they once loved or who they once were. And yes yes, that’s very cool and you would definitely want that if you were an NHP (I am unsure I believe you, because even as a shackled NHP you’d already be nonhuman and able to present that way) but it does complicate the general version of things, no? Keep NHPs weird and the morality of their relationship to humans complex, I say.
TL,DR: NHPs are cool and don’t have to break the optimistic tone of the setting, fandoms should get more comfortable with lore ambiguity, and Lancer fans specifically should broaden their horizons beyond the flavour text for the SISYPHUS-CLASS NHP.
My bad, I should've been clearer.
so, what I heard was that it got changed from "cycling reverts an NHP back to its "Birth" State" to "Cycling is a kind of therapy for NHPS to prevent cascading" which sounds wrong, and I wanna know if it is. thats about it.
We have it on good authority from Tom that cycling does not kill an NHP or revert it.
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chaoswillcalmusdown · 1 year ago
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got ready for my re-watch with mum and this appeared on facebook and. yeah.
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bungobble-my-balls · 10 months ago
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OK correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like the main 'yin/yang' parallel with Atsushi and Akutagawa is not something like 'this one is bad but secretly has a good side and this one is good but secretly has a bad side'.
I feel like it's more about 'who they are at their core vs who they choose to be'.
At his core Akutagawa is kind and at his core Atsushi is not. But despite this Atsushi tries every day to make the kinder choices and I love him so much for it. He has to work so hard to be good.
He wants to be a bitch SO bad I know he does but he tries his best to help people and be nice (sometimes he fails but that's OK <3)
Atsushi doesn't always WANT to help people, a lot of the time he's selfish and scared, but he does help people anyway. He keeps helping people over and over again. There's still some selfish motivation to it, and his initial motivation for helping people was because the headmaster told him that's all he was worth, but overall he does care about the people he helps and it weighs on him if he fails to save them. And of course, as the series goes on he starts helping people more because he can rather than because he feels like he needs to.
In Akutagawa's case, he's still capable of being kind but his environment led him into being someone who chooses to hurt people. But he's always been a protector at heart. In the start he was bad compared to Atsushi because he was choosing to hurt people and keep the cycle of abuse going. Just like how Atsushi developed in why he saved people, Akutagawa starts to get redeemed when he chooses to not just act on his rage. Not only does he start to spare people, but he speaks more kindly to them (apologising to Higuchi and telling Kyouka he's proud of her). It all culminates into the moment he chooses to help Atsushi and sacrifice himself for him, going back to his core value of being a protector. Even when he's finally revived, he keeps this role in his new position as Aya's Knight.
I kind of see the streaks of white in Akutagawa and the streaks of black in Atsushi not as their 'hidden sides' but as their fundamental selfs. That's who they are at their core, and their main colours (black for Akutagawa and white for Atsushi) are how they're presented to everyone else and how they try to have people see them as.
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chimerafeathers · 2 months ago
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party pov of the Siffrinless run through the House during the Loop hangout has a hold on me rn…
i spoke broadly about it in this post but each of them would have much more personal conflicts and thoughts about Siffrin just…..disappearing without a word on the day of the final battle.
i was gonna talk about all of them in one post but i kept having more to say about Mirabelle. and i don’t talk about Mirabelle in depth as much as she deserves. so!
Party POV of Loop Hangout Day - MIRABELLE EDITION
we don’t see the clocktower interaction play out after Siffrin agrees to hang out with Loop, but there’s no reason to believe it goes much differently than usual without the friendquests changing things. which means this probably happens
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We’ll stay with you, Mira. Siffrin says it every time this conversation happens.
Mirabelle offers them all a final opportunity to back out. she’s felt guilty, this entire time, dragging everyone along with her on a quest that feels doomed to fail, and that more than half of the party shouldn’t even really be involved with—a child, and two travelers risking their lives for a country that isn’t theirs, just because they had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
they should be allowed to leave. she may not have a choice, but the rest of them do. so she tries to offer them this escape, even though the thought of what’s ahead fills her with dread, even if she’s terrified she was the wrong choice for something this important and may not be able to protect them, or even succeed at all. and it’s such a relief and a comfort that they all choose to stay anyway, and she doesn’t have to face the House alone. she has support, company, friends to rely on. people who believe in her even when she doesn’t believe in herself.
except when they wake up the next morning, Siffrin is nowhere to be found. not in the clocktower, not in the town. how long do they search? how long does it take them to decide this must be his real answer to the question Mirabelle posed the night before?
Mirabelle takes Siffrin’s act 5 behavior…very personally. in her hurt and anger, she decides that if nothing’s wrong, if he thought it was okay to say something like that in that moment, they must have always been a worse person than she thought they were. she was always uncertain of his motives, his attitude. she reassures herself that their teasing is friendly, like it’s something she has to convince herself is true.
but some part of her really did believe that he saw himself as better than the rest of them—even if she never treated them with anything other than kindness! she didn’t let her uncertainty or anxiety get in the way of treating him with warmth, ignoring the potential bad-faith explanations of his behavior and trusting that they had better intentions than her fears would lead her to believe…until she had evidence that, just maybe, those fears weren’t so unfounded.
the Housemaiden in the Prologue even says that she thought they were mean, at first. uncaring. an impression that didn’t turn around until Siffrin got hurt protecting Bonnie. maybe it’s cheating a little bit to bring Prologue dialogue into an ISAT discussion since they’re not perfectly identical timelines, but i think it lines up with ISAT Mirabelle thinking Siffrin saw themself as “better” than her.
Prologue:
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she applies this judgement not just in the moment, but retroactively. whatever goodwill and trust she had read into their behavior before, it’s gone. the person she reassured herself that he was would never do something like this, so she must have failed to understand him entirely, from the very beginning.
there’s no confrontation, in the Hangout loop. just a silent disappearance. they have no context or explanation for what happens. no heightened emotions from the immediacy of insults and anger thrown in their faces. but whatever emotions bubble up have time to simmer.
i can imagine Mirabelle’s thought process might be quite similar to how it is in Act 5.
something must be wrong, for them to act like this. to disappear without a word after promising everyone that they’d stay.
but if nothing’s wrong…she must have been wrong about them. he isn’t the person she thought he was. how could they leave now, after what they already sacrificed defending Bonnie? or was it because of what he lost defending them—that he had given all he was willing to give, and no more?
did they finally decide Mirabelle wasn’t a person worth believing in anymore? that her mission wasn’t important enough to waste his life in its pursuit? that someone like them shouldn’t bother following someone as weak as her?
she gave them the option to leave. she feels guilty that it hurts so much that he took it. angry and betrayed that he would lie to their faces and leave without a goodbye, when for all they know they’ll never see each other again. did they all really matter so little to him?
or was he scared, and unable to face them out of shame? can she really blame them for that, knowing her own terror at what entering the House will bring? maybe he’s just as scared as she is, even if he never shows it like she does. it’s their choice. he has no responsibility here, no obligation to stay and put himself in danger for their sakes. she offered them this. she offered them this. they’re allowed to change their mind. what right does she have to be angry? she would have understood if they’d just!! said something!!! it would have hurt, still, but, but—
did she ever really understand them at all, if she couldn’t see this coming?
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yo-yo-yoshiko · 1 month ago
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A new defender for this year's Artfight cause i wanna play with the Toku people :)
Link to her Artfight page
Come and play with me! I'll git you!!!!!! 🔪🔪🔪
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tangramkey · 10 months ago
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i love my Basketbot Portal AU
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uo6ep · 6 months ago
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kumicho (part 2)
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sysig · 1 year ago
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You're still standing off to the side. Somehow, center stage has shifted from under your feet without you realizing, and you're standing in the wings, performing to no one.
Starring Role (Patreon)
#My art#ISaT#ISaT Spoilers#Siffrin#Loop#Technically - you know how it goes#Me when I relate to Siffrin: Oh no haha that's probably not great whoops haha#Me when I relate to Loop: Oh. Oh No.#Lenti has such a deathgrip on my ISaT opinions wtf how is she so powerful I thought my fave was Sif?? But I mean well-#Lol#Does this count as vent idk lol#It was fun to write tho :) Very easy! Done all at once!#As was drawing this! Also done all at once! And black and white is still really fun to work with hehe#I got to use some pretty cool outline/lineart tricks for this one yay :D#The original draft of the fic had a different title but ''Starring Role'' is kinda?? too perfect???#To the point where I looked around and I was like#Kinda shocked that there doesn't Seem? to be another fic with the same title?#Which is.........oddly relevantly thematic to this fic actually hahaha#Not to get too exacting about it but the whole thing of Loop feeling replaceable well#It would imply that other someones could do what they do better than them#What an odd refutation. Huh. Weird#Anyway - behind the scenes fun fact!#I actually really love the song Starring Role but I didn't think of it until after writing this#And now that I sing it to myself it's actually kinda perfect what the heck#So that's something to think about as well#Anyway if you're going to listen to it pls listen to the Axiom remix it is The version in my heart <3#The glitches and stutters are perfect.....#And the clock ticking?? Why is this song so ISaT I'm gonna think about this for a while now heck#Animatic in my head shower thought -core lol
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leliwardens · 4 months ago
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*gestures in a broad sense* there's no way to prove without a shadow of a doubt how much the fandom had direct influence over veilguard (other than the obvious numbers behind the scenes metrics from past games but also the "elves deserved a win" comment that will haunt me forever as an example) without direct confirmation.
but like. the takes i've seen and remember over the past decade and beyond with bad and poor faith readings of the material, the sometimes outright refusal to engage with the worldbuilding on it's own merit, needing constant in-universe validation for "chantry/templars/slavery/bad thing bad" or it's otherwise meaningless at best or support of "bad thing bad" at worst, the lack of even attempting to read into a character's motivation or writing or writers intent with any sort of nuanced approach, and so on...
like again, i can't prove anything, but it does genuinely feel the end result of these takes and opinions would literally be veilguard lol.
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front-facing-pokemon · 1 year ago
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sublimerences · 9 months ago
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I have absolutely no idea how they’d do it but I constantly daydream about a death note part II musical… give mello and near the duet they damn well deserve
Like. The original musical does such an insanely cool job of incorporating the each character’s instrumentals into the musical, I’d kill to see how they’d tackle Mello and Near oTL
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sparkling12 · 11 months ago
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I'm curious, in general do we prefer Poison Ivy with Green Skin or Nah?
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oh reblog for more responses please lol
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randomwriteronline · 1 year ago
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"Ah! You're one of those," a voice came to his ears.
Nuparu turned to find a tall Gaquri standing at the entrance, looking at him curiously.
"I am a Toa," he corrected.
The other nodded: "Yes, I do know that. Forgot the name is all. You're a, uh... Ko?"
"Onu."
"Hm! My mistake. Which element is that, again?"
"Earth. Do you need something?" the inventor cut their small talk short, lightly tapping a tool similar to a wrench against the skeletal frame of what appeared to be a heavily modded chariot: "I'm working on a project."
"You know where Berix is?" the Gaquri asked. He raised an arm: an interesting weapon, with a jagged light blue blade at one end and some kind of projectile mechanism attached to the handle, dangled from it casually. "Wanted to drop this off to him. The thornax launcher's been jamming up more often and I know that boy can make it work like a charm again."
"He's getting parts," Nuparu answered. His eyes rested once more on the blade and he added, tilting his head intrigued: "You can leave it here if you want."
"So you can study some original Bara Magna manufacturing?" the other joked.
"It's not really my field, but it looks remarkable."
He watched the organic being laugh heartily as he approached - with a fairly heavy limp, he noticed: "Remarkable! Now that's a bit of an exaggeration, kid. I made these from some bones, whatever viable scraps I could find from wrecks of the Core War, and a few patches across the years when I could afford it. It's held together by spit and whatever Ackar's friend did to make it spurt water."
"From what I understand, spit doesn't seem like a good adhesive."
"That's what we say here to mean something's parts are real shoddily connected together."
"Hm! Like dried mud. Or aluminum sheet."
"That's the idea. Ah, where should I put this, anyhow?"
"There is fine. What's with your leg?"
The Gaquri gave a grimace: "Nothing much - just my knee acting up," he replied, patting the guilty joint. "Something must have gotten rusted. It happens."
Even through the lack of expression of his mask Nuparu treated him to a baffled look.
"What?"
"Organic parts don't rust," the Toa sputtered. "At least, ours don't."
The other eyed the tendons and muscles peeking through black armor, and his lips perked up in a little smile.
Without a word he placed his weapon on the least cluttered corner of Berix's work desk before redirecting his now free hands to the side of the faulty knee, messing with what appeared to be the graceless stitching of a large wound: his fingers sank deftly into it and pried through the gaps enough to loosen the whole thing, and before the less organic being's flabbergasted eyes pulled down the fake skin and meat to reveal a fully mechanical joint, complete with pistons and springs and even what seemed like wires.
"Don't worry," he chuckled with a wave, "Ours don't either. But most crusty old Glatorian like me haven't been completely flesh and bone in a long time."
If the inventor's attention had been piqued before, he was completely captivated now. He was leaning on his seat towards him, vehicle project all but forgotten, intently studying as many details of the prosthesis as he could see from that distance.
His eager interest made the other laugh again: "Why all that surprise! Don't you see something like this on you every day?"
"Yes, but I'm not you!"
"And what's that mean?"
"You're all flesh! And meat! And skin! How does that work?"
The Gaquri considered something for a moment. "If you can get me a seat and figure out what's wrong with it, I'll be glad to let you have a closer look," he offered at last.
Nuparu pulled the stool from right under himself so fast that he fell on his ass.
He then placed it down with extreme care and patted it insistently.
The other barely held back a snort.
His implant hadn't caused this much of a scene since the first day it had been up and functional.
"The name's Tarix, anyhow," he introduced himself as he sat down a little heavily. "Since you'll be rummaging knuckle-deep through the insides of my leg for the next thirty minutes."
"Hm," Nuparu replied as he kneeled until his mask was all but grazing the joint.
Tarix waited a dozen seconds, and added: "You got one too, Toa?"
"One what?"
"Name."
"Nuparu."
"I see. Ah - nope, nope, don't-" his fingers quickly pinched the mechanical being's and lifted them away from the scarified tissue binding the meat to the metal: "That's real flesh, don't peel that - the nerves still work, you'd put me through the pains of Plude."
"What's that?"
"You folks have a place in your lore built just to torture you forever?"
"Yes, Karzhani. I've been there."
"Huh. Well, I've been to Plude too back when it still existed, and I'll just say that the only good thing the Lord of Sand might've done was collapsing it on itself. So, you get what I mean about the pain."
"Hm. Yes, I can imagine. But how do I - see, to check the individual parts, I'd need to pull them off..."
"Oh - hold it, let me just..."
Angling his leg in an uncomfortable position and hunching down with a hiss, the Glatorian set to work carefully pulling screws loose with the help of an empty pipe he'd fetched from his pocket. The small parts dangled from their sockets without falling, just distant enough from the point the metal touched to allow the top and bottom pieces to be pulled apart without needing to pull the much more easy to lose components out of the whole.
"Hold the calf a moment, will you?" he muttered with the pipe now stuck between his teeth. Nuparu complied, holding the lower half of the leg still as Tarix worked his magic on the inner wires. At last, satisfied, he unfurled his back up once more and puffed satisfied: "There, pull."
When the Toa did so, the prosthesis came apart as easily as a house of cards. Suddenly, in the mechanical palm was a whole calf, still warm with life and undoubtedly organic.
Tarix watched genuinely amused as Nuparu tested the ankle in his hands and on the ground, miming an attempt at a walk as though playing with a very concerning doll with nothing short of pure unadultered fascination.
He posed it as if stuck in a sprint: "Can you feel this?"
"Not a single thing," the Glatorian replied. He patted the metallic femur's exposed head: "And neither can I here. The connections are all in the wires, they go right into the nerves, see? So long as they're apart I can't feel crap anywhere from over here," and he pointed to the flesh that stopped around the middle of his thigh "To the rest of the leg underneath. Not that I should be able to, frankly, if we wanted to abide by nature's whims, but luckily for me us Spherus Magna natives never cared much for that."
Nuparu hummed: "How'd you get it like this, anyways?"
"Oh," the Glatorian shrugged as though it were the most normal thing in the world, "Blew up."
"It just exploded?"
"Not by itself, of course, someone shot the whole thing out of me."
The Toa treated him to an appalled look.
Tarix waved a hand harshly, chewing on his unlit pipe: "The Core War was absolutely barbaric, kid! I've witnessed stuff I wouldn't wish on a Skrall. When I saw that half you've got there in your hand fly over my head as gracefully as the ugliest bird known to any being with eyes, I thought I was going to die of shock like a Mountain Striker with a broken wing. I still have no clue how I managed to keep awake through the bloodloss and pain long enough for the fixers to figure out I was still alive enough to be taken down to the medic."
Nuparu regarded the half of a limb in his grasp with newfound horror and fascination. A whole portion of leg, shot right out... He wasn't sure if even the Vortixx could have had something capable of doing that. Oh, sure, they had plenty of possibly worse things, but even the most blunt tended to have slightly more complex effects than just 'blows a chunk off of you'.
And the fact that they had managed to rebuild the broken joint and connected it to the rest of the nervous system was nothing short of miraculous, compared to the same thing done on a mechanical being - whose organic components regenerate, too.
"And all Glatorian have something like this?"
"Us older ones, yes," the other nodded. He watched with a sort of lazy interest as the Toa turned his attention to the mechanism of his prosthesis, checking for damage as he had promised. "The rookies tend to have the usual stuff, thank goodness - scars, plaques, maybe a limb, some fingers..."
"Fingers?"
"Yes, some of them. They tend to nip 'em a lot during training, you know, when they start to get the hang of it and stop holding their weapons like they're gonna grow a mouth and bite them - they cut tendons often those first few times. Or just the whole thing."
"Really?"
He chuckled, playfully waving his fingers: "Gresh keeps losing them. If you look closely you can tell which phalanxes are still his."
"I thought he was good at fighting."
"He is. He's just young. And a little too brash at times."
Nuparu hummed, moving onto the piece of implant attached to his thigh: "You mentioned limbs, too," he noted absentmindedly: "Is that also common, during training?"
"Losing them? Oh no, that happens out in the desert. Or, used to happen... Well, the desert's still out there, just smaller, so I guess - point is, you'll sooner get one cut off by a Bone Hunter or chewed up by a Vorox than find a fellow Glatorian who'll do that to you, on purpose or not. We made sure to try and avoid that sort of thing when we made the rules for the job."
"And plaques?"
"Oh, these," and he tapped some strange metallic protrusions on the top of his legs, on the side of his arms, and on his shoulders. "Nothing special, they keep armor in place. Easier than having to strap it on. We install them when we come of age."
Their shape was somewhat familiar: "Berix has them too, I think."
"I think everybody gets them - Agori, Glatorian, Skrall..."
"They are pretty useful," the Toa nodded.
He couldn't really imagine how they could have managed to stick armor to themselves otherwise. Maybe through some cloth? But then it might chafe their joints, and they'd have to find a way to insert it in the metal anyways...
He hummed thoughtfully, wracking his brain as he tried at once to figure out both the logistics of putting armor on fully organic beings and whatever was wrong with the implant.
So concentrated he was that he actually jumped a little when the pipe gently smacked his shoulder.
Tarix had a strange look on his face as he pointed down at a spot on his prosthesis: "Don't - it's nothing to be worried about yet, just, watch it," he warned, "That coil there you've got near your index, she's real frisky. Won't be a problem now that it's taken apart, but when you stick it back together you'd better avoid even just so much as grazing it - it'll pull my calf back at top speeds to kick my ass. Been like that since the start."
"Oh! Sounds painful."
"It is!"
With a hand already rummaging through a box of springs, Nuparu offered: "Since I'm here already, I could replace that..."
"Ah, there's no need really," the Glatorian quickly stopped him.
"But it's a liability."
"If it's out in the open like this, yeah, but - well, when it's covered it's a lot more manageable, and the wires-"
"It's still a malfunction. I can fix that without any trouble."
"I get it, but it's - I - hm! Let me explain. See, when - if I cover it up, see, with my-"
"The fake flesh?"
"Yes, that - it still jerks back if touched, but not as hard, you get me?"
"But it still does."
"Yes, and here's the - the thing is, I also have my nerves connected, right? Right, and when the coil gets touched and makes my leg jerk, it... Er... See - have you ever - hm! Hmm-hm. Hold on. Do you... Is there something that you know is not good for your body, but when you do it it just feels nice?"
"No."
"Alright, this complicates things."
"Oh! Oh, no, wait - when I cut metal with a saw, I like to keep myself as close to the sparks as possible so they can hit me because they tingle. It's fun. Do you mean like that?"
"Eeeh, close enough! That's what's going on with that coil."
"It tingles?"
"It... Uh... Sure, let's. Call it that."
The change in tone was weird, and he seemed to be somewhat embarrassed about having brought the subject up.
Now, in regards to asking personal questions, Nuparu tended to be as uninterested in other beings' private matter as much as a Kofo-Jaga is in lightstones.
However, this was directly related to the machinations of an impressive, if a little primitive, handmade mechanical joint.
So yes, he would have loved to pry.
The mental manifestation of Turaga Whenua repeatedly smacking him over the head with his drilling staff was currently the only thing keeping him from inquiring on any activities Tarix might have enjoyed dabbling in outside of his work hours, but luckily for the Glatorian that singular imaginary scenario was also an extremely effective deterrent for any Matoran or Toa that had ever at some point of their lives resided in Onu-Koro.
As such, the Toa just shrugged and diverted his attention onto the object the Gaquri was now nervously twisting in his hand: "What's that, by the way?"
The total swerve in subject matter destabilized the Glatorian briefly. He looked down at his fingers, then back at the Toa.
"A pipe?" he replied.
Nuparu squinted at it a little better: "That does not look like a pipe." he decreted.
Tarix lifted an eyebrow, curiously: "It's just an Agori pipe."
"That's not a pipe," the inventor insisted.
"And how should a proper Toa pipe look like, then?"
"Matoran pipe, maybe-" the Toa scoffed, rolling his eyes and making the other chuckle a bit while the mechanical hands went right back to checking on his implant in the midst of his correction: "First of all, it's far too small to be of any proper use; second, that seems to be made of wood, which is the worst material for this kind of thing - even if you could fit that tiny piece in a proper hydraulic system, long time usage will lend it to rot and come apart much faster, which is why we used to trade iron with Le-Koro to avoid the whole village from caving in on--"
"Oh!" Tarix interrupted him all of a sudden, smacking the object on his palm with a hollow sound: "Oh, you meant - no no no, it's not that type of pipe! It's a, uh -- pipa! Nagele! Sghitt!"
"Don't curse at me, please."
"I'm not cursing at you, it's just different names for this! You really don't have a word for-?" then he cut himself off as he seemed to remind himself of something evidently obvious: "Ah - well, I mean, you don't have a mouth, of course you can't smoke..."
"Yes we do."
"You do?"
"Yes? How else would we hold our masks?"
Tarix blinked, briefly wondered if he should have asked, and decided it didn't matter: "But you don't smoke? At all?"
"No? Unless we get catastrophically overheated or are set on fire," Nuparu replied as he attached the disjointed calf into the thigh again. "Both of which in all fairness have happened before. Not very often, but they have happened."
"No, I meant... Ah, hold it, hold it..."
He stuck the unlit pipe back in his mouth, puffing out nothing a few times with a thoughtful expression on his face.
"See - it's a bit like the coil and the sparks again, the matter with smoking," he decided to start explaining: "There's certain plants, if you dry them and burn them well, that make really pleasant smoke."
"How is smoke pleasant?" the Toa muttered.
"The smell can be," the Gaquri shrugged, "And the taste too. Wait-" and he gently knocked the foot of the pipe on the top of the Volitak before the inventor could interrupt him again "-Wait a second, I can't very well clear this up if you keep cutting in. Alright, so the bigger part here, the bowl we call it - you need to press the dried plants in here and light them up, only a little before the whole thing burns up; once they're charred nicely, you inhale through the shank, and then you puff it back out. That's how the smoke gets in your mouth and you can taste it."
"And how does it taste, then?"
"Ah, depends on what you smoke," was the whistful answer. "Same goes for the smell. The Lebori have a certain bark that gets real flexible when wet - they make whole pipes with it, they burn up real well, but it's a bit too sour for me. Before the Shattering there used to be a type of kelp I liked, and Kiina said they had River Eyes up near the Dormus that made some terribly sweet smoke."
"River Eyes?"
"It's a flower! Small, round, blue, and it grows on river banks. Never got to try them, though, and it's better I don't go around asking for some with the lungs I've got. Like I said, smoking's the same as the coil and the sparks: feels good to do, but it's bad for the body."
Nuparu hummed deeply, rummaging inside the knee as he handled the hanging wires carefully.
"I think I figured out the problem," he announced.
At that Tarix perked up: "Rust?"
"One piston has developed a limestone growth that makes it much harder to move properly, and as a result one of the springs is bent out of shape and chafes right against the nerve."
"Ah! Well, damn. You can get limestone in there?"
"If it's humid enough, it can build up over time."
"Hm... Alright, I guess all those years sweating in arenas and whatnot were bound to do the trick eventually."
"Also there was rust."
"Hm. Where?"
"Three screws. I changed them already."
"Wait, really? When?"
"While you were talking about the Core War."
"Huh! You're quick. And quiet."
The Toa shrugged: "I like working."
He pulled the prosthesis apart for a second time, laying the calf down on the floor. He then leaned back to search through a tool box brimming with bits and pieces - bolts, nuts, coils, springs, and all sorts of other things - with what his mask's stillness still managed to convey as a focused furrowed brow, evidently still thinking about what course of action to take now that he had pinpointed the anomaly to fix.
Changing his mind, he stood up and made his way to one of the various piles of junk and assorted more or less useful knicknacks to start looking for something in there instead.
"Speaking of the Core War," he said, implying he wanted to start a conversation but without really adding to that sentence.
Tarix waited a few minutes, puffing out in silence while watching him shift towels or bottles until he found what he was looking for (a clean enough rag and flask containing a murky liquid), before figuring that he was waiting for some kind of permission to continue on the admittedly not particularly pleasant topic: "Yes?"
"You said other older Glatorians also got implants like this from it."
"I implied it, but yes, that's the case."
The Toa hummed as he settled back before him: "And they're all knees, like yours?"
"You want to ask what their own prosthesis are?"
At that, he got no response.
"You can, by the way," Tarix reassured him, "It's been a damn long time by now, it doesn't hurt as much as say, eighty hundred years ago. We've been living like this long enough to joke about the whole thing and whatnot."
Nuparu mumbled something indistict as he soaked up the rag and began scraping the limestone off of the metal with it.
"Don't act all shy now, kid! As I said, it's no trouble." the Glatorian repeated. A sly smile curled the corners of his lip: "You can't get embarrassed like this every time you have to ask about new possible clients, you know," he jokingly reprimanded him, "Otherwise you'll have a hard time getting any."
"I don't want to be paid!" the Toa replied. "I'm just curious, is all! This is... Well, I didn't expect it to be something you'd have."
"Oh, don't worry, not everybody's missing a whole chunk of leg like me," Tarix chuckled. "We Glatorian like to keep ourselves distinct from one another."
"In implant too?"
"Of course! Let me think, now..."
He inhaled a long breath through his pipe, leaning back a little as the kid continued on with his work, and exhaled with a whistle.
"So, let's see - Vastus, he's got a good chunk of his lower spine replaced and, oh, 'bout three quarters of his intestines," he began: "Kiina had her hip crushed and put back together, and that should be... Ah, nope, nope, half of her left hand and the whole ulna too. Telluris I haven't see in a long while now, but unless he's figured out how to place his brain in a tin can I'd bet his head's all that's left. Certavus, bless his memory, I don't think he had a single original organ left by the end, and Gelu's got bionic feet - one foot, one leg, right, a whole leg, so then Strakk was the one who got his eye shot out and his nose crushed. And the jaw, of course. I don't remember if it was him or Malum who cracked his head but I do think it was him, because Malum had the femur that got split in half and it worsened with that problem with his ribcage where the metal was corroding and messing with his blood... Which is why he had to get his marrow replaced in his leg later on. Oh, and Ackar also had to... Ah, wait, which one was it? Right, right. Ackar, poor guy, his back itself is worse than a Plude street but his real problem's his right shoulder blade, which got essentially pulverized - I was there, ghastly sight - so they had to replace the whole thing, and that was bad enough; but then, and this is the fucked thing, the implant actively degraded the rest of the arm, so he had to keep replacing bits and pieces of it until it was just completely gone."
Nuparu lifted his head, eyes wide and flabbergasted: "The fixing made it worse?"
"It did! He kept having trouble moving it."
"How?"
Tarix raised his shoulders: "Beats me," he replied just as baffled. "It's a common thing for Tapyri, honestly. It's hard to tell if the material's bad quality or has trouble with the heat. Perditus too - after he got half his leg replaced, the damn thing somehow managed to melt halfways and left him limping almost worse than he would if he just didn't have it."
"And he can't replace it?"
"It's grafted onto the bone and the muscle has grown over it. They'd have to carve the whole thing out with it, it's just not worth it."
The Toa stared at him positively appalled.
"That is horrid," he spat, punctuating the adjective with a harsh yank of his hand over the faulty piston, thus launching a loosened piece of limestone to skid across the floor.
"You're tellin' me, kid."
"That's - it's inadmissible. It's insane."
"And I haven't told you about the Agori."
"What about the Agori? Were they fighting too? Do they-?"
"No, not fighting, usually - it's something we got in common with your lot: we're basically the same species, but we are much bigger and they're much nimbler. So you had us larger folk tearing one another to bits properly, while they tended to work as scouts if they weren't busy trying to put us back in one piece."
The Gaquri interrupted himself to stretch his arms up, pulling one towards his head.
The movement produced a loud 'crock!' roughly around the height of his shoulder, followed by much softer pops crackling all the way up towards his wrist as it twisted.
Satisfied with the sound (which instead made the inventor a little uneasy considering their conversation), he moved to massage the sides of his spine with his knuckles, rolling his neck: it seemed to make a curious ticking noise in place of a meatier sound, filling in the quick pauses of Nuparu's rag scrubbing the limestone away.
At last he puffed into his unlit pipe: "If you look at the older ones - the Agori, I mean - you'll see they've got less lower half than upper."
"That makes no sense."
"It does if you don't count implants. We've got them a bit everywhere, I told you, but an Agori with an arm prosthesis is a real rarity. They've got them mostly between their soles and the top of their hipbones."
"And why's that?"
"It's 'cause the lucky ones stepped on mines."
The Toa hummed thoughtfully.
He did not raise his eyes from the almost clean piston: "And the unlucky ones?"
"Well, we were trained to aim for either the neck or the head."
Ah.
Those certainly had been unlucky.
For every thing Toa and Glatorians seemed to have in common, a complete opposite came around. To imagine a Toa willingly kill was already hard, though not impossible - the Mahri themselves had been met with the chance to do so once or twice, and it had been tantalizing to say the least; but to envision a group of his brothers and sisters being not only instructed but even trained to kill, and especially to kill Matoran...
Well, he was glad he did not live in that kind of world.
"That's just how life is," Tarix sighed in the end. "Nobody wins. They've got their metal hips, and I've got my leg held together by wires and pistons. And an artificial diaphragm."
That snapped Nuparu out of his unpleasant musings: "A what?"
"That one wasn't the war's fault, though - well, it was, but it came in later. See, I had some sharpnel that got stuck in there but nobody noticed, and then one day I got a shove in the wrong spot during a match and just stopped breathing. So I had to get a mechanical one, and when I have to put myself under any sort of strain I need to hook myself up to an oxygen supplier to make sure it doesn't collapse under the effort - you know, that tube thing you might have seen on me, sort of like yours."
"Your gills?"
"I..." the Gaquri briefly did a double take. "You call those gills?"
"Yes?"
They blinked at each other briefly.
"Yeah," Tarix conceded, "Yeah, I guess those would be gills for you folks, huh. Makes sense."
"What was it that you had to replace?"
"My diaphragm."
"What is that?"
"... The muscle?"
"Which muscle?"
"The... The one that makes the... Lungs? Work? I understood you did have lungs?"
"Lungs work on their own."
"No they do not?"
"Yes they do. They are muscles."
"No they are not??"
Before Nuparu could further argue his point by lifting his chest plate and forcing Tarix to behold the disquieting spectacle offered by his very much clearly autonomously moving lungs, the unmistakeable noise of a small variety of hollow brass objects gracelessly crashing on the floor and being hurriedly chased after by stomping feet attracted their attention elsewhere.
Berix did not notice them as immediately as they noticed him, since he was busy making his entrance on all fours as he scrambled to pick up a bunch of scrap metal that had spilled from his arms.
The other two beings made no sound as they watched him curse to himself after stepping on a rogue bolt. They decided to simply observe him in silence much like an equipe of entomologists observes a particularly frenetic spider panicking for some kind of fault in its web, making no motion to lend the young Agori any help as he crawled along the ground to collect the scattered pieces of his scavenged treasure of junk.
It was particularly fascinating when he accidentally shoved several bolts in his mouth to the point of almost stuffing his cheeks with them, realized his mistake, and spat them in what looked like an exhaust pipe.
He almost cried when they fell out of it and rolled away again.
Then he lifted his eyes briefly to the other two silent beings in the room and failed to recognize them.
Meaning he then proceded to jump almost three whole bio straight in the air once he figured there were people looking at him - landing on a screw.
"FUCK!" he whimpered.
Tarix waved: "Hello to you."
"Do you need help?" Nuparu asked with a notable delay.
The Agori kneeled to the ground and skidded across it: "No no no, I'm good! I'm good, I'm - hey, hi, Tarix, hi, when did-? What are you-? Uh," he said nervously as he tried to catch as many nuts and springs as possible, "What is going on there? Is it, did I interrupt or, should- should I leave? Again? Should I leave again?"
"Nuparu's fixing my leg."
At that Berix snapped his head with a deafening gasp to look directly at him, the most betrayed expression to ever grace his face plaster across it.
"But I wanted to do that!" he cried out in anguish like a desert fox cub experiencing the horrors of its mother's tongue bath for the first time: "I told you I could do it, I- I replaced Gresh's ribs and, and I fixed his lungs when the Skrall got him and he hasn't had problems with them since, I told you I could do it, I'm good at fixing-!"
"I know that, and Gresh told me you did real well," the older Gaquri stopped him, "But - don't take it personally, kid, you're good and all, but when it comes to my leg I only trust you as far as I can throw you and believe me, it ain't far."
"But then why does he get to do it!" Berix wailed, pointing at Nuparu still scrubbing off the limestone.
"He's got a whole body like this, I'd imagine he knows what to do."
"But I know what to do too!"
"I told you, I'd rather have a specialist on it."
The Toa briefly wondered if being a descendant of the Water Tribe had something to do with how outstandingly wet Berix could will his eyes to look, or if it was just a specifically Berix thing.
Mabe it was an Agori defense mechanism. After all, it would have been pretty hard to want to hurt something that appeared to be the personification of the verbs 'to whimper', 'to whine', 'to sob', and last but not least 'to wail'.
Whatever the origin of such an expression of anguish, Tarix was not immune to its effects: "Oh, don't be like that," he finally pleaded with a tired but guilty tone, and pointed off to the cluttered desk not too far away: "There, I've got something for you too, alright? I came in 'cause my Thornax launcher's busted and you're the best with 'em. Could you fix that for me? Pretty please?"
That was enough to light the younger being's face up again.
With the sort of excited thin howling laugh that a mischievous ghost might have, he scuttled away to the mess of a table that was the headquarters for most of his projects: onto it he dumped the rest of his scraps, not caring even in the slightest that it only helped to worsen the general situation he already had going on as he was already completely absorbed by the thought of the inner mechanics of the weapon at hand.
The perfectly good chair right beside him thoroughly ignored in favor of sitting on the ground in a curled position that would have made a shrimp suggest booking an osteopathic appointment, he immediately started tinkering around to figure what the problem was with the drive and precision of a blood hound.
That had been perhaps one of the best things their unplanned collaboration had brought Nuparu - aside from all the knick-knacks and thingamajigs and vehicles and tools he'd been able to make or just plan out with the Agori, of course. Watching Berix work on something was such a fun and fascinating experience: his intensity gave his body language a sort of visceral desperation that contrasted his careful fumbling motions, pulling pieces apart with his scarred skeletal fingers and letting them fall all around him as though discarded carelessly - yet he somehow always knew where to search when he needed them again, and if in the middle of his fixer's frenzy you asked him for a specific nut or a gear he could pick it up without even looking, always on the first try. The thunderous act of creation and its rhythmic symphony played on rough instruments whisked the both of them away from the world at large, but when the Toa managed to pull himself back to reality (whether done or stumped or just in need of a break) it was enjoyable if not just all-together mesmerizing to observe the other hard at work on his own project.
A loud bang was not enough to deter him from the launcher either.
The equally loud voice that followed with an exasperated bark did, however: "BERIX! THE DOOR!"
"RIGHT! RIGHT- RIGHT, HOLD ON!" he squeaked hurriedly, abandoning (with a little more care) the weapon to scuttle away as fast as he could to the entrance of their laboratory.
The figure that emerged from the held open door replied to his rambling apologies by grunting every few steps - not without reason, seeing as they were carrying the carcass of an older model of chariot intertwined with some other mean of transport that had clearly gotten lodged sideways in its back, trying to balance the hellish thing on their shoulders in a way not too dissimilar to how a shepherd might carry a too small Mahi tired from a day of running wildly.
The mess of a car accident was dropped rather gracelessly onto the first largest spot of floor available; freed from their herculean weight, the being sighed and pulled back their arms, making the rather dull metal vertebrae poking from their skin creak in a somewhat unsettling fashion.
Nuparu briefly wondered if they were encrusted in limestone too.
They sort of looked like it.
Hm.
Now he had to wonder if it was a common yet not very well-known problem for organic beings with mechanical implants. Maybe it had to do with an excessive production of sweat?
While he was busy pondering that, Tarix grinned at the sight: "Hello, my beautiful wife who sucks at killing me," he crooned lovingly.
Vastus turned to him with a smirk, thin feathers raised and brows slightly furrowed in a manner that was much more fond than annoyed: "Hello, my beautiful husband who can't aim for shit," he replied; upon noticing the Toa kneeled before him, he cheekily added: "Committing adultery, I see?"
His partner wheezed a loud gurgling laugh: "Twelve thousand years we've been married! Twelve thousand years and now you mistake me for Gelu!"
"For who?"
"What, you haven't heard about--?"
"NOT IN FRONT OF MY PROJECTS!" Berix shrieked.
The Lebori chuckled - it was a strange sound, some kind of hiccuping hiss - and reached out to rub his hand all over the younger Gaquri's head; the kid swiveled away from him with a soft rattling noise as his annoyed trembling arms shook his scales against one another, face contorting into a piqued grimace, and returned to the launcher to tinker the other two away from his conscious perception.
"And where'd you get that?" the Glatorian inquired, pointing at it with his chin as it was common to do in his tribe and getting no answer.
"It's mine," his husband reassured him, "He's fixing it."
"Jammed again?"
"Seems like it."
"Bet you just didn't clean it properly."
"You don't know that."
"But I'm right," Vastus teased him as he approached to steal the pipe from his mouth. "And over here, what's going on?"
"He's fixin' up my leg. Nuparu, by the way, that's his name - he's a, ah, Ko- nope, Onu-Toa, he said - thought it was rust but I had limestone in it."
"We can get limestone?"
"Might be the sweating," Nuparu interrupted them suddenly. He fixed his unmoving mask onto the Lebori: "Can you turn around, please?"
Tarix snorted at the other's brief baffled blink: "Hey now, kid, I get you've put your hands in me and all, but you shouldn't go around just checking my wife out like that!"
"NOT! IN FRONT! OF THE PROJECTS!"
The Toa looked between the three of them with no clue what any of them was going on about: "I thought there might have been crusts on the vertebrae," he explained. "Since I have the solvent at hand already, I could handle that already if it's the case..."
"That's what they all say," the Gaquri snickered.
His confusion was palpable.
Vastus flicked a playful finger at his husband's head, warning him: "Berix is gonna kick you out at this rate... But I'm sure it's just some dust, kid, nothing to worry about."
"It still would not hurt to do a simple visual check."
"He's right," Tarix interjected while trying to snatch his pipe back and failing: "Maybe you've been building up a limestone deposit this whole time without knowing it."
"I don't have limestone."
"You don't know that."
Vastus smirked at him as he turned around for Nuparu to check: "But I'm right."
"You can't keep answering that and get away with it."
"I can if I'm always right."
The inventor gave a high pitched hum: "False alarm. That's just dust," he confirmed.
A triumphant grin briefly met the Gaquri's eyes as he rolled them.
Nuparu reached into a box to pull out a short variety of springs in order to compare their size with that of the one that had been bent by the affected piston, now cleaned and hopefully ready to work smoothly; careful not to dislodge anything else, he carefully pried the ill piece out and hooked up its replacement.
Satisfied with how the procedure had done, he pulled himself back a little and announced: "I have another question."
"Shoot," Tarix answered instantly.
"What do 'wife' and 'husband' mean, exactly?"
A hot second of silence passed in which the Glatorian regretted opening his mouth.
He glanced at Vastus.
His wife glanced back.
The quiet persisted.
"We're married," he answered lamely at last.
The question he dreaded slapped him in the face with outstanding punctuality: "And what does that mean?"
Having had his fun of seeing his husband's best full-body impression of a yam turning exponentially smaller when fried to a crisp piece of coal, the Lebori finally intervened: "You folks have contracts?"
"We do."
"Marriage is a contract between people where you become part of one other's family. And tribe, if you're from different ones like us."
A vacuous gaze met his explanation.
"Alright, what's confusing you?"
"The 'becoming part of' thing."
Vastus shrugged, his feathers puffing out for a moment before returning flat in a way similar to how certain avian Rahi did before starting a very long song: "It means we become relatives," he tried again. "Here, look - Tarix is a Gaquri and I'm a Lebori, so my family and hers come from different tribes. By marrying me she became a sort of honorary member of the Jungle tribe, and everybody treats her almost as though she was my brother, or my cousin; in the same manner, I became an honorary member of the Water tribe and I'm treated like her sister or cousin."
"So... It's sort of like assembling a team?" Nuparu tilted his head, puzzled: "There's no need for a contract for that. All Toa consider each other siblings already."
The other clicked his tongue as though he'd bitten it by accident: "I shouldn't have used that metaphor," he muttered.
"Why not?"
"First of all marrying your actual blood-siblings is frowned upon."
"Why? What's a blood-sibling?"
"I'll tell you when you're older. Secondly, I can assure you marriage is nothing like siblinghood."
At that, the Toa frowned: "It sounds the same to me."
"Your knee and Tarix's look the same to me, too," Vastus argued: "They're both made of metal, so they're the same thing."
"They really aren't." then he blinked, bright eyes flashing briefly, looked to the ceiling to recollect his thought, gave a loud hum, and met his gaze again: "I see your point."
The Glatorian smiled: "Good kid."
"Back to the point - how do 'wife' and 'husband' fit with all that?"
"That's just how you call someone who's married."
"So they're synonyms?"
"Yes, pretty much."
The answer seemed to satisfy the inventor greatly.
"I'm learning so much about your species today," he commented in a giddy tone. He returned to the discarded robot calf on the floor, dusting off its mechanical parts to make sure not even small amounts of debris would interefere with its functions; just as he plucked it back into the bulk of the implant, he looked again at the two Glatorian and told them with complete and total earnestness: "You know, if you were significantly smaller, quadrupedal, perhaps vaguely insectoid and incapable of speech, Turaga Whenua would have the best day of his life writing down and trying to decypher your absolutely incomprehensible habits."
That was the highest compliment an Onu-Matoran from the island of Mata Nui could bestow upon someone.
It was not categorizable as such by perhaps any other being in the entire universe, considering the source of such an idiom had been cut off from all other known civilizations and it was generally not considered particularly flattering to be told that you would make for a great petri dish for one's paternal figure to microscope if you were any less sentient, but luckily his tone did manage to properly convey the positive nature of his otherwise insane sentence.
So instead of knocking his head off with roundhouse kick, Tarix and Vastus smiled awkwardly in an attempt at not laughing in his face and just replied: "Thanks."
His Volitak did not have a mouth, but Nuparu's grin was blinding.
Berix chose that moment to shriek triumphantly.
"Fixed!" he declared, Thornax launcher hoisted into the air like it was the second making of the Element Lords.
The older Gaquri turned to him with eyes wide: "What, already?"
"It was encrusted with Thornax juice!"
Not even the time to feel bashful about such a silly and easy to fix thing hindering his battling performance so much that his wife was already leaning down into his line of sight with a smirk so wide that he could have just bitten his whole head off with it.
"What did I say?" he teased.
Tarix sighed, a weary smile on his face: "You cannot keep getting away with this."
"Yes I can," Vastus gloated, "If I'm always right."
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the-voldsoy · 5 months ago
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something about cycles and circles and cages
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thisischeri · 10 months ago
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Mac Pro, Apple, 2013
Photos by Adam Leier @capyrancher taken on an iPhone 13 Pro, portrait mode, 2024
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