#before you can do anything your boss orders you to have a flamethrower fight

[evilkitten3]

azula when she's the favorite and is "safe":

azula when she realizes zuko is no longer there to be the unfavorite:

was fucking around on google images and i ended up stumbling on a reddit post from three yrs ago with a picture of iroh grabbing azula during a fight scene...

this is the only time i can think of when azula seems completely terrified.

he grabs her and she's scared shitless

but he just redirects her lightning and she's just bewildered.

i wonder what she was thinking there

[marisandini-chu-blog]

Bruce Wayne is a Simp for Bad Bitch

OmG I can’t believe I’m writing the obvious but the idea is in my head and I need a place to word vomit. 

Okay, so it occurred to me that Bruce has a more serious and intense relationship canonically with three women, as far as I know; Andrea Beaumont, Talia Al’ghul, and Selina Kyle. All of whom are the epitome of Bad Bitch with the capital B. (Yes, I’m ignoring Rachel Dawes from Nolanverse. The only thing I like about it is the Iconic Joker. No batman movie is good enough without the Batfam.) 

Why do I raise this point, you might ask? Well, that’s because I want to rant that Bruce, my boy, my man, my childhood comfort character is actually a SIMP?!?!

Like... I’m just... urgh.... okay... I am very vocal for a healthy relationship with commitment and based on mutual love and respect. So the fact that Bruce has only bad, iffy, or casual relationships really want to tear my hair out. And why my heart don’t want to ship with any of them, even though BatCat is one of my favorite pairing! 

I am a WonderBat shipper because I love watching them in JLAU as a kid and even though I’m not slash shipper unless it’s canon, SuperBat made much more sense to me. Heck even a threesome with the Trinity would have been healthier relationship rather than whatever Bruce had with the three of them and here’s why: 

You might not have heard of Andrea, but she’s canon from the Timmverse movie called Batman and the Mask of Phantasm which is A REALLY GREAT MOVIE. Totally recommend. One of the best Batman movie at all times (Yes, I say Batman movies not Batman Animated movies). Has great plot twist and good pacing. so Spoiler Alert! Andrea was Bruce’s fiancé, making her possibly Bruce’s first love, before his journey and possibly could have stop him from becoming Batman (I would say he’s a simp in this case, but he would have had a much more happier, healthy household so it’s not bad thing) if she hadn’t disappear for being a Mob Boss’ Daughter!!! 

I repeat, a mob boss’ daughter. 

And she came back only to be a mask avenging assassin that went toe-to-toe with Batman.

And she could have choose to stay with Bruce but she didn’t because she choose vengeance over him. Like.... Bats, you should stop with the “I am Vengeance” routine you’ve got going on because she does it better than you ngl. 

So she left and I cried at the end of that movie because trauma wasn’t enough, you put heartbreak after heartbreak to my boy. Thanks DC. 

Then there’s Fucking Talia Al’ghul which is a no brainer why she’s not Bad but BAD. Like, Talia groom Jason, supervise Damian’s harsh, brutal, and abusive training, control Damian through the implant spine to kill Dick, orders Damian execution before regretting it, DRUG BRUCE when CONCEIVING DAMIAN!!! And that’s only the top of my head. 

And if you want to blame it on Morrison’s writing, THAT’S FINE. We’ve bitched about Tom King’s writing enough to know it’s valid. 

But, BUT, bUt... it needs to be address that even before Morrison, Talia CHOOSE to stay in the League of Assassin. People can tell me that she’s a complex character that’s loyal to her father but love Bruce and that her upbringing makes her complicated or whatever. Nuh-uh. You don’t get to make Talia helpless when it suited you. Talia is a fucking Bad Bitch (TM). She’s been taught to do whatever the fuck she wants according to her belief and ideal. At some point, Talia knew she wanted to be in position of power in the League rather than staying with Bruce. 

But it’s canon that Talia, if I remember correctly, doesn’t like Gotham or Bruce’s mission. She thinks being a hero is beneath them or whatever. And doesn’t understand why Gotham is special to Bruce. So yeah, you might not agree how Morrisons write her. But do not fucking tell me she’s not a character who will not be willing to do what she thinks it’s necessary to get what she wants, including training her son as an assassin. I mean, she likes being the Demon’s Daughter in the league. She may not agree with her father but Talia wants to give Damien what she wants. Power.  

Talia loves Bruce. That’s a fact. He’s probably the only person that makes her feel like she’s a person instead of the Demon’s Daughter. Bruce has a knack for that. To make people want to be better, even just a little. Talia could have chosen him, if she wanted to. The fact that she helps him so much when fighting against her father numerous times is proof enough. 

I'm highly suspecting the reason she stays is because she knows Bruce would always forgive her (SIMP ALERT) unlike her father who would straight up stab her if she ever betrays him.

I’m not saying there’s no love for her son, I’m just saying if she even looks at the batfam funny than I will raise my flamethrower on that bitch’s face. Because you can’t rely on Bruce on that. That man would give bullshit excuse for her or want to handle her himself because your “history” with her makes you entitled.  

Aaaah, don’t you just love it when there’s a great villain you can hate on so much?

I'm not saying she can't be a good person. Pre-morisson made Talia more of an anti-hero. But I do like Talia "I'mma cut a bitch" al'ghul. It's just... I like ruthless Bad Bitch like her. Though preferably she could have balance it with more of her maternal side through Damian.

Okay, I’m getting off tangent. Now comes to my favorite girl. Catwoman. Selina Kyle. The famous ship of all Bruce’s relationship sans SuperBat. 

I... am conflicted the most about this. 

See, Selina is one of the few people who understands Bruce. Who was there when he needed a shoulder to rely on. Someone who doesn’t take Bruce’s shit, and one of the constant person in Bruce’s life. 

But not... constant enough. Which is a theme of her, even in her fursona... I, I mean PERSONA, PERSONA!!! 

Anyway, I love seeing these two broken people. One handles it with violence and vigilantism, the other through thieving with a Robinhood-esque thing going on. So of course they get each other. It always helps that they try to make each other better. Selina taught Bruce to be okay of being selfish of wanting to be happy, and Bruce believed there’s good in her that makes her feel she’s not a hopeless case, y’know? It’s even canon that in one universe, they’re married and have daughter, Helena Wayne. So... yeah? Happy end! (Until they died but that’s non issue here at the moment.) 

Then Tom King (Urgh, him again) wrote Bat proposing to Cat, and by the time they’re about to be married. Selina left him at the altar. 

So yeah. 

But then they get metaphysically? Figuratively? married after the Flashpoint which they turn Thomas Wayne into a villain (At least make him from alternate universe instead of timeline!!!) and kill Alfred (WhYYYYYY?! Bruce suffered enough why do you go kill both his fathers dammit!!! Let the goddamn butler rest in peace). And basically Selina and Bruce promise each other forever. Which is sweet. BatCat Forever, am I right??? 

Yeah, here’s the problem. (And I’m just nitpicking here, okay). For all Tom King’s character assassination of Bruce, he did Selina right in one thing. Which is the fact she doesn’t like being tied down by anything.

If Talia puts importance in power. Selina puts importance in freedom and her self-independence. 

I remember as a kid watching BTAS, that Selina didn’t want a relationship with batman if it meant changing who she is. So when Selina left the altar, I wasn’t surprise at the news. Then she actually agreed to marry him, only this time, she didn’t need a judge or a paper to make the marriage legit, y’know. And I thought, yeah that’s so her. 

But the thing is Bruce. Accepts. Her. Every. Single. Time. 

Without a single thought. She asked, “Do you still want to get married?” and he asked “When?” 

Even though it’s not the first that Cat leaves him hanging. 

Tell me he’s not a simp for that. 

It’s great that he accepts her for everything she is. But I’m conflicted because Selina stays static. She stays with the cat theme in the fact she doesn’t want to held back by anything. She takes what she wants. She loves who she loves. And no one was gonna change her. But then where’s the character growth? 

Is it regressive of me to think Selina should be ‘tied down’ or express commitment when she never has been tied down before even though she loves Bruce? 

Is it not-feminist of me to think Selina has to change herself for a man? 

I just don’t like the fact Bruce and Selina enables their masked persona. Their relationship is strongly base on their cat-and-mouse chase. They nicknamed each other “Bat” and “Cat” for God’s sake. Even though yes, it’s canon that “Batman” and “Catwoman” is their real selves and their civilian life is their masks. Heck, she didn’t go for the altar because she believed (though manipulated) that making Bruce happy would make Batman insufficient, or losing him entirely (Thank Tom King for that). 

That would be true, and stay true if not for one thing. Which is some thing what Bruce has that Selina doesn’t: 

The Batfam.

Bruce’s real identity isn’t just the Batman anymore. He has to be a single father with growing children he never plan to adopt but did anyway because they needed each other. He can’t use his batman persona to be a father at his house, but he will when training them to be his partner. His family became the strength to Bruce’s fight for Justice. 

Bruce is the Batman, but he’s not everything who he is. Selina is supposed to be part of the batfamily yet sadly, I haven’t read or watch anything that has her interact with them in a positive way or actually bond with them. Heck, when Alfred inform the proposal to the batfam they were shocked and thought it was a bad idea even (And they’ve known her for almost half their life by the way.) 

The fact that Tom King implied Bruce was never happy or wasn’t happy enough without marrying Cat when his Batfam should be the source of his pride and joy?! Apparently family means nothing to Batman. Woah DC, what a great message you’re sending here. 

I guess that’s why, I was a bit iffy when Selina “marriage” with Bruce isn’t official. Because she commits to the man but she doesn’t say she’ll commit to the family (though I suppose it could be imply or I just forget stuff). The batkids are grown up enough that they don’t really need a maternal figure, but that doesn’t mean they don’t need more emotionally available people in the family. And that I haven’t seen much of her taking effort to bond with the people that’s the most important to Bruce. 

It just makes her want to commit to Batman instead of Bruce Wayne, in my eyes I guess. 

So yeah, that’s why Wonderbat and Superbat makes more sense to me. Because they’ll make an effort to be THERE for the family and they’ll be just generally be a healthier relationships because, again, emotionally available so they might talk when they have a problem instead of running off the altar when you think a Happy Batman is Bad Batman. But no, DC have to make Bruce is a simp and his life edgy. 

Anyway, I might be wrong in some things because, you know. Canon becomes a blur to me after a while. 

[popculturebuffet]

Darkwing Duck: Just Us Justice Ducks

This is it. 7 reviews, 10 episodes, 2 teams,  7 brave heroes, 13 villians but only 5 of which are relevant here. All leading to this. One big final review of one of the most loved, most important and most awesome Darkwing Duck episodes, the ONLY two parter outside of the pilot in the show’s long history. If your just joining us, as hinted at in the opening sentence i’ve been doing reviews of every episode of darkwing duck featuring the first apperances of the Justice Ducks and Fearsome Five. The only exception was Megavolt, but I ended up doing Negaduck instead, so I could cover both Megs and the original version of Negsy in one fell swoop (A great idea and comission from longtime supporter of the blog WeirdKev27). All so I could give this the build up  it deserved and get the background I didn’t have years ago when I wanted to watch this, wanted to see all of the first apperances first.. then just didn’t get around to it, not even finding out the episode order is an utter nightmare.  While i’ve given out about this before, allow me to do so again: Due to prioritzing what got done first over proper order, ALL of the justice ducks first appearances eps were aired after this and while Morgana at least got an episode before this, it was her second appearance. Same with LIquidator and Quackerjack though like Morgana, Quackerjack still got an episode or two before this one. So yeah as a result to most kids it was a bunch of heroes just introduced, up against two new villians and 3 old faviorites. You kinda see the problem. It’s why I watched it in chronlogical order: to have this be a gathering of established heroes against darking’s worst foes... and the debut of the worst of THE worst, the true Negaduck at long last. So with the proper build this deserves and not much else to say, let’s look at this two parter and see if all my effort was worth it and if the hype is real. Let’s, get, dangerous under the cut

We open in St. Canard in Darkwing Duck’s secret HQ over the bridge, where he’s getting ready to go out with Morgana and does... things to his hair. 

Excellently terrible hair do.. seriously I love a good pompadour as much as the next person, probably unheathily more than the next person, but this isa bit much and adding a curl to it is just.. 

I mean Superman’s hair looked better at this point, and for those wondering “Wait superman usually has a pretty good look”.. welll. 

Yeah.. post-ressurection.. he had a mullet. Look there are only 4 people in the world who can pull of a mullet: Brock Sampson, Patrick Swayze (God Rest his soul), Hank Venture and Daniel Cooksy as a teenager. And he ALSO put a curl in it and it still looked okay because that’s one of this things along with being selfless, and idiots calling him bland for you know, being a kind hearted symbol of humanity at it’s best. But man the mullet was just not for you bud. 

Morgana naturally tries to change it while Gosalyn watches and...

Yeah as you can probably guess a LOT has happened.. and all off screen. Morgana is not only fully on the side of good apparently, but she and Darkwing have gone from simply flirting with one another to dating AND Gosalyn has met her and they fought the astro mummies together.. no wait that was the Caballleros yesterday.. but still eveyrthing else is PRETTY important stuff and even with the messed up episode order the kind of thing you’d ASSUME an episode would be made about. I mean this is her meeting darkwing’s kid for fuck’s sake. That’s a big step in any relationship let alone one just starting out. And trust me, I didn’t miss anything: every other morgana ep seems to have them already in a steady relaionship. I DO think it’s stuff like this why some fans aren’t crazy about this relationship. Me I think he’s honestly too good for her. 

But before they can go out for whatever vauge date they were going to have the power goes out and DW notices it’s megavolt and prepares to go after him only for Morgana to question him about their date. 

Morgana.. sweetie.. the entire city is blacked out. Nowhere will be open.  But Gosalyn offers an alternative, Morgana go along with him and while both are reluctant they go with it. So Darkwing confronts Megavolt... and soon finds a bunch of chattering teeth. Yup, it’s Quackerjack as the two have teamed up, and together easily defeat Darkwing, putting him in an electric chair. The two also really get along which makes sense: Both have similar personalities, being kinda nuts indivdiuals with a singular obession , which compliment each other as toys often need electric power after all. THey strap darkwing into an electric chair, that got dark fast and he begs morgana to save him.. only for her to accidently turn him into jello. I mean.. they say pudding but.. their diffrent things. Just because world famous sexual predator Bill Cosby promoted BOTH for the jell-o brand doesn’t mean Jello is magically pudding. If he could magically make one thing 

Point is Darkwing is jello, the villians mock him then set up some kind of device and head off.. while also mentioning a mysterious boss. I wonder who it could be. 

Nah.. too obvious. Darkwing is humilated and of course blames. morgana.. for saving his life.. as while the jello humilated him he’s also you know not dead. 

Anyways Darkwing storms off while Morgana worries he likes her. Morg.. the guy got pissy because you saved his life the wrong way with some bad aim. And before that clearly just wanted you there as a trophy to impress you instead of because he valued you in any way but your looks, because let’s face it he’s shown no intrest so far in any way that isn’t superficial and neither have you in him. You both need to actually try to deepen this or end it.  Anyways enough me ranting at 90′s cartoon characters, it’s time for our next Justice Duck to enter the episode as Stegmutt is selling hot dogs now, but no one stops because they just.. run in terror. Poor guy, good thing he’s too oblivoius to notice. Maybe Dr. Fossil had a point.  Back to the plot and it turns out the next phase in the Fearsome Five’s plan is to take out the police... okay so wait are they the bad guys or not? Questions for later. Point is we get a nice mismatch as Bushroot’s timidity contrasts perfectly with Liquidator’s showman ship and he drowns them out. Darkwing prepares to attack, but gets interrupted by Stegmutt, refuses his help.. and we get the best and most iconic gag of the episodes: Darkwing makes a joke about playing pretend.. and senseing Stegmutt is a dummy have him pretend to “put out the darkwing”.. which equates to pulling a Droopy while saying “put out the darkwing”. So the two villians finsih their job and high five and this is one of the most charming parts of this 2 parter: the camradere between the five minus negaduck. The other four just.. easily bond and enjoy each ohters company, only fighting ONCE, and then being on the same page after that. 

It’s also what makes them so deadly: the go too for ANY superhero team in any medium is to simply get the vilians to fight each other as most vilian teams are built on REALLY shaky ground, a mixture of egos and ambitions that unlike with most superhero teams, can’t really be overcome with the greater good.. because their only in it for what they want. The thing that keeps any of these groups together longterm.. is camradere. I’ts why the Flash’s Rogue’s gallery is easily one of the most dangerous; while there are outliers like the reverse flash, most of them are part of the rouges, and ascribe to their rules and morals.. and thus the camradre and support that comes with it. One guy with a cold gun or a super flamethrower or a weather wand or mirror powers.. is pretty damn tough. All four and more together, willing to bail one another out, having their own tailor and weapons hookups. The four remind me of that: a bunch of guys who have the common goal of beating darkwing but likely just.. hang out when not trying to do crimes. Well except negaduck, hence the four thing. By not being able to just easily turn them on one another, it means you HAVE to take them all at once. Even if you got rid of negaduck as both the comics and the 2017 reboot have shown.. you still have 4 immensley powerful, quackerjack included, supervillians who easily can work together instead of a bunch of angry assholes who tend to work better one at a time and just with a united goal. Point is Darkwing Duck is Darkwing Fucked.  Darkwing once again refuses help and yells at Stegmutt, because he’s been evne douchier than usual, and then makes the mistake of yelling at Neptunia, who promptly has her octopus friend throw him into the distance because .. well he deserves it. So while Darkwing patches up that wound to his pride and his spleen, we finally meet our vilians new boss: NEGADUCK. And... they do not explain why a guy who looks exactly like drake is here, if he has any relation to the other negaduck he was inspired by, or why any of them would trust him. This would bother me more.. if A) it wasn’t too much of a stretch for darkwing to have foes we hadn’t seen given the whole casefiles thing and B).. well okay this isn’t really a logical opinon but since when have that stopped me. 

There’s a damn good reason that Negsy has one of the biggest episode counts of Darkwings villians. The guy is just.. the perfect foil to Darkwing, the Joker to his batman, the reverse flash to his flash, the green goblin to his spider-man, the sabertooth to his wolverine. He’s Drake’s equal and opposite number. While Drake can’t take two steps as Darkwing without wanting some attention, Negsy is happy to avoid having any until the moment strikes. While Drake wants attention as much as he wants to do the right thing, Negsy just simply loves doing what he’s doing. To quote the Spies are Forever song “Somebody’s Gotta Do it” “Can’t you see.. how much I enjoy this, i’d never avoid this, cause buddy i’m a diffrent breed. This is my calling, and though it’s appaling, I love making people bleed.” 

He just LOVES being evil. He’s as comically devoted to being a bad guy as Darkwing is to being a good one. He loves the idea of being able to shoot a bunny, he revels in his villiany and he loves every second. But as I said unlike darkwing he dosen’t let his flaws get in the way of his villiany as much. He still does on occasion, he’s still a version of Darkwing after all, but he has his eyes far more on the prize and is far less prone to distraction. He dosen’t care about toy deals or infamy.. he just wants to watch the world burn and laugh manically over the flames. While his obessions CAN be used against him.. as this episode shows it only lasts for a bout a second and he’s usually ready for it. He’s a Drake with no morals, no connections and few drawbacks. And he’s also every bit as clever, with him winning for most of the two parter. And not because the plot needs him too.. he’s simply THAT good at planning, with his plan here being geninely clever. I’m REALLLY hoping for Frank to lead the reboot because combining ALL of this with his reboot backstory will be divine if he gets to. Negaduck was very much worth the hype. 

So his next plan, itself clever.. is to dress up as Darkwing and inflitrate SHUSH, taking out the next possibly thing that could stop them. And he does so easily, even while Darkwing is there and to show off just how friggin awesome he is predicts what Drake will say. The only thing that trips him up is drake hilarious pointing out a cute bunny, because he and the other Negsy apparently share the same burning hatred, causing him to get out his shotgun. And can I just say how wonderful it is he can use a shotgun?  That’d never pass nowadays, which isn’t the worst thing but i do question why VILLIANS can’t be shown being reckless with fire arms. Their the bad guys, kids aren’t going to see it as a good thing. And they still equate laser guns with guns. They aren’t going to trivilaize gun violence because of Darkwing Duck or Looney Tunes. 

Even being found out Negaduck still acomplishes his goal and floods thing. So now both the cops and shush are down, and things aren’t looking great. Darkwing’s still determined he can do this himself and beat them.. but it’s transparent that not only he CAN’T and won’t admit he’s outnumbered but freely admits he just wants the biggest win of his career by taking them all out 4 to 1. Probablem is.. he’s not spider-man and this isn’t the sinister six. As I said he’s not fighting a villian group whose egos clash so badly , at least whent hey first formed, they have to take turns or in later iterations have some member blackmailed in> Their working in concert. He needs help but as we’ve seen multiple times now Darkwing just can’t accept it. He has to be in the limelight and while he does have to relearn the lesson .. it works better here as personality flaws aren’t the kind of thing that fixes itself overnight. Sometimes never. It feels less like it does sometimes in cartoons, where the character just.. never fucking learns, and more like Darkwing has learned it.. he’s just so very human and thus can’t resist sliding black. Less peter griffin more bojack horseman is what i’m saying. I mean there are still bits of just poor writing, but for the most part his ego is like most of his enimies: he just can’t get it to stay beat. 

So it won’t suprise you that when the national guard and gizmoduck are called he’s not happy. You may recall when I reviewed “Tiff of the Titans” I REALLY hated this verison of Gizmoduck. He was concited as Darkwing but treated like he wasn’t, treating the daring duck of mystery like a criminal for stupid reasons and was generally pretty useless and obnoxious. The fact that hamilton camps gizmoduck voice sounds not like a 20-30 something like Fenton is but like Grandpa Simpson mixed with a dash of dudley doo right dosen’t help. 

It’s not lost on me that Dan Castellaneta’s character is NOT the one that sounds like Abe Simpson either. But while that problem is still around... the rest of them.. aren’t. Gizmoduck’s character development actually stuck from last time, so rather than be a dick to darkwing he’s warm, friendly and happy to accept his help when Darkwing shows up, thinking his old “Buddy” is just volunteering to help instead of screaming at him for doing his job. Not only that but while he still has elements of a standard superman type “Cape” hero parody... their more toned down and actually funny with him giving giant speeches, and that being useda gainst him and being over the top.. but still being the noble, big hearted hero you’d expect from the roll, just wanting to do good not for the Glory he gets anyway, but because people need him. In short.. he’s 100% better thsi go round. Well okay 80.. he still sounds like this. 

Gos also brings Morgana along, because apparently she forgot the entire episode where her father was so obssed with being noticed he tried to upstage his 10-12 year old daughter... and you know the hundred other times Drake put his ego over his job. 

So he naturally wants to shoo her while Gizmo. .warmly welcomes the help because he recognizes that people are counting on them not counting on him.  Just then the villians make their move and activate the electro slave device from earlier which.. does nothing like that’d sound like and just creates a giant electrical wall, cutting off ST. Canard and bringing the plan full circle: The villains have now cut off the town and taken out almost anything that could oppose them. And despite you know everything Darking only gets more pissy when Stegmutt and Neptunia show up., Stegmutt because he still wants to return Darkwing’s change as Darkwing bought a hot dog from him and Stegmutt’s also a really sweet guy and Neptuina because well... .the ocean’s her thing and a bunch of bad guys just put a giant line through it she’s now on the other side of. Gizmo suggests the obvious: It’s a day unlike any other when a threat no one duck, or fish or dino duck, can face alone. It’s time to assemble! And Gos is more than excited about the idea, suggesting the name Justice Ducks which.. is honestly fairly weak in my opinon. Not BAD but very clearly just “Justice League” with Ducks in it. Given how good the series is at names, you think they’d of taken more than five minutes on this one. Maybe it was disney mandate I dunno.  But the concept itself.. is brilliant and I wish it came back in other epiosdes; Taking a bunch of other heroic characters in a setting and making them into a team is always a great idea, it’s why the tmnt unvierses have been using the mutanimals more and more lately, and they do ballance each other out nicely. You have a nice contrast of powers: while multiple have super strength, stegmutt is your bruiser, Gizmo is the tech guy, darkwing’s the strategy, morgana handles magic and Neptuina can swim in anything and is super strong and agile outside and inside water, so as long as she can keep hydrated, she’s useful> Which by the way has ALWAYS been the case for aquaman.. except the superfriends version. 

He really does suck and ruined it for the rest of them till Jason Mamoa and his mighty abs, coupled with Geoff Johns run on the charcter that served as the foundation for that movie, finally rescued the character from a fucking decades old cartoon’s smear campagin.  They have the makings of a great team.. it’s just Darkwing dosen’t want a team and screams at everyone to get out and that he dosen’t need them.. I mean he does try to be softer on Morgana but.. he’s still a dick and she really should dump him. Seriously, their attraction is superficial, at this point at least we’ll see in Feburary if it gets any bettter, he dosen’t respect her as a person, and now he’s having to restrain himself at yelling at her.. for HELPING HIM. When he clearly needs it. Holy shit... I was not prepared for that amount of douche. And this would sink the two parter.. were this not clever setup for one hell of a downfall and not a key part of his character. Like has been said: Ego is a massive part of him, and as Tad Stones has put it his real arch enemy. It’s been the basis for several episodes and as we saw in the pilot was his motivation for getting into crimefighting in the first place. He means well and clearly has a heart.. but this is just as much about thwarting evil as it is the attention. And here it’s used perfectly as in the reverse of the gizmoduck episode, where he wanted attention but for fully understandable reasons and judged Gizmo more on stealing his thunder, which while petty i’ll admit is a bit fair given Gizmo did NOTHING in St. Canard but got the key of the city while Darwing had saved it multiple times at this point. 

Here he’s being petty and selfish.. and he has no good reason. It’s just his own ego wanting the credit for everything when it’s not what he or the city needs. Honestly this feels like an ahead of it’s time parody of how Batman would be written when written poorly sometimes in the years after this episode:  a massive dick who thinks he knows better than everybody else and everything else should be entrusted to him because he’s the goddamn batman, the kind who throws people out as potential parts of his family for petty shit and acts like a controlling ass and okay maybe this is spiralling a bit. But the refusal to see any other way is right? Yeah that defintelyf its darkwing like a glove and eveyrone leaves either bummed or pissed at him. And the most pissed? Launchpad who while agreeing to it, his face and tone clearly mean he’s disapointed in his buddy for acting like this when now is REALLY not the time. 

And I wish.. we got more on this because Launchpad disappears till the ending scene after this. No really. Despite being Darkwing’s best friend and sidekick and despite warranting a spot on the justice ducks and despite having every reason to pitch in. he just vanishes. I mean Ducktales may of gone overboard in not having him around since Let’s Get Dangerous, but at least that’s a valid reason: he has another family, he’s really busy and Scrooge has another talented pilot to do the job for him. Granted he’s clearly still doing it offscreen at times but he was both a major part of an hourlong and will be part of any possible spinoff. And hell even back in season 1 when the character ballance was at it’s worst... Donald and Beakly at least HAD reasons for not being in a whole lot of episodes: Donald HATED his uncle, HATED adventure, and HATED the fact his kids were following in their mothers footsteps as he only saw death at the end of it. While they SHOULD have found ways to include him more and his exclusion was pretty bad... he at least had a reason. Here launchpad just has to go now his home planet needs him. And he’s not the only one Gosalyn gets more, she’s worried about darkwing, we’ll get to why in a second and wants to go but Gizmoduck refuses.. and then ALSO vanishes. Which makes even less sense as when has Gosalyn EVER listned to an authority figure? Especially when her dad might be dead? It’s just grossly out of character for her to agree to sit things out and not just tag along with steggmutt anyway once gizmo can’t stop her. I do get this is about the justice ducks but there’s no reason to neglect the other main characters. At least have Negsy capture them too or something. Cripes. 

So yeah the “thinking he’s dead part”. Darkwing sets out to find the five’s lair and misses the big honking flag Negaduck set up, but finds a crumb, puts two and two together and finds them.. as Negaduck planned. Down to the crumb thing as, in my faviorite line of the episode, he planned on Darkwing missing the flag and focusing on the flimisiit clue instead. Naturally they kick his ass, EASILY, and throw him out a window to his death and in classic bond villian fashion don’t check for proof of death. Krakoa would be ashamed. So part one ends with darkwing duck getting thrown to his possible death...

Only for part 2 to pick up with him landing in a trash truck before exiting. And this.. is what makes the ego parts tolerable.. Darkwing.. earnestly reflects, depressed he let his own ego get in the way of things and shoo off his only hope, and thus let the villians take over the city, with Bushroot’s plants harassing people, quackerjacks teeth running the police, and Megavolt having taken the power company and using it to shake down locals and Liquidator flooding part of the city for a plan we’ll get to in a moment. He’s at his lowest point and tht’s while it work: his hubris DOSEN’T get unpunished, he’s fully sorry for it and while he dosen’t out and out apologize to them, he’s not only genuinely contrite but does work well with them and evenly when he finally does get back to them.. but we’ve got a bit to go before that.  So with Darkwing missing Gizmo takes over as big good and not bein ga prick eagerly takes the others help Neptuina nopes out of helping, which fits her personality, so with only three left because he dosen’t consider children useful  which shame on you. I mean i’ts responsible from a real world standpoint but not from a cartoon show standpoint. But anyways they split up gang: Gizmo will go take the power plant back, Morgana will try and use her spells to find the lair and Stegmutt will find darkwing. I do like despite how they neglect Gosalyn that her friendship with Stegmutt was remembered and used as a plot point here. 

So we then get to a rather repttitive part of the two parter. It’s not lacking in good gags or character moments but it’s basically the same scene repeated 4 times just with a diffrent scenario and gag for each of the justice ducks and the fearsome five member they encounter. They do their respective schicks the hero is defeated.. this is 5 or so minutes of a 20+ minute episode. Not TERRIBLE stuff, iv’e seen worse repttition, but not terribly intresting compared to the rest of the four parter.  So, Neptuina encounters Liquidator, whose scheme is selling rafts to people to not drown in exhange for a millioin dollars.. or whatever they have he’s not picky, and they fight but Liqui ultimately wins, Gizmoduck, in the best of the four sequences, swoops in to stop Megavolt and not only lands on his foot.. but spends so long speechifiing Mega gets him from behind, phrasing. Stegmutt hilariously tries disgusing himself with Groucho glasses and is bested by Quackerjack, and Morgana finds the lair but gets taken out by bushroot, though her pet spider archie escapes to go warn the others. 

So after all that Archie makes it back to darkwing’s hq.. only for launchpad to squish him. “ew a bug!”.. just a great quick laugh. Thankfuly he’s more resilent than the average spider and is fine once Gosalyn scrapes him off and they now know the five are in trouble. Also I was wrong Launchpad does return.. for this one scene. And neither get into action once Darkwing returns and after an overly long bit of him deflecting blame to the point I was screaming. 

That being said it is nice when once Darkwing is aware of the situation he gloats a little.. but still goes to save them without any hint of caring about doing it all himself. He learned his lesson.  So at the Lair of the five, Negsy shows what a sadsitc bastard he is, another great side of him.. from a writing standpoint at least. It shows that like darkwing despite a comedic exterior.. he’s VERY dangerous. And he’s set up speciic tourtures for each of the five he has: He’s hooked up Gizmoducks armor to a device that lets him control it’s power flow, so right now it’s entirely drained.. but he can overload it and electrocute him to death when he flips THE SWITCH. Neptuina is stuck under a heat lamp and will fry when he hits THE SWITCH. Stegmutt is stuck in a weightless enviorment that will also loose air when he hits THE SWITCH and morgana is in a chair that will crush her tod eath when he hits.. THE SWITCH... he really loves THE SWITCH and props to him. A lesser villian would’ve had all the traps have a diffrent trigger which while making it harder on any rescuers is just a time waster asking for the heroes he hasn’t gotten to yet to break free. And while it is based in his sadism he still fully intends to watch the deaths personally. Seriously he’s got all his bases covered.. and would’ve won.. if it wasn’t for the rest of the five.  The rest of the five are fighting over territoiry: Buddies they may be but they all want the pie. Negaduck, in his most badass scene shuts them up by pulling out his signture chainsaw for hte first time and scaring the crap out of htem, then using it to carve up the model of the city: They each get a quarter.. and he gets all the loot. Which they dont’ like but agree to to not die today. Though really... what’s the value of that? They have a full city held hostage, control over a quarter each, and no real way to SPEND the loot without letting someone else, say scrooge mcduck, in to stop them. Just give him the money and let him sit on it Smaug style. You get a quarter of a new york sized city to yourself to live out your dreams. I’d love that... maybe nto become a supervillian for that but still, point is you have carte blanche jsut take the W.  Darkwing meanwhile uses Nega’s scheme against him and plans to be delivering skulls, after flowers only piss nega off, and then knocks the guy out.. though his attempt at playing Nega fails as the Four have wisely decided that since they outnumber him and a four way split of the loot is better than none of it, to kill him. Nega.. is not pleased and just wants them to attack him, and they do, and it seems darkwing’s going to have a front row seat for THE SWITCH. But Darkwing recovers, and we get a great tug of war between him and negsy as the switch is turnd on and off on and off till Darkwing finally wins, and then frees Morgana and apologizes and has her free Gizmo, and so on and so on. So our team is reunited, Darkwing’s finally ready to lead and thus we get our battle cries “Justice Ducks, ASSEMBLE!” “Fearsome Five, GET OVER HERE!” And the two face off

And the battle.. is fantastic. Easily the series best so far as everyone gets a moment to shine. Neptuina takes out both Liquidator and Megavolt, this time beating liquidator by creating a whirlpool inside him and turning him into a watery tornado and crashing him into megavolt before he can get stegmutt. Gizmoduck beats Quackerjack handily by using a drill on the teeth, great gag then giving Jacky some ansteic.. a boxing glove to the face. And Stegmutt takes on bushroot and when unsure of what to do.. we get a truly wonderous callback as Stegmutt.. honestly dosen’t know what to do.. so Darkwing gets some payback and tells him to “put out the bushroot, put out the bushroot” you can guess what happens next

Or if you want the more recent versoin

Point is three down two to go, and we get a call back to the pudding thing with Morgana trying to hit liquidator.. before Darkwing in a show of how much of a team player he is now, offers his help, simply having Morg teleport some instant pudding mix over the guy... I mean at least it’s brown this time even if i’ts still  in a jello mold. And to finish it off he and gizmo awesomely use a mixer on both sides. So our heroes have triumphed.. almost. Negs has the controls for the barrier and runs out planning to destroy st canard if they refuse.. then being Negaduck decides fuck it i’ll do it anyway... but Darkwing stops him and we get a slapstick beatdown as DW uses an anvil a pie and other classics and utterly curbstomps his nemissi in an wesome scne. The day is saved, the generator shut down and the city freed.  So we wrap up with the Justice Ducks celebrating.. with Gos and Launchpad. I have an inlking how that conversation went. 

Darkwing relcutnatnly is forced to eat his own words and admit he both enjoys the team and needed their help, before heading off on that Date with Morgana.. though Gizmoduck tries to make it a group thing. Dude no one likes a third wheel.. not even when i’ts ninja brian. So Darkwing uses the iris out to escape, but Stegmutt does try and give that quarter back first, with Darkwing, in a genuinely sweet moment, telling him to keep it and then going off, having earned his happy ending and grown as a person.  Final Thoughts: This episode was WORTH the build up I gave it. It turns out I really didnt’ need most of the intro epsidoes, as while it enhances the villians the heroes are all given decent enough introductions apart from morgana so tht even without the context of how darkwing knows these people it still works. It’s a thrilling, tightly paced for the most part, hilarious and wonderful two parter that ties a huge chunk of the show together into one hour long masterpice. I had my issues of course and i’ve stated them: Gosalyn and Launchpad doing nothing, the pacing towards the middle of part 2.. but otherwise.. it’s perfect. It’ has a great character arc for darkwing on top of everything, once again having his ego bite him in the ass but in a unique enough way it dosen’t feel like a retread of the pilot, and having him genuinely feel bad about it and grow. a bit smug when he learns he has to rescue them sure but he’s never smug to the heroes themselves. And ironically.. he gets his big moment. While he dosen’t beat the five himself he still infliatrated their hq, beat up their leader, saved his friends and then beat negaduck all by himself AGAIN. It may of not been the big moment he wanted.. but it’s the one he needed.  As for the road to the justice ducks itself.. it was a fun ride. Only one honestly two bad episodes; Tiff otf the Titans and Paint Misbehavin and even those had their moments, paticuarlly Misbehavin’s art sequences. The rest of the episodes ranged from alright to standout and overall it was a hell of a time.. so i’m going to rank all the ones i covered leading up to this review. Just Us Justice Ducks (Both Parts) Negaduck Beauty and the Beat Dry Hard Jurassic Jumble Ghoul of My Dreams Something Fishy Fungus Amongus Whiffle While You Work Paint Misbehavin Tiff of the Titans And i’m proud to say this is the first ongoing project on the blog, the first story arc or what have you, i’ve completed. While I DID do a four parter of catch as cash can, this is the first one i’ve done over several months that i’ve completed and i’m proud of it. Does this mean i’m done with Darkwing?

Next week we’ll be wrapping up some more unfinished buisness with another Darkwing Double Feature, this time covering the short career of Quiverwing Quack and in Feburary, and the reason I spent so much time catching up, we’ll be seeing both Morgana and Negaduck again just in time for Valentine’s day. After that?

We’ll just have to see won’t we? So until there’s another rainbow, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. 

[mithrasisgay]

Lights

@tyrias-library Hope it’s okay to tag you, even though this doesn’t fullfill a prompt!

On AO3

SUMMARY: The pirates of the Chimaera are well aware what eerie lights on the Open Sea mean - Krait. Their prisoners using these lights to wave down ships, begging for help. Every sailor worth their salt knows to avoid these dreaded towers, for their own good.

The fog lies heavy on the surface of the Unending Ocean, making navigation fort he Chimaera nigh impossible. The ship glides slowly through the waves, as distant thunder cracks, lighting up the impenetrable blanket of mist.

“Lights! Lights on the Horizon!” calls Cariyen, the ship’s only Sylvari from the Crow’s Nest, then swings over the small platform’s railings and descends the mast. “Starboard side, Captain.” She elaborates, when she is down on the main deck.

Captain Asha Gaets, flanked by her loyal First Mate Snezz, is already peering through her spyglass, brows furrowed as she strains to make out anything. “I see ‘em. Very faint. Think they’re moving a little.” She says, lowering the spyglass from her eye and looking down to her asuran companion. “Mh, bad idea, Captain.” Snezz remarks. “We’re too far out to be encountering anything friendly.” “I know.” Asha responds. “Krait.” “Those lights mean that they have prisoners, trying to wave down ships.” Snezz speaks up a little, as the crew gathers around. “We’d do best to avoid them, unless we want to join them in their cages.”

“Prisoners?” a sharp voice enter the conversation, as Farris Nightrunner, a young Charr, squeezes her way through the small crowd. “Boss, we gotta help them. Who knows what the greasy snakes are doing to them!” “That’s a terrible-…” Snezz begins, but is cut off quickly by Farris’ growl. “Coward! If we leave them, their blood’s on our hands. Your hands!” she snarls at the small Asura, who does not even flinch. “These waters are their domain, Farris.” He calmly argues. “If we engage, we will all suffer their fate. There’s courage, and there’s recklessness.” “Are you calling me a fool, you sniveling runt? You might run from a challenge, but we-…” Farris stops mid-sentence, interrupted by the Captain firing a gunshot into the skies.

“Good thing that decision isn’t up to you two.” Asha says, stowing her flintlock on her belt again. Snezz looks up to her with hope in his eyes, but she only graces him with a crooked grin. “Farris, you’re right. We’re going in.” “Captain-…” “No. Zip it up, Snezz.” Asha raises her hand for emphasis. “I’m not leaving these people.” A brief beat of silence occurs, in which Snezz leans back against the mast and huffs in exasperation, wondering how Asha Gaets even stayed alive before she met him, but elects not to further defy his Captain. Not out of respect, but because he knows her well enough to understand when she won’t budge on a decision.

“Cariyen, Liamu, Farris and Auri.” Asha calls again. “I want you with me on a rowboat. Snezz, you have command of the ship. Bring us in, but stay out of visual range.” “Aye.” Snezz says, and makes his way to the wheel. One of their deckhands is already pushing in a crate for him to stand on, while another two begin lowering the rowboat. Asha steps forward, her striketeam in tow. Her eyes narrow as she gazes at the lights.

 --

There’s a tense silence among the rowboat’s passengers, as it approaches the Krait Deeps. Asha sits in front, staring on ahead, while the two Charr, Farris and her mother Auri are busy rowing behind her. Cariyen, the Sylvari is behind them, carrying a magical light in her hands to illuminate their immediate vicinity. At the back end of the boat sits Liamu, the tiny asuran necromancer, currently in the process of summoning a selection of horrors to aid in the fight to come.

“Cariyen.” Asha says, and the Sylvari snuffs out her light. She looks up, now much closer to the lights she’d spotted and feels oddly nostalgic, reminded of the glowing pods in the Pale Tree’s boughs she used to look upon from below. But that is where the similarities end. The closer the rowboat gets to the Deeps, the more the area’s eeriness is replaced by horror. Pained cries pierce the silence, the sound of whips and hateful voices taunting. Farris’ upper lip pulls back in a snarl.

“Get ready.” Asha order in a hushed whisper and draws her rifle. A splashing sound briefly draws her attention, but it’s just Liamu’s minions jumping overboard and swimming ahead. The group holds their breath and listens. Minutes go by, and Asha’s gaze rests on Liamu’s face.

The little woman has her eyes closed, and an expression of deep concentration on her features. “Twenty, maybe more.” She reports. “There will be many under the surface. I am drawing their attention to my minions.” “Cause some chaos.” Asha orders. “Once they’re busy with your little friends, we jump into the fray.” Liamu nods, digging a tooth into her lower lip, as she coordinates several individual undead at once.

An angry hiss sounds, then a battle cry and a cacophony of combat noises breaks loose. Asha stands up in the boat. “Auri, element of surprise.” The Mesmer nods and hands her oar to Farris. The air distorts around the boat as she raises her hands, channeling her magic, cloaking the group in a veil of invisibility. “Let’s give ‘em hell.” Asha growls and steps off the boat, just as it comes to a stop on the Deeps’ surface gangplanks.

The rest of the team follows her, Cariyen leaving last and pulling the boat onto the wooden planks. They stick close together, watching Liamu’s minions maiming and being maimed by their serpent enemies. Asha assumes a crouching position and levels her rifle on the largest Krait she can see, aiming directly for his head. When her shot rings out, her invisibility falls off her in a flash of purple magic. A barrage of bright blue arrows arches over her head and comes down on the Krait with the fury of a god. The group swarms out from behind their Captain. Cariyen seeks high ground, while raining her magical arrows down on the enemy. A cloud of toxic locusts ascends the tower, gathering around the heads of a group of Krait that were about to come to their brethren’s aid. Shrill cries fill the air, broken up and distorted by time itself warping and twisting from Aurelia Sharpwit’s shield. Clockhands made of ethereal light spin in reverse, rewinding the Krait into their previous positions, opening them up to attack. That attack being a jet of fire from the mouth of Farris’ flamethrower. Those that do not immediately die, shriek and try to slither away, into the water, but Auri’s magic freezes them in motion and her daughter’s flames consume them entirely.

While the battle on the central platform rages, Asha makes her way upward, rifle at the ready. The prisoners are all in the upper levels of the tower, locked up in crude cages. There are some stragglers in her way, most of which she can dispatch at range, or punt off the ledge with the butt of her rifle.

“Help! Please! Please help Quaggan!” cries a prisoner as Asha approaches the first set of cages. They’re unguarded, as most of the Krait are currently down, fighting her crew. Only one of them has movement inside, a little quaggan, all alone. Left and right are only putrefying corpses, picked at by birds. Asha rushes over, pulling her crowbar out of her backpack, and getting to work on levering the cage open. “Don’tcha worry. That’s why we’re here.” She assures the prisoner inside. The poor quaggan is beaten and bruised, and holding one of its hands close to its chest, clearly broken. It takes her some elbow grease, but Asha manages to wedge the doors open, and the quaggan limps out, fearfully looking up at its savior.

“It’s okay. Stick with me. My friends are distracting the Krait.” Asha explains. “I’m going further up. There’s more prisoners there.” “Quaggan will follow you.” They reply. “Too wounded. Nowhere else to go.” “I’ve got a ship. We’ll patch you up and take you home.” Asha promises as she moves on up, mindful to reduce her speed, so the quaggan can keep up with her.

Another voice addresses her as soon as she comes in view of the next set of cages, one platform up. “Hey, you! Let me out right now!” demands an Asura, with enough spirit in her to rattle at her cage’s bars. She wears black and red, tattered, but still very much recognizable as Inquest. Asha pauses, but shakes her head and jogs over to her, then gets to work on the door. “How’d someone like you end up so far from Maguuma?” she asks while she works, and the Asura huffs and puffs for a moment before responding. “We were on our way to Orr. That’s all I’m classified to tell you.” “You the only survivor?” Asha inquires, and the door creaks open under her assault with the crowbar. “I think so. I haven’t seen any of my krewemates.” The Asura steps out of the cage and Asha positions herself protectively between her and the quaggan. “Great. Well, I saved you, which means you owe me. So keep your mouth shut while I free the other prisoners and we all get to go home alive.” She states and moves on the next cage. Inside is a humanoid creature Asha cannot discern. They’re blue, but clearly breathing, clad in a full-face mask and adorned with a pair of luminescent wings.

“She’s put up a good fight.” The Asura comments. “And the Krait pressured her tenfold for that.” “She’s alive, though.” Asha says and gets to work on the door. “That’s enough for me.” “Quaggan knows her.” The quaggan adds. “She got captured near Quaggan’s home.” “When?” Asha asks. “Quaggan does not remember.”

“They were here when I was locked up. So, more than a week ago.” The Asura contributes. “Hey, do you have a ship or something? I’m not a good swimmer.” “I do. She’s circling the Deeps just outside of view.” Asha responds and gets the door open. She casts her crowbar aside and crouches down to inspect the creature. She looks horrible. There are deep gashes all over her arms and back, likely caused by bladed whips. Her wings have holes and the left one’s main bone is completely shattered, as if intentionally crushed. Under the creature’s heavily damaged armor, Asha gets a glimpse of greenish black flesh, an ugly infection, or a necrotic curse. She presses two fingers against the creature’s neck, feeling a slow, but steady pulse. Relying entirely on the mechanical exoskeleton around her left arm, Asha lifts the creature up and takes her out of the cage.

The rest of her team is luckily just ascending the planks. “Ah, good. We’ve got wounded.” Asha says and hands the creature over to Cariyen. “You and the Quaggan can go back to the boat and row over to the Chimaera. Tell Snezz to bring ‘er in, then take care of these two. Be ready for more wounded. The rest of you, spread out and gather any survivors on the central platform. Me and my new friend here will establish a perimeter.”

While she speaks, Asha pulls one of her pistols from her belt and hands it to the Asura she freed. “Don’t try anything funny. You’re outnumbered.” She hisses to her as she passes. “C’mon.”

Cariyen, and the Quaggan accompany them down to the platform, before getting on the boat. “I will see you soon, Captain. Be safe.” The Sylvari says, before grabbing the oars and starting to make her way back to the ship. “You too.” Asha calls after her, then turns back to the Asura.

“What a massacre.” She comments, as she steps over the piled up Krait bodies, burned, pierced and rotted away by Liamu’s magic. “They deserve worse.” Asha simply justifies. “You don’t look too hurt.” “I’m not.” The Asura admits. “They were too busy beating the living daylights out of my neighbor. I thought I could use that to slip away, but… Where would I go?” “Fair.” Asha says. “You got a name?”

The Asura hesitates visibly. “It’s Mhido.”

--

It took a good twenty minutes to reach the ship, but once she is back on the Chimaera, with Asha’s command passed on to Snezz, Cariyen has time to care for the wounded. She already cast a mild regeneration spell on the quaggan’s superficial wounds while on her way back. “Let me see your hand.” She asks, and the small creature shyly extends their arm to her. It causes them obvious pain, so Cariyen already has a numbing spell ready on her fingertips when she makes skin contact. The bone is, thankfully, cleanly broken. Cariyen closes her eyes, gently nudging the bone back into its regular place, and funnels healing into the quaggan’s body. Both bone fragments slowly connect again, a fragile connection, but with time and care, the injury would mend fully. She puts the arm in a splint and wraps it in a bandage for good measure.

Then, she turns to the unconscious creature. Her hands brush lightly over her whip marks, closing the open wounds and rejuvenating her body’s natural regenerative powers. Likely awakened by that energy, the creature jolts and grabs Cariyen by the wrist. “Where am I?” she asks in a sharp, heavily accented voice, attempting to sound menacing, but her fear shimmers through. “Be at ease.” Cariyen soothes. “You are safe. We attacked the Krait Deeps you were held in and rescued you. You are badly injured. Will you let me mend you?” A few seconds pass, and the creature’s grip loosens. “You defeated the Krait?” “Not alone. My crew and I did.” Cariyen responds and gently frees her hand from the creature’s. “I have to set your bones straight before I can mend them. This will hurt.” “Do not hold back. I can endure.” The creature says and Cariyen gets to work on the mangled wing. It is entirely limp, and the creature is likely unable to move it at all. One by one, Cariyen reconstructs the shattered bone, making her way from the base to the tip of the limb. The entire time, the creature is completely silent, only the odd, sharp inhale hinting that she feels pain. “What were you seeking among the Krait?” she eventually asks, while Cariyen begins mending the wing. “Their victims. We saw the lights from afar and decided to intervene.” The Sylvari explains. “In exchange for what?”

Cariyen pauses and looks up at the creature’s mask. “We did not do this for a reward.” She states and the creature falls silent again, in quiet contemplation of what altruism might be.

The sounds of a second rowboat being returned to the ship has Cariyen looking up. The Inquest Asura, Farris and a number of freed prisoners step onto the deck, in varying degrees on injury and weariness. There is more work to do.

[theotherteamrocket]

Silver Linings - Chapter 1

Posting the first chapter of my fanfic, Silver Linings.

A Team Rocket grunt crosses Domino in a training exercise and sets off a chain of events that will change her life forever. She finds herself going to extreme lengths to keep her partner pokemon, becoming intertwined with her eccentric coworkers along the way.

Silver Linings 

Chapter 1

The cafeteria was busy as usual. A tired looking, brown haired Team Rocket grunt squeezed through two other people and searched the room, finally laying her eyes on a vacant table. Her food was already cold, but she didn’t care. She sat her tray down at the end of the table. At the very same time, two other trays came down at the opposite end.

“Well, well, well.” It was a familiar voice. She knew who it was before she even looked up. It was the unmistakable rasp of Butch. He and Cassidy sat down at the other end of the table.

“If it isn’t the flavor of the week.” He laughed. “We were just talking about you.”

“Along with everyone else on the team.” Cassidy flipped one of her long, blonde pigtails over her shoulder and slid down beside the other girl as she lowered herself onto the bench. “Butch, take my picture with her and post it on our page.”

She flashed a peace sign and smiled wide. Ria smiled, too, but it felt as fake as her interest in talking to them right then. Still, as friendly as she was with Butch and Cassidy from having worked with them numerous times, they both outranked her and she wasn’t about to blow them off.

“I guess you saw the video.”

“Saw it?” Cassidy asked. “Butch was the one who filmed it!”

Ria blinked as she processed what Cassidy as said, before standing and pointing an accusatory finger at her green haired colleague.

“That was you!?”

“Calm down, calm down.” She glowered at him from beneath the brim of her cap and sat back down as he continued. “I made you famous. You should thank me. You should see how many likes this thing has on Rocketbook.”

Ria sat back down. He slid his phone over to her and she looked at it warily. Since members of Team Rocket were barred from posting any of their information or photos online due to it being a security concern, Giovanni’s recent initiative to provide a social networking platform exclusively for Team Rocket members had been a hugely popular success. In light of recent events, however, Ria couldn’t say that she was a fan. She wasn’t particularly interested in re-living the battle, but the two of them were already standing on either side of her watching the replay of her earlier training exercise with Domino.

“Heh heh. Check out that excellent camera work.”

“Be quiet Butch, this is my favorite part.”

The three of them looked on as Houndour started to glow and change shape, becoming a Houndoom. Butch and Cassidy laughed as Domino’s Roserade fell almost immediately to its attack.

“Look at her face!” Butch cackled. “It’s like you didn’t even care that the flamethrower would be overkill.”

“I didn’t ask Houndoom to use Flamethrower.” Ria said quietly. “ It just…happened.”

She rubbed the back of her head. She was still in shock from its evolution when it all happened, and it happened so quickly. Had it been up to her, she probably would have stopped the battle altogether. It had just been a training exercise, after all, and although she had been volun-told to do it, had she known how things were going to turn out she would have surely found a way to get out of it.

“Well, either way, it was hilarious.” Butch said around a mouthful of French fries.

“I don’t think Domino felt the same way.”

“Oh, please.” Cassidy rolled her eyes. “She got cocky, she wanted to humiliate someone that had a type advantage over her to make herself look like a better trainer. She picks on spineless grunts like you all the time, no offense, knowing that you don’t have the backbone to actually defeat her even if you wanted to.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Guess she wasn’t counting on that mutt of yours having a mind of its own.” Her partner chuckled. Ria sighed as Cassidy continued. She’d never had a problem with Houndour listening to her before it evolved.

“If you ask me, that little witch had it coming. That bleach job alone should be a felony.”

Behind Cassidy, almost as if she’d been summoned from Hell by the mention of her name, Ria saw Domino approaching the table. She had a sly smirk on her face and it was apparent she was up to something. 

“Uh, Cassidy-“ Ria tried to interject when she saw the other blonde heading in their direction. Although Domino was technically the same rank as Cassidy and Butch, her relationship with Giovanni carried a lot of extra weight outside of the usual chain of command. Butch and Cassidy liked to tell anyone who would listen that they were the Boss’s favorites, but it was no secret that the title actually belonged to Domino.

“ -if only Houndoom had missed Roserade entirely.”

“Cassidy,” Butch also tried to intervene, but there was no stopping her at this point.

“HQ has been a much better place now that that spoiled brat has been taken down a peg.”

“Oh, and what spoiled brat are we talking about, exactly?”

Cassidy froze and, finally, turned to see Domino standing behind her.

“Domino!” She stammered. “Oh, you know…eh…”

“Actually, it’s no one that you would know at all!” Butch stepped in for the save. “Most definitely not anyone at this table or in the immediate vicinity of it.”

“Absolutely not!” Cassidy added.

“Well, feel free to carry on,” the blonde said, looking down at the lowest ranking member at the table. “I’m just here to see my good friend Ria on some urgent work business.”

“Work business?” Ria asked, suspiciously. She had expected some kind of retaliation, sure, but in the form of extra work detail or being sent on a field assignment in an undesirable location. The possibility of a face to face confrontation hadn’t even crossed her mind. Domino pulled a brown envelope from behind her back and handed it to her. She started to open it and Butch and Cassidy again leaned over her shoulder.

“Do you mind?” She muttered. Neither of them budged. She continued to open it carefully. Domino tapped her finger impatiently until she could no longer contain herself.

“You’re being audited!” She exclaimed, in a sing-song voice.

“What?!” Ria stood up in her chair, clutching the piece of paper so hard the edges wrinkled. Her eyes darted over the wording again and again, trying to make sure what she was reading was correct. It was an official order, and it had been signed by the Boss himself.

“Had to do it, Ria.” Domino’s remorse sounded more like sarcasm and Ria bristled at the sound of her voice. “It’s my duty as an officer to make sure everyone follows the rules, so I really had no choice. We both know that a grunt like yourself shouldn’t be able to defeat an officer like me in battle. The Boss would just be so disappointed if any officer witnessed something like that and didn’t report it.” 

She glared at Butch and Cassidy who looked at each other sheepishly.

“You didn’t have to do it.”

“Now, now, you know as well as I do Rockets are only allowed to keep pokemon up to a certain level, depending on their rank of course. This may be a criminal organization, but we have rules for a reason and those rules apply to everyone, even me. But listen,” Domino leaned in, “I’ll tell you what. I’m in a really good mood. I know you’re about to leave on an assignment, so we can wait to do this until you get back. That’ll give you time to say your goodbyes to Houndoom. Don’t worry…once we retrain it, I’ll take really good care of it.”

Domino walked away seeming satisfied with herself. 

“Thanks a lot.” Ria said, fighting the urge to smack Butch across the face with the lunch tray. “ She wouldn’t be half as mad at me if everyone hadn’t seen what happened on video.”

“Hey, there were plenty of people at that training who saw it first hand. That would have put her on a warpath with you anyway.” Butch defended himself.

“You guys are officers.” Ria pleaded. “You have to tell me, is there anything I can possibly do to get out of this?”

“There’s no way.” Cassidy was blunt in her reply. “Team Rocket is and always has been very strict about adhering to these audits, ever since…you know.”

“The incident.” Butch said with air quotes.

“What even happened, anyway? I was just a kid. My father was a part of Team Rocket at the time, and I remember hearing about it, but I didn’t really pay much attention. I…had a lot going on then.”

Ria ran her finger around the edge of her drink can. She was aware of ‘the incident’, as Butch called it, but it had occurred right around the same time her father had passed away, so she hadn’t paid it any mind. 

“We weren’t there either, but the story goes an Elite agent decided he wanted out of Team Rocket.” Butch explained.

“Obviously they told him no.” Cassidy added.

“Right.” He continued. “So the guy just skips out one night. Makes a run for it. When the Boss finally finds out, he’s furious. Puts a BOLO on this guy, pretty much has the whole team after him.”

“A manhunt.” His partner echoed.

“When they finally tracked him down, I hear it was a bloodbath. This guy was a real hotshot trainer, there was talk he coulda made it into the Elite Four if he wasn’t a Rocket. His pokemon were really powerful and your typical Team Rocket issued field trash was no match for it.”

Cassidy narrowed her eyes at him when he said this. It was a well-known fact that Raticate was her favorite pokemon, and Ria assumed this was why she seemed to resent that remark.

“They say it took almost 50 men to finally take him out, and he didn’t survive.”

“Giovanni never wanted to have to deal with that again, which is why he put this policy into place where Rockets are only allowed to have pokemon up to a certain level. When any pokemon exceeds the level cap for their trainer’s rank, that pokemon becomes the property of Team Rocket. They’re sent off to the breeding center to be re-trained, and they’re either assigned to an officer or put into the reserves if they’re needed later.”

“Wait! I have an idea! You guys can have higher leveled pokemon than I can. Cassidy, what if you take Houndoom for a while?” 

“Are you insane? That thing is public enemy number one right now.” She scoffed. “I’m not about to put a target on my back for Domino.”

Ria sighed. She pulled out Houndoom’s poke ball and looked at it. 

“It just doesn’t seem fair.”

“Well, them’s the rules.” Butch said, matter-of-factly. He and Cassidy stood to collect their trays. “ It’s all in your employment contract, so there’s really nothing you can do.”

“My recommendation would be to just use the Team Rocket issued pokemon from now on. It’s what Butch and I do. They’ll send you a new one every few months. Even if you’re out in the field, Delibird brings it to you.”

“It’s kinda like a subscription service.” Butch added. “They’re tailored to the kind of work you’ll be doing, too. It’s neat.”

“Catching your own pokemon is allowed, sure, but you get attached and eventually you have to either hand them over to Team Rocket or set them free. The only other people I know of who actually do that are those losers Jessie and James. This is a really good example of why it’s just not a good idea.” 

“Sorry kid.” Butch offered before he and Cassidy headed toward the exit. “That’s a real tough break. Here! You can have the rest of my fries.”

“…thanks.”

“French fries? Really?” She heard Cassidy hiss at him as they walked away.

“Well they always make me feel better after a bad day.”

Ria sighed as their voices trailed off and stared sadly at her lunch tray, which now overflowed with the addition of Butch’s leftovers. The fries actually were good here. Unfortunately, she had completely lost her appetite.

[timeclonemike]

Axiom Verge: Setting and Plot Analysis

This has been bouncing around in my head for a while, so I’m going to just put it down for posterity.

Axiom Verge is a side scrolling platformer in the Metroidvania Style. Half of the game is exploring and getting new equipment, then backtracking to try that new equipment on old areas to look for secrets impossible to find earlier. The player controls Trace, a physicist who has his experiment blow up in his face, and then wakes up in an alien world fighting for his life.

I’m dropping a Keep Reading Cut here since the discussion will mention spoilers and lots of them.

There’s three main issues I want to talk about: Simulation Theory, the Alternates, and Trace’s Characterization. There may be other, smaller tangents that will get mentioned in passing.

Simulation Theory: This is a philosophical theory that posits the entire universe and everything in it is the result of a simulation being run on a computer. (I have numerous problems with it myself, but those are not germane to the analysis of this game.) In Axiom Verge, this theory is true, but the “simulation” just happens to be a sidescrolling platformer. Most of Trace’s weapons are deliberately designed to invoke classic console game glitches; a gun that causes enemy behavior to glitch out called the Address Disruptor, a lab coat that lets him noclip through walls, and the counterpart to the High Jump Boots from Metroid is literally a device that changes the local laws of physics so Trace can jump higher. There’s even a  device that functions like either a password system or the old game genie / game shark cartridge add ons that let people change the game in different ways, and it’s the only way to get to several secrets and the gear they hide.

About halfway to two thirds of the way through the plot, it’s revealed that all this equipment that Trace has been finding is equipment that Trace originally created. After the lab accident, Trace not only came up with a way to prove Simulation Theory, he managed to design hardware based on the theory. Some of the documents found in the game are from Trace, including an extract / excerpt from his original paper, with a quote that was important enough that it made it into the actual trailer.

Axiom 1(c): Any algorithm giving rise to cognitive entities will be perceived as reality by the entities described.

This, I think, is used to deliberately invoke the idea of the Simulation Theory, and all of the events of the game take that theory to it’s logical extreme; if the universe is a computer program, it can be hacked, it can glitch, and it can crash, which raises two important questions.

Question One: If the universe simulation starts to glitch out or corrupt, what would that look like to the people in that universe? A number of notes found in the game refer to something called the Breach; in game, it looks and sounds like some sort of graphical or audio corruption, and one note calls it “a forced re-linking of the lattices underlying adjacent universes.” The Breach is also responsible for the “Secret Worlds” of Axiom Verge, where assets and set pieces are randomly thrown together with very little internal logic. These Secret Worlds are almost certainly a reference to the “secret worlds” found in the original Metroid game, not just in style, but thematically as well. The Metroid secret worlds were created when the game accidentally started reading its own code as level data. With that as context, the note describing the breach suddenly makes more sense.

Question Two: If the universal simulation should be fatally corrupted or even crash, what happens next? This is only indirectly touched on in two parts of the game, one note describing the backstory of the world of Sudra that Trace is exploring, and the “pathogen” that was released on the world. In the note about old Sudra, it’s said that the people of that world had achieved untold heights of technical and scientific knowledge, but weaponized it and caused untold calamities before they got to the point that they were unwilling, or unable, to continue fighting. Given that they ended up creating at least one weapon that Trace can find, the flamethrower, and hid it in a cave using a literal password system, I think it’s plausible that the Sudrans were actually on the precipice of just such a disaster. In fact, it is entirely possible that they created the Breach itself either as an accidental result of their fighting, or as a deliberate ultimate weapon. This position is supported by the language of the notes referring to the breach and anything related to it with weather terminology; in order to capture the Rusalki, a storm-related machine was activated, and in the events of the game proper the Rusalki can’t get close to the Breach Attractor as long as it is powered on.

There’s also the matter of the “pathogen” that is unleashed on Sudra by the antagonist. If you made a list of synonyms for pathogen, you’d find “Virus” on that list. In light of the Simulation Theory, it’s not even that much of a jump to go from “pathogen” to “computer virus” and this is supported by noted left by the various bosses before they are completely transformed by it; one of them deliberately points out that the algorithm that defines them is itself twisted and corrupted.

The Alternates: One of the big plot twists halfway to two thirds of the way through the game is that the player character Trace isn’t the same Trace that got caught in the lab accident; that’s just where Trace’s memories of Earth stop. The original Trace was left blind and paraplegic by the accident, which didn’t even have anything to do with his physics experiment; a pressure valve froze and that caused an explosion. Trace ended up having a revelation while recovering and developed a revolutionary new theory; the media loved it, but the scientific community ridiculed it and him. They gave him a nickname: Athetos.

Conveniently enough, Athetos is the name of the antagonist of the game, who unleashed all the chaos on Sudra in the backstory.

Trace is actually a clone created from Athetos, as are all of the game bosses. These clones were created by the game’s version of the Save Point, called Rebirth Chambers. The original Trace was completely healed of all injuries from the accident, and there’s a hidden area with his old wheelchair and a note explaining what happened.

The main reason I’m bringing this up is because I saw an explanation video that stated that the Athetos variants created by “Prime Trace” were from alternate universes. The evidence from this was referring to a specific note talking about algorithms across universes, but the problem with this theory is that there is one part of the game where two Rebirth Chambers are actively being used to create more clone variants. So the multiversal theory didn’t even NEED to be invoked, we already have cloning.

However, that note in particular is important because I think it describes the video game phenomena of multiple lives. The relevant test goes “the instances which do not cease carry on for those that do. For most of us this happens without us being any the wiser.” If you’re playing a game and you fuck up and die, you restart at the last checkpoint / save point / level intro / what have you. Again, Axiom Verge explores what a video game reality would look like from the inside.

Trace’s Characterization: If Trace has one defining trait, it is his pacifist nature. He keeps trying to talk his way out of boss fights (which almost works once) and as soon as he realizes that he and Athetos are the same person, he wants to talk to the guy to figure out what the hell is going on and why Athetos has done all these things that Trace would never consider.

This is something that I have NEVER seen fully addressed as far as the plot goes, so I guess I have to do it.

The note next to Trace’s old wheelchair is signed Trace. By the time it was written, Trace had already been healed by the Sudran Rebirth Chambers. However, in the note, while he was impressed with the technology, he understood that it was too dangerous to even try to bring the technology back to Earth in case what happened to Sudra happened to Earth as well.

This is in complete conflict to what Athetos tells Trace at the end of the game before the final boss fight. In that same cutscene, Athetos also says “If I tell you too much, your captors will have to kill you.” (Athetos is referring to the Rusalki, who have control over both the Rebirth Chambers and the “nanogates” inside Trace that allow him to come back to life after dying.) In that context, Athetos making the claim that he just wanted to bring the technology to Earth and was willing to destroy Sudra to do it sounds like a cover story; he couldn’t tell Trace the real reason without putting Trace in danger, but he needed to tell Trace something that both Trace and the Rusalki would believe. (Given that the Rusalki have been lying to Trace since the moment he woke up from the Rebirth Chamber, the can’t really claim the moral high ground here.)

There’s one other important detail about that note found with the wheelchair: “We are going upstream - to the Filter, or whatever lies beyond - for answers.“ Now, upstream could mean several different things. It could refer to an actual stream, implying that Trace arrived at Sudra near a body of water near a Rebirth Chamber, and the stream led to civilization. The word Filter, on the other hand, could refer to a machine called the Power Filter that Trace has to activate in the game and seems to be tied into the power grid for Sudra’s technology, in which case upstream meant following the power supply for all the amazing tech to figure out how it works. Finally, there is the possibility that “upstream”  and the “Filter” refer to the Breach Elevator and what lies beyond; Athetos has his main base in the game in this space elevator kind of machine that is implied to pass through the Breach.

Each one of these scenarios is equally plausible until Thomas Happ makes a sequel or officially supports a given theory on social media or something like that. What each of these things has in common, though, is that it raises another question. Whether it was encountering an alien civilization for the first time, or discovering how the Sudran technology worked, or discovering what lies beyond the Breach...

What did Trace find that was so awful that it made a peaceful, pacifist scientist willing to commit genocide?

[pkmnsdarkqueen]

Mun talks about her D&D characters for munday

I thought it’d be fun to let ya’ll hear about them. Also I know a ton of them start with L names, I’m sorry and I don’t know how this happened. 

Lokni-Human Blood Hunter (TW: death, demons, sex, child neglect, pregnancy complications) Life goal: To kill Raktos the demon  Campaign: Ravnica

The current favorite of my friends who I’ve played a few games with. Personally I think he has one of the most tragic backstories but I had to give him an intense one cause he has a very dramatic goal. The campaign is set in Ravnica which for those who don’t know is a setting where most things take place in a large city where power is divided by guilds. My child is in the Raktos guild which is the ones who throw parties put on shows, and run the brothels. Thing is they also kinda murder folks alot, live on the idea of viva la anarchy and they do this to keep their guild leader, a massive demon happy so he doesn’t end the world. Now that you’re caught up his story goes as follows. He was born to two parents, things were great, his mom got preggers, she was out with her husband and got dragged into a Raktos show cause they do that, she was injured and basically it became either save her or her unborn child and he insisted on the child. Dad blames the kid for loosing his wife, neglects teh child, Lokni also a child adopts his dad’s mindset being confused and hurt, family friend of mom takes in unwanted child (she is a centaur by the way), Lokni realizes eventually his dad really doesn’t care about him either as dad slips further into insanity about wanting to bring his wife back, Lokni decides to go apologize to bro who instantly forgives to live with centaur mom. Later they are told their dad is dead getting mixed up with the wrong people (however based on hints from the dm I fear he is not dead and also fear when the dm brings him back). His goal as a character is this: He wants to make sure no family ever ends up ripped apart like his so he wants to kill Raktos and put someone else on the throne, not him cause he recognizes he is not emotionally stable enough to run anything. Although originally I was planning on making him more obsessive about his goals and basically become his dad, obsession and hurt drives people to crazy things, but he kinda ended up finding a 16 year old ghost girl in the woods who’s been stuck to possess a knife and basically was like,”well this child clearly has a rough time in life I’m gonna adopt them!” and fatherhood is forcing this man to rethink things cause murdering Raktos=major trouble and he doesn’t want to rip up this new family he’s making so now considering teleporting him away? changing him to be a good person? Yeh it’s getting complicated. OH and he was kind of forced to drink some potion stuff, cause his boss is crazy (she has a ghost choir that she possibly killed everyone there, complete with a kazoo section cause ya boi Lokni on a whim said it needed more kazoos and she listened to him cause he knows music, he plays the spoons and does magic tricks btw as a job, so clearly he knows what he’s talking about) and ye so he is a fox lycanthropy now.

Lapis Lazuil/Laz-Triton, Cleric.  Life goal: Literally be the best monster killer Campaign: Regular D&D 5e

Basically we had a D&D show we were filming at school up until things got too busy with the main show we were producing. This character came before Lokni and we were told,”hey so your characters are monster hunters at this guild but they’ve all kind of been kicked out of their former parties for one reason or another which ya’ll can decide and this is your last chance to stay in the guild.” Me: “cool imma make a triton that hates water, and their a tempest cleric.” Dm: “....why, why are you like this.” Me: “YOU SAID MAKE BAD DECISIONS!” So ye that’s how Laz was made. Her story is that she was adopted by rock genasi. She thinks her parents abandoned her. Truth is they just fell on hard times just before she was born and well couldn’t afford a child so did what they could now trying to find her. So she changed her birth name to be named after a rock like the rest of what she considers her real family. She also has the attitude of the stereotypical highschool cheerleader on disney movies and talks like one too but with a more raspy voice because she is dehydrated, again she hates water because of her hatred for her ‘real family’ and also she genuinely doesn’t like the way it feels,”It’s just liiiike the worst ya know, um like on my skin....yeah so don’t pass out in water or whatever cause like I probs won’t try to heal you....sorry not sorry.” That was literally her first line to the rest of the party. I now use her in one offs and like low key she is alot of fun. 

Luc-Pantoran (I forgot the class and the dm still has our character sheets cause thank you virus) Life goal: Clear their name! Campaign: Starwars 

So first of all funny thing about this one is that usually I have a gender and voice made pretty early into creating a character. With this person....I did not, like literally I got everything else figured out except these two details so I decided,”You know what! You don’t get either of them!” Their story went like this, they have 12 siblings ok, super rural regular family in the inner planets. All of their siblings are wildly successful and they were average. They knew they couldn’t really succeed like everyone else but hey did find themselves enjoying being a nuisance so basically when asked what they wanted to do with their life they would look up at the adult asking and just go,”Crime.” SO that’s exactly what they did. Once they became an adult they ran off, used sleeping with folks to get what and where they wanted, eventually joined a pirate crew, and life was great. They were so good, and kind of had a thing going with the captain that they became first mate. Pretty recently they realized they didn’t relate to either gender and became non binary, they also are still trying to figure out their voice so it would change rather often. Thing is they got framed for stealing from the captain, and hey they’ve done alot of bad but they HAVE NOT broken trust like that, after all they actually cared about the captain, and for once was considering being just with them instead of sleeping around. Nonetheless they are on the run now trying to clear their name. Their theme as a character is,”hey you know that little voice in your head that tells you not to do something, ye they don’t have that. Just a voice that says, do what ya wanna do pal!”

Clarity-Robot, vault dweller (Tw: death mention, human experimentation, dog experimentation) Life goal: Just see the world Campaign: Fall out

I love this character so much she is a baby however her theme is,”depending on perspectives people can come across as wildly different things.” So If you’ve played fall out no she’s not a Mr. Handy or one of the robots that looks incredibly human like. We decided an amalgamation of the two fit her story better and it was available in the unofficial fall out table top we were playing. She looks humanish, a human like form but with clear casing showing her inner workings and a human mask to try to look  more friendly. She’s got on a little yellow dress on too, very vintage, and with the sweetest most innocent sounding voice. She even travels with a Dalmatian who, as a robot could think of only the most appropriate name to describe her grizzled hound, Spot. As for fighting one arm can transform into a flame thrower and the other into a chain saw. Also as a robot she can not go against programming. She also makes comments such as,”I am overjoyed you will not become a plant!” “Oh no don’t pick flowers! I would hate to hurt the plant...” “Are you sure the grass will not mind if I step on it?” If you have played fallout you might know where this is going. Basically there are 2 vaults that are important, both of them are found over grown with plants one containing half human half plant monstrous creatures. Her story is that she was in the vault that laster holds the monstrous creatures. Her programming was to continue the experiment, the experiment to combine humans with plants in an attempt to improve upon humans. She could not tell the humans what she was doing, and she could not stop the experiment until it was complete. There were dogs there under her command to be used as experiments too or keep the plants in line. So the chain saw and flamethrower were to stop unruly plant monsters from attacking her and keep them in line until finally the order came that the experiment was over and she was no longer needed. So she left, secretly horrified by her actions attempting to avoid ever processing what she witnessed fully through her system. She wants to see the world for herself now with her dog friend. Again when people meet her she seems like a sweet angel going so far as to worry about even the feelings of plants, but for anyone who was in that vault they would see her as a very different person.

[aterabyte]

Rating Fallen Order Bosses from Easiest to Hardest for Me, Personally (Except the Albino Spider thingy because I never fought that)

Beware of spoilers and longwindedness below the cut. 

12. AT-ST; this was by far the easiest boss. It took me a while to whittle down, but I don’t believe I even needed to use a stim. It was just parry until it’s stunned, run in and slash, roll away from the grenades, force push the missile, and repeat. No trouble at all. Granted, it was to introduce a recurring enemy (albeit a rare one), but I think it would’ve been served better as a more dangerous modified AT-ST of some sort (perhaps with a stomp attack?), with regular ones appearing later as degraded bosses with fewer features.

11. Security Droid; another boss fight to introduce a new enemy, and only slightly more dangerous than the last. It had tight confines that made the droid hypothetically dangerous, given its long ranged melee attacks and high damage, but the droid was ultimately far less threat than many droids that appeared later on due to being fought alone. I’m not sure it even brought me to half health on my first stim pack. 

10. Arena Bounty Hunter; Ding, mine was called. She caught me by surprise during the ambush and stunned me without me landing a single blow, and when I finally got to the arena and got my lightsaber back, I had an infuriatingly tough fight--I think I must have died three or four times. The last death was right after I reached her with about half my health left and no stims--but then when I got to come back in at full health with no beasts to fight, she was pathetically easy. She mostly attacks with blaster fire, which can be easily parried. Every once in a while, she’ll fire a missile or strafe you with a flamethrower, but these are easily avoided. The only time she even damaged me in our second fight was when I got greedy and didn’t roll away in time after landing a lightsaber combo, and she hit me with her flamethrower. 

9. Nydak Alpha; this one took some time for me to figure out as I’d spent most of Dathomir avoiding the Lesser Nydaks. Because of this, I died once when I had almost killed it. When I came back, however, it was just a matter of patience and diligence, dodging its unblockable lunge and then parrying its three-hit combo to get a few good hits in. Rinse, repeat. 

8. Second Sister; by far the easiest melee-focused humanoid enemy in the game. She has an impressively varied set of combos and some good range, but her attacks are easily parried, and her unblockables are not only easily dodged, but leave her very vulnerable. Not only that, but the fight ends at half health, so she doesn’t last very long. Unlike the previous two entries, she didn’t even kill me--but at the same time, the last two were mostly circumstantial losses, and she got a number of good licks in due to her sheer variety. 

7. Gorgara; This oversized bat seemed at first like it would be a terrifying foe. Its very early first phase is easy, with just a couple of heavily telegraphed unblockable that let you land several hits, followed by an opportunity to Force Pull it to the ground and hit is head for massive damage. After you do that, though, it takes to the air and starts hitting you when sonic strafing runs, then charge attacks, then ground pounds that make a shockwave like the last two bosses. For all its variety, though, this boss fight is clearly a power fantasy more than anything. Its attacks are easily avoided and it takes little damage to bring down for its size. 

6. Taron Malicos; Essentially a better version of Second Sister in every way, and the first boss I’d say gave me serious trouble as a lone enemy against a full-health Cal. He starts off with some easily-parried lightsaber combos, but those combos quickly cease to be easily-parried once he starts mixing in his unblockables. Malicos is an extremely technical fighter who will often take a parry, then bounce back with an unblockable--or throw his lightsaber at you several times in a row, then toss one into the air out of your sight to pull in back down at you while you’re dueling him, or just pick rocks out of the air and throw them. Lucky you, Merrin will come in and start helping you halfway through the fight, hitting him with magic at various points that drops his stamina. He didn’t quite kill me, but he got me within a single hit of death, which was impressive since I had six stim packs at this point and a badass magic lady teleporting in and out of the fray. 

Honorable Mention. Electrobaton Purge Troopers; these guys are actually just regular enemies, but you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. The first time I encountered one, he killed me with almost no damage taken because of his absurdly fast combos that stunlock you into taking several more hits if you don’t block or parry the first blow--and then killed me two or three more times for good measure. These guys also have an unblockable at the end of their main combo, which catches you by surprise at first. And if you don’t parry before attacking and instead just block then dodge, they also tend to, instead of blocking and letting you take down a chunk of their stamina meter, dodge your attack and throw a weird jumping attack out of nowhere. Plus, they tend to come in areas where you can’t Force Push them off the ledge, at least after you unlock the upgrade that makes your pushes strong enough to affect them. Even at the end of the game, one of them came in with a couple scout troopers and took two of my stim packs, which was absurd since I was tearing through every other regular enemy in the Fortress Inquisitorius with ease. Fuck these guys.

5. Oggdo Boggdo; Oggdo Boggdo was an interesting one. The earliest miniboss in the game, encounterable in the first hour to hour and a half. If I’d come back and killed it later, I likely wouldn’t have struggled at all. Fighting it as early as I did, however, I only had a single lightsaber blade, one force power (which didn’t even work right, because if you Slow its tongue and try to hit it, your blade goes right through) and little enough health that it could kill me in two hits even after I lowered the difficulty to normal for the only time in the game. Even after doing so, I had to drop down from above and cut off a quarter of its health, and it still brought me to almost no HP. Oggdo Boggdo may not have been that dangerous in reality, but with how early I faced it, it earned a solid place just just inside the top 5.

4. Haxian Brood Droid and Bounty Hunter; of the randomly-generated miniboss ambushes, this was the only kind I ever encounter, and it was a doozy. Both enemies are unthreatening on their own--the Bounty Hunter is identical to the one in the arena, and while the droid has long range and mostly unblockable attacks, it’s also slow and easily avoided. The problem is that this is a very good combination. The Bounty Hunter tends to stay in the air, and it’s a lot harder to deflect her charged shot and bring her down when you have a Droid named Chonk or whatever pummeling you. Conversely, if you try to focus on the Droid, you get pelted with annoying lasers and stunned with missiles. Of the four times one of these pairs showed up, the only one I actually killed was on Kashyyyk,  where the Bounty Hunter got stuck in an infinite walk cycle and couldn’t move or attack unless I came close, allowing me to whittle down the, on its own, pathetically easy Droid. This pair is perhaps the greatest example of enemies being more than the sum of their parts. 

3. Rabid Jotaz; Funny enough, I never actually killed this thing. I went to face it immediately after getting the scomplink, died three or four times, and then gave up. I’m confident I could have killed it if I’d faced it a little later, but at that point in the game, this simple enemy was too much. Its attacks have wide arcs and obvious tells and are easily dodged in theory, and its health was pitiful for its massive size, but the Rabid Jotaz had one big advantage--a tiny arena. Seriously, the arena was a claustrophobic circle maybe two and a half times its armspan in diameter. It didn’t matter how slow the thing was when there was no room to go anywhere and its unblockable swept across half the room. It would’ve been much easier, I think, had I come back to kill it later on but I hate backtracking, so it gets a spot in the top three. 

2. Trilla Suderi; Trilla has an absurdly varied moveset. Even right off the bat, she likes to throw two different combos with multiple variations on how they can end, sometimes leading into each other, sometimes leading into a weird spinny move, sometimes leading into a jumping downward stab. Of course, that’s nothing compared to the shockwave she has. It’s like Ninth Sister’s where she’ll smash her hand into the ground after a short windup and send a wave of force bullshit you have to jump. The thing is, she likes to throw it at two inconvenient times. One, right after she summons an annoying probe droid to distract and stagger you, and two, when you’re at point blank range and have no time to dodge. She also has absurd range, blinking across the entire large arena in a matter of moments, which is bad enough when she’s throwing an unblockable lightsaber attack, but is even worse when she’s throwing her most infuriating attack of all. She’ll lunge at you, grab you by the face, and suck out both your health and, for good measure, your Force meter. The only saving grace is that is has a generous windup time. 

With all that, why’s she only number 2? Well, she’s sloppy. I had a hard time whittling down her block meter because so many of the attacks she does will let you just hit her health directly and take off a good chunk. Plus, after my first death I started using a fun tactic where I’d run in, spam Force Push to drop her Stamina, hit her to regain my Force meter along with the experience she stole, then use a dual lightsaber attack for massive damage, dropping somewhere close to a fifth of her HP in one fell swoop. Plus, her attacks are mostly easily blocked or dodged. She killed me five times, but it was always because she either used her OHKO suck-yer-brains-out move, or because she summoned a Probe Droid that staggered me at critical moments before I could kill it. With all that, it was very satisfying that I beat her by throwing her own exploding probe droid into her. 

1. Ninth Sister; she killed me a whopping twelve times. Like, seriously; this lady did not play around. Her first phase, when she’s using just one blade, is simple. Parry, parry, dodge to the side to avoid the unblockable stab when she Force Pulls you in, don’t get hit by the overhead jumping swing. You can deal good damage to her with the openings she leaves, but she’s still more defensive than Trilla despite her brutish style, and she has health befitting her stature. Still, the first phase poses no threat. Then, she activates the other blade on her lightsaber and becomes a lot tougher. 

Noticeably, she has several more special moves. She’ll do a shoulder charge that’s pretty easy to avoid, but once her health gets down to about a third, she’ll throw in a second charge, which caught me off guard sometimes even when I was expecting it. She has an unblockable spinning blade attack, which is easy to avoid but does massive damage, and she has a ground slam like Trilla--but easier to evade because she always creates distance before doing it. My big struggle was the simpler part. Her combos are faster and last longer, she seems harder to land hits on, she pulls switcharoos with similar-looking attacks that turn out to be unblockables, and her stab seems to have less windup time, making it a far more dangerous attack than in the first phase. For all the fanciness that she adds, it’s mostly easily avoided. What got me was just the regular attacks, and that damnable stab. With this, the Ninth Sister of the Inquisitorious takes the #1 spot. 

[gamearamamegathons]

Dragon Quest V: My Life As A Lawn Gnome

Circe here! At this point I should really just steer clear of royal lineages. It never goes well for me. But okay, let me pick up where we left off.

So I was going to head off to this Cave of Trials to prove myself to the suspicious chancellor and ascend to the throne of Granvania. It looks like I can bring my monsters with me, so it's just Bianca who's staying behind. Clearly the chancellor is hoping I'll be offed by monsters, but we can guess how well that works on a JRPG protagonist. The Cave of Trials starts off with a curious little puzzle, actually; you can enter one of four doors, and it appears to be a dead end, but if you leave through the correct door, you come out somewhere else. It took me a while to figure out how this works, but once I had it, it becomes a fairly conventional dungeon. The encounters aren't really that tough, so I'm able to push my way through pretty easily. There's a couple more puzzle-like things, but the only one I found at all interesting was where you had to drain a room of water without being swept away, by positioning a rock so you could catch yourself on it. So that was kinda neat.

Once I found the Symbol of Royalty at the bottom of the cave, I was soon confronted by some thugs who informed me that "someone" didn't want me to become king. Gee, I wonder who that is. Luckily they were not terribly threatening, so I brought the symbol back to the castle. By this time I had enough evidence to stick my sword through the chancellor's chest, or at least, as much evidence as you need when you're a king-to-be. Instead, of course, the current king didn't notice anything unusual and let the chancellor wander off to set some other very predictable trap.

First, though, we need to continue the whole pregnancy subplot. It looks like Bianca is going into labor, which means that I get to wander around and be useless until the plot moves forward. This whole thing feels weirdly creepy and normative, with Bianca not seeming to care about anything except giving me a baby. It's a very narrow, sanitized view of childbirth, and the best thing I can say about it is that at least we're moving on from this plot point soon. The weirdest part is where Bianca asks you to praise her for...giving birth good? And you can answer "yes" or "no"...for some reason. I said yes, because, I mean, I'm not a monster. This whole thing is fucking bizarre.

In any case, she ends up having twins, a boy and a girl. I decide to name them after my own characters, so now we have baby SAMMY and baby LAMIRA. Now it's time for everyone to get hammered in celebration of my becoming king! Just, the whole kingdom pretty much, it seems like. So that's a very good idea and nothing could go wrong, except it does. After a good amount of wandering around trying to find the fucking plot, I finally ended up giving in and finding out that you have to SEARCH UNDER YOUR BED. I have no idea how long it would've taken me to figure that out on my own. Once we do that, we find the midwife hiding there with the babies, and she explains that Bianca has been kidnapped. Because of fucking course. In order to find out what to do next, I'm left to wander around the castle, so of course I just look up what to do next. If we poke around in the chancellor's room, we can find a pair of flying shoes. I'm pretty sure we went through this exact same process in Dragon Quest 4, and sure enough, if we go outside and use the flying shoes, they take us somewhere else.

There's a convenient place to rest in this new location, and then, further up, a tower for us to climb. This dungeon turns out to be kind of a pain in the ass. There's quite a few more traps here, in the form of flamethrowers that will activate when you walk past them, taking off a huge chunk of your health and possibly even killing you outright. To get past them all you have to push rocks in front of them. You can also be cursed, which causes you to take damage when walking around, but can't be cured by the Antidote spell. So that's fantastic. Regardless, I make my way up the tower and find the chancellor, who was apparently immediately betrayed by the monsters he was plotting with, and dies. What an absolute piece of garbage.

When we reach the top of the tower, we fight a boss called "Orc Lv. 20", which is very odd because enemies do not typically display their levels in their names. I have no idea what to make of this. He's pretty easy to kill. After that we fight "Wyvern Lv. 35", who uses some heavy damage spells, but is also not that hard to kill. With those two...weirdly generic bosses out of the way, we can fight the dungeon boss proper, a horse monster named Jahmi. Did we see this guy before? I can't remember. Anyway, he also has powerful multi-hit spells, and in addition we only do 1 damage at first. After a few turns, Bianca destroys Jahmi's shield, which she can do because she has the blood of the legendary hero. So, uh...yeah, the whole awkward pregnancy plot is starting to come into focus. I'm not happy about this, but it's about what I figured.

Once we beat Jahmi, he kinda turns both of us to stone, to prevent the legendary hero from being born. Joke's on him, I guess. Well, he's dead, but we're still stuck. A couple guys wander in to loot the tower, and steal both of our en-statued bodies. They sell me to some random guy, and keep Bianca. And then I get dropped in this guy's yard.

And then I just kinda chill there for eight years, apparently fully conscious.

So that sucks.

Apparently, many years after I was turned to stone, some bad stuff is going down, because monsters show up and kidnap this guy's kid. He takes his anger out on me, who is, I remind you, still a statue. I'll grant you, he's having a bad day, but I think I'm kinda the one with the short end of the stick here. Do you have any idea how long eight years is? I can't even ask him to put on a movie for me every once in a while, because they haven't been invented, and also I can't talk. Eventually, though, the Granvanian search party finally finds me, including the twins, who are now, well, eight year olds. Surprise surprise, Sammy can use the legendary equipment I'd collected earlier. And Lamira can cast magic, so that's pretty cool. I guess you become a badass at an incredibly young age in this universe.

Soon after, we're given another location to travel on our quest. Bianca is still missing, of course, and I don't even get a few days off to recover from having to stare at a fence for eight consecutive years.

So far, my life has kind of sucked, if I'm being perfectly honest with you.

[mtvswatches]

Wynonna Earp 1x02 Keep the Home Fires Burning

Spoilers disclaimer (please read before sending messages or writing comments.)

Stray thoughts

1) Buffy and Veronica would be so proud of her punning abilities…

2) Well, this guy blew up his own cover rather stupidly…

3) Her quick-tempered nature is going to get her in trouble, isn’t it?

She did exactly the opposite of what Dolls asked her to do. But if this town is anything like Sunnydale – which considering how adamant they were about saying that Wynonna’s uncle died of a heart attack or something even though he’d been FUCKING BEHEADED – they will probably ascribe these shenanigans to a PCP gang, right?  

4) Is this like the Revenant Boss? The Master? Big Bad?

I’m sure I’ll find out soon enough.

5) I’m guessing there will be some sort of connection between this guy (I can’t remember if they mentioned his name already?) and Wynonna, given their conversation at the bar, the fact that he protected her and Waverly, and the fact that they’re both pariahs in their respective communities. Can we talk about the revenant community? Is that PC?

6) Yep, the revenants mentioned “the boss”.

7) “We know who you are and who you rode alongside of.” Is this because he crawled out of the well after Wynonna? Or did he hitch a ride with someone or something else we haven’t seen yet?

8) More backstory, thank you, show, I need it.

DOLLS: The Black Badge was a top-secret branch of the Marshalls founded in the 1900s by Roosevelt…

WYNONNA: Eleanor?

DOLLS: Teddy – to eradicate the paranormal forces suddenly blossoming on North American soil…

WYNONNA: Do you have a flamethrower? 'Cause a flamethrower is at least fun.

DOLLS: …working with your grandfather actually, Edwin Earp, to handle things up here.

WYNONNA: Hmm yeah. A one-year wonder. Family legend has it Eddie was only the heir for like 11 months, but came real close to sending all 77 of Wyatt's kills back to Hell.

So, if I got this right, when each heir turns 27, all the revenants killed by the prior heir come back to Earth, so that means they have to kill all of those plus the ones who hadn’t been killed by the previous heir, right? A ton of revenants, basically.

9) Yep. That’s Sunnydale.

10) This Boss Man doesn’t look like the one before…

So…

At least I now know that the cool revenant’s name is Hank. 

11) Okay…

BOSS: And the Earps?

HANK: It is just a matter of time before they figure out who I really am and what I did to their great-great-granddaddy.

A few things about their convo. Hank is clearly an outcast. He’s not respected among the revenants because of his connection to the Earps and because he’s not a revenant - he seems to be something else, and he won’t be accepted by the Earps if they learn what he did to their family. I always find this type of characters incredibly interesting, the ones who walk the grey moral line and who will typically do whatever is more beneficial for themselves in order to survive. It’s always interesting to see their inner struggles with morality and good/evil, and I wonder if Hank will be one of these characters. And who does he want revenge against?

12) This doesn’t feel random…

So, Waverly used to have an “imaginary friend” when she was a kid. Could this mean that her friend wasn’t really imaginary and she has some sort of psychic or supernatural powers?

13) I like Gus 100% more, bless you.

14) Now, this was totally unexpected but super cool!

So, Revenants can’t touch the gun without getting demon epilepsy or something. And I really, really like the way the show gets rid of the bodies – they literally burn down to hell.

15) This lady was totally flirting with Waverly, but what are her intentions?

In the words of Anya Jenkins…

16) I can’t disagree with him, though…

Raise your hand if you love him since Instant Star...

17) I hope she is right, in the long term…

WAVERLY: I got a good feeling about you. And I'm an excellent judge of character.

HANK: Sweetheart you really aren't.

18) She’s also a dork. I’m liking her more and more.

WYNONNA: Regular guns can slow the revheads down, but they will always come back for more until they meet Peacemaker, which only I can handle…

19) Bossman is not playing around…

BOSS: Malcolm kills her uncle, lures the heir back home, and now this? How many times do I got to tell you idiots? Peacemaker can't be touched by revenant hand.

LEVI: But-but we-we just thought…

BOSS: Don't! Ever! Think! I do the thinking for all of us.

20) So they want to hire a “professional” to create a distraction, but the problem is, the payment needs to be human blood… Is the shadowy guy from the beginning of the episode the “professional”? Will this show only ever give me more questions?

21) Hank looks so awkward wearing a hoody. And I’m gonna go ahead and say it. He kind of reminds me of Spike.

22) So, I think “shadow assassins��� are like a special type of revenant? Levi mentions that they can only be activated by a blood sacrifice. I’m guessing this Killer Miller is the shadow guy we saw at the beginning of the episode.

23) Ooh, more scoop on Hank!

LEVI: You were Wyatt Earp's right hand; what would he say if he knew you were joining forces with every man he ever put down?

So, this revenant is disgusted by Hank helping… the revenants? Huh?

24) Okay, so the girls’ mom is not dead but just a deadbeat mom. I’m sure we’ll see her again. And I’m sure there was a reason for her leaving.

25) I didn’t really think he was going to do the blood sacrifice thing. And I didn’t believe he was human either? But I guess I was wrong…

And yeah, his reaction? Don’t tell me you don’t see the similarities…!

26) I kind of thought that the Shadow would end up going after all the revenants listed on Waverly’s notebook instead of going after Waverly… And btw, I guess she really wasn’t a good judge of character after all? Like, Hank didn’t even hesitate to throw that notebook into the hole in order to save himself, he didn’t care that he was going to send the shadow after the wrong target.

27) I knew it.

BOBO: Perfect time to make a hole - for our friend Waverly.

YOUNG WAVERLY: Will this really - make them happy?

BOBO:This will guarantee you all get what you deserve.

WAVERLY: Bobo. The name of my imaginary friend when I was growing up: Bobo! And I'm starting to think that he wasn't so imaginary.

Do you think Bobo could be Boss? Same initial letters… And I guess she didn’t have supernatural powers, after all, she was just tricked by a revenant.

28) I really love Waverly’s attitude. She doesn’t have any powers so far, but that doesn’t stop her from getting ready to fight back…

29) Well, that was easy… Cool. But disappointingly easy.

I mean, he was kind of scary, but in the end, he wasn’t really a threat? Unless he can’t be really killed off and he’ll come back every time someone does a blood sacrifice?

30) You really need to be a badass in order to be threatening while wearing plaid flannel PJ bottoms and furry sleepers…

Remind you of anyone?

31) “You’re just a girl” I mean, the references must be intentional, right?

32) That was cool, Waverly!

33) What is he doing, though? And what is he?

WAVERLY: Yeah, well, most of my stolen stuff was returned, OK? And he's just one of those crazy Wyatt fans. No, he's definitely one of the good guys.

WYNONNA: Everything in my body tells me he's one of the bad boys. My entire body.

34) Yep, Hank will do whatever he has to in order to survive…

At least for now, anyway.

35) Why is his back burning like embers?

36) And what exactly is their plan? What is “the dig”?

BOSS: I swear to you, our salvation lies not in thieving Peacemaker, or defeating the heir, - but in the dig! We stick to the plan! We stay on course. We let the Seven deal with the heir while the rest of us work, as we've been working for 15 years, towards one common goal: freedom! 

He got a little William Wallace there, didn’t he?

37) So, this is what Henry’s revenge is all about…

BOSS: I'm a man of my word, Henry. I can give her to you. The woman that changed you.

HANK: Well then, Bobo, we are officially in business.

And yes, Bobo was Boss. Manipulating a little girl? That’s really low, even for a revenant.

38) I’m getting very invested in this story, really. I have to thank you for suggesting I should watch this show! I really love the pacing in the episodes I’ve seen so far. It’s really hard not to comment on every scene because it seems all of them are relevant to the plot, there are no filler scenes, you know? And I really hope the episodes continue to be arc-driven instead of the “monster-of-the-week” type. I can’t wait to see the rest!

39) Hope you enjoyed my recap, and, as usual, if you’ve got this far, thank you for reading! If you enjoy my recaps and my blog, please consider supporting it on ko-fi.Thanks!

[mezzopurrloin]

Mezzo Plays Final Fantasy X: Part 10

Tidus awakens in a mysterious oasis.

No one else is around.

I don't think we're in Macalania anymore, Toto.

Yes, a giant bird is just what we need right now. I tried to flee from it, but to no avail.

Thankfully Auron and Lulu showed up to help. Together, they take it down.

They still have no clue where they are, or where anyone else is.

It doesn't take long to find Wakka hanging out under a makeshift tent.

These Al Bhed Potions restore 1000 HP to the whole party and cure poison, petrification, and silence, but can only be used by Rikku. They'd be pretty handy if she was here.

We find Kimahri trying to walk up a sand dune.

You just can't have a desert without giant sandworms, can you? This thing has a staggeringly high 45,000 HP, more than even the bosses we've fought up to this point.

It can also swallow an ally whole, removing them from combat until it regurgitates them.

After finding Rikku, all the guardians are together, but there's still no sign of Yuna. And she actually knows where this is. She has something to say, but everyone has to promise to keep it secret.

This prompts a big "Hmm?" from Wakka.

Rikku explains that this is Bikanel Island, and there's a secret Al Bhed base called Home nearby. Why it's "Home" instead of "Rusa" I don't know. Anyway, Rikku thinks that Yuna will be there, so the guardians head in that direction.

I ran into another sandworm on the way. I decided to give it a taste of Auron's Shooting Star, and this time got all the inputs right.

See ya, loser.

A Cactuar! This cute little cactus thing can be quite dangerous. It's known for its 1000 Needles attack, which deals exactly 1000 damage. Sadly, this one ran away before I could do anything to it.

We also ran into these plant things lurking in sand pits. Their Seed Burst causes confusion, which makes a character attack themself or their allies at random. Like with sleep, a good smack will set them right.

Home is just over the next hill, but things don't look good.

A dying Al Bhed near the entrance says who is responsible for the attack.

This is Cid, Rikku's father, Yuna's uncle, and leader of the Al Bhed. He's trying to gather the survivors and lead them to safety. Almost every Final Fantasy game has a Cid, and they're usually connected to airships. This one is too; we'll get into that later.

The guardians have to fend off more fiends summoned by Guado guards inside. An alarm is constantly blaring "Ajanouha ihtan!" ("Everyone under!" in Al Bhed) and it sounds kind of like "I'm annoying, huh?" And yes, yes you are.

These dual chimeras are particularly dangerous, since fighting one on its own was tough enough in Macalania. The Guado guard isn't helping, either.

Rikku explains that the summoners are held in the Summoners' Sanctum.

Wakka guesses (correctly) that the Al Bhed have been kidnapping summoners, explaining the disappearances. He seems to understand why, though. Tidus sure doesn't. Don't summoners have guardians to protect them?

Inside the sanctum, Dona and Isaaru are present, but Yuna isn't. They are about to perform a sending for the Al Bhed that died protecting them. The Al Bhed believed that summoners shouldn't have to do their pilgrimage. Tidus is still confused, leaving Rikku to finally explain...

Whoops. When Rikku said "sacrifice" earlier, she was being a little more literal than Tidus thought. And yes, everyone else knew. No one wanted to bring up the subject to him.

Tidus thinks of all the things he told Yuna, about how they would go to Zanarkand together, of things she would do after she beat Sin, and all she could do was smile. He flashes back to the time in Luca when they were talking together.

"I learned to practice smiling when I'm sad, you know?"

"I want my journey to be full of laughter."

Okay, so I've tried to avoid spoilers, but this one's kind of out of the bag. There is a sequel to this game, Final Fantasy X-2, and it has Yuna in the starring role. So no, she is not actually going to die at the end of her journey. As for what actually happens, well, you'll just have to wait and see.

We can't angst for too long, though. We've got to get going.

We also get this great moment of Cid suplexing Tidus after he tells him to find Yuna again. He sure isn't going to let his niece die on some pilgrimage either. Once everyone's on board, they activate the engines.

It's an airship! It takes to the skies.

Cid doesn't really know how it works, but it flies, and that's the important part. He and Rikku's brother pause a moment, then they sing the Hymn of the Fayth together. Rikku explains: They're going to blow up their Home.

Home is gone, and the attackers with it.

The next step is finding Yuna. Cid thinks he can use the scanning device to search for her, but it will take time.

In the mean time, Tidus can explore the airship. A number of friendly travelers are also on board, including many Al Bhed, Rin, the Al Bhed Psyches, Dona, and Isaaru and his brothers.

Back on the bridge, Cid and Auron are bickering about Yuna. They're interrupted by Rikku's brother, who has found her.

He isn't dead! Seymour surprise! (Actually he is, but it's complicated.)

Lulu knows the location, and it's not gonna be easy to reach. Not that that will stop Cid, of course.

The red carpet has teeth. This is Evrae, the guardian wyrm of Bevelle, and the guardians will need to defeat it before making their approach.

Rin offers to sell some supplies, but yes, they still have to pay. He's confident that they can achieve victory.

This boss is fought on the deck of the airship. Tidus and Rikku have trigger commands to tell Cid to move closer or further away from it as needed, but it takes him a few turns to respond.

Its poison breath is quite deadly. This hits the whole party and causes poison that deals further damage each turn. Rikku's Al Bhed Potions are great for patching everyone up after that. Since there's no Yuna, she has to take over as main healer. It also has a petrifying gaze which again, Al Bhed Potions can cure.

When further away, you can't attack it directly except with Wakka. Magic technically works, but it has high magic defense and resistance to all elements.

And if you can move the ship away in time, its poison breath dissipates harmlessly into the air. It's a little tricky, but not too bad to handle.

Until that happens. Now you have to deal with it using attacks much more frequently, and if you stay far from it, it can use a sweeping attack to close the distance. It's still defeatable, but this is where things get painful.

Take that, you bastard.

Once it dies, the party flies toward Bevelle.

There it is, the greatest city in Spira.

Seymour is walking Yuna to the altar when...

The airship arrives. It launches a pair of grappling hooks into the ground.

Guardians to the rescue!

You now have to fight off many waves of warrior monks. Some have rifles, others have flamethrowers, and there are a few machina weapons too.

Tidus learned a new Overdrive here: Slice & Dice, a series of dash slashes.

Eventually, the party is stopped by Kinoc and his soldiers.

Yuna attempts the sending, but is halted by Maester Mika.

Mika: "Stop! Do you not value your friends' lives? Your actions determine their fate. Protect them...or throw them away. The choice is yours."

Seymour: "Kill them."

Yuna runs to the nearest ledge.

Seymour orders the soldiers to stop.

Yuna tells her guardians to leave her...

...then plummets off the side of the building.

She is safe, and her guardians are able to get away in the chaos.

They know where she's going, too.

Wakka is stunned to find that there are machina inside the temple. Seems Yevon doesn't exactly follow its own teachings.

This Cloister of Trials is themed around paths of light that you can ride platforms on. Bevelle Spheres are used to activate the platforms and create new paths. It can be a little tricky because of the camera angles, but this maze isn't that hard to figure out.

It's required to get the Destruction Sphere treasure in this one, since you can't return here later.

Tidus decides "you can stuff your taboos" and tries to open the door to the Chamber of the Fayth himself. It doesn't work, until Kimahri helps out.

This is the fayth, and the true form of the mysterious child we've been seeing. A human soul, imprisoned in stone.

Yuna prays to it, and then it enters her body and collapses.

As Tidus carries her out, he finds Kinoc and the soldiers waiting. They are to stand trial for their crimes.

But not before naming the aeon first. This guy is common to nearly all Final Fantasies, and his name is usually Bahamut. This name was a suggestion from Silent. Yes, it is just "Dragon" backwards.

Here is the fourth maester of Yevon, Maester Kelk Ronso. He and the other three maesters abdicate Yuna's trial. He accuses her of inflicting grave injury upon Maester Seymour, and conspiring with the Al Bhed.

Yuna offers her rebuttal.

She explains that Seymour killed his father.

Yuna says that she should perform the sending for him. Mika just laughs.

After all, the maesters claim, the dead make better rulers than the living. Spira is truly ruled by death. Resisting its power is futile.

Yuna and her guardians are deemed guilty.

Well now what?

Tidus and Auron talk about what Mika said to pass the time. Everything in Spira revolves around people dying. Summoners kill Sin, and die by doing so. Guardians die for their summoners. The fayth are the souls of the dead. The only thing reborn is Sin, and that is so it may kill again.

Kinoc comes to their cell, and says their sentence is to be decided.

They are sent to the Via Purifico, a system of tunnels under the city.

But supposedly, there is an escape somewhere. Seymour decides to watch the exit, just in case.

Yuna is lost somewhere within the maze. There are some fiends here too, giving her a chance to try out that new aeon.

This dragon has quite the regal air to him. He's a league above the other aeons we have, with stronger stats. He has no elemental affinity, but can cast spells of all elements, including the third tier spells Firaga, Thundaga, Blizzaga, and Waterga. His special is Impulse, an energy pulse that hits everything on the field.

And his Overdrive is something to behold.

This deals out annihilation to everything in sight.

Lulu can be found in the tunnels, so that Yuna doesn't have to fight alone.

And Auron shows up soon after.

Isaaru was brought here by Maester Kinoc, who told him to "deal with the traitors". He didn't realize it's Yuna he'd be fighting. However, he won't back down now.

This is an aeon duel similar to the ones we've had with Belgemine, but with much higher stakes. He opens up with a Grand Summon on his first aeon. If you check the little bar at the top, you can find his aeons have their own unique names.

I had Romanov Shield his Hellfire, then retaliate with her ice magic. He was soon reduced to ash.

Time for round two.

Kaminari had to endure an Energy Ray, but then was able to retaliate with the hammer of Thor, finishing this one off.

And now he gets serious. Spathi here will stand imposingly, doing nothing but charging his Overdrive for 5 turns. Once that's done, it's Mega Flare time. Shield helped Amon survive the Mega Flares, and he could heal himself with Fire as he slowly whittled down the dragon's HP.

Once all of Isaaru's aeons are defeated, he surrenders.

Meanwhile, over in the underwater section...

These three have to fight off some aquatic fiends in a large tunnel. They're not too difficult, but can take a while to defeat due to being heavily armored.

And then Evrae appears again. This is actually just the zombified corpse of the guardian wyrm, but it's still dangerous.

Since it's a zombie, healing effects deal damage to it. This means that tossing a Phoenix Down on it will take out half its HP, and then a second one will take out the other half for a ridiculously easy battle.

Everyone's back out, safe and sound. I'm not exactly sure how Kimahri got free, but apparently he did.

Oh look, it's this creep again.

He had Kinoc killed too. I'm not exactly sure why Kinoc is a lifeless corpse rather than an unsent soul like Mika or Seymour.

Seymour claims that he has relased him from his own pain, fear, and paranoia, and now only sleeps eternally.

This is what he needs Yuna for. He asks her to come with him to Zanarkand, so that he might become Sin and save Spira from its own sorrow by ending all life.

Tidus just says he's totally nuts.

Kimahri makes a similar point. Seymour just considers it unpleasant. Then, he absorbs the souls of Kinoc and his guards...

Kimahri offers to stand guard while the others escape. They initially flee, but then realize they can't leave Kimahri behind.

We have to fight this idiot again, and he's got some new tricks up his sleeve. The little claw thing floating beside him is called the Mortibody, and it supports his attacks.

I gave him the grand opening with a Grand Summon. He then used his Banish special to unsummon Nogard, ensuring that we can't really use aeons for anything else here. The Mortibody can take damage, but can't be killed as it will absorb HP from Seymour if its own runs out.

His Break spell causes petrification, then the Mortibody follows up with Shattering Claw. If it hits a petrified character, it shatters them to bits, but it doesn't deal much damage to flesh.

Lucky for us, we've got a few more spells of our own.

Lulu's Bio spell inflicts poison which deals damage every turn until death. It doesn't seem like much, but the damage can rack up, and it's based on the enemy's max HP too.

Yuna learned Reflect, which bounces spells back toward the enemy. This is a double-edged sword of sorts, as healing and buff spells will be reflected too. Still, it nullified pretty much all of Seymour's attacks once it was on the whole party.

At lower HP, Seymour broke out another new spell called Flare. Here he is getting it reflected into himself like an idiot. This looks like a fire spell, but actually deals non-elemental damage. Maybe it's just too hot for fire resistance?

Tidus finished him off with a Slice & Dice, and he was done for.

"We escaped with our skins intact, but Yuna lost something. I could already tell, her faith was shaken. Yevon had betrayed her. I felt like I should do or say something -- anything... But nothing came. I was just as lost as she was. And then..."

[bewarecreepercomics]

Beware the Creeper #2

I’m into this cover. Our hero, front and center, bright against the muted colors of the background. Hostile gazes from all angles any or all of which might belong to the newly introduced Proteus. Heck yeah.

Little bit of a color whoopsie on the boots, but that wasn’t uncommon on older comics. Funnily enough, my copy of the Steve Ditko Creeper Collection doesn’t fix this, though it does fix some other color mistakes.

Our comic opens with a cute bit of meta: credits on the title card. Looks like the station is doing a little report on the Creeper. Jack seems pretty unconcerned by this, considering it could spell the end of yet another career, and his personal freedom.

You just keep living your life carefree and easy there Jack. It’s not going to come back to bite you in thirty seconds, I promise. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

I love the look on his face here. “Do I really sound like that?” Also, he’s doing the hand thing. Take a shot.

Geez dude, I know he was talking shit, but that newscaster does not deserve what is about to happen to him. By the way, all of you are standing way to close to this frankly gigantic grenade. Thing is about as big as a real pineapple.

I goddamn told you so. Also, that newscaster’s body must have been made of steel-he’s dead, sure, bit he’s still intact.

As you can imagine, this is a pretty bad turn for our Jack. Creeper is already wanted by the cops for the crimes of vigilantism, assault, and indecent exposure, now they’re just going to add murder to that rap sheet. And who would believe that this was a frame up? Certainly not Jacks boss, who is even more gung ho to get that guy than usual.

Even though that’s still not a part of his job. I can’t stress this enough.

The story on who the Creeper really is was dead wrong of course. Some simplistic but sensational tale of him being a shill for some illegal gambling mogul named ‘Legs’ Larson. What is it about gangsters being named after body parts?  

It’s the part of the body they like to break most, isn’t it? Just call me ‘Hearts’ Mackenzie then.

Anyway, Jack has to rush off in search of evidence, because he’s somehow completely uninjured from the explosion mere hours ago, and he definitely doesn’t need to sleep or anything, ever. But before he can even make it out of the building, he is faced with yet another bombshell:

Ambushed! Turns out it’s just a publicity stunt though. Vera’s non-feelings for our hero haven’t changed in the least. In revenge for this, Jack locks her in a broom closet and goes on his way.

True Love, everybody!

Once free of the dame, he heads straight to Larson’s place. You know, for the one not named ‘Legs’, Jack sure does a lot of legwork. Larson’s place is a huge mansion, with loads of people coming and going, and a whole group of bodyguards at the gate. How is it that the cops can’t get any evidence to put this guy away? He is not subtle.

I mean, this is all set up right in the freaking living room, has no one thought to sneak up to the window with a camera or something? Jack smoked all the guards by himself, and the cops can’t? No one in this joint is paying attention!

Case in point:

Lol.

Yeah, he just wanders through the whole mansion, wearing the brightest colors on the spectrum and absolutely everybody failed their perception check.

He doesn’t even try to sneak up on Larson, just busts into his office, a-punching away. Then this guy(?) shows up.

I’d like to point out that, up to this point, Larson had said nothing at all that could be counted as a betrayal, or even as a lead-up to a betrayal. This unfinished theater mask just really wanted to shoot somebody.

Proteus is both a really good shot, and a really bad shot. Like, he hit that guy, even though Creeper was standing in front of him, with his back to the gun. But then, he missed Creeper, who was standing in front of that guy, with his back to the gun! 

To be fair though, Creeper flubs as well, allowing Proteus to escape.

Well, Larson initially wasn’t going to betray his boss, but in lieu of recent events: Fuck that guy.

Welp, a man has died. Let’s treat that with the respect that only Silver Age dialogue can give us!

I’m not kidding, this is the very next panel.

Continuing in true Creeper form, he busts out of there and breaks up the party, as conspicuously as possible, causing a panic at the party, and a rush into the streets. In order to blend in, Creeper switches himself back to Jack and leaves...

...Still as conspicuous as possible. Seriously Jack, try harder.

Back at the office, Jack gets some bad news:

Yup, his sweetheart is looking for him. Oh the romance.

Going through that file he was given (instead of, you know, turning it over to the cops, whose job this actually is) Jack finds dirt on most of the rackets in town, and plenty of people to ask about this Proteus fellow. Not bothering to rest again, Creeper scales a building, and gets spotted, because lemon yellow doesn’t blend with concrete, you guys.

But while Creeper is getting the cops called on his barely covered ass yet again, He ambushes a nameless fellow who does his level best not to become a stooly, but ultimately fails under the Creeper’s superior interrogation technique...

GEEZ DUDE, maybe chill with that just a little bit? 

This is like the only person in these comics that the cops actually save, because Creeper tosses him back into the building when they show up, so that he can escape for himself. Which e does by turning back into Jack just before the police spot him, and playing dumb. Again.

Take another shot.

Jack finally gets back to his boss, who is more ornery than ever. Though he is always gung-ho where the Creeper is concerned Bill seems angrily unconcerned with the cliff notes version of the file Jack has left on his desk, and wants to know where the real files are, to avoid a libel case. Falling prey to the arrogance of the braggart, he goes ahead and tells Bill; the files are at his apartment.

It takes him a moment too long to realize that his boss was acting a bit out of sorts, and makes a dash for Bills apartment, where even now, there is a situation.

New boss, same as the old boss, right? Both of them talk to damn much.

Well, Jack may have been slow of thought, but his legs are fast, so he arrives before Bill can shoot Bill.

BILL!BILL!BILL!

Nevermind. Jack get’s his butt kicked. Who’s surprised? But during the fight we find out that Bad Bill has a face like clay; malleable, and difficult to harm. Jack does manage to cause Bad Bill enough trouble to force him to flee, but Jack is unable to follow. He instead stays behind, to free Less Bad Bill, and then goes on his to his own apartment.

While he does not find Bad Bill at his apartment, he does run across Vera, who he wastes no time insulting. But despite earlier reports of her wrath, Vera just brushes him off, citing a meeting with her mother, and carting a golfing bag along with her.

And then Jack goes and makes me very uncomfortable.

You better have a good explanation for this, Jack.

Turns out he does. The man did used to be a reporter after all, and he knows a thing or two about his coworkers. Vera is an orphan, and she doesn’t enjoy any sports. 

Still uncomfortable.

This knocks the wig off Worse Vera, who is actually Bad Bill, who is actually Proteus, if this wasn’t clear yet. Also, that golfing bag is actually a flamethrower, which is a gimmick I absolutely must remember next time I play a tabletop RPG.

Jack dodges the flames, but the entire building itself fails its dexterity check, and goes right up.

Jack decides to go full Creeper to escape from the flames. Because the wool of a voluminous sheepskin rug is naturally fire resistant. And the chase is on!

Which brings us to the obligatory ass shot!

And eventually leads us to that great staple of comic books: The Rooftop Battle! It’s actually a rather fun sequence, with a bit of a tongue in cheek in-joke.

Cute.

But after a pitched Rooftop Battle, Proteus falls through the collapsing building, into the raging inferno below.

He is so dead, you guys. That is a thing that kills people. And even though Proteus was also a thing that killed people, Creeper is surprisingly sympathetic.

Cool story, hey remember that guy he murdered right in front of you? I sure do.

Also? Burning building. Better get off of there. 

Hey, can anybody tell me if this actually works? This firemen’s net thing? You see it in all kinds of older media, but was it actually a thing?

Though his apartment, and the files are now gone, Jacks life hasn’t changed much. His boss still wants the Creeper’s head on a plate, Jack still climbs out windows to escape from Vera, and the bad guy still isn’t as dead as previously assumed.

Dun Dun Dunnnn!

And so our comic ends, with the Creeper having made a grand enemy. This is the beginning of the overarching story of the mini-series continued in Beware the Creeper # 3, coming soon!

[writerofcreativity]

The Twelve Zodiac (chapter 17)

"You ladies find anything?" Both Tatsumi brothers regrouped with the two women who are standing in front of the portrait that seems suspicious.

"Nothing. You said there's a blood bath and I don't see anyone bleeding." Ryoka said placed both hands on her hips.

The warrior of the Chicken is hard to read from time to time... "it's probably hasn't begun yet, although Fredrick says that it starts at 9:00 and right now it's 9:31." Nagayuki checked his phone to look at the time and puts it back into his pocket.

"What about you two? Other than money, you must have found something interesting." Misaki asked still staring at the portrait.

The only thing that they found interesting are the gold bars, valuable jewels, thick stacks of money, and other priceless items that can be exchange for cash are in a safe although to open it, they need the code which they didn't had the chance to get.

"Nope, nothing caught my eye." Takeyasu spoke "although, there was a lot of shuffling going on. It's safe to assume that the fighters are getting ready to fight." He added.

"We'll be damn lucky if we get front row seats to see it." Nagayuki crossed his arms to his chest and finally noticed Misaki still staring at the painting on the wall on his right. "Sharyu, seems like you're fond of that painting." He looked at it and so did the other two.

"This painting is beautiful but I can't helped but feel as if something's wrong with it." She said sensed a dark presence inside the picture despite it appearing innocent.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, we are sorry for delaying the Blood Bath, we needed to make sure all the preparations are complete. In a line, enter downstairs and the show will begin." A voice spoke through an intercom.

All the guests who wanted to see the show begins to walk towards an entrance that will lead them downstairs in a line. Ryoka, Misaki, Takeyasu and Nagayuki follows suit ignoring the portrait for now but as they turned away, the woman in the painting opened her eyes that began to bleed.

~~~

They entered a large room filled with seats and each seats are filled with people. The four chose to sit in the front row, not because of them wanting to get the best view but wanting to know what's so entertaining about this Blood Bath that seems to excite others.

"Please enjoy the show with your cocktails." A waiter stood beside them with a tray of red cocktails and passed one to each then leaves.

They looked at their cocktails "hard to believe that they'll serve drinks just to enjoy watching the fight." Takeyasu said "well they are the host and we're the guests." Nagayuki said.

Just as they were about to drink their cocktails, they caught scent of the beverages and picked up a metallic smell "either this has metal mixed in it or it's blood." Ryoka spoke puts her drink down "but whose blood is it?" Misaki questioned.

"Although, the main reason why we keep these things is because of their blood. People will pay a lot for amounts and once they drink it, they get special powers." Fredrick's words echoed inside the twin's heads.

"Duodecuple-san told us that drinking blood of Celestial Beasts are dangerous for humans." Misaki puts her glass down on the table.

Soon all the lights shut off but one above the steel cage ring is still on, Fredrick walked onto the center of the ring and bows at the audience "this organization is very happy for all of your support and we will keep our promise to give you all one hell of a show!" He shouted which made the audience cheered loudly.

Two people are brought to the ring by two guards and those two men looked deformed like mutants "we hope that you all enjoy." Fredrick walked out of the ring and once he leaves, the two mutants begins to fight one another, their blood splattering outside of the ring but those who are watching aren't bothered.

The smaller mutant quickly gouged out the big mutant's left eye and tear his throat by biting it, causing more blood to spray out and even splattering on the audience sitting in front. The big mutant dropped onto the floor and died by choking on his blood, ending the match quickly.

"Winner!" Fredrick shouted making some of the audience cheer while some are upset because they had made a bet and lost their money.

"Hm, ore-sama had thought that the big guy would win instead of the little one. Luckily I didn't make that call." Nagayuki spoke.

"Ha! I thought the same thing!" Takeyasu laughed.

Misaki calmly takes off her glasses and use a napkin on the table, and wipes the blood that splattered on her lenses "this is just like Mixed Martial Arts except more violence." She said "it's hard to believe that someone like you can stay calm when you witnessed a murder." Ryoka looked at her "well, I had been on battlefields that claimed a lot of lives and I have to cope with them." She said puts her glasses back on once they are free from blood.

"So what you're saying that you have to deal with the fact that you hit me?" Nagayuki questioned.

"Well, I can deal with that because it's basically knocking some common sense into you or others who needs it." Misaki smiled.

"Zodiacs!"

Three Celestial Beasts pushes their way through the audience once they broke free of their chains that held them back.

"Damn! I don't have a weapon to fight!" Ryoka shouted.

"Don't worry, Niwatori-san. There are just three of them and we can handle them." Misaki reassures, getting up from her chair.

Takeyasu grinned "finally we get to fight." He immediately stands up and knocked his chair down.

"Well, since Rat boy and the others are having fun, we should do the same." Nagayuki also smiled, getting up from his chair.

The audience begins to panic upon seeing Celestial Beasts running without any restraints and they quickly rushed towards the exit. The Celestial Beast that resembled like a cobra flung itself towards Misaki, she jumped high into the air and over the beast "sorry but it's my job to eliminate you." She said grabbing its tail, using her strength and throws it at the other side of the wall but spikes pops out of the tail, piercing her hands and forced her to let go.

Nagayuki is fighting a Celestial Beast that looked like an overgrown praying mantis that has blades for hands, it swings its blades at him relentlessly. "Ore-sama won't be killed by bugs that easily." He felt as if he's repeating himself back when he fought the pill bugs. The elder Tatsumi uses his ice thrower and fires but the praying mantis is fast, the people who were trying to escape got frozen instead, not that he cares.

"Burn mothafucker!" Takeyasu laughed maniacally as he uses his flamethrower at a giant crab celestial beast.

"Shit, things are getting out of control. Get the Hell Boss immediately!" Fredrick ordered a man beside him. That man quickly responded but before he can go, a giant bat crashed through from the ceiling and landed on both men "Where the Hell did this thing come from?" Fredrick tries to get up but his head got stepped on by Tsugiyoshi who jumped down from the ceiling.

The boy looked down "oh, sorry mister." He apologised although isn't sincere. He looked at his surroundings, as expected, people are running from the chaos that is happening, and his teammates are fighting.

"Nezumi-kun!" Misaki called him, noticed he entered.

He greeted her by putting his hand up "I brought Niwatori's Cockscomb." He holds the weapon.

The green haired woman quickly ran towards him and takes her weapon, although didn't join the battle because they are being handled.

"Nezumi-kun, I only see three Celestial Beasts. I thought there would be a lot more than that." Usagi landed next to him with the others who are also surprised to see little beasts roaming around.

"Rat boy! I thought you said there'll be a big haul!" Nagayuki shouted dodging the blades swinging at him.

True, he did say that. He had saw an army of Celestial Beasts that should be attacking them at this very moment but there are three present. Did he made a mistake in picking his path?

"Now is not the time to stay in your thoughts. First we need to handle this situation." Eiji informed "perhaps half of us can search for the remaining beasts that are hiding from us." He suggested.

Tsugiyoshi nodded and sent Toshiko, Ryoka, Michio, Sumihiko, Yoshimi, and Eiji to scout the building to find those creatures. They agreed and began their search.

[lacommunarde]

Words of Love - DC Coldwave Fic - The Flash/Legends of Tomorrow verse

This whole soulmate thing was a sonovabitch. It was supposed to be so romantic, so the gossipy girls on his bus ride always said. But see, it wasn’t like the books always said. Love at first sight hardly ever happened, and when it did, it was more likely to be lust at first hard on. And if it was love at first sight, what’s to stop them from beating a person solid. Falling in love so fast was hardly ever smart. At least so Len thought, sitting on the bus home from work behind two twenty-somethings slightly older than him sucking at each other in a way that was sure to leave a dozen marks come morning.

‘Sides, what if someone never did fall in love? With anybody? And by someone he meant himself. He wasn’t ever gonna be his mom, falling head over with his dad. The words on your flesh being what the person said that makes you realize you’re in love in them, supposedly wherever it was they were going to touch a person next but everyone knew that was BS. Love was something that made people idiots and narrowed one’s field of vision to one’s one and only (there must have been some people with more than one soulmate, he would bet money he didn’t have on it), and to him, there was little differentiating it from a thing one caught that lowered one’s defenses.

And yet, there the words were, written on his back and shoulders, across his chest and his stomach, and faintly up his face. “Lenny, what are you…? Why’s the place on fire? Oh… oh shit. Snart, why are you saving me? I fucked up,” written on his chest, stomach and one shoulder. “Nice… Boss, you didn’t have to search the world to get me the best present ever. You want me back in, I’m in,” written on his other arm right along his elbow, and very faint writing on his forehead and cheek with was so faint he couldn’t read it, just scrawl in blueish scars tissue.

Which was definitely interesting to say the least, but not exactly what he’d call a normal love confession. And it sounded like he jumped into a burning building to save someone, which, yeah, no, he couldn’t see himself doing ever. Then, he must break up with them and gotten back together, because that was the only way he’d have multiple soulmate marks, which the gossips on the bus said was terribly romantic. They seemed to have an investment in him finding his soulmate too for some reason known only to them. One of these days he was gonna invest in a boom box to drown of their interest and put on some good rap music.

He doubted he’d be interested in the whole love thing, particularly with the whole, falling out of love and back into it on and off thing.

--

Years later, a job had gone south due to a mob fight having gone down on that very spot and the shoot-out having pierced several gas tanks – which thank Central, goddamn corrupt company and mob run city – and if anyone thought the job was still on after that, they had another thing coming. He looked around for Mick, star distraction and smart enough to handle himself on jobs, unlike so many newer recruits, and couldn’t find him.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw an orange warm glow that spoke of fire – the distraction. Mother fuck. Mick could handle himself except when there was unanticipated fire. Then he focused on nothing but the fire, the rest of the world narrow to just that, so Mick had explained to him, and he’d agreed to keep an eye out for him. If he didn’t, Mick would go up in flames too.

Hell no. He wasn’t living without Mick. Mick was his partner, in crime, but more than that - he trusted Mick around Lisa, and around him and he trusted him enough to tell him things he didn’t even tell Lisa. He needed Mick next to him.

He turned and ran into the building where he had last seen Mick.

Mick was in the center of the fire, staring at it in wonder as the flames were licking his arms back and legs. Len grabbed a tarp, darted through the fire surrounding Mick and draped Mick’s body over his shoulder to get him out of there.

Mick started stirring once they got out of the building and away from the fire. “Lenny, what are you…? Why’s the place on fire?” Shit, Mick was still facing the fire, but at least Len was moving them both away from it and the heat.

“Oh… oh shit!” There was panic in Mick’s voice. Len would deal with that later, once they were far enough away.

Mick tried to push himself away from Len. “Snart, why are you saving me? I fucked up.”

“Stop moving, Mick. Makes carrying you difficult.”

“Why’re you saving me if you’re just going to put a bullet through me? I fucked up a job.”

“The job was off. There was too much gas. And the place was gonna be crawling with cops in just a half hour. I said it over the…” Len’s voice left off, seeing the frayed wire on Mick’s walkie talkie. And then his eyes drifted over the burned flesh.

He was killing the new tech kid who was supposed to check these things.

“I fucked up, boss. Ya should have just left me…” Mick murmured.

“Shh, Mick.” Len put a hand on Mick’s forehead.

Len got them over the hill and into the getaway car. He loaded Mick’s body into the back, still murmuring things about how he fucked up. “Drive,” he ordered the driver, climbing into the car. Mick began whimpering something about it being cold. “To the hospital.” The expression he was giving the driver kept any protests silent if the driver had had any.

Len knew one thing: he didn’t want to lose Mick.

It was only once he had gotten Mick to the hospital and on the ICU bed that he realized what Mick had said in his half-delirious murmuring.

And like the coward he knew he was around any emotion, Len fled.

--

He kept doing jobs without Mick, arranging teams, that sort of thing that he had usually left to Mick, who was better at it, or at least got more competent, less wet-blanket, much less likely to lose their temper people. After one bad incident of the last type, which ended with his gun against the short-tempered person’s head and the short-tempered person on the ground with his brains splatter against the fridge in the lay-low warehouse, Len was cursing himself over his bad luck: Mick was such a good partner and second-in-command, after all. Why he had to go ruin things by falling in love with the man was proof of a malevolent god or maybe karma coming back to bite him in the ass.

He disbanded the team, sent them off with their money to go spend it god knows where and grabbed a beer out of the fridge, before determined that he should probably clean the fridge off, bleach it good and proper, because even with the team having disposed of the body, the fridge still had blood on it. So he scrubbed it with a rag dipped in bleach, kneeling on the concrete as he had when his dad had ordered him to scrub the blood away, lest the cops find it, and allowed himself to take a few deep breaths to try to calm his nerves. It wasn’t as effective as Mick was at it. He got up when it was done, looked at the fridge to make sure it was clean, and then kicked an oil can filled with contraband and woodchips that was next to the slop sink in the warehouse. Then, taking another breath, he took out his blueprints to plan how to best get at a very pretty, much desired diamond that was coming through town.

The following week, he got knocked down in the middle of pulling a job of the moving truck that he was very proud of having planned. When he was able to zoom in on what he done it, and saw that it was a man moving at top speed – interesting to say the least – he determined that if he was not going to be of a job, he was going to have to up his game.

The black market of Central always had such interesting things – one of the perks to living in a city with the most research labs per square mile was that it was always easy to steal stuff from them, particularly as scientists, for the most part, did not seem to understand the purpose of locks. This time was no different. The fence brought him to a flamethrower. “I’m trying to slow things down not speed them up,” he told the guy, but already he knew that he was walking out of there with the flamethrower. He wanted to see Mick’s expression when he gave him the gun so badly it hurt.

“This might be more your speed,” the fence showed him the prettiest, sleekest gun he ever did see.

He walked out of there with both guns and was unsurprised when Mick’s first words on receiving the gun were: “Nice…” then turning to face Len with surprise, “Boss, you didn’t have to search the world to get me the best present ever. You want me back in, I’m in.”

And that was the moment he stopped fighting his renewed love for Mick.

--

A few years after that, after the Waverider, after his long journey among the stars and the timestream, after he finally found his way back to his Mick, he stood there drenched in the blue of the Oculus, Mick got up and embraced him, kissing his forehead and temple and cheek, clinging to him as if he would never let go and whispering sweet nothings into his ear. The only thing Len really caught was, “I love you, man. Don’t you ever do anything that dumb again.”

Len brought his arms up around Mick’s shoulders. “I love you too, Mick.”

[bestfriendforhire]

Children of BFFH, Entry 27

 I yawned and stretched.  Why hadn’t my alarm gone off?  I blinked, grinning as I realized what today was!  Jumping out of bed, I did a basic self-cleaning spell and got dressed.  Then I left my room.

 “Happy birthday to you…” sang Doc immediately, quickly accompanied by my parents.

 “Thank you!” I told them when they finished, struggling to keep my eyes off the presents sitting by our sofa.

 Before I could start begging to open the presents, there was a knock at the door.  “The birthday boy special, as requested.” stated Momma Mila after Dad got the door.

 He thanked her and brought the cart into the room.  Then he started passing out our plates.

 Removing the cloche, I breathed in deeply, enjoying the incredible fragrance of cheesy scrambled eggs, bacon, and chocolatey waffles!  The others had something different, of course, but this was one of my favorites.  I mean, who doesn’t love chocolate for breakfast!?

 The food was gone all too soon, but not soon enough.  Father was taking his sweet time drinking his morning coffee and hadn’t even touched is apple bostock yet.  Catching me staring, he nodded toward the presents and said, “Oh, go ahead.”

 Mom nodded and smiled when I looked at her, so I ran to the pile as they watched.  Doc came over to sit by me, grinning as much as I was.  “Do that one last!” she exclaimed when I reached for the small present on top.

 I shrugged and went for the next one.  “Whoa.  Is this leather!?” I exclaimed, grinning more as I touched the jacket.  The feel of leather was neat, and Crazy couldn’t do anything to it as long as the thread was synthetic.

 “Sure is.” replied Dad, looking amused.  “I knew you had your eye on those jackets a couple weeks ago.”

 “Thank you!” I exclaimed, hugging the jacket to enjoy the feel more.  Then I quickly put it on.  “How do I look?”

 Scrunching her nose, Doc teasingly said, “Doesn’t suit you.”

 I playfully shoved her with my magic, but she absorbed the energy before it landed, grinning at me.  Absorbing a type of energy you could utilize was common among us of fey descent.

 “I think you look perfectly handsome.” insisted Mom.

 “Thank you!” I told her, already moving to open the next present.  “A skateboard!?  Neat!”

 “Emma helped us with the details, since she’s an expert on them.  She’s also offered to give you some lessons, so be sure to thank her.” replied Mom.

 Next, I opened the last one, which was obviously from Doc.  “Curse of the Lich’s Eye? I asked, examining the book’s cover.  “Wow.  This is leather too, isn’t it!?”

 She nodded.  “Might not be my best title, but I tried.  Even if you don’t enjoy the book, you should enjoy the story as a game, right?”

 “There’s a game too!?” I questioned excitedly.

 “Yep.  Momma Mila wrote it for me.” she stated.

 I hugged her.  “You’re the best sister ever!  So… will reading the book be a spoiler for the game, or the other way around?”

 “Both, of course, but there are a couple extras in each to throw you off a bit.” she replied with another grin.

 “I’m reading the book first, so I can prepare my character properly.” I insisted.

 “Just don’t be expecting a terribly long adventure… I mean, I tried, but… I’m not the best.  It’s only a short story.” she told me.

 “I already told you that you’re the best sister I have!” I teased.

 “Yeah-yeah.  The only one.” she replied, smiling again.

 “Thank you, everyone!” I exclaimed, looking forward to showing the others and wondering if they’d play the game with me.

 There was another knock at the door as I spoke, so I jumped up to get it.  “Aunt Kayla!

 “Oooh, looking good, Aspen.” she told me, rubbing her hand along my jacket’s sleeve.  “Wait.  You opened presents without me!?”

 I nodded, unable to stop grinning at her.

 “So cruel!  Guess I should go hide this for next year.” she told me, turning around to walk away.

 Quickly hugging her, I said, “Nooo!”  Luckily, Aunt Rowan was coming down the hall, so I called out “Help, Aunt Rowan!  Aunt Kayla’s trying to get away!”

 “She wouldn’t try to disappoint my favorite nephew on his birthday, would she?” teased Aunt Rowan, crossing her hands to stare at us.

 “Your nephew?  He’s obviously mine.” replied Aunt Kayla, hugging me and lifting me up.  She turned to walk inside with me, using her magic to shut the door.  Luckily, she relented when I tried to counter her.  I could actually overpower in that type of magic already, but she was waaay better with residual energy than any of our immediate family.

 “Sis, help!  She’s stealing my nephew!” exclaimed Aunt Rowan as she shut the door behind her.

 “Everyone, be nice to the birthday boy.” ordered Mom, though she didn’t bother looking up from her food.

 “I’m always nice to my nephew and niece.” insisted Aunt Kayla.  Then she said, “But don’t you, Rowan, and Daphne go cheating on any of the games this morning.”

 “I would never!” exclaimed Doc, pretending to be indignant.  Then she grinned and said, “Except to win.”

 Hiding things from Mom, Doc, and Aunt Rowan was really difficult in games.  Touching anything allowed them to see the past of areas where what they touched had been, so they could see everyone’s cards in card games by concentrating and manipulating their point of view.  The Boss knew ways to counter their magic, but the spell was waaay too massive for me to manage yet.

 “As if you’re not going to cheat at dice when we get to a dice game.” pointed out Aunt Rowan.

 “I have no idea what you mean.” replied Aunt Kayla, grinning at her.

 Within minutes of starting our first board game, people were obviously cheating, but that was just part of how my family played.  We laughed, teased one another, and played games for a couple hours, though I was a little distracted reading Doc’s story between turns.  The more I read, the more I looked forward to playing the video game with everyone!

 Next came VR gaming with Doc and our friends.  First, we did Doc’s game, which was actually a bit scary at a few points, like when Aid’s first character burned alive!  He occasionally forgot that could happen, but this time was from a flamethrower-like trap.  Despite knowing the basic plot, I failed to guide the others to avoid waking the lich, despite taking an entirely different route out of its tomb than from the book.  The fight was intense, but we won in the end.

 The next game was a random dungeon in my favorite generator.  Then we moved on to some Ancient Tribes of Earth after a break for lunch.  I was having a great time, and my friends loved my new jacket, but seeing this year’s presents from them was mind-blowing.  We ended up playing outside for a while instead of going straight back to gaming, just so I could try a few of the gifts out.  I couldn’t even imagine how next year’s birthday could hope to compare with this one.