#but i know that original work gets 0 attention. its much MUCH easier to use a pre-existing character('s name)

[birdkittenn]

it is an *interesting* development to see how my iterator sun and moon designs developed to go form a whole new iterator oc that isnt meant to be them

if i had a nickel every time i turned an au variant of the dca into an oc, id have 2 nickels

[raining-anonymously]

RAIN I MOVED BLOGS SO NOW I DONT HAVE ANY SILLY MUTUALS TO REBLOG MY FANART OF MY NICHE HYPERFIXATIONS AND THEY SIT THERE WITH 0 NOTES WHAT DO I DO ITS LIKE I MOVED TO A NEW NEIGHBORHOOD

genuinely? post a LOT. post all your infodumps and theories and doodles, even if you don’t think they’re that great. tag them with every relevant tag you can cram on there. (it feels obnoxious, but people WANT to see your art. as long as you’re not tagging unrelated stuff like people do on instagram, you’re good.) follow everyone who posts things you think are cool. reblog tons of stuff from other people in the fandom and leave tags/comments. interacting is scary, but listen:

do you know how rare it is these days to find people who say words on here and don’t reblog with no addition or just leave a like? if someone i don’t know leaves nice tags on one of my posts i’m bound to at least check their blog out briefly.

i categorize my fandoms by tag mostly for blacklist convenience, but this also means anyone who enjoys one post i made on the topic can click that tag and see EVERYTHING i’ve posted on it. including reblogged stuff. when other people do that and i see their blog has a lot of recent stuff for whatever i’m into, i’m likely to follow them back. of course, most people don’t follow as liberally as i do (900something people iirc. i don’t know most of the people on my dash haha). and even i don’t click on every blog that interacts with me. so if you don’t get a follow back, don’t be discouraged!

other tips- having a tag for your art or original posts can make it easier for people to find it. i have an art tag, #drawing anonymously, with what i believe is every art piece i’ve put out here. even the ones i don’t like at all. obviously it’s your right as an artist to take down anything you post, but you never know whose day might be made by what you deem your worst works. besides, this gives potential mutuals the ability to find more stuff by you that they’ll then reblog, sharing your work with OTHER potential mutuals. and boom, your network grows.

another thing that helps is joining fandom discord servers. it can be hard to find a good one, but even if you’re not getting much of a reaction, this is a place designed to drop your art, infodumps, writing, theories, what have you. use it. and if some stranger is rude about you sharing your passion, you can simply ignore them or wait for your lovely mutual to go “erm aCTUALLY that’s what this channel is for :/“ on your behalf. and that way you’re exposed to the art and ideas of people who you haven’t seen on tumblr, too!

now, i’m no expert. i’m just a neurodivergent blogger who’s had a single post consisting entirely of screenshots break 1.5K notes. but this is what’s helped me personally get attention (and make friends!!!!!) on here. and hey - i’ve got a TERRIBLY over-the-top tagging system and people still follow me back now and then so i must be doing something right.

[zaph1337]

Monster Hunter Rating 21: Khezu, the Blank Stare

When I reviewed Basarios, I made a joke about how the devs likely gave it human teeth over sharp teeth because the latter might not give children nightmares, but I don’t actually think that the devs ever intended Basarios to be more terrifying than any other monster in the game. This monster, however, is literally the stuff of nightmares, and I’m not misusing “literally” here. This may be the longest review I’ve written yet, so buckle up. Time to get spooky with Khezu!

(How it appears in Monster Hunter 1)

(How it appears in Monster Hunter Rise)

Appearance: I think there’s been a mistake here; last I checked, Capcom wasn’t making Silent Hill games. Seriously, this thing would fit right into that series, and not just ‘cause its phallic neck lends itself well to metaphors. The pale, veiny skin, the leech-like mouth, the complete lack of eyes...Khezu’s unlike any other monster in the series because it’s the only monster that’s meant to be horrifying to look at. It’s got flabby, tattered wings and gecko-like feet, but its main characteristic (other than the head) is its tail, the tip of which can open up into a suction cup that allows Khezu to stick to ceilings.

Obviously, Khezu’s an abomination that came from a really dark place in someone’s mind, but that’s just it: Khezu is a monster that appeared in an MH developer’s nightmare either before or during the production of the first Monster Hunter game, and said developer (I don’t actually remember who) decided to put it in the game. I learned of this from the Twitch streams of a streamer called DuncanCan’tDie, who’s a huge MH fan that’s on great terms with Capcom. Unfortunately, I can’t find any other sources for this claim, but I don’t think he’s lying for a few reasons; firstly, like I said, he’s on great terms with Capcom. He’s friends with some people who work there, and he even has a tattoo designed by someone on the MH team he called “Kaname-san” (who didn’t actually give him the tattoo, but drew the design that a tattoo artist used) and the only person who could go by that name is Kaname Fujioka, the man who literally directed several MH games, including the first one, and who was the art director for Monster Hunter World. So yeah. Duncan and Capcom get along great, and if he was spreading false rumors, they’d probably know about it.

The second reason I believe Duncan about Khezu’s origin is that someone once came into one of his streams (and I was there at the time) and started spouting “lore” about two monsters that looked like they could be related, but actually weren’t. Duncan flat out told this person that what they were claiming wasn’t mentioned anywhere and asked for sources...which the loregiver did not provide. In fact, after Duncan started getting on their case, I don’t think they said a word for the rest of the stream. Duncan believes that this person was just making stuff up to sound like they knew a lot about MH and weren’t aware that he was an MH expert, and I doubt that someone who would call someone out on that would do the same thing, especially if he had a reputation to uphold.

I apologize if I spent a lot of time talking about that, but I didn’t want people getting on my case because they couldn’t find anything to support my claims. But in conclusion, I believe that Khezu truly was born of a nightmare, and that’s awesome. It makes the Silent Hill comparison even more fitting since the enemies in those games are basically projections of the protagonists’ psyches. Disturbing enemies are much more effective if they scare(d) the people who created them, and Khezu is certainly disturbing. Because of that, as well as its ominous origin, I’m giving it a 9/10.

Behavior: Khezu mostly inhabit caves, jungles, and swamps due to the need for their skin to be moisturized, though they usually only leave caves to hunt, which they don’t have to do very often due to the plentiful fat beneath their skin, which also keeps them warm. Their favorite hunting strategy is to ambush their prey from a location usually concealed by darkness, which is made easier by their extendable necks. However, their reliance on darkness, as well as their preference to dwell in caves, has made them completely blind and reliant on their other senses; despite not having visible nostrils or ears, Khezu have great hearing and a very good sense of smell. Back to hunting, while they need to subdue larger prey, smaller ones, like Kelbi, are slowly swallowed whole...which is apparently something you can actually witness in the games, according to TV Tropes (I normally stick to the wiki and what I already know for resources, but I went to the “Monster Hunter / Nightmare Fuel” page while searching for another source for Khezu’s origin as a nightmare). As if this thing needed to be more disturbing, it doesn’t always kill its prey before it tries to swallow it, so the Kelbi you can see it eat is constantly struggling as the Khezu swallows it bottom-first. That’s...that’s messed up. But it gets worse.

Practically every monster in this series isn’t any more intelligent than what we consider a normal animal to be. Aside from Lynians, which are people, the smartest monster I’ve talked about is the Velociprey, which might not be as smart as, say, an irl crow, which is very intelligent by the standards of nonhuman animals. What I’m getting at here is that most of the monsters in this series don’t really take any sadistic pleasure in killing and eating prey; they just do it to survive. But Khezu is different. In several MH games, including Rise, the first time you go on a quest to kill a specific monster, the gameplay is preceded by a cutscene that shows off how powerful or intimidating that monster is (and in Rise’s case, you also get a poem). Here’s Khezu’s intro, and I want you to pay attention to what Khezu does from 0:24-0:30:

That’s right: this thing “looked” right at the monster it was going to eat, and smiled. That isn’t just me anthropomorphizing it, either; I’ve seen what Khezu looks like outside of that cutscene, and even with its mouth closed it has a neutral expression, so it smiling actually means something, and considering the context, it’s obvious what the devs wanted us to take from it: Khezu likes killing. It enjoyed the prospect of swallowing that monster whole while it was still alive and struggling, which means that this is the first monster I’ve talked about that we can definitively say is evil rather than just an animal. Rather fitting for a living nightmare, I would say. And if you thought all that was disturbing, I have some...unfortunate news. I hope you aren’t eating anything right now, ‘cause this next part is just gross.

Y’know how some wasps lay their eggs inside other bugs so the eggs have incubation they can eat when they hatch? Well, uh...Khezu do that, too. And they’re hermaphrodites that, from what I can gather, don’t need to mate, so any adult Khezu is capable of injecting another monster with its “whelps” (not saying that Khezu are always “pregnant,” just saying that any of them can be). And you know the really crazy part? After everything I said about Khezu, there are still people in the MH world that tame them and keep them as pets. Why would you want to have a slimy, flabby, sadistic, parasitoid, 14-to-40-foot abomination as a pet!? God, people are so freaking weird.

EDIT (05/07/2021): My older brother reminded me that I forgot about one of the odder aspects of Khezu; when you enter a fight with a Main Monster, its battle theme plays (don’t know if every monster has a unique theme, but several do, to my knowledge), but Khezu has no theme to speak of. I don’t know if this is true in every game, or even if it was intentional at first, but it’s still both funny and eerie at the same time. There’s no background music until you get in a fight, so if you somehow tick off a Khezu without seeing it, then it can sneak up on you. “But Zaph, the moment a monster enters ‘fight mode,’ it roars! So the Khezu will give away its position!” See, you’d be right about that if it wasn’t for the fact that, according to TV Tropes at least, Khezu’s roar sounds just like wind--howling wind, yes, but wind all the same. I don’t know if there’s any howling wind SFX in the areas where Khezu live, so for all I know you’ll still be able to identify it in a hurry, but just imagine what that’s like in-universe! Imagine that you’re walking around in the Frost Islands or something and hear a chilling wind from out of nowhere. Unless you’re an experienced hunter, you’d likely have no idea if that was a Khezu or not, so you wouldn’t know if it’s too late to run or not, or even if you should run at all. Going back out of universe, the details I just described are very nice touches to a monster that was already horrifying in behavior, so I’m bumping the score here up from the 7 I initially gave it to 8/10.

Abilities: All of the “Flying Wyverns” I’ve talked about so far have had a lot of trouble with the whole “flying” part, and Khezu are no exception; they’re better at it than Diablos and Gravios, but they still need to flap really frantically to stay in the air. They’re great at jumping, though, and their gecko-like feet allow them to scale walls and stick to ceilings, something that their tails also allow them to do. Khezu are Thunder-element monsters capable of discharging electricity in a manner of ways, including shooting balls of it from their mouths and emitting it all around their bodies. Since Khezu like to spend time around water, their attacks are even more dangerous, as everything near them will likely be wet and therefore more conductive. This also applies to Khezu themselves, which may be why they stick their tails onto the ground before discharging electricity; they ground themselves so that they don’t shock themselves. Finally, Khezu saliva is very dangerous; we don’t know if it’s electric or acidic, but anything that gives off smoke when it touches something probably isn’t good for your health, which is why owning a pet Khezu is so dangerous; their drool can literally kill you. 7/10.

Equipment: Most Khezu weapons are as interesting as you’d expect them to be, considering the monster they’re made from. Most of them have a horror aesthetic, like this Great Sword called the Khezu Shock Sword:

I just noticed that the skin is actually stretched over the blade, rather than being what the blade’s attached to. Gross, but I never expected Khezu weapons to look pretty. There are also weapons which emphasize the monster’s electric aspect, like this Gunlance called the Full Voltage:

It still has Silent Hill vibes due to its “rusty hospital” aesthetic, and looking at it long enough reveals little details it inherited from Khezu. Speaking of hospitals, there are a couple of weapons based off of syringes, such as the Khezu Syringe, which is a Light Bowgun, and a Lance from MHFG that’s literally a giant hypodermic needle, but I didn’t want to show those off in case they triggered anyone with needle phobia. The last weapon I’m gonna show will be very familiar to those of us who’ve played the Rise demo a lot: the Insect Glaive known as the Bolt Chamber!

I like the green tube running from the sac between the blade and the shaft of the glaive; according to the Bolt Chamber’s in-game description, it uses that “pulsating device” to steal energy from its targets. If you mentioned that to me before I grabbed its image for this review, I probably would have asked how it did that. If you then pointed out the mouth at the glaive’s end, I would have thanked you for cursing me with the knowledge of its existence. Seriously, I’ve used this thing probably more than 20 times, and until I saw this render, I never noticed that. As for the armor, here’s the Blademaster Khezu Armor from MHGU:

The male armor here is almost identical to the one from Rise--which sadly doesn’t have any pictures on the wiki yet--and yes, it does look like the main character from Assassin’s Creed. The female armor, on the other hand, looks almost like a nurse’s outfit, especially with that metal thing on the woman’s head with the cross. The more I look at this equipment, the more I feel like they wanted people to think of Silent Hill, and if so, that’s pretty cool. I’ve got another armor set to show you; the Gunner version of the Khezu R Armor from MHGU:

Jesus, is this an armor set or a medical emergency? I can’t imagine bandages are very effective at protecting your body from physical damage, but thankfully it looks like most of them are just covering actual armor...meaning that the people who designed this stuff in-universe wanted the people wearing it to look like they were in an accident. Not sure I get why, but I’m not here to--actually, I am here to judge, so never mind; it’s gross. Also the female set has Khezu mouths as arm coverings, which is someone’s fetish, I’m sure. The equipment as a whole is macabrely interesting (TIL that macabrely is a real word) and calls to mind a fascinating horror game franchise, so 8/10.

Final Thoughts and Tally: I figured that Khezu was gonna be interesting, but I didn’t know how far the devs would take the horror theming. Everything about this monster is creepy; it looks disturbing, it acts even worse, and its equipment makes me feel like I need a tetanus shot just from looking at it. But that’s not at all a bad thing...unless you’re really squeamish, in which case you were likely cringing this whole review. I’d apologize, but you made the choice to stick through ‘till the end. 8/10.

[rip-a-dip-dip-you-potato-chip]

Trade ya

based on this ask

TW//Slight violence and a mention of blood

-

Macaque slipped back into the theatre after his little chat with the Monkey Kid.

Boy howdy, that kid had some explaining to do, to his companions. If only he could stick around and watch that mess unfold. But he had to retrieve his lamp.

Honestly, that was easier than he thought it would be.

Wich was concerning.

As Macaque walked over to the stage he paused for a moment, where was (y/n) is all this?

The Monkey King was off doing his own thing for a while, and he'd assumed his kid would be hanging around Mk and his friends, yet the amber-furred monkey wasn't with them when they had entered the theatre.

Did Mk literally forget one of his friends? damn, he was starting to become like the Hero...

despite everything that's happened between them since the whole 'I stole the Monkey Kings powers from Mk and broke his trust leaving him emotionally distressed' thing, he actually wanted to get to know his kid(and maybe convince them to join him)the week of stalking wasn't enough for him to say the least.

Disregarding the thought (though not entirely) he make is way back to the remains of the lap.

And with a little magic it was good an new!

Fuck ya!

As he admirered his handy work for s little longer and sound of clapping caught is attention. Wiping his head around he saw the wired guy in a pin strip suit form the play, if Macaque remembered correctly this was the guy that game my the *Skeleton Key.

"My my, that was such a magnificent performance!"

"Ha, ya well it's over, t-this was the last show actually"

Oh he did not like this for a single second. His fur was standing on there ends screaming for him to just leave.

Just as Macaque was about to use the shadows to escape, in a flash of icy blue light the guy was now behind him, and the next thing he know he was being picked up by the neck and for some reason couldn't, fucking move.

What the actual hell is happening???

"Lady Bone Demon would like a word with you~"

In the blink of an eye, the scenery changed form the damaged auditorium he'd rented out to and underground cave with mechanical parts and machines everywhere.

Just one wif of the musty roten air and he knew he was in the Spider Queens lair. But it looked different then it had been that last time he was there.

Then again it's been centuries since he was last there.

He was shortly let go by the insane suite wareing guy and rubbed his neck where it had been grabbed. And just like that the guy disappeared, leaving the Lady Bone Demon in his stead.

"Why greetings Macaque, its beet long since we last spoke"

" not long enough if you ask me"

The white haired lady let out a hum of acknowledgement as she circled the monkey.

...

"Soo any particular reason why you got one of your brain dead servents to get me?" Macaque questioned, pulling back a bit not wanting to be in her immediate range.

Up purely tactical.

"Ah, well it's come to my attention that you poses something of grate use to me" her icy gaze fixed on the lamp.

"Ya not happening" Macaque said flatly, he went though a lot to get his hands on this thing and he wasn't going to part with it so easily. Besides what ever the Lady Bone Demon was planning, would spell doom for the world as they know it.

Macaque my be a bad guy in some sense, maby even be considered an antihero-that was just more of an ass on a good day- but he wasn't one for wold domination.

In the past he just wanted to wreck heaven with his dear beloved friend befor his change of heart, not enslave mankind. They just wanted to prove there worth nothing more. But this bitch, na she was jack shit crazy. It took the combined forces of Demons and celestials alike to seal her away, himself being one of said demons.

"Ohh what a shame, looks like I'll be keeping this little one then"

In a puff of smoke (y/n) collapses on the foor to her, there fur slightly matted with blood and a visible gash on the left eye.

Similar to where his was-

It wasn't deep and wouldn't cause damage, but it still needed treatment.

Holy hell is this where (y/n) was all this time?

Macaques mind was going a mile a minute but he kept his poker face.

"And I sould care about some random kid because?"

"Oh~ Don't play dumb with me, Six Eared Macaque. You know exactly who this little one is" she started using her powers for lift the amber-furred monkey off the ground there one good (color) eye glosed over and hazy.

"After all this is your child"

"Hate to brake it to ya, but I don't have a kid"

"My sources say other wise"

Several screens descended for the walls and around them, all flicked to like to reveal footage of Macaque during his little stalking mission when he first planed to steal the Monkey Kings powers and found out about his long lost kid, and then some other footage of his watching them from the shadows.

Oh, oh no.

"I had my suspension on the Luner New Years, but your reaction solidify's my assumption"

Wha- shit his poker face slipped! Shiiiit

"So I'll ask again, the lamp or your child- they won't die persay, but I think the underground market would pay a hefty sum for one of such unique lineage"

His heart was beating faster than he thought possible, wait why would it be doing that! He shouldn't care! Should he?

Glancing between the lamp and (y/n)'s beaten form Macaque made a decision he might soon come to regret.

-

(Y/n) was having a good evening, well that was until the Spider Queens minions jumped them while on there way to the theater to meet up with the others(minus Sandy, what he had cats to take care of!)

When the first woke up it was in a dingy cell. And the next thing they knew the Spider Queen tried to get information about the Monkey Kings whereabouts.

"Ya right like the peach loving old man tells me anything! So if you could kindly let me on my marry way that would be fantastic"

You realy needed to know when to such your mouth or just give total bullshit information because Queeni had gotten pissed, and tried to beat the information out of you.

The Lady Bone Demon had to pry the spider off you. Saying you still had a use befor you blacking out.

-

When they woke for a second time everything was hazy, and there was muffled talking almost like they where under water.

Water was nice, you should learn to swim! It seems like fun! Maby you could get Mk or Mai to teach you.

After all the Monkey King was a shitty swimmer- wait no he was crap as under water fights, but wouldn't that require swimming as well-

Uh oh, was you being moved? Nooo das no gooood stop!

Ughhh why won't the muffin voices stop! And why can't I feel my eye!

E-y-e

Y E S spelles yes

E Y E S spells eyes how did that one guy get that confused, and you is moving again ST 0 p

Wait this was more comfy than before, is that red? Oh my moons it is! It's so soft!

And soft it was and you drifted to a more comfortable rest this time.

-

The third and final time (y/n) woke, they weren't in a cell, or had a hazy mindset. Areas not that hazy, but this time it was more so due to medicine than pain.

In fact they lay on a plush mattress, with equally soft pillows and nice heavy blankets tossed other them.

As (y/n) sat up they winced in pain slightly.

Looking down they take notice of the bandages, and a slitting head- and there are bandages on your eye as well fucking perfect.

"Good to see your up" a voice greated. Wiping their head to the side, there stood Macaques with a slight concerned look on his face.

Wha- owowowowowowowow

Probably shouldn't be moving so fast as (y/n) winced in pain again.

As (y/n) tried to steady themselves again and think of a retort, and side of the bed diped and a hand was placed oh your forehead, whilst the other heaped your arm.

"What are you-" "checking to see if you're fever spiked " "I has a heaver?" "Fever, and yes it set is last night after a particularly nasty infection" "oh"

"Wait, why are you-"

"The Bone bitch had you, i-i couldn't just let her harm you any more than she already had"

"That's dumb, you're dumb"

Sigh

"Okay back to sleep with you"

"Where am I?" "One of my safe houses, now sleep"

Sleep but what if...

"I-its okay, it'll be okay I'll be here when you wake again"

(y/n) blinked at him.

"I promise" he said softly as he guided you back down to the pillow, he retucked you in and was about to leave when (y/n) caught his hand.

Well fuck

Uhhh, you know what he's had a long fucking day himself he needs some sleep too.

So discarding his scarf to the side, as well as some armor plating and his shoes, Macaque got into the bed himself and just used himself. As he made himself comfortable, back tuned away for his pup a single thought echoed in his head.

'Im a fucking dad now, geat'

--

*Skelton Keys are said to open any door, plus the cannon key had a skull on it so why not?

UwU Anon you have no idea what this means, you have water my crops cleared my skin and my mind is sane!

I was originally planing to have this thing where the spider queen captured the reader/oc and used the robo parasight to make them a follower, but this, this is so much better sksksksksksk

I did most of this on mobile and my auto correct is bitchy 🙃

[nanoland]

Title: Besyd the scarcety of bread amowngst us

Fandom: Supernatural 

Pairing: Crowley/Dean Winchester

Summary: In which Dean asks a question.

Warnings: Crowley being Extremely traumatized and kind of oblivious to that fact + SPN demons being SPN demons (i.e. remorseless bodysnatchers) + Dean being his casually misogynistic self + graphic descriptions of starvation + exhibitionism (sorta?) + sexually explicit content because this was MEANT to be straightforward smut and then Crowley happened, the prick.

Also on AO3!

0  

“So how come you aren’t a hot chick?”

The glass stills an inch from Crowley’s pale lips. “I humbly beg your pardon?”

It’s late. The bar’s quiet. He doesn’t need Dean to repeat himself. Just a moment to decide on a response.

Well on the way to utterly shit-faced, Dean gestures vaguely, meaninglessly. “You offer people stuff. Then, ten years later, you drag ‘em to Hell. And – and they know that’s what’s gonna happen if they make a deal with you. Which means that you gotta be real fuckin’ persuasive. Which you are. Grade A Bullshit Artist and don’t I know it. But... uh, what was I gonna… yeah, wouldn’t it be easier, right, just way easier if you were a hot chick?”

Crowley can tell he’s not done, so he keeps his silver tongue behind his faintly yellowed teeth for the moment.

While Dean is usually delightful company, in his surly, macho way, this evening there’s an uncommonly obnoxious edge to everything he says. That almost certainly means his insecurities over what he’s been letting Crowley do to his arse lately are acting up.

Understandable. Still annoying.

So Crowley’s more than willing to let his favourite human dig himself a wee bit deeper before pouring boiling tar into the pit.

After quickly throwing back the last of his drink, Dean goes on: “Now, I didn’t go to some dickslurp business school. I ain’t that brand of asshole. But I’ve seen enough beer ads in my time to have an idea of how marketing works. You got something you want people to buy? Fastest way is to get a hot chick in a bikini to hold it up. Because guys have most of the money in this shitty world of ours and guys think with their dicks. I know I do. So why did you decide to possess someone who looks like a balding, middle-aged banker going through a stressful divorce? That ain’t enticing. That ain’t capturing anyone’s interest. Y’know?”

“Mm,” says Crowley, and stands up.

“Fuck’re you doing?” Dean slurs, watching him take off his tie.

“Ever heard of the Seven Ill Years, Squirrel?”

“Nope. Seriously, what’re you doing?”

Draping his overcoat over the back of his chair along with his tie, Crowley sets about taking off his jacket. “‘The Seven Ill Years’ refers to a particularly shitty time in early modern Scotland; the 1690s.”

He tugs off his costly leather shoes and places them side-by-side under his chair. “I was in my… early thirties at the time, I think. Thirty-two? Maybe thirty-one. Whatever.”

Dean is gaping now. He’s never seen Crowley without his outer layers, much less the growing slice of exposed chest as Crowley unbuttons his shirt.

“For a lot of complicated reasons relating to oceanic thermohaline circulation, solar activity, and a few ill-timed volcanos, the weather turned rotten. These days, it’s called the Little Ice Age. Us pigshit stupid peasants who lived through it didn’t know anything about all that. All we knew was that it was freezing bloody cold and the crops kept dying.”

“Dude,” Dean hisses, red-faced as Crowley sets his shirt alongside his jacket and overcoat. “Stop it! We’re going to be thrown out!”

“No. Look around. Is anyone paying attention to us? Precisely. We’re invisible to them at the moment, Squirrel. One of my little tricks.”

“Oh. Okay, that’s good. But that’s still not an excuse to take your fucking pants off in public oh my God oh my God!”

They’re expensive pants and Crowley takes care to fold them before putting them down. “To cut a long story short; famine struck. And famine, it’s…”

Crowley pauses, thinking, ignoring Dean’s pathetic attempts not to gawk at his dick.

“It’s hard to describe famine to someone who hasn’t lived through one,” he says eventually. “Language – English, at least – isn’t equipped to convey what it feels like to be so hungry you’ll try to boil and eat someone else’s shoes. Then someone else’s children. Then your own children. There are no words for it. Or, if in some distant corner of our monstrous universe there are, then they’re words that would drive a human raving mad to speak them.”

Naked now but for his black socks, Crowley scratches his stubble. “Sometimes I think that’s why I got on so well in Hell.”

He sits back in his chair. Folds his legs. Taps his fingers on the side of his empty glass. “Don’t get me wrong; having someone cut open your lungs, fill them with scorpions, and sew them up again isn’t fun. But – how can I put this? – you can process it. You can grapple with it. You know why you’re suffering; because you’re in Hell, and that’s what Hell is for. It makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is going about your everyday life and watching all the people around you – the baker, the priest, the prettiest girl in the village – go about theirs while they turn into walking skeletons. And knowing they didn’t do anything to deserve it. Couldn’t have done anything to deserve it, because no crime, no matter how vile, warrants that kind of punishment.”

Dean says nothing.

After a moment, Crowley pulls himself from the dark, sucking well of memory to add, “Anyway, to answer your question; I don’t want to be a hot chick because a. I’m a man and b. hot chicks are skinny, and I will cheerfully burn this world to the ground before I endure living in a hungry body ever again.”

He glances down at his unclothed meat suit and smiles proudly, running a hand up one of its thick thighs. “Also – y’know – I personally think this long-deceased lad of mine is sexy as Hell.”

Gazing at his shoulder, Dean says roughly, “Didn’t know you had tattoos.”

“Oh. Those. Yeah. Can’t stand them. Worst decision the stupid bastard ever made.”

“I think they’re kinda cool.”

“Do you? Well, you do have incredibly bad taste so perhaps that’s not surprising. Now, are you going to get over here and put that erection to good use?”

Oh, bless him; he’s adorable when he squirms.

“Here?” Dean asks, eyes wide.

“Here.”

He says it like a challenge, for Dean can never resist one of those. Immediately, those wide eyes become narrow and determined.

The boy stands. Looms over Crowley, who casually flicks both their glasses to the floor and moves to sit on the cool wooden table. It’s clean, more or less, thanks to Dean (for once) agreeing to follow Crowley to a semi-respectable establishment.

“These hands,” Crowley murmurs, running them across Dean’s broad chest, “don’t have a single callous or scar. See? Soft as butter. Not a single day’s honest work, either of them.”

Dean swallows. Leans in to kiss him, hesitant and gentle.

Contrary to popular belief, Crowley likes gentle. Or, more accurately, Crowley likes being pampered.

He goes on: “And these legs…”

A groan escapes Dean’s lips as one presses up against his crotch.

“…these legs haven’t walked more than ten miles, collectively, since I moved in. No muscles. No blisters on the undersides of their feet. Not so much as a splinter.”

“Jesus,” Dean mumbles, drawing him in and latching onto his neck.

“And this stomach is never empty. Never even close. Never once forced to digest anything that isn’t purely, perfectly delicious. I treat my meat suits better than most people treat their family heirlooms.”

“Crowley. Fuck.”

He squeezes Dean’s arse and growls, “Because this is my reward, Dean. I won this. This softness, this safety. This nurtured, nourished flesh. I endured the seventeenth century and all humanity’s horrors. Endured my mother. Endured Hell. Built myself a reputation and a kingdom. All for this. And isn’t it wonderful? Say that it is, Dean.”

“Yeah,” Dean moans, even though he can’t understand a word; Crowley slipped into Gaelic a while ago.

(The things Crowley wants to tell Dean and the things Crowley wants Dean to know are categories that rarely overlap.)

Crowley takes Dean’s leaking cock in hand.

“Say I’m beautiful.”

Dean’s knees buckle as he whimpers, so Crowley wraps an arm around his narrow, underfed waist.

“Say you love me.”

Dean comes in his palm, gasping and cursing.

“Say you love me more than anyone else.”

“I’m guessing that was all Scottish dirty talk?” says Dean when he has his breath back. “You were – what? Calling me your bitch?”

Crowley smirks, licks the sweat off Dean’s jaw, and gives his backside a pat before reaching for his clothes. “None of your business. Go get me another drink, would you? Ta.”

 the end

NOTES: The title is taken from a quote found in Karen Cullen’s ‘Famine in Scotland: the ‘Ill Years’ of the 1690s’ (you can find extracts via googlebooks). Yes, canonically Crowley WOULD have been about thirty when this happened. Just in case his origin story wasn’t horrific enough wheee :D

[hey-hamlet]

BNHA AU Ideas : The Original Sin

Also on AO3! 

TL;DR: 

Midoriya Izuku is born incomplete, part of him lacking in a way that makes him abnormal - inhuman. When he turns nine, this changes.

( shamelessly based of the young loki storyline in marvel comics a while ago with the title stolen from there as well. Look - "I am the crime that can not be forgiven." is a baller line ok.)

Midoriya Izuku is born blue and silent. There is no gentle rise and fall of his chest, no pulse, no movement. The Doctors whisk him away in a blur of activity – they tell Inko they will do everything they can. They do not expect a happy ending.

20 Minutes later, Izuku begins to breath on his own. With no previous reaction to treatment this spontaneous respiration is shocking. They expect major brain damage, only to see the infant open his eyes and squint in the bright light of the room. He yawns. They cheer.

They return him to his near hysterical mother’s room. He’s hooked up to countless monitors, but they assure her its just a precaution. She is warned he may have some form of brain damage that will become apparent as he grows, but he is alive and healthy and that in itself they can promise.

Inko cries – her son is alive and he is smiling and that’s all she could ever ask for.

Izuku grows up strange. As a baby he rarely cries – so rarely in fact that Inko can’t stand to have him sleep in a different room, so scared her near silent son will drift away without her knowing. He never does. He seems to understand her from day one as she tells him stories about heroes and dragons. His little hands wipe her tears as she cries. She doesn’t know how, but her son is special.

He doesn’t speak a word until he goes to daycare and meets a firecracker blonde, upon which he shows he can speak far better than most of his peers.

Despite this he seems somehow – lacking – to the other children. Like he’s missing something he needs to be one of them, to be human. They hurt him and push him and take his things. He does not cry.

The only child mostly unaffected by this is Katsuki. He still admits Izuku is a “weirdo”, but he’s smart and fast, sure on his feet with dexterous hands. He seems somehow older and younger than all of the other children in a way that makes adults baby him, but children fear him. Katsuki will not be scared.

Katsuki gets his quirk first. It’s bright and colourful and everything they expected from him.

He asks Izuku about his quirk. His looks into the middle distance for a moment before smiling. It’s small but bright as ever. “Mine will be late.” He then frowns, looking down at his own two hands. They seem ever so small at the moment. “Not sure why.”

Inko asks if he wants to go to the doctor, to see if he has a quirk. Izuku shakes his head gently. “I have one – I know I do. It’ll be late though.” Inko asks him if hes sure, but she trusts her son. He’s much smarter than they remember to give him credit for.

Still, the others don’t believe him. He grows up labelled quirkless with all it brings. Katsuki stays by his side, the quiet and kind boy is something different from the extras - he knows this as well as he knows the sun will rise. They make an interesting pair. One quiet, calm, too knowing, the other brash and loud. They are both whip smart.

Izuku has an eye for quirks better than anyone, always teasing out their mechanisms and probably limitations faster than someone with decades of experience. Katsuki is convinced this will prove to be an aspect of the elusive quirk that refuses to show itself.

Izuku dreams of horrors he has never seen – blood on his hands and quirks at his fingertips. He feels powerful but oh so alone. In the dark on night when he retches silently into his bin, the feeling of hot blood still so real under his shaking hands, he vows to be nothing like the man in this dreams.

Never again.

Izuku is nine when it happens. Katsuki is dragging him through the forest excitedly, hands warm and gently crackling in his own. His head begins to ache.

What started as a nagging irritation quickly shifts into a blinding pain worse than anything Izuku has ever felt in his life. He stumbles to the ground, clutching as his head and he screams and sobs, tears hot down his face.

Katsuki has seen Izuku cry plenty – but never from pain. Not when they got their shots, not when the bully from two grades about them slammed his fingers in the heavy oak door, not when he felt from the tree Katsuki had begged him to climb; bone sharp and pink through his skin. Katsuki wraps his arms around his friend and screams for help.

The screaming stops. Izuku slumps. Katsuki panics. He can feel his friend’s breath on his shoulder but he will not wake. Katsuki can only hold his friend and hope.

All for One had known this day would come. He had known All Might would kill him – it was only a matter of time. That’s why he had a plan B.

A quirk he’d stolen nine odd years ago, creating a shell his mind and quirk would snap to upon his original body’s death. It would kill the original holder of the body, ideally leaving nothing more than an empty shell of a person he would become should he die. He felt some what bad knowing he had killed an infant before it got to draw it’s first breath, but the feeling was fleeting. He had work to do.

He watches Izuku grow. He always had a link to the boy – something about him being an extension of himself making it ever so easy to find him. The boy’s soul – because what else could it be – is stubborn. Parts of it linger in the body, only growing stronger as he ages. He can’t help be grow fond of him. The boy is almost like a son to him, in some strange and twisted way. A creature that should have died but refused to at every turn. All for One could empathise.

That’s why, them All Might’s final blow falls, he feels a flicker of sorrow. Izuku would be no more soon, simply a body he would wear as a puppet. There was no choice though. His work was not yet done.

All for One / Izuku finds themselves in a world of pain, two souls waring for life in a body that can only hold one. What astounds them the most is that Izuku is winning.

All for One plunges them into darkness – away from the pain, so they can talk. They have a time limit though, they are tearing the small body to pieces from the inside out.

Izuku doesn’t want to force All for One out – that will kill him. All for One doesn’t want him dead either. They strike a deal : Izuku will keep his own body until he dies, All for One’s quirk his to use (though the man will keep every quirk he’s personally acquired close to his chest). When Izuku dies – as he will, All for One insists, because the boy wants to be a hero – All for One will take control. They agree.

Izuku opens his eyes and smiles. What once was dull green is now bright and electric, flickers of crystalline white running through them. Izuku feels whole – normal. That makes Katsuki worried most of all.

He explains everything to his only friend – everything he knows. Its not a lot admittedly, only that there is someone else in his head now – their quirk his to use, and that when he dies he will no longer be himself. They do not tell Inko. They train – they will become heroes.

All Might meets Izuku under the bridge, a scraggly man trying to wring his neck as he screams incoherently. All Might knocks out the man before asking is Izuku has seen the villain he was looking for. Understanding blooms in the child’s eyes and suddenly the man on the floor is liquid once again. All Might feels deathly cold.

Izuku gets his autograph, the strange man sharing his mind griping idly about the “blond buffoon” as he insits on calling All Might. Izuku doesn’t mind, ecstatic to meet his hero. He doesn’t miss the flinch on All Might’s face when he lets the man’s quirk flow back into him, but he brushes it away. Everyone is scared of his quirk, its nothing new.

As All Might is distracted by memories long after the boy leaves, the slime villain slinks away

Izuku saves Katsuki, clutching the boy’s own quirk in his gentle grasp, pulling it into his own fold ever so gently, never truly severing it from the blonde. The villain recoils from the blasts as Izuku pulls his friend. All Might swoops in.

Later he asks to train the boy – revealing his smaller side. He says nothing of One for All. He is considering it but he is so scared of any possible connections to All for One he dares not mention it. Izuku takes this with a smile and open arms.

Other stuff:

Izuku is told about One for All a few months in to training because All Might sees his boy is good and kind and nothing like the monster the thought he could be. Izuku immediately goes on about all of the good someone with All Might’s quirk could do, never once assuming it would be his to use. That makes up All Might’s mind – he will pass it to him.

Izuku calls All for One Zero. For All for One it’s kind of a pun about he is One for All wielder number 0. He starts calling Izuku Ninth, or Niner just before he get’s One for All – Izuku thinks it’s a pun on his name.

Izuku can both take quirks and borrow them. Taking them severs their connection from the wielder, borrowing them is just like holding them for a second – they snap back when he stops paying attention. Borrowing is faster and easier and can be reversed without contact. Taking means he will keep the quirk even if he is knocked out or stops concentrating – he tries to avoid doing that because it hurts to give them back and he doesn’t trust himself to do it no matter how guilty stealing something would make him feel.

All for One is actually big soft on Izuku and really doesn’t want the boy dead. He chats to him a lot, offers to help him cheat on tests – which Izuku never takes – and subtly heals their shared body while Izuku sleeps. He wants to kill the children who hurt him. Izuku can’t bare the thought.

All for One and Katsuki get along like a house on fire, even if their interactions are all mediated through Izuku serving as a mouth piece, and its scary. Katsuki and Inko were the only people he told about Zero until All Might. Others in 1A find out at various points in time.

Izuku eventually finds out about the weird quirk hes a part of and has a crisis knowing he is not the Izuku that should have been born into the world. He tells his mother, expecting her to hate him, but she only smiles. "You're still my son - I couldn't ask for anyone better."

[warsmith-38]

How I would do RWBY Pt. 0

Disclaimer: It is easier to improve what already exist than it is to create something new. Boy howdy do I know that. That being said, I believe that RWBY has more than its fair share of flaws and this is how I would do it differently if I was behind the reigns. This is just a collection of my opinions and ideas which in the end will probably amount to nothing. I felt the need to do this because my brain just decided ‘nah motherfucker, you ain’t thinking of anything else from now on’ and this is the end result for nothing else would satisfy my rage.

I wouldn’t quite call this a complete re-haul, but more rather a rework with some of my own brand of polish. It’s not a compete rebuild from the ground up in a different world with different concepts and themes, but how I would go about a second go around with the series from the base that is already there. If a detail is missing from my musings then assume it is either unchanged or removed, depending on context.

If some of my complaints were addressed after I stopped watching, I honestly don’t much care. If it takes longer than 4 seasons to fix what I view as fundamental problems, then it’s far too little too late for me. I paid scant attention to the series post my stopping point and liked little to none of what I saw.

Please do not take this as a specific attack on anything other than the writing of the show itself. This is not directed or targeted against anyone, regardless of position or feelings on the topic at hand. If you ignore what I just said and decide to take this as an insult, then I say that you need to be more self-secure in your tastes and interests.

Things I would remove + reason why

Silver eyed warriors as a concept- it’s more or less the same concept as dojutsu from Naruto. It’s the fucking sharingan (rubygan). It’s not quite chosen one level, but crap like this is the blight of good protagonists. It’s fucking eugenics that makes you awesome not your own skills or training but on your bloodline. No need for personal development or life-changing hardship when you have a built in power that can be cultivated like a fucking bumper crop.

Maidens- Wasn’t intended originally and only made the overall story more cluttered with power creep and plot device. It’s a similar problem as above. No need for training or anything if people can just kill the person who has the power currently and take if from them. Which, at that point, why do you want that power if you’re already strong enough to kill and take it from the person who has it to begin with? It’s something someone just shouted out and they rolled with it because it sounded cool in the moment.

The Relics- McGuffin dragonballs that serve as plot device and little else. A story can be told without needing to monotonously race for Excalibur or the holy grail. Considering the Maidens, I doubt that the relics were intended in the first place and as such if you can’t tell a story without throwing something in after a few seasons because you realized that you didn’t have a plot, then you’re not that good at telling stories.

Oscar- The show didn’t need more main protagonists when what was already there wasn’t being given enough characterization to begin with. For that matter-

Quite a few characters- The cast is cluttered and convoluted enough as is with seemingly important characters getting the shaft in favor of yet another new character that would barely do anything. Time and effort seems to be put into one-off schmucks that would be better served making the story not need poochie the dog, let alone several. Character integration is not ‘create a character to do one thing and then pretend they don’t exist’. There’s already plenty of characters than can be used wherever.

The overt shipping bait, especially if it’s just going to be taken up or abandoned on a whim- I don’t mean relationship building, I mean the obvious baiting of a relationship that, in the end, might not even happen. All it does is dumb down characters and character arcs, draw out pointless scenes, and make the fans have conniptions one way or another. People are pissed off whenever things don’t go their way with shipping so the only winning move with these people is not to play their game. Looking at you Klance and Zutara. Either don’t do anything or have a fucking plan and stick to it and not make complete swerves when fans get uppity. If it genuinely matters to you, then pretend whatever ship happens at whatever point, I don’t care.

Changes to the world that I think would go over better-

Everyone has a level of aura with a naturally high level generally meaning that they might be able to unlock a semblance. A semblance is unlocked through some sort of specific event, typically a stressful one IE: Yang and Ruby are caught in the woods by grimm and Yang gets frustrated and scared at not being able to defend her sister before getting angry and her rage mode semblance unlocking. Not everyone who unlocks a semblance goes into combat schools but it is a requirement for acceptance into most of them. Having the potential to unlock a semblance seems entirely random but has a higher chance with genetics.

There are two types of semblances: 1 is hereditary like the Schnee glyphs, changing only slightly, if at all, through the generations. 2 is a random personal power like Yang having her rage mode as compared to Raven’s portals. Whichever you get tends to be random with the occasional exception depending on genetics and the specific semblance.

Every 1 in assumedly 10 people who have semblances have the potential to have two semblances, often times, but not necessarily, being one hereditary and one random. The process of unlocking the second semblance involves immense emotional distress and in some cases might not even happen for the individual who has the potential, period, thus skewing data. This gives an enhanced type power but isn’t protagonist exclusive. It shows a higher than average power capacity, but isn’t a gamebreaker to the same level as a fucking kekkei genkai or getting the powers of a fucking demigod. A good amount of characters would only have one semblance and be considerable badasses despite it and even be able to beat a couple of the few that have two.

Establish Menagerie as the official Fifth Kingdom, the newest of the great kingdoms. Maybe not the singularly strongest or most influential, but make it so Menagerie and its people, the faunus, have a considerable role in the world’s affairs, if even from an isolationist standpoint. Don’t have them as even a semi thriving entity that isn’t a kingdom because that only begs the question as to why the kingdoms are so important to begin with then.

Make the White Fang a faunus supremacist group that has very little support, if any, from the faunus people as a whole. Faunus right issues are history for the vast majority of the world and the White Fang as a whole is only using the problems in Atlas with the SDC as a means of trying to gain power. There are actual faunus rights groups trying to make things better for their race in Atlas and other marginalized areas but the White Fang dislikes them on the grounds that they go against their goal and it makes them look even worse.

Fucking pronounce names correctly, I mean, Christ. Weiss, the word, is pronounced like ‘Vice’. It’s an actual fucking word. It’s the German word for white. It’s like saying tor-till-uh not tor-tee-ah. Blake is Bella-doe-nah not Bella-dawn-uh. Shit like that. No you don’t need to put on a heavy accent to say these words but pronouncing things so inaccurately just makes you look like an ignorant rube (no, that was not a pun). I don’t fucking care what your reasons are. Why use these words in the first place if you’re not even going to try to say them right?

Ozpin is order to Salem’s chaos. Ancient demigods of both archetypes vying for power across the ages and the innocent peoples of the world be damned in the crossfire. Neither are entirely good nor evil but both are not exactly helpful to the free peoples on the world and the continued livelihood thereof. Their progenitor god created them to try and guide humanity in a balanced way. That seemed to work at first, but then failed like a bad marriage and they waged war ever since like a bad divorce. The grimm are a creation of Salem’s to test humanity and make then stronger through conflict. Ozpin ranges from the lawman to the fascist fairly duplicitously. The two can only be permanently killed by each other but neither wants to get too close to the other because of that exact same reason. If killed by other means, they will resurrect after a fashion no worse for wear.

Overt changes to (and complaints about) Ruby Rose- It is a crime that the titular character has so little actual character beyond just being ‘Hyperactive Anime Protagonist #235’. Most of her (few) character traits are tell not show, and of course she’s got the fucking rubygan bloodline ability crap. She has next to nothing that isn’t allotted by default to most anime protags on the grounds of the stereotype. For the main character to have less character than any of the members of the fucking B-team is a travesty.

1. Give her a clear rebellious streak, a distinct problem with authority, and a headstrong attitude. Daddy doesn’t want her to be in danger, so she decides to become a huntress. She’s told to stay put, so she hunts down Roman. She’s told that she needs to stay home and recover, so she sets out on her own not thinking about the exact consequences. Make her the impetus for the team’s involvement with the problems of the world in the early seasons. Make her a driving part of the plot, not just being along for the ride or because someone else said so.

2. Give her blood knight tendencies. Make her VERY willing to get into a fight with the bad guys, not just fights in general, but fights against bad guys. Nothing over the top, but enough that she has a scene or three where she says “Shut up bad guy, skip to the part where we get to kick the crap out of you,” or something of that nature. Hyper combative characters are fun and ethical.

3. Give her more traits as a mechanic and weapon nerd. Include scenes of her fixing everyone’s weapons for fun or being able to analyze an opponent’s fighting style based on the type, design, and/or wear & tear of their weapon, make her a polyglot of weapons that can be at least proficient in using just about any weapon. Come to think of it…

4. Anything that could give her actual character traits. They don’t even have to be all that major traits, just give her enough so that we actually have a character with more definition than printer paper. She’s the main character, the titular character at that. This isn’t a video game with a blank-slate protagonist. If the main character isn’t even really a character, like, at all, then what’s the fucking point?

5. Convert silver eyes power into a second semblance for white fire vision that kills grimm like nothing else. Gotten as a hereditary semblance from Summer. Which is also why Summer was specifically targeted by Salem on the grounds that it makes her just a little too dangerous for her long-term plans. This makes it so she isn’t just the fucking chosen one, but still has a clear definitive reason to be involved against the big bad because, y’know, dead mom. Yes, this kinda goes into the whole ‘bloodline is what determines importance’ thing I wanted to be rid of, but it’s only a chance two generations instead of a massive lineage of nonsense and keeps more of the onus of involvement on Ruby herself.

6. Give her a very clear motivation that’s deeper than surface level. ‘Oh, I want to do the right thing’ is a flimsy as balls motivation especially compared to the rest of her team that has that AND an actual reason for thinking that way. Why does she want to be the good guy? What happened in her life that makes her this motivated to doing the right thing? Yang has her desire to find her mother (which, come to think of it, doesn’t necessitate being a good guy), Blake has wanting to make up for being a terrorist, Weiss has her desire to step out from under the shadow of her family’s reputation, even fucking Jaune, the b-team protagonist, who wants to live up to his family reputation, has a proper motivation to be involved in the story. WHY is Ruby involved beyond ‘I’m the main character’ level reasoning? As much as admitting it makes me wish to commit Sudoku, even SAO has better main character motivations. Good god, I need hooch after typing that.

Overt changes to (and complaints about) Yang Xiao-Long- Her arc was mostly fine, barring some of the pacing. Raven being a maiden undercut the message of ‘screw that deadbeat bitch, go to your real family’ by making her important to the overall world state and confirming a measure of later relevance but that’s more a flaw with Raven than Yang.

1. Keep her motivation about getting strong enough to find her mother but add in the clear desire to kick her ass for leaving her and Tai. Of course it’s more about just getting the answers to her questions, but the ass-kicking should also be a major component.

2. Amp up the rivalry between her and Mercury. Mercury was designed as an opposite to Yang, I mean for fuck’s sake, look at him. Consider their respective backstories too; both raised in a single father home yet one was supported and loved (if a little neglected) while the other was horrifyingly maimed and abused. Punch vs kick. It works.

3. Make her more protective of her little sister, explicitly going along with her personal crusade to keep her safe (safer, rather). If she’s supposed to be the good older sister, maybe just maybe, something more than lip-service to that idea should be done. Hell, maybe she can be overprotective like their father, or even the exact opposite, not really giving a shit and then learning to give one. That might lead to a little tension and growth between the two of them.

4. Make her semblance consistent. Is she supposed to have super saiyan rage mode or is it energy buildup and dispersal? Is it supposed to be both? Just make it rage mode, for the sake of fuck, and don’t flip-flop. Speaking of…

5. Give her anger issues. Flesh out her being the kind of gal that would start a fight in a nightclub when she doesn’t get what she needed with little justification. This would stem from abandonment issues from Raven, Summer (inadvertently), and Tai and her general thrill seeking personality. This could lead to tensions and dramas until she overcomes it and learns to use her aggressive feelings and not let them use her.

Overt changes to (and complaints about) Blake Belladonna- Shitty-kitty is shitty, here’s why.

1. Do something with the hypocrisy of being, more or less, princess of Menagerie, a world power albeit a minor one, and joining a band of terrorists that do more harm than good for the people they claim to represent. It’s like a trust-fund baby joining some charity organization in Africa for a few weeks, doing jack-shit to help, joining some jihadists, and then acting like she’s Mahatma Gandhi.

2. Make her arc less about running away and fighting Adam, more about realizing that running is for assholes and try to find her team to at least apologize for cutting and running like she did. Doing that and stopping Adam are not mutually exclusive. The friend thing should be the priority. As it stands she is almost rewarded for abandoning her team just to focus on her own problems.

3. Make her arc involve going from ‘There’s no such thing as pure evil’ to ‘Okay maybe some people are just too evil to work with’. Some people are too far gone and, despite still having good traits, will only ever continue to do evil things and don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. Not everyone has some sort of good motive beneath the surface and, even then, does that matter when the only action they do is objectively evil? Still, y’know, save who you can, like Ilia.

4. Have Belladonna not actually be her last name. If she’s the daughter of a the chief of Menagerie, the closest thing the faunus have to a unified racial leader, then how the unholy shit does nobody recognize her name? She is, again, princess of Menagerie, yet nobody recognizes the name in a grander context. Have ‘Belladonna’ be a cover name so she can hide her identity better so that she’s using what should be a very recognizable real name in a tournament that is broadcasted worldwide. Her real family name could be “Nightshade” or some shit like that.

5. If she’s supposed to be ‘The quiet one’ maybe actually have her be quiet and not make big speeches every season or have loud arguments with her team. Just a fucking thought. If she’s still supposed to do that, then make her ‘the opinionated one’ or ‘the kind of mean one’ or even ‘the one who doesn’t shut up’. Blake, as seen, or rather heard, is not the quiet one.

6. Have her actually fucking interact with Ruby. Maybe they have a two-person book club. Maybe Blake teaches Ruby to meditate or something. Anything, anything at all would be fine, anything more than nothing at all. Blake’s whole interaction with the team shouldn’t just be through Yang and cursory scenes with Weiss.

Overt changes to (and complaints about) Weiss Schnee- You can’t solve racism with like two scenes.

1. Make the racism thing a much more gradual decay rather than more or less disappearing after a single conversation. Hell, make jokes about it, ‘oh, no, one of my best friends is a faunus,’ stuff. It’s hard to unlearn an upbringing of hate, but she’s trying type stuff.

2. Involve her at least a little with the White Fang plot. It only makes sense that the heiress of the company that still more or less has slave labor is at least semi-involved with the plotline involving terrorists that want that company destroyed. Make her subject to assassination attempts at a young age, or even have her been kidnaped at a young age and held hostage, getting her scar in the process.

3. As evident by some of the intros, her rival was supposed to be Emerald. This could be serviceable, at the very least. The street rat pickpocket that had to learn life lessons the hard way and was taken in by the baddies VS. the rich heiress born with a silver spoon but raised by a dickhead. There’s potential there and it is a crime that it is not explored in the slightest. Even Yang and Mercury had a minor fight.

4. Like Yang, make her semblance consistent. Is it supposed to be summoning or physics altering magic symbols? These are two completely different powers, it’s not like super speed also giving super reflexes or whatever. Just make it one or the other, don’t bullshit us on these things. Or, hell, make it a second semblance she gets during the course of story.

5. Emphasize her loneliness. Make the main onus of her personal arc be about how she goes from this prickly, spoiled, opinionated, brat to a warm and caring friend who only wants the best for everyone. Yes, this might be the main intention in canon, but I feel it could have used a little more refining.

Overt changes to (and complaints about) Cinder Fall- If she’s supposed to be Ruby’s chief rival and foil then she needs a lot of work to even be close. She shouldn’t be nothing but the rival, but at that same time she should have that be a considerable part of her characterization and role in the series. I feel the best way to do it is to have their similarities highlight their differences in both character and design. Basically, make her the Vergil to Ruby’s Dante.

1. Make her Ruby’s age. Being the same age as Ruby while initially outclassing her, and even veteran hunters, provides risk and contrast between the two. Throw in an evil sadistic streak compared to Ruby’s happy-go-lucky personality to further the contrast and you’ve got a good little yin-yang thing for them. It also shows just how bad someone can turn out if raised to be a killing machine.

2. Keep her using the bow/twin swords as a comparably simple weapon in contrast to Ruby’s, even in universe, overcomplicated Scythe/Sniper rifle. Both weapons are long range marksmen’s weapons as well as vicious close combat weapons but are still very different in essence. Also make sure she keeps the red with black and gold color scheme is contrast with Ruby’s Black with red and silver. Even minor visual cues can work to the rival schema.

3. Make her one of the people who have two semblances. Pyromancy (pyrokinesis? Fire bending, she has fire bending) and dilated perception (bullet time) so that Ruby’s super speed and the dilated perception cancel each other out, adding a little extra tension to the fights now that both parties’ signature abilities are moot points against each other.

4. Make her competent. She kills Ozpin and Pyrrha and then she either fails or draws every fucking fight she has afterwards baring nameless jobbers here and there. Even before that, she needed help to take down Amber and even manages to fuck that up. The more failures she has and the less intimidating she is. Too much of that and she’s just a jobber that makes you wonder why she was ever seen as intimidating in the first place. When that happens then Ruby beating her is just the status quo and not a triumph of any sort.

5. Make her Ruby’s long lost fraternal twin sister. Incredibly cliché, I admit, but siblings make the best rivals, especially twins. Once again, it’s all about adding the similarities and the contrasts. In this case it creates the ‘there but for the grace of god go I’ idea with the two of them. Ruby seeing it as how evil she could have turned out and Cinder seeing it as how weak she could have been (Eventually becoming how good she could have had it because I’m a sucker for redemption arcs) Who said that?

Overt changes to (and complaints about) Team JNPR- JNPR was fine-ish but the over focus on Jaune and the underutilization of Ren + Nora early on are both issues. B-team should not get jack shit before the A-team gets the lions share.

1. Downplay Jaune’s screen time. I doubt this is a particularly controversial statement. Jaune is not the titular character. This is (technically) a shoujo not a shounen. It’s supposed to be about the girls more than the guys. It kind of undercuts that idea when the guy (the side guy at that) gets the lion’s share of characterization, attention, and growth before the girl (the main girl) does.

2. Make Ren and Nora actual characters earlier on. Comic relief is all well and good, but either extend that to the whole team or make these two characters more than just comic relief in the early parts of the story. Make them, y’know, actual characters. They ain’t gotta be all that important, but they do have to be actual characters.

3. Make Pyrrha’s deathflags less blindingly obvious. We all knew Pyrrha was going to get clipped. The self-sacrificing type, all the musical and visual cues throughout, being based on Achilles, and ‘oh she just confessed to the boy she likes’. Homegirl was waving deathflags like an insecure redneck with the confederate flag. When you foreshadow obvious things that much it’s not a surprise to the audience when it happens and the reaction of the in universe characters seems overdone. If it’s not supposed to be a surprise then, whatever, but that’s clearly not the case if you’re going for just shock value. It’s fine for a character to die, but for the love of Jaysus you got to do something with it more than ‘this character’s sole purpose is to die for the angst and to up the stakes’. Pyrrha was just a plot jobber.

4. Make them a little more independent in the overall plot. Give them their own full sub-plots, have them go on their own little adventures, have them do things completely separate from RWBY that has plot relevance but not overtaking the main story in grandeur or importance. B-team gets B-plots and are cool in it of themselves.

Overt changes to (and complaints about) Qrow Branwen- Take or leave this, I just felt the need to include this because reasons.

1. Just make him Dante from Devil May Cry. Just make his personality the same as Dante from Devil May Cry. Make him stylish and cool but low-key a massive dork. He’s too cool to drink or smoke or anything harsher than PG-13. This series could use a guy like that, says I.

2. Make his semblance something that makes sense and isn’t just an angst generator. How do you even quantify ‘bad luck aura’ as a power? Make it short range teleportation as a connection to Raven’s portals. Make it so that he can direct the bad luck at will. Do SOMETHING with it that isn’t just an excuse for mostly pointless character angst.

3. This technically also counts as a Raven change but whatever. Make the Branwen family old nobility and not a loser bandit tribe from nowhere. Or at least make it so they used to rich or something. They come from a family that had a good amount of cash and even a chateau in Mistral. After the money dried up and the chateau ransacked by grimm, the Branwen twins had differing opinions on how to proceed. Qrow fully integrated into the hunter thing while Raven ran away and became a bandit, using it as further excuse to skedaddle on Tai and a recently born Yang.

[loptyrs-moved]

Can you talk more abt ur fandoms ocs? I like your writing a lot and would like to know more abt em

Oh my goodness I’m 🥺🥺🥺🥺 you’re SO sweet thank you!

Well, I have quite a few and some have their own deeper lore stories that go with them. If you guys want more information on them, I can do separate posts on all of them. But Here they are! I’m so excited to share my babies with you!

More is under the cut. The Picrew I used is here.

Ikemen Revolution

Black Army Side

Corrin Fukui

Age: Appears to be in mid-early twenties

Hair: Brick white

Eyes: Blood Red

Height: 4′11

Any other Qualities:

Draconic features -- She’s literally a dragon but not by nature

Curved Opalescent Horns

Shimmery opalescent tail

Wings that also shimmer in the light

retractable?

Pointed ears

Easily frightened by loud noises and sudden movements

stunted growth

Hoards blankets and comfort items

writes in a journal every day 

its one luka got for her and she refuses to write in anything else. she pours her heart out on the pages, and all her memories

she had a brother! but he passed away because of the magic tower :(

turns into a gIANT DRAGON 

ICE ICE BREATH BABY

Was found by Luka while on a patrol near the forbidden forest, lost and afraid, so she was taken in

Had amnesia at first

She actually is an experiment of Amon and she managed to escape

Excellent at sewing and gardening

Sufficient with baking

She’s for Luka! The way they fell for each other was a slow, gradual trust, and mutual understanding. She saw him as a man, as he was, and nothing else.

Sometimes is called Corri

gentle hearted and innocent

but not as innocent as you’d think 

she’s a dragon, and she’s a greedy little one

Ophelia Dae

Age: 24

Hair: Crimson red

Eyes: Jade green

Height: 5′8

Any other Qualities:

A skilled swordsman, and one of the Chosen Thirteen

9 of Spades baybeee

While she is more accustomed to short swords and sabers, Phelia is a magic user! But she isn’t really in agreement with Ray with his stance on magic

BOMBASTIC AS HELL

BISEXUAL

“Is he bothering you Queen?”

Trans

Was friends with Ray and Fenrir while in school, and was just as much of a hellraiser as them

she was there when the day things went dark happened and was almost taken but that day is a blur for her

phelia REFUSES to talk about it

she still has nightmares

raised by a single mother

TRIVIA! She was an old fire emblem oc i had and she was the daughter of Arvis -- so if you squint when she uses magic you’ll see Valflame

joined the army probably because Fenrir was too, and she was inspired by him 

she joined for her own reasons but he made it easier for her to do it too

his passion was what made her fall for him in the first place

has a personal vendetta against the magic tower for what they did to her and her friends

AND CORRIN JEEZ

will sacrifice herself if necessary to the cause

PROBABLY HAS ALMOST DIED BECAUSE OF IT

Bruh girl

Amira Nasiri

Age: 22

Hair: Chocolate brown

Eyes: Turquoise blue

Height: 5′3

Any other qualities:

My version of Alice! Difference is that she’s Persian

That’s it

She’s just as spunky as Alice 

however she responds with being called Alice a little different

she’s adamant about being called Amira

At some point she just accepts Seth does it to distance himself

also an avid baker like alice

pISTACIOS

BAKLAVA

Amira is just Alice except she’s just my take on her. 

She has the same vibrant spirit as Alice

and I personally consider Seth the canon route for REASONS

just ask me why fjgdfgjksd

Red Army Side

Azul Flores

Age: 25

Hair: Raven black

Eyes: Wisteria purple

Height: 5′0

Any Other Qualities:

An old friend of the Queen of Hearts

like she met him when she was 8 years old

fought his bullies when they would give him a hard time when he was a kid

they dated for a WHILE

did NOT work out

HARD CHILDHOOD

Ambitious, hard working young woman who was married into a high standing family on the Red side. Her mother was a teacher and gained the attention of one of the Chosen Thirteen on that side, and got married

Azul is NOT the officer’s daughter. She’s his step daughter

Has had extensive studies on the History of Cradle and of the Red Territory.

Wants to be a Cradle Historian

Works for the Red Army as a personal assistant to the queen

UNINTENTIONAL

THEY ACTUALLY CANT STAND EACH OTHER

Unless....

Look their story is very dramatic and it hurts me every day so please stay tuned with them. 

CUT THROAT BITCH

YOUR DEVIL

DEMON

Heckles Jonah like its her job — she knows him better than anyone elsd, if anyone knows his bs, its her

Bad resting bitch face

Actually really shy, and quiet when in different surroundings

A sweetheart and will cut a bitch for you once she knows u

She is perhaps one of the most transparent, honest, genuine person. there is no bullshit with her. she will tell you her honest thoughts with you

Cerise Nam

Age: 19

Hair: Berry Pink

Eyes: Petal Pink

Height: 5′2

Any other qualities:

Her mom came to Cradle from a far off place, and set up a food and pastry shop in the Central Quarter. Met her dad. Been there since

They live in Black Territory

She works for her parents and works with the pastries/desserts

loves making desserts from where her parents are from

She knows the Queen of Hearts VERY well since she makes the best mille feuille

Got a job from him actually, and works for the Red Army Headquarters kitchen

Loves to cook and bake!

a little naïve, but she’s a realist

youngest of FIVE kids!!

Morning girl

She may be petite but she can HEAFT heavy bags of flour/rice/dry goods

Met Zero by accident, and crashed into him while in town

love at first sight for her. how can you fault her?

she thinks he’s dreamy... and sweet...

does she flirt with him a little? Cerise can’t help it...

She and Zero have more of a hidden relationship because she fears her parents won’t approve

family stuff -- and she understands

RED ARMY OFFICER?? BLACK TERRITORY GIRL

look im cheesy

dont worry it works out

zero has to consider himself and his own personal stuff too so its a little difficult 

Non Army Suitor(s)

Lucile Lidell

Age: 20

Hair: Straw blonde

Eyes: Aqua blue

Height: 5'1

Any other qualities:

She and her twin, Noelle, are the actual descendants of the original Alice

Inherited unusual hairpins that were from cradle

More of the 'modern woman stuck in the wrong time' kind of gal

Rebellious

Noelle and Luci: partners in crime

Short skirts galore

Does not give a singular shit of what MEN think of her

Wants to be taken seriously

Sometimes acts like an airhead in order to get attention. She's actually pretty somber as a person and prefers to be in the background as her sister takes the stage

loves her sister more than anyone else in the world

When she and Noelle fall into Cradle, they kind of hightail it and live in the woods with Harr and Loki

Sticks with Harr since he's literally the least threatening man ever

First man to feel safe around

"Excuse me he said NO pickles!"

Will cut a bitch for him, or use magic -- luci will hurt someone if they even think a bout looking at him wrong

Loves to make clothes

'I mended the holes in your cloak for you...' 'Bye Harr, be safe and have a good day.'

'Welcome home, I missed you.'

Puts up a tough girl front but she's just a big softie just like him

Doesn't realize she has a crush on him until shit starts to hit the fan

Actually very vanilla tbh but wants to spoil her bf

Ikemen Sengoku

Ito Tsunade

Age: 26

Hair: Straw Blonde

Eyes: Molten Gold

Height: 5′5

Any Other Qualities:

Graduate student at the same university as Sasuke 

got stuck in the storm with him and Mai, and was tossed into the sengoku era

but she got separated from Mai

Met Shingen first much to her luck because uh.... lets say Tsunade is aint the sharpest tool in the shed

HEAD EMPTY

ZERO THOUGHTS

AIRHEAD

her aesthetic when she gets there?

TITS OUT

BIG HONKERS BIG TATA

HOT

her head might be empty but her tits are fat and they will protect you

Music nerd — loves traditional Japanese instruments, especially the difficult ones

Specializes in girl metal in modern day

eventually proves herself and plays some sick chords for the takeda/uesegi forces

she has entertained them for now

puts sake away like a monster

when she meets sasuke, she finds comfort in the fact he’s also lost with her, so she clings

asks him how to protect herself from shingen bc he’s horny lolol

genuinely thinks sasuke is hilarious

also does NOT realize she’s in love with him until the gravest of grave happens

her name was UNINTENTIONAL

Aibana Hinata

Age: Presents in his early-mid twenties

Hair: Black Midnight

Eyes: Haunting gold and vermillion

Height: 5'3

Any other qualities: 

The concubine of Nobunaga

Please know I made him a long while before the other guy was dropped so I’m just gonna offer this little gay boy

Nobunaga bought him from a brothel after being so intrigued by him. Hina entertained him so well that he was set for life

A RIGHT SNARKY BASTARD

HE KNOWS HE’S PRETTY AND CAN GET AWAY WITH MURDER

Likes to challenge Nobunaga in battles of wits

board games

debate as pillow talk

swordplay if the lords will entertain him enough

Bisexual as hell

Gender? Don’t know her

He uses all pronouns

True pronoun: princess

ONLY EXISTS IN A UNIVERSE WHERE THERE IS MAI

Nobunaga/Mai/Hinata........

Unless.......

Smart, and educated

former geisha

he can read! and write!

LOVE FUCKING WITH HIDEYOSHI

if there is mai, he would bond with her like no one else

he would be her best friend

her confidant

genuinely adores her

even if she is pursuing nobunaga, he doesn’t resent her ... he just wishes that she would find room in her heart for him too

puts up a tough exterior

a softie.....

[obsidianfr3sk]

Falcon in the Dive

Summary:  Piercing into the sky and higher, Ace thrived. The weak cowered, but the fittest, like him, survived. He didn't wait until the darkest hour, he didn't wait until they spring alive. He, with claws of fire, devoured like a falcon in the dive.

AO3

As my contribuiton to the Multifandom Gift Exchange 2020 (hosted by the wonderful @darkalinas and @scxundress), here’s a gift for my little sister and favorite villain apologist (?) @alecjamesartino. As soon as they told me I was your gifter... well, I was really happy!!! And then x’d I knew I had to write something about Ace and this song just... LIKE I JUST KNEW I HAD TO WRITE SOMETHING ABOUT ACE INSPIRED IN FALCON IN THE DIVE, ALL RIGHT???? I JUST ✨K N E W✨

Before y’all start reading xd I need to... kinda clarify something. So, I don’t know if you know, but I actually based all of my fics on this timeline made by @honey-hippie-harper and @healing-winston-pratt, and I kinda just started to create my headcanons from it. But, today I decided to throw all of them through the freaking window and base this fic on this timeline, made by my giftee:’))) She uses it for her fic Love and Anarchy (which you should totally read!). That said, this work has nothing to do with my other fics (for example, Rise of the Renegades or The Origins), I’m just experimenting with new headcanons:’)

Another important thing x’d On this fic I mention Leroy’s eyes turn green when he uses his powers and that Hugh’s eyes are gray instead of blue. This are not my headcanons, they’re actually from this drawing made by @healing-winston-pratt​. Go check it out and reblog it!!) 

Now... well, my dear little sister Alec, I hope you like this gift. I know how much you like Ace and the Anarchists, and I have never written anything about them (Begginings and Endings doesn’t count, it was from David’s POV x’d) so this was a complete challenge for me. But what kept me going was... thinking that I was doing this for you. And honestly, your timeline just gave me so much space to play with new headcanons and scenarios, so thank you for that:’)) Personally I consider myself someone with a extraordinary imagination, but you, Alec, left me dumbfounded (quedé dirían en mi tierra). You are so young, and brilliant, and adorably deathly that I just want to hold you and protect you from the the bad things that happen on this world:’) 

I’d say I love you but I’m akward so I’ll just say I’m really fond of you. I think you have a lot of potentential and I hope I get to see you become a wonderful woman. Felices fiestas✨✨✨ 

Knock in the doors, lock up the city,

track him down through this town,

and be quick about it... now!

How the devil can I ever prevail when I'm only a man?

I can never be duped by that scurrilous phantom again.

Year 0, month 0

“I thought you were going to be taller.”

Ace stopped looking at the chandelier hanging over his head to look at the woman to his right. “Sorry?”

“I thought you were going to be taller,” she repeated almost yelling.

“Fuck, Honey ...”

Ace turned to his left. “What?” Honey asked. “I’m just saying, geez.”

The young man's eyes went from dark to toxic green.

“Leroy,” Ace interrupted, “your chair is ... burning.”

Leroy removed his hands from the armrest of the chair he was sitting in, cursing underneath. There were drops of a greenish liquid coming from his fingers and the wood smelled like a burnt tree. As he did his best to clean up the mess he had made with his powers, Ace turned his attention back to Honey. “Did you think it was going to be taller?”

Honey tucked one of her blonde curls behind her ear. She was wearing a white coat with rhinestone as buttons; a group of prodigies had given it to her in exchange for allowing them to join their ranks. Ace had replied that it was not necessary to pay any kind of tribute and that anyone who agreed with the values of the Anarchists, could consider themselves as such. Despite this, one of the boys insisted on giving Honey the coat, because from the moment he saw it, he thought it was “fit for a queen”. That was the moment when Ace's theory was confirmed: Honey had a weakness for compliments and gifts. She accepted the coat with a smile and even defended the boy when Leroy muttered, “Ahem, simp.”

That was also the moment when he realized that Leroy's weakness was driving Honey out of her mind.

Regardless, Ace could tell that they had some kind of… appreciation for each other. The first time he saw them use their powers was when Honey sent a cloud of wasps to a group of cops who tried to get Leroy into one of their trucks and when Leroy burned the face of a guy who had grabbed Honey from wrist strong enough to make her scream.

Those two were powerful and loyal without falling into blind fanaticism. Ace needed people like that in his ranks.

The whole world needed such people in its ranks.

“I mean, yeah,” Honey continued. “I had heard so much about Ace Anarchy that… well, I have to admit I did build up some expectations.”

Ace fixed his gaze on Honey's feet. She was wearing heels. Obviously. “Why don't you get off those stilts and say it to my face?”

Honey burst out laughing right away and Ace too. He could even see Leroy trying not to smile before crossing his arms on his chest.

The three were on the seat of the cathedral, Ace sitting on the main chair where the priest who officiated the mass sat, and Honey and Leroy on the chairs to the sides, generally reserved for the seminarians who helped during the celebration. He had taken the table out of the way with his powers and stored it in a cellar, in case it was needed again. During those last three weeks that they had been using the cathedral as a base, Ace had given some speeches there. The light coming from the windows illuminated his face and the crucifix behind him made him feel a kind of power that he could not describe. Also, the main chair was wide, tall, and shiny. It would have looked like a throne if it were covered in some golden metal...

Stop it.

“I think no one else is coming,” said Leroy. “we better get out of here. These chairs are uncomfortable.”

“Use a cushion, like me,” Honey commented, proudly displaying the small cushion she had placed on the chair to make it easier to sit.

Leroy couldn’t look more disgusted. “Why would you put your ass on the same cushion you use to sleep?”

As his allies began to argue again, Ace put his arms on the sides of the chair, focusing on the immense doors of the cathedral.

As far as they knew, Ace was waiting for recruits. It was a fairly common thing to happen. Many prodigies (like the simp and his henchmen) had been flocking to the cathedral, seeking help, acceptance, or a chance to prove themselves worthy of being within Ace's close circle. It was a bit tiring at times, but at the moment he couldn't afford to turn them away without even bothering to see what their powers were. If he knew something, it was that no power could not be taken advantage of in some way, and if that way could benefit him, the better.

But at dusk, the chances of people coming to the cathedral began to disappear, because at night the city became dangerous. Thus, Ace knew that he would not receive any new potential recruits until the next morning, and he knew that his allies need to rest and eat something.

However, he also knew that David could be the one to walk through that door at any moment.

Ace was still furious with him. He probably would be furious with him for the rest of his life. David was a condescending, deluded guy who didn't bother to think outside the box for the good of those who were like them.

But at the end of the day, that guy was his blood (whoever he liked it or not) and he wanted to make sure he was still alive.

David Artino would never miss an opportunity to exercise his authority as an older brother and scold him for the first reason that crossed his mind. He could see him hiding like a mole in some hole in the city, losing his mind to the chaos that his younger brother was slowly planting in every corner of planet Earth.

However, he could also see him being killed in the street by an angry horde who knew he was a prodigy, or by a group of policemen who mistook him for one of the hundreds of protesters that had filled the city, and although the thought made him uncomfortable, it might be best if things stayed that way.

After all, if David went out to the real world, the world that was out there right now would probably kick him to the ground, take out his eyes, and eat them before stabbing him and letting him there to die.

Yes, things should stay that way. With Ace Anarchy alive and building the world as it must have been from the start, and with the Artino brothers dead, buried in a sealed tomb from which not even their souls could escape.

He was about to stand up when someone knocked on the door. Honey’s bees, which had been quietly resting on the church pews, began to buzz like watchdogs barking at the presence of a stranger.

Alec knew those four knocks.

Honey and Leroy suddenly fell silent and settled into their chairs almost unconsciously. Ace put on his helmet and then, with a wave of his hand, he slightly opened the cathedral door.

His hair was longer than normal. He recognized the same coat he was wearing the last time he saw him, but he had changed his pajama bottoms for faded jeans. He had a mysterious blow to the head and the deepest circles under his eyes he had ever seen. That, plus that unkempt beard, made Ace even more certain that, had he seen him on the street, he probably wouldn't have recognized him.

At least until he saw his blue eyes. David had unmistakable blue eyes.

“Good evening, fellow anarchist,” Ace greeted from his seat. “How can we help you?”

David gripped the door and frowned. “Alec?”

The bees buzzed louder and Honey turned to see him. “Do you know him?”

Leroy and his toxic green eyes seemed to ask the same question.

“You don't want to mention that name here,” Ace warned, ignoring his allies. “Seriously.”

David did not reply. Not that he expected him to. “Come in,” he assured him, nodding slightly. “Us Anarchists are willing to help any prodigy. We fight for all of them. Even for those who prefer to give in to the system that oppresses us in the first place. "

His allies fell silent. Ace knew he wasn't going to be wrong about them; they were fully aware that their opinion was not necessary at that time.

David's old sneakers squeaked on the marble floor of the church. The white shoelaces were stained with dark blood. “I… I looked for you everywhere,” he muttered.

“I didn't go anywhere,” he replied. “I was always here.”

He resisted the childish urge to ask where he had been, precisely because that was it. Childish. Something that only a kid would do.

And Alec James Artino, the kid, was dead.

David reached the first step of the altar and Ace stood up. “Don’t.”

His brother stopped before taking another step. He even stepped back and put his hands to his chest, as if his heart had ached at that simple word.

You see? Weak.

“I'm not here to take you anywhere,” he assured.

Ace gave a mocking laugh. “So?”

“I'm here to join you.”

The smile faded from Ace’s face. However, he did not interpret it as a sign of weakness, because immediately, he was able to recover from the blow and remain expressionless as his brother's gaze pierced his like stakes.

Even with him there, right in front of Ace, standing in the middle of the cathedral, he knew that David didn't belong there. He was not an Anarchist like them. Something was missing. Maybe courage. Maybe it was determination.

Perhaps what he lacked was that spark of life that rage gave when it started a fire in the depths of your gut.

So why bother?

Before the question slipped from his lips, the answer came to his head and it all made sense to him.

Ace was right. The day anarchy was born, the Artino brothers had died, but there was no one alive to bury them. The ghost of David Artino had spent days searching for his only remaining family, wandering around town like a beggar.

Because deep down, he needed him more than Alec had ever needed David.

How did he explain that the little brother he was looking for was dead, and now only the man he had become remained?

He knew how to explain it, but David was stubborn. Even if Ace chose the most appropriate words for the situation, he could never make him see things the way he wanted him to. At least not if he knew Alec was dead.

He did not know that in an ideal world, the only one still alive was Ace Anarchy.

It wasn't the perfect scenario, but the perfect thing about that scenario was that David didn't need to know that just yet. Alec's ghost could come out of his grave as many times as necessary and Ace could use that to his advantage for as long as he wanted.

That would make the ghost David very happy. And if David was happy and he could take advantage of that happiness, then Ace would be happy too.

Ace removed his helmet and laid it gently on his chair. When he returned his gaze to David, his eyes were full of tears.

He also tried to cry, but couldn't. Therefore, he decided to extend his arms and allow David to stumble his way to him, giving him the strongest hug he had ever received while stroking his hair and sobbing: “I missed you so much, my little nightmare.”

Alec took Ace by the arms and placed them on David's shaking back. “I missed you too.”

But he was lying. He wondered if ghost David was lying too.

He better not.

***

I wasn't born to walk on water,

I wasn't born to sack and slaughter,

but on my soul, I wasn't born

to stoop, to scorn, and knuckle under.

A man can learn to steal some thunder.

A man can learn to work some wonder.

Year 4, month 7

When it all started, Ace did not like to think of himself as a leader. At least not a leader like the previous ones. God, just thinking about becoming one of those who used to rule the world before he turned things around made him feel sick.

However, over time he grew tired of explaining to each of those who arrived, full of desire to prove something (to the world, to Ace, and themselves), that he was not a leader as such. Little by little, he started to ignore those types of comments and just let himself go with the flow.

At least until David noticed his unconformity with the matter and approach him to talk about it.

It was a couple of months after he arrived. Ace was saying his prayers before going to bed when someone knocked on his door.

Four times. As always.

He quickly crossed himself and muttered, “Come in.”

David came in, holding a candle and wrapped in a robe that "the simps" had given to Leroy (it hadn't fit him, but David was so malnourished that it was like the robe had been made for him.)

Ace put on his robe too. “How can I help you?”

David fixed his gaze on the figure of the Virgin Mary that Ace had on a ledge. “Were you praying?”

“Of course,” he answered, feeling a little defensive.

David scoffed. “Wow.”

“What?”

“I thought ... I thought you didn't do it anymore.”

Ace rolled his eyes and pretended to arrange the covers on his bed (they didn't need to be arranged, he was very meticulous about that matter). “How can I help you?” he repeated.

David finally took his eyes off the Virgin Mary and turned to see him.

It surprised him he still had bags under his eyes. He thought that now that he slept in a decent bed, ate decent food, and no longer had to go through the same stressful situations that he went through before, his face would start to look more youthful again.

Maybe the bags under one’s eyes were like expression or acne marks. They would always be there.

Just like experiences.

Then David started talking to him. A lot. About how he had noticed his discomfort when people called him a leader. About him believing that he shouldn't feel that way because being placed in such a position was completely expected and even natural for it to happen. (“Don't interrupt me.” “I wasn't going to.” Oh, but he was going to.) About if he really wanted things to work out, the world was going to need someone to guide it down the path of good, and David did not doubt that someone was Ace.

They spent several hours just ranting about it. There was a point where the two of them were lying on his bed, Ace covered by his red blanket and David tightly holding a pillow against his chest. The candle was getting smaller and smaller, and David had chosen to place it next to the figure of The Virgin Mary as if it had been lit for her from the beginning.

Only that there was a God who saw everything, and that God knew that the candle had not been lit for her.

Ace was staring at the wooden ceiling when David told him, “I could never be a leader.”

“Why?”

Obviously Ace knew that David could never be a leader, but he wanted to know why his brother thought that way.

David clung to the pillow tighter. He wasn't looking at the ceiling; he looked at Ace. Sideways, but he was looking at him. “I don’t know. I think it's just not my… personality. Even when the guys and I were out there doing the… protests and stuff, I never led any of them,” he explained. “I've always been more of a follower.”

Ace did not answer. Yet he hoped David would interpret his silence as a sign that he had agreed with him.

“But on the other hand, you... Alec, you are a leader.”

His jaw clenched when he heard his name. He had to work on it. “What makes you think that?”

“Because… seriously, why wouldn’t you be a leader?” He turned around so he could look at him and Ace felt obligated to turn to see him as well. Only that he decided not to. “People look after you. They know you are a leader and they follow you. See how much you've changed in a matter of weeks. Inadvertently, you have led people up to this point in history. No one had ever come this far. No one except you.”

Then, Ace couldn't take it anymore and turned to meet his brother's eyes. “But won't that make me like everyone else?”

“Everyone else?” asked a very confused David.

Because David never understood anything.

“Like all the other leaders,” he replied, trying not to lose patience. “Leaders who are corrupt and selfish and—“ His brother interrupted his monologue with laughter. Much to someone who had complained when he tried to cut him off in the middle of a ridiculously long explanation. “—What’s so funny?”

“I’m sorry,” David replied smiling. “It’s just… forget it.” He put a hand on his cheek and kept laughing underneath. “Alec, you’re not going to be like the other leaders.”

“And how are you so sure of that?” he asked a little louder than he wanted to.

David hardly seemed to notice. “Because you are not like that. You are not evil.” He sighed. “Now… there is the potential for evil everywhere, but the only way to combat it’s if more people choose goodness. If more people choose heroism. And you… you are one of those people. I am sure.”

And with those words, the candle extinguished, and Ace decided that it was time for both of them to go to sleep. He allowed David to stay the night. It was not like he had given any sign of wanting to go back to his room anyway. Ace spent most of the night awake, but not necessarily because his older brother's snoring kept him from sleeping.

What kept him from sleeping was thinking that maybe... maybe he was right. Maybe Ace did have to start taking the role of leader. After all, human beings were like that. They were always looking for someone to follow, someone they could cling to that would protect them in some way or another. That someone could be the parents. Older brothers. God himself.

But sometimes that someone was not looking for what was best for them. For example, Ace and David's parents never made the slightest effort to hide how much they hated their children. He was still a kid when his brother took him by the hand, put a coat on him, and told his parents that they were going out to the park. Ace didn't want to go to the park; he wanted to stay home to play with his wooden cubes, but David told him that if he went to the park with him, he would give him a surprise on the way home.

However, they passed the park and David went to a clothing and suitcase store that was near the dock where various boats full of tourists departed. On his way out, he bought his younger brother a lollipop and two one-way tickets to Gatlon City.

They never looked for them. Although if they had, he doubted they would have found them.

For a long time, Ace didn't fully understand what had happened. He just knew that he was never going to see his parents again. Regardless, it was not a thought that haunted him. After all, he hated his parents. And he didn't feel bad about it. Ace had David. David would never hurt him in any way.

At least that's how it was until he grew up. He grew up and realized that David had lied and stolen to get them out of Italy. That wasn't necessarily a bad thing; they would never have survived in Italy anyway. The bad thing was when David lied to him and robbed him for his own benefit. He lied to him about Gatlon's hate towards prodigies and he stole money from his savings when what he earned wasn't enough to pay the monthly rent on his apartment.

And then… there was God.

God existed. Clearly. It was one of the few things Ace didn't feel like he needed proof for. However… God hadn't always been there for him. God had been used as a weapon for hundreds of years to attack prodigies like Ace...

Yes, God was not going to save him. He wasn't going to save any of the millions and millions of prodigies that were counting on Ace Anarchy. God was not a hero.

But Ace could be.

So from that day on, Ace began to be the head in practically all the operations that the Anarchists carried out. Nothing happened without him finding out and approving it first. He recorded numerous videos and wrote dozens of speeches that they would use to spread his word around the world. Prodigies from all countries began to rise against their respective governments, and although some of them gave them what they wanted, the vast majority made the mistake of underestimating them and denying their more than reasonable requests.

Because, well, Ace didn't find anything outrageous about a bunch of people asking their governments to recognize their basic human rights.

Sometimes the prodigies of those places could take down their governments by themselves. However, on a couple of occasions, Ace had to travel to those places to give them a hand. They weren't too far away, so Ace could use his powers to transport himself there, and he still had enough strength left to turn the helicopters and tanks that they sent to try to finish him into unusable pieces of metal. There wasn’t a single place where he had not succeeded, and there was not a single place where people did not make him a symbol and call him a hero.

Not even a single one.

That was why he did not understand people who wanted to leave the trenches.

The first time people from the cathedral had explicitly told him that they wanted to resign were the Benitez twins, Fénix and Tritón. He was a water elemental and she was a fire elemental, who had fought alongside Ace and hundreds of other prodigies like him when they took over the government palace of their country and liberated the population. They were young but strong, like most of those who joined the cause. They spent a year and six months helping on missions that Ace, Honey, or even Leroy assigned them, and never received anything other than good comments from their superiors...

“Then why do you want to leave?” Honey asked them.

She, Leroy, the twins, and he were in what had been the bishop's office after he summoned them all to a meeting where they would assess the situation. Not because he felt a special affection for them; they weren't too different from the other people Ace had in charge of. He just wanted to know why and approve the situation.

Like he always did.

Tritón smiled charmingly at Honey. He and his twin sister had the same curly black hair, but she never smiled. “As we said before… it's nothing personal,” he replied. “Fénix and I were never mistreated here, but... we want to find our own way in life.”

Honey and Leroy turned to see each other. Leroy looked quite indifferent to the situation as if he wished to be in his lab, looking for new ways to finish burning his eyebrows, while Honey seemed quite suspicious regarding the true intentions behind Tritón's words and Fénix's deadly silence.

Ace stood up and looked out the window.

“Are you going back to Mexico?”

“Yes. But not to the same place we came from.”

“And how are you going to—“

“Stop overwhelming them with so many questions, my Queen,” Ace interrupted while turning around. “They are old enough to make their own decisions.”

Tritón sighed in relief, and Fénix didn't even look up to see him. “They had already packed their things, apparently,” and he pointed to the backpacks they were carrying. The same ones with which they had arrived at the cathedral.

“Yes, it's just… we didn't want to make a big fuss about our departure,” Tritón replied. “We want it to be respectful and press-free, please.”

That comment managed to make him smile slightly. “I see no reason to keep you as prisoners,” he said, addressing Honey and Leroy. “If they want to leave, they can.”

Leroy raised his only remaining eyebrow. “Can they?”

“They can,” he repeated. He turned slightly to continue staring out the window. It was a lovely day out there. “Wanting to look for something more than what we are capable of offering is a valid reason to leave.”

“Not that we’re filling like something’s missing here,” Tritón said. “On the contrary, we have never been more… blessed. We promise that we will always keep in mind all the things the Anarchist taught us. We will be on your side even if it is from a distance.”

Now it was Honey's turn to raise an eyebrow. “I don't know, this is too—“

“Excuse me, Queen Bee,” Tritón interrupted, “but ... we're in a bit of a rush.”

“An ally has promised to take us to the border in his truck,” Fénix said, speaking for the first time during the entire conversation. “He's going to pick us up in an hour and it's a long way to the meeting point.

Ace looked through the window to find David welcoming some of the prodigies who had come out to find more supplies for the cathedral. He pointed out where they were being kept and offered to help them carry some boxes up the stairs.

Ace had to go to check on that.

“Acey...”

“Take care of yourselves, Tritón and Fénix,” Ace said, heading for the exit. “Thank you very much for your loyalty. Let me show you the door.”

The twins looked at each other, immediately nodding slowly and leaving the room, walking in front of Ace, shoulder to shoulder, and muttering something. As they walked down the stairs, Ace was too busy thinking about the new shipment that had arrived to care about their conversation, until he tried to overhear them and realized they were speaking in Spanish.

They never spoke Spanish. Not in the cathedral. No one could have understood them if they did. What was the point of hiding something?

Unless they are hiding something.

He turned his attention back to the backpacks they carried. Yes, they were the same ones that they had brought the first day they arrived, but now they seemed fuller than before. And when Ace said fuller, he meant it. Those backpacks were about to explode.

He stopped at the bottom of the stairs. The twins kept walking as if they hadn't realized that Ace was no longer with them. Honey and Leroy caught up with him, while Honey was saying something about this situation making her babies (the bees) very nervous, and she knew that was a bad sign. Leroy replied that those "babies" should take a Xanax, but he didn't sound too convinced of his words either.

Fénix took his brother's hand and Tritón looked back, making contact with Ace's dark eyes.

The backpacks. The backpacks were too full.

Ace used his powers to rip them off their shoulders, at the same time he grabbed them from the collars of their clothes and lifted them like a mother lioness would have carried her cubs. The two cried out in shock but fell silent when they came face to face with Ace.

Neither of them said anything. Not even Tritón. They only held on tighter by the hand as Ace opened their backpacks, dropped their contents on the floor, and revealed that they were carrying, along with their personal belongings, tons of food and hygiene items taken directly from the cathedral warehouse.

The warehouse that David was supposed to watch.

“My bracelet!” Honey exclaimed. “That... bitch was taking my bracelet!”

A group of bees returned the bracelet to her queen. Honey thanked them in a low voice and immediately, her face was completely changed by her anger. “How dare you?” she asked Fénix putting a finger on her chest. “How dare you disrespect me like that ?! Is that how you were going to pay the man who was going to take you to the border!?” But Fénix didn’t say anything. Again. “Answer me!”

“More like how dare you!” Fénix suddenly yelled. Honey took a step back from shock. “How dare you take everything from people who have nothing!”

“Fénix... por favor...” Tritón whispered.

“Shut the fuck up, Diego!” she yelled at his brother. “Tell me, Harper! How do you sleep at night?” she kept asking. “How do you sleep at night knowing that you have helped destroy the world as we know it? How can you reason that what you’re doing is right?!”

“Eleonor! Eleonor, por favor!”

Fénix started to try to free herself from Ace's grip, but that only made Ace cling tighter to the collar of her blouse. “How dare you even think you’re the good guys?”

Then, she looked him dead in the eye and spat, “How dare you call yourself a hero, Alec Artino?”

Ace thought hearing his name was going to make him lose his mind. Yet some way or another, his face remained expressionless. Even when Honey slapped the shit out of Fénix and the bees began to fly around her, stinging every bit of skin that wasn’t covered by her clothes. He also remained expressionless when he heard Tritón yell at Honey to leave her sister alone, calling her a "pinche vieja bruja" in the process, or when Leroy (who didn't understand anything, but knew it wasn't a compliment) held both of his wrists to prevent it from forming a wave of water that would drown all the bees instantly. It did not cause him anything at all to hear the poison melting Tritón's skin, making him cry in pain, or Fénix yelling and cursing.

And he didn’t even flinch when he broke Tritón's neck. Or when he left Fénix alive just the exact amount of time for her to process what her actions had caused to the only family she had left before breaking her neck too.

Ace dropped what was left of the Benitez twins. The bees moved away from the body and returned to Honey as if they were children hiding in their mother's skirts after having been lost for hours in the market, and Leroy let go of Tritón’s wrists without saying a word. Ace looked around and realized that a big amount of people had watched the entire scene from a distance.

One of those people had been David.

At that moment, Honey's bracelet fell off her hands. Ace picked it up with his powers and Honey whispered, "Thanks, Acey". She tried to put it on, but her hands were shaking so much that Leroy reached out (reluctantly) to help her adjust the clasp.

She didn't take her eyes off the corpses. “Someone come pick them up,” Leroy ordered.

Ace pointed to the first group of people he encountered. “You,” he barked. The trio of anarchists trembled slightly. “You’ve heard Cyanide. Clean up this mess.”

He turned to tell Leroy and Honey to go with him to the office, but they had already made their way to Honey's quarters, while she was babbling about something insignificant and a cloud of agitated bees followed them. David was also not where he had last seen him, but found him turning his back on him and putting the supply crates in the warehouse.

The warehouse that was his responsibility. The warehouse that the Benitez twins had managed to steal from it without anyone noticing.

David couldn’t stay there. He would have to get him a new position, the sooner the better.

Being a hero was not doing things that everyone considered right. Being a hero was to be a revolutionary, one who was willing to make sacrifices to protect the people who were on his side. Especially when those sacrifices meant the death of traitors who only sought their own benefit, completely forgetting the rest of them.

To protect the people who were on his side. Not the enemy. Never the common good.

The common good was not something Ace believed in, because that would mean looking after his oppressors, and they had never looked after prodigies at any point in human history.

Why start doing it now that the tables have turned?

Perhaps those thoughts made him more than just a revolutionary. Ace was probably a visionary.

But did those thoughts make him a villain too?

***

And soon the moon will smolder,

and the winds will drive.

Yes, a man grows older, but his soul remains alive.

All those tremulous stars will glitter,

and I will survive!

Year 10, month 11

For a lot of people, the answer was yes.

Being a visionary was the same as being a villain.

No one had ever said that to his face, but Ace knew it was what they were thinking. He saw it on the journalist’s faces, who came from time to time to the cathedral to report the latest advances in some important mission or some notable event. He felt it in the air of the cathedral, where some of his allies bent down every time they saw him as if they were not worthy to look him in the eye. He felt it every time he looked at his brother's expressionless eyes, working in the basement that served as a workshop where he created weapons for the Anarchists.

However, none of those silent reproaches mattered to him. Ace knew what he was doing was the right thing. Even if that made him not fit into the perfect image society had in its head of what a hero should be.

Ace had learned that there were no heroes or villains. Not like everyone thought.

The world would one day understand it as well as he did. But in the meanwhile, he had to sit down and observe that embarrassing spectacle.

They had managed to fix the TV that was at the former’s bishop's office. The only channels that were still actually broadcasting anything, besides the same old shows over and over again, were the news channels. But then he decided to do it just when it was absolutely necessary, for example, when they lied or got too close to a truth the public didn't need to know.

After all, freedom of speech was a human right.

Leroy was sat on the comfy chair Honey always sat on when they were in Ace's office. David offered Honey his chair and she said that she expected no less from someone as chivalrous as him (“Definitely some men should start taking your example”), but then added he shouldn’t worry about it, Ace was surely going to allow her to sit on his desk. Ace didn't see why not. She even brought her pillow with her. She put it over the desk, at the exact place she was going to sit on, and had her eyes fixated on the TV like she were a little girl watching colorful cartoons.

They were broadcasting from the West Zone of the city. An Anarchist truck was on fire in the background of the image. The trio of prodigies that Ace himself had sent to exchange some weapons for medicines with the usual gangs they always trade with, were tied with a chrome chain as if they were animals. The sky was still blue, but the evening light made the clouds turn orange and illuminated the faces of the two figures standing at the base that held the statue of a man with a copper-colored helmet.

Ace had never seen that monument as an ode to himself. He didn’t even know it was there until David told him about it, after going out to the city to visit that girlfriend of his. It seemed that some prodigies had come together and built it on their own. They hadn't left a signature or a way to prove who were they, but they did leave a golden plaque that read: "Long live to anarchy".

To anarchy. Not him. He was just the face they had given it.

He thought that everyone would think the same, but apparently, that pair didn't see it that way.

Because again, apparently, that pair shared a single brain cell.

One of them had brown skin and his cape flapped in the wind. His entire body looked slightly translucent, probably due to the nervousness that caused him to have that many people looking at him. Ace had met enough prodigies to identify when their powers gave away their mood. However, most of the general public would not be able to know exactly what he was feeling, because a black mask covered most of his facial features and he was not saying a single word.

He was terrified.

Poor little thing… sure.

The other was blond and his eyes were full of courage. The more words that came out of his mouth, the more his cheeks turn red and the tighter he clenched his fists. He was also wearing a mask, but even someone less observant than Ace could tell exactly what he was feeling.

“…and now this!” he yelled at the crowd. “Now this statue! A statue in the middle of the city, as if having experienced firsthand all the misfortunes that his anarchist reign has brought to our lives has not been enough, now he wants to constantly remind us that he won. He won—” His voice cracked, and he tried to hide it by coughing. Honey burst out laughing. “—and he will keep winning until someone stops him!”

The boy in the cape put his hand on the monument. “You know what this reminds me of? It reminds me of loss.” He became invisible and within seconds, he was sitting on the statue's outstretched arm. “Because Ace Anarchy has taken away from us so many things—” He jumped off and fell gracefully onto the base again “—that he took our fear with him.”

“That’s why we are here,” the other continued. “We are fed up with Ace Anarchy and his government, and I'm sure you are too.” He took a deep breath and smiled at the nearest camera. “But we don't blame you if you still don't understand. There is nothing wrong with being paralyzed with fear. That is what Ace Anarchy has wanted us to do during these ten years that he has been in power. The good news is that there is a cure for fear, and that cure is hope.”

A young, dark-skinned reporter pushed her way through the crowd. Her microphone had a number five printed on it, and Ace recognized the channel immediately.

He had killed one of its journalists after she refused to stop digging graves. He had to do it; if she dug too much, she would surely have found Alec Artino's body.

After all, freedom of speech was a human right. Messing up with the dead was just a quicker way for you to end up like them.

“Georgia Rawles, for Channel Five,” the reporter said with a heavy breath. “I think we're all asking ourselves the same question about—” She tried to search for the correct words, but the time was running out and she couldn’t find it, so she sighed and just blurted out, “Who are you?”

Leroy rolled his eyes. “More reporters like her, please...” he mumbled sarcastically.

She handed the microphone to the one with the cape. For a few seconds, he was almost completely invisible, but the insistence of the reporter Rawles brought him back to reality and his voice did not tremble as his legs did when he said: “We are that hope.”

The other boy tapped Georgia Rawles’ shoulder and she swiftly passed him the microphone.

He never stopped smiling. “We are the Renegades.”

Georgia Rawles drew back slightly. He couldn’t tell whether her expression was one of horror or joy because right after replying, the boy smashed the monument to anarchy with a single blow and turned it into pieces.

They both jumped from the base before the monument could crash them. Dread Warden and Captain Chromium ran towards the city, without any reporter bothering to follow them.

Ace turned off the television with his powers, and for about five seconds, neither of them spoke.

“They're not good at picking aliases,” Honey spat out of nowhere.

“So that’s the problem you have with this?” Leroy blurted out.

“Dread Warden… that has nothing to do with his powers,” Honey explained as if she were explaining to a five-year-old why the sky is blue. “And Captain Chromium is too… cheesy to be a real alias. Are we sure they were serious when they gave their names to the reporters from the first channel that arrived on the scene?” She cleared her throat and said (trying so hard to imitate the voice of a teenage boy whose voice hadn’t change yet), “He won,” before burst out laughing again.

“How mature of you…” David muttered.

“Do you have something to say, brother?” Ace asked.

For a second, he thought that David would not answer him, as he had been doing lately whenever he asked him that question. However, this time he did not remain silent and turned to see him. Not in the eyes, of course. “Actually, I do.”

Ace leaned back in his chair. “Go ahead then.”

“I don't think we should take this lightly.”

Honey scoffed. “Who says we are taking this lightly? The invisible twink and his lesbian boyfriend hate us, so what? They’re not the first ones, like… get in line, girl.”

“Well, you don’t seem too worried about the whole situation, to be honest.”

“It's because Honey doesn't shut up about the names thing, right?” Leroy asked in a slightly teasing tone.

“It's just my marketing major talking,” Honey said, slightly kicking him, barefoot. “I know about branding and stuff.”

“You dropped out.”

She put on her left heel and kicked Leroy. “You too!”

David massaged his temple. Ace turned around in his rotating chair and looked out the window. The sky had turned the same color as the clouds.

“Alec,” David called him. “It seems like… they—the Renegades think of themselves as heroes, and… they see you as the villain. I don't know, they could be a real threat, you shouldn't ignore them.”

Ace really wanted to tell David to just go back to his workshop. What did he know? They were just a couple of children who had destroyed a monument, who hadn't even been able to reveal their true identities and hid the entire time behind their masks, like criminals.

They were not a real threat.

But then, the seventeen-year-old Ace Anarchy appeared on the other side of the window, challenging him to finish that sentence inside his head. The seventeen-year-old Ace Anarchy who had dismantled entire governments and liberated millions of prodigies simply by wearing that helmet and its powers.

And when Ace blinked again, it was no longer the dark eyes of his old self that were staring at him from the glass, but the gray eyes of Captain Chromium, with that smug and arrogant smile, that he used to charm the cameras moments ago, passing his fingers through his hair as if his life depended on it.

Ace couldn’t look away from him.

He resembled Ace, but it was not enough. The old Ace didn't smile at his oppressors and he didn't have an unhealthy obsession with his hair either. He did not seek to protect people to win their affection, because he didn’t care if people like him or not, he knew he was doing the right thing.

The old Ace was not a kid playing to be a superhero, because superheroes didn't exist in the first place.

When he blinked, none of them were there anymore. Just his present self.

He smiled at himself to regain confidence.

Ace had learned that there were no heroes or villains. Captain Chromium was going to have to learn it too, and soon. Ace was willing to be the one to teach him that lesson.

And he would, whether he liked it or not.

***

There was a dream, a dying ember.

There was a dream, I don't remember,

but I will resurrect that dream,

though rivers stream and hills grow steeper.

For here in hell where life gets cheaper.

Oh, here in hell the blood runs deeper!

And when the final duel is near, I'll lift my spear and fly!

Year 20, month 5

The main difference between Ace and his brother was that David always fled at the first sign of danger. Always.

When the boys at his school began to suspect that he was a prodigy, David skipped school for weeks, getting his clothes dirty enough to make it look like he had spent breaks running after a ball along with his bullies. When his mother slapped him with the hot metal spoon, yelling he would not eat dinner that night, they both hid in the closet of his room, while David hugged him tightly and sobbed, telling him he rather be dead. When his father came home from work a few hours later and almost killed him, David took them both out of that house and out of Italy.

He said it was because he knew that the next beating would be the last and that when he was gone, Mr. Artino was going to focus all his anger on Alec, who would end up having the same fate as David. He didn't want that for his little nightmare.

What he didn't count on was that if Ace had been in his place, he would have turned around and slammed the bullies into the concrete wall of the school. He would have endured hunger and weariness with dignity and would have killed his father before he could touch a single one of his hairs. Ace wouldn't have turned his back on his problems. Ace would have fought for himself, just as for twenty years he had been fighting for all prodigies.

And now this.

He always knew that David didn't have what it took to be an anarchist. He was too deep in his own thoughts to even make an effort to listen to him. Ace had decided not to bother to explain to him the whole situation because there was no force on Earth able to change his mind anyway, and he had much more important things to worry about.

They were both sitting in the tiny white dining room in the apartment where he, Tala, and the girls lived. Ace had arrived unexpectedly so she had put more water to boil because the one they had put in for breakfast had cooled down. She apologized for the inconvenience, but he assured her that there was no problem, she could take all the time she needed. David had a cup of cold tea in his hands. He had never lost that disgusting habit of biting his nails.

No, David was not an anarchist. But Ace never thought he was a traitor.

Not until now.

The kettle began to boil at the same time the baby cried from the other room.

Tala turned off the stove and Ace could tell she was debating between pouring his tea or going to see what was going on.

“Don't worry,” Ace said walking towards her, “I'll serve it, you go take care of your daughter. Would you like me to make one for you too? "

He knew he intimidated people, but Tala took it to another level. She looked at her feet the whole time, her hands were shaking and she didn’t even answer the question before running into the next room, where Nova was complaining about her little sister's cries.

Ace took another splintered mug from the cupboard. With his powers, of course. The place looked clean (they probably spent a lot of time cleaning for lack of other hobbies), but he didn't trust them. “I've always said it: Tala is a lovely woman,” he said.

David didn't even flinch.

He had never been good at hiding his feelings.

“How does she like her tea?”

“Uh?”

He put his hands behind his back and opened the jar where they kept the chamomile tea. “How does Tala like tea?” he asked again.

David finally came back to reality. “Oh… three of sugar. She likes to add three spoons of sugar.”

Ace tried his best not to roll his eyes. I see this wife of yours wants to give herself cavities.

By the time the tea was served, the baby had stopped crying and Tala left the room again, with Nova following her. “Uncle Alec!”

David and Tala turned to see her with a single exclamation on their lips.

No.

But they didn't say anything. It was too late. Nova was already hugging his legs and Ace was stroking her strands of poorly cut hair. “Good morning, Nova, how are you?”

“Terrible,” Nova replied in all honesty. “Evie has been si—“

“Tala, Alec made you some tea,” David interrupted suddenly.

“Oh, that’s true.” He levitated the cup towards her and couldn't help but smile when he saw her recoil as the cup approached her, wondering if this was how she would see the barrel of a pistol approaching her forehead. “With three tablespoons of sugar. Just the way you like it.”

For the first time, Tala looked at him. “I don't like my tea with sugar,” she said in a calm voice. She shot David a stern look. “I thought we have talked about it.”

David looked so... small and weak. “I forgot about it. I'm sorry.”

But that "I'm sorry" didn't sound at all like the "I'm sorry" someone says when the only wrong they've done is forgetting how their wife prepares her tea.

It was the "sorry" of a traitor.

It was the "sorry" that Ace was waiting to receive.

Then he held out the other cup. “I apologize, that was my mistake. Take this cup then. I don't like to add sugar to my tea either.”

Tala accepted the cup. She took a sip and Ace recognized that micro-expression of disgust as she felt the hot chamomile water touch her palate.

It didn't surprise him that she had lied to him. That whole family was full of liars.

Nova turned to see her dad, laughing as only a child could laugh. “Oh, silly papà…” she said, hiding her head in his uncle's neck.

David smiled almost imperceptibly and raised his arms slightly so that Nova could run into them.

It reminded him a lot of when he wanted Alec to run into his arms.

But, like Alec, Nova didn't go to him. She liked being in her uncle's arms. “Oh, silly papà” Ace repeated. “Silly, silly papà...”

And the imperceptible smile disappeared completely.

“What were you saying, Nova?” he asked. "Moments ago. Are you having a terrible day? "

Nova knew immediately what he was talking about. She wasn't too busy drowning in the bitter taste of her lies. “It's just that Evie hasn't stopped crying for days,” she exclaimed with a face of pure exasperation. “We have given her everything, but nothing calms her down, and I always have to—”

“Alec, I have to tell you something.”

David had stood up and his fists were clenched on the splintered table. His knuckles had turned white and his bushy eyebrows betrayed the real nervousness behind all that facade of sternness.

He was so pleased by the image that he didn't even comment on how inappropriate it was to interrupt a woman when she was giving her point of view on something, or when Tala took advantage of this seemingly distracting moment to snatch Nova from his arms.

That was the moment. David was going to ask for forgiveness. He was going to break as he had broken that night when they were hidden inside the closet and just as he had begged his abusive father before he smashed his head against the nightstand. He would tell him that he regretted betraying him and that from now on, he would agree with him on everything. He would accept that he had never been anything but a coward who escaped trouble at the first opportunity and would run into Ace’s arms one more time.

That was the time for David to choose Ace as the god to whom he would pray for mercy.

That was the moment.

But of course, it would have been too dangerous. Therefore, he was not at all surprised, when he looked down at his teacup again and blurted out, “Evelyn has been very ill, and… we have run out of options. You know I wouldn't bother you with this if it wasn't important, but I wanted to know if… you know.”

“If I could get some medicine for Evelyn?”

David nodded energetically. “That's right.”

Ace pretended to stop to think about it. He wanted to see the desperation in his eyes and wanted him to suffer at the thought that he might never get the much-needed medicine for his little daughter.

He wanted David to suffer in every possible way he could, and when he thought it was going to break, Ace replied, “I think I have a contact that could help us with it.”

“When will you—”

“And with that medicine, Evie is finally going to stop crying?”

Now it was Nova's turn to interrupt him. If he weren't so blinded by the pain he wanted to inflict on his brother, he probably would have had found the act of Nova being the one interrupting her father delightful.

Tala tried to hide Nova with her arms when Ace approached them, but it was useless because he used his powers to gently pull Nova towards him, making her laugh out loud at the feeling that the levitation caused in her entire body. “I assure you, Nova, that with that medicine Evie will stop crying,” he replied, brushing a lock of hair from her face. “But in the meantime, you have to help your mom and papà, and keep doing what you say you do to calm her down. Now… how do you calm down your little sister?”

“I put her to sleep.”

David threw down a chair and ran over to Nova. Ace felt like she had been snatched from his arms again.

Having the two of them there, side by side, made him more aware of how similar they looked. Although Nova had always been a perfect mix of her two parents, Ace was much of the idea that one could know a lot about a person by looking into their eyes.

Nova had the same eyes as her father, but without the golden details that gave away the stardust that David was able to manipulate since birth.

The fact that their eyes were very similar but not identical could mean a lot of things. Perhaps it was that Nova had the worst quality of her mother and the only prodigious thing inside her was the half of the blood that ran through her veins. It would be a shame. The world did not need the oppressors to continue to reproduce with the oppressed and to gradually extinguish the spark with their inferior genes each prodigy had. It was only one of the thousand ways in which they were slowly annihilating them.

However, it could also mean that Nova was not like David, but not in the sense of being or not being a prodigy. Maybe those golden sparks were actually that her brother's soul had been born rusty and that was what would never allow him to see the world as Ace did. Instead, Nova did her name justice and could symbolize a new beginning for them, much like the supernova that granted them their powers had been.

For a second, she saw Nova not as a child, but as raw and pure potential.

Did he know? Was David aware of how precious was what his rough hands were holding?

“She sings her to sleep,” he explained hastily. “Nova loves spending time with her little sister, and she loves carrying her. Whenever she cries she insists that we let her hold her and that always calms her down. It is like—”

“Magic?”

David hesitated. “Yes… magic.”

Nova played with the collar of her dad's shirt, thinking about God knows what, until something made click inside her brain. “Uncle Ace!”

“Yes, Nova?”

She opened her mouth to speak, but David silenced her with a severe look.

Ace offered Tala his help with washing the dishes before leaving. He assured them that he would be back as soon as possible and asked Nova to kiss little Evie goodnight for him. He gave Tala a quick (and unrequited) kiss on the cheek and a handshake to David.

The same hands that could have defended themselves from the abusers, that could have stopped the burning spoon before it slapped him, and those that could have wrapped around their father's neck before blood stained the old carpet in the room.

He decided that there would be no survivors. Not even the ghost of David.

David always ran from danger, but now he was the danger that could destroy what it took Ace years to build. Ace wasn't running from him. Ace noticed it, faced it, and defeated it.

Because, in the end, Ace Anarchy was the real danger.

***

Piercing into the sky and higher, 

and the strong will thrive.

Yes, the weak will cower while the fittest will survive

If we wait for the darkest hour,

'till we spring alive...

He had already been to the dome of the cathedral on other occasions. The first time he had done it, it was dark. The entire city was in lockdown and there was not a single light because Ace had managed to uproot the building that provided basic service to all the city. Then, he thought that maybe, just maybe, that night the sky would be so clear that he would be able to see the stars. And what better place for stargazing than the dome of the cathedral.

He was right. He could see every last star. Their light was not like the light posts in the parks or the lamps in his old room. Their light was energy, it was strength, and it was sheer power.

They were so present in the sky and seemed so close to his fingertips that he felt one of them himself. But he did not believe that his energy, his strength, and his power was similar to that of any of those stars; it would be like reducing himself to being something that he was not, so he could fit into a mold that he did not to fit in and please people who did not appreciate him.

And like that, under the stars and on the dome of that cathedral, the birth of anarchy was announced with the explosion of a supernova.

Ace Anarchy was a supernova. Ace Anarchy was born on that dome.

Now he wondered if he was going to die there too.

Hugh Everhart was in front of him. He didn't move a single muscle and he didn't make a single face, not even when Ace spat his name like it was a blasphemy. With one hand he held his spear and with the other, he clung to the piece of cloth that passed through his chest and that held a baby dozing on his back. He took a step forward, and Ace imitated him, too blinded by adrenaline to even think that this image was too good to be true and that Hugh Everhart would never give himself up like this, on a silver platter, and without his allies by his side, unless he didn't plan on giving himself up in the first place.

It was the worst mistake he could have made. And he didn't even notice it until he began to feel… that.

It was as if he was being absorbed. Someone ran their hands from his head to the tips of his toes, causing the feeling of lightness with which he had lived for so long to gradually fade away. The cars he launched, the walls, and the corpses he used as weapons against the friends and relatives of the dead were growing heavier and Ace had never carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. At least not that way.

Never like this.

The fire inside him was getting smaller, and smaller, and the only thing that seemed to remain was a single spark.

Ace stepped back, but Hugh Everhart kept on walking towards him.

There came a time when there was no more dome Ace could stand on and he fell to his knees.

For that thousandth of a second, he felt the presence of Tala and the baby behind him, looking at him with a deadpan expression. David's ghost, made of the same stardust that his fingers could manipulate, laid his hand on his shoulder and a tear, bright and white, fell on the fabric of his trench coat.

It was a pure tear, waiting to be paid for with another tear that was just as pure as the first one. But Ace had long since lost the ability to cry.

Hugh Everhart pulled the helmet off his head with such force that he backed away a couple of meters. The air swiped away the ghosts of his brother, his wife, and daughter, leaving only Alec Artino, with his knobby knees and messy hair, looking at him as the lost child in the middle of the battlefield that he was.

He ran towards him and wrapped his thin and fragile arms around him telling him that perhaps it was time to accept his own humanity.

Because… what is Ace Anarchy without his helmet?

His enemy readied his spear and Ace turned to see the boy asking the question, who was looking at him as if his mere presence was the answer.

What was Ace Anarchy without his helmet? Was he that weak child, with a stuffy nose and restless hands? Was he the man he saw in the reflection of his eyes, with a sloppy beard and deep dark circles?

Was he the ghost he would soon become?

Alec held Ace by the cheeks, with those bony little hands that were always cold, no matter how many gloves he wore or how many times David wrapped his around them and rubbed them to keep them warm.

And then he asked him, “How do you kill a god?”

The answer was what brought him back to reality and the one that made him realize, that it had only been a couple of seconds from the moment he fell to his knees and now that he was standing up, Alec’s ghost fading for the last time.

Because David and Alec Artino should have died completely since day one. In a perfect world, the only one alive was Ace Anarchy.

Someday, that vision of a perfect world would become real, and neither Alec nor David would be there to intervene.

Someday...

The only thing that remained inside of him was a spark, but even a single spark could start the biggest of fires.

How do you kill a god?

How do you kill Ace Anarchy?

Oh, my little nightmare.

You don’t.

And with that, he spread his arms and leaped straight into the flames.

...then with claws of fire, we devour like a falcon in the dive!

[lilolilyr]

Fics I Wanted To Write This Year But Didn't, Part 2: Star Trek AU

For @spookyvoidangelskeleton for this ask

Now I suppose these would have been several fics, but in a series or a collection as they're all about the same main storyline: The collapsing of a (or several) universe(s).

If you've known me for a while, you know that I am very into Multiverse Theory, both real life and fictional, and Star Trek with the Mirror Universe is of course one of the first fandoms that comes to mind for me to write my batshit ideas in xD

Basically, in my personal little (fictional, bc I know and understand 0 about real life physics or whatever would be relevant for this) multiverse theory, there are an infinite number of universes, evenly spread around the multiverse, and a new universe comes into existence when a timeline/universe (same thing) can go into 2 seperate ways naturally, or when there is timetravel involved to manually change a timeline: The original timeline won't be affected, you can't change what's already there, but a new changed timeline will be created.

Now, in some cases that works out well, with the timetraveller ending up in the new timeline and never knowing that their original universe is still out there- in other ways of time travelling, not so much. If the person trying to make a change manages to do just that but never notices, because they or a version of them is stuck in the orginal timeline, what do they do?

Try again, with the same result, many many times.

And that's where it gets problematic, because the multiverse gets unbalanced, and whether you see it as a sentient entity connected to the Qs in Star Trek or just as something that Works That Way automatically: the multiverse doesn't want to be out of balance, so the new universes start to collapse in on each other, creating a Splitter-verse and leaving its inhabitants to a fate arguably worse than death (in this fictional world): they completely stop to exist. This doesn't just affect the new universes but the surroundings ones, which would have split earlier and are already more different from each other, too, to make sure the one that was the cause for it all falls, too.

Now (of course, because I can't help myself) this would be part of @thelucyverse , with there being Central people trained in spotting such time anomalies before it is too late, but with there also being time-bombs (yeah hahah) created in inter-universal wars to create smaller, controlled splitter-verses (I say small and controlled here but like. We're still talking about entire universes), and with Central having back-up plans to get people out of the 'verses, in order as follows: anyone visibly IDing as Central (the organisation is still largely volunteer-based, shit's got to have some perks), then everyone whose energy indicates recent travel in-between universes, as these are also most likely to a) be Central and b) be okay in a new 'verse, after that, if there is still time and anyone willing to go back into the falling universe, children as they are also more likely to adapt in a new world. If there is enough warning, they also get out whoever people Central members want to have saved, but usually it just turns into whoever stands close enough to grab and get the hell out of there.

Whether taking people out of a universe against their will is a good thing or nah is ...debatable and still being debated amongst those who do it and those who think that taking someone away from the possibility of dying death in their own universe is vile (as amongst most religions, it is thought that you can only reach the same afterlife as those who died in the same umiverse- but again most also think that there probably won't even Be an afterlife in a splitter-verse).

Sometimes, people are also pushed out of the universe by the explosion itself, but they then tend to die upon impact as they seldomly end up exactly at the coordinates where they left, which leaves them either suffocating in hard matter or in space.

If you want to use these ideas for your own fanfic feel free, just give me credit and link this post as inspired by/ link to my ao3 or @ my tumblr!

Anyhow! To Star Trek... and I suppose this is now SPOILERS not rly for any Star Trek canon but for these fanfics, if I do end up writing them!

I tend to forget which characters are canon and which are complete OCs because I spend Way more hours on tumblr and ao3 + thinking about my own headcanons than I spend consuming the original media, but I am fairly certain a canon Joana McCoy, daughter of Leonard 'Bones' McCoy exists? If no and I stole the idea from sb else's fanfic I am sincerely sorry. Gotta look that up.

In one universe close to what would be the centre of the splitterverse, Joana- as a young child nicknamed 'Jojo', but now as a young teen trying to get rid of the childish nickname- has a younger part-vulcan girl as a friend, and this girl, nicknamed Aka, has, through having sticky fingers and connections to Central, a device that allows you to jump between universes. She's used it before and gotten into a lot of trouble for it, but to her it had always been great fun- until reality is starting to collapse around them while she is visiting Joana, and Joana is the only person she can reach in time and take with her to the next universe.

Distraught, the children are left in a new world, debating what to do, waiting for Central to contact them, hoping that they saved their families- but of course, Central has quite some different problems right now and won't contact them any time soon, and even if they did it wouldn't be with news of their parents: the adult families of non-Central members who only happened to have jumped between universes before themselves are really not the top priority, and the universe is collapsing too quickly to even get down the prio list to 'children',

Aka wants to leave the universe again and look for Central elsewhere, hoping that her moving around will attract their attention. Joana has enough from universe jumps for a lifetime. Thus, they part ways.

While Aka at some point does run into a group of Central troubeshooters who more or less adopt her as one of their own and teach her how to work their equipment and use magic and weapons and starships (not what a child her age should be learning. But then, none of the adults there ever signed up to be a parent, so who's to blame them), Joana goes looking for her family in this world.

Now I could write entire novels about Akas adventures and how it may or may not be healthy to not have a home at all and decide to not rely on anybody instead of either finding new versions of her original parents or letting someone new into her life properly (spoileralert: it isn't healthy at all), and how meeting a girl from one of the original splitter-verses (the not bombed ones) telling her not to make the same mistakes she made finally makes her think about her choices and and and, but this post is already going to be Long so I won't. That would all be a seperate fanfic anyways.

Joana finds a girl her age who looks just like her and acts almost exactly like her, too- the only difference seems to be that there's no Aka around, which made this version of her less used to adventure but also less wary of it.

The version of Joana from this universe- she decides to call herself Joan when they are alone, while the Joana we already know goes with 'Jojo'- her once loathed childhood nickname now a connection to her past- is thrilled to meet her and begs her to stay, I mean what is cooler than suddenly having a twin, and won't it be fun there is so much they can do! As their parents are seperated, they manage to spend their time mostly at one of their homes, either together when the parent is too busy to notice that there are two kids around, or one at each place, guessing correctly that if the parents were to talk about it, they wouldn't even think of the possibility of there being two children and instead just get mad at each other.

This goes on for a few months during the summer, with Jojo feeling vaguely guilty both to her original dead parents and these new ones who think that she is their real daughter, and the girls are just deciding about what to do when school starts again when-

Reality breaks apart around them.

Jojo clings to Joan in fear, and- as Jojo is now on the list of people who have travelled between universes in the past, she is saved by Central, and Joan with her. They are placed into a universe further away this time, a safe distance to the only slowly contained Splitters.

Meanwhile, in the same universe, two people were currently out on a space-walk: Michael Burnham and Philippa Georgiou.

They are thrown out of the universe in the explosion, and as they are wearing their suits, they survive as they end up somewhere in space again, but- they don't end up in the same universe. Michael ends up about 20-30 years earlier in a universe further away, and she doesn't even end up in what would've been federation space in her old 'verse. Philippa is only thrown one universe to the left and picked up by Central. As Central likes to name their acquaintances in some way that makes it easier to identify just which version of a person you are talking to without having to add the long universe number (even harder when the universe was destroyed and there isn't a known number), they ask Philippa to pick a new name. She is way too rattled and desperate to go looking for Michael as quickly as possible to care about what name she is supposed to have, so she goes with the first option given to those who don't have their own nickname ideas: lastname for firstname, making her Georgiana, short Gia.

Through Central, she finds out that the universal explosion left her and Michael connected- but it won't be much help in the search, basically just a way to say 'alright this verse is closer to it than that one', it's still trial and error... (I could also involve some body switching here, idk I already wrote a long fanfic with that trope in the Andromaquynh fandom, but I happen to Like that trope so yeah maybe I'll recycle some parts of In Your Stead if I ever do manage to write this Milippa story. Which, btw, if not already obvious, would again be a seperate fic from the Joana universal-sister story. On the other hand, Aka runs into Georgiana a lot, even calling her 'auntie Gia').

Meanwhile, Michael doesn't have to jump through universes but make her way through just the one universe to get to federarion space. Except what she find's isn't the federation at all... you guessed it, the 'verse she ended up in is more similar to a mirrorverse than to Prime. However, the Georgiou of this world isn't the emperor yet, she's young and Michael is able to influence her enough over the years so that she turns her back to the Empire.

Yes, it takes years for Michael and Gia to find their way back to each other, maybe decades... they also wouldn't have spent exactly the same amount of time apart as they aren't in the same 'verse. In fact, Cleo of Central carefully tells Gia that Michael might have died by now, but of course Georgiana doesn't want to hear this.

Michael and that universe's Georgiou also get quite close, though Michael doesn't want to cheat on her Philippa... of course, after years of this, she might think that she will never see Philippa again... (We are approaching ot3 territory here lol, and I don't even want to think about the potential of ot7 with the two canon mirror and prime versions adsfghjkl because if I finish this story here, I would 100% write a lil fix it where Central! Gia Mikay and Phil go fish Mirror! Michael and Georgiou out of a splitter-verse into the next prime verse in which Michael already knows that Georgiou... and ad they're already at it they also get half dead! Prime Philippa away from the Klingons... heheh sounds like the kind of poly chaos I would enjoy writing, but sadly I have to make it through all the Plot first)

Anyway! Back to Jojo and Joan: they decide that while they maybe should have told Joan's family about Jojo's existence soon if they had stayed in that 'verse, the initial idea of staying with one's universals wasn't so bad, so they go looking for this universe's Joana McCoy. The girl- (nicknamed Anna, which makes Joan decide to change hers from Joan to June because she doesn't want to be half Jojo and half Anna), is happy enough to meet them, but often feels left out from the other two as they act as if they've known each other forever even though of course it's only been a few months... In turn, Jojo and June aren't sure whether Anna really wants them around, whether she might think they're trying to steal her life and family from her...

Lots of potential for conflict! Yay! XD would of course come to a happy ending, with at least Bones accepting his three daughters, dunno yet whether they'd tell the mom... also Aka ends up in the same universe at some point, together with a version of her vulcan birthmother who she had never known the original version of but now gets along with alright... oh and if I do write aforementioned Milippa ot7 bullshitery, this would also be the Prime!verse for that, so all stories in the series or collection interconnect again!

this got... long... and I could obviously go on but I need to go back to writing my Bachelor thesis :(

@whoever read through all of this, do let me know whether you like these ideas and which you would like to read proper fanfic for! Might influence future writing decisions.

[meichenxi]

For langblr asks: 7, 10, 11, 18, and 49

Thanks!! This may get long, so I apologise in advance! I’m learning German and Esperanto alongside Chinese, but since my German is fairly advanced and I don’t really learn actively any more (I just read, listen to talks etc - mainly because I have no reason to actively speak German sadly) and my Esperanto is basic I’ll just talk about Chinese. 

7 -  What are some things that you learned about language learning that really improved your studying? 

- Hands down learning about the role of attention in language learning. In an ideal situation, you are exposed to the target feature, then have your attention drawn to it/figure it out yourself, and are then exposed to it in natural language again. I think we all know the wild experience when you learn a word and then magically the universe provides it - and suddenly you know that word forever. I now like to think of word ‘learning’ as incremental rather than binary: recognising a word in a familiar context, an unfamiliar context, and then finally using the word are all different levels of ‘knowing’ that word. What this means in practice is that I worry less about not being able to use all the vocabulary actively that I recognise passively, because I know once I do use it actively that item will be easier to access. So there are two things here: first of all, that I don’t worry if I’m watching or reading something and don’t actively extract vocab from it, because I know that hearing it will make it easier to remember later on; and secondly, that if I ‘pay attention’ to a word but don’t ‘learn’ it because I haven’t seen it in context, that state of not knowing is temporary. The moment I see it in context - sometimes months later, when I had completely ‘forgotten’ that word - I know what it is. So I don’t stress as much about not being able to remember words from flashcards or whatever, because I know that seeing/hearing them in context is what cements that word, not just repetition. 

10 - What are some thing that you love about the language you’re learning?

Oh my goodness. So many things. I love characters; they used to absolutely drive me crazy, but the ability to read after so long being unable to read now just feels wonderfully exciting every single time. I love learning about different components and how they combine together. I love too that the idea of ‘the word’ is tied so intimately to characters: there are psycholinguistic experiments showing that Chinese native speakers learning English show interference effects when two words are presented in English that have the same component (not even whole character!) and it slows down decision making. I love the way that tone and intonation interact and I love seeing how far I’ve come from not understanding how I could express emotion at all. I love what Chinese shows about the power of the second language learner: it’s incredibly homophonous because of limited syllables even with tones, and it’s radical pro-drop, the more formal you are the shorter/more concise sentences tend to be, and when you’re in a different dialect/Chinese language even those useful initials or finals can change and still you know what is being said. It’s incredible. I love the sound of <q> and <j> and <x> and especially the final <ing>. 

The thing I love most about Chinese is its conciseness and elegance. I love learning about different systems of politeness and register and Literary Chinese is just so incredibly concise: if learning modern standard Mandarin is interesting, Literary Chinese is just...it blows my mind. It’s very unique: and I don’t mean this in the sense of ‘oh look how Exotic and Different’, I mean this typologically: it’s arguably the most analytical language in the world and is regularly used in linguistics papers to exemplify phenomena found in such highly analytical languages. I also think the encoding of order-based pragmatics into actual linguistic implicature is absolutely so cool. 

I love the difference registers it has, and I love that it feels such a good language to moan about the bus being late in and also, you know, that kind of poetry which just takes your breath away. I love how the same sentence can be expressed in different registers and how grammar patterns from literary Chinese can be used in modern Chinese. I love how compounding and derivational morphology work in Chinese (it’s absolutely nuts?? and so versatile??) and I love how names carry so much meaning. I love it for its ambiguity and conciseness and completely *shrug* lack of need to express tense or person because you know, if you know you know.

And from a synesthete’s point of view, Chinese is beautiful too: it’s a crisp clear dawn-like language, cool and misty. 

Finally, I love it for what it has taught me. It’s the first tonal language I’ve ever learnt, and the learning curve has been huge. Parts of it have been massively frustrating (we’ll get to that). I remember the week before I went to China for the first time hurriedly trying to learn some phrases, and I just couldn’t get them to stick in my head. I think I practiced ‘good morning’ about 10,000 times and I still couldn't say it right, or remember it. Languages were sort of my thing - I had taken my German GCSE early, done French and Spanish 0-GCSE in one year each, done three language A-levels (Spanish in five months because I dropped out of another A-level, self-taught German) as well as an extracurricular Latin GCSE. I was cocky!! And so not being able to do it was crushing at first and also just, what?? So learning Chinese has taught me patience, and it’s a useful bench-mark now if I ever feel like I can’t do anything. It’s taught me that you just need patience and determination, and that you'll get there in the end. Genuinely, that’s the most useful lesson I’ve learnt in my short life. 

11 - What are some things that you don’t like / find frustrating about the language you’re learning?

Originally, I found both the pronunciation and characters immensely frustrating. I think I’m over those hurdles, and now what annoys me most is the grammar - and if anyone says there is no grammar in Chinese I may just murder you. Chinese grammar is hard because, as I’ve talked about before, a lot of rests on sentence patterns and a lot of it seems to shift in ways that, say, Spanish grammar doesn’t, depending on context, formality and so on. But the reason Chinese grammar is difficult is again because the categories it manipulates are ones that don’t map perfectly onto what we think is being manipulated. So we build representations in our mind and try to learn structures without realising that a lot of it is patterns, not something set in stone. This includes phenomena like topic-marking, fronting, emphasis and so on. The most ‘grammar’-like of Chinese grammar actually is based in large parts in implicatures and the pragmatic-semantic interface, which is very hard to teach. This is why I think that input is especially crucial in Chinese. 

Also, embedded wh-questions are hard. 

As I’m learning more, though, this is all gradually becoming less frustrating. I don’t want to jinx anything and I still have a lot to learn, but I’m feeling cautiously optimistic that the worst is behind me. Things are making a lot more sense now anyway!!!

18 - Have you had any conversations with natives of your target language/s? How did that go?

Haha, of course. I lived in China for six months and then visited again for two months. I also work as an English teacher online and have a lot of Chinese students. I also sometimes chat with other Chinese students in the German classes I was taking. I’m really excited though to go back to China though now that I’m a little bit better and see how I can improve from there!!! I feel like last time I wasn’t really at a good enough level to improve quickly; I think this time would be really hard, but I can communicate well enough that I hope people wouldn’t switch back to English. 

One of the problems I have always had though has been that my pronunciation sounded better than my knowledge of the language - because of immersion. So people always assumed I understood way more than I actually did which was always terrible because I never knew wtf was going on. 

One really really nice conversation I had recently: in my English class, a young girl’s mother asked if I could explain the present simple vs present continuous to her daughter...in Chinese. And regardless of what nonsense I said, the little girl understood! Ahhhh that warm glowy feeling of human connection and accomplishment. 

49 - What are your language goals for 2021?

Since I’m learning quite intensively at the moment, these goals will be appropriately intense. Gulp. 

1) Pass HSK5 (March). This is my biggest goal, and the first time I’ve ever worked towards a language exam so I’m a little nervous. I think it’s do-able (especially with the help of the course that I’m taking, HSK Online), but still large enough to be scary. 

2) Be able to write all words up to HSK5 by hand (July). I have a little more time for this one - normally I don’t think handwriting is particularly important, but since I’m going to be studying in a Chinese university next year with the dreaded 听写 I need to be able to do it. They sort you into groups depending on your exam results, and if I can’t handwrite more than 我 then I’m not going to get very far. How do I plan on achieving this? I’m planning maybe on buying a subscription to Skritter again and working through (I really like them), but most importantly, just handwriting freely in a notebook and building up the habit. 

3) Be able to read at the same speed as the subtitles. I know, I know, most people can. But I can’t lmao so let me practice. 

4) Be in a good place to take HSK6 in early 2022. I don’t actually know if I’m going to take the HSK6 exam: maybe not. HSK5 is only important for me because I need it for a scholarship. But as random as some of the words are, it’s a very good benchmark and a useful list. Considering I’ll have from March until the end of the year, and from the end of June onwards I’ll be in a Mandarin-speaking environment (and be in a Chinese university from August/September) I think it’ll set me up well. It’s way too much to do by the end of the year though, so this goal is just to do as much as I can before 2022. 

5) Read the first Harry Potter in Chinese. Guys, I’m not looking to understand the descriptions of the moat or Hagrid’s beard. But I want to be able to read the dialogue with ease, and be able to dip in and out of the book with ease. 

6) Complete my literary Chinese textbook (mid-year). 

7) Be able to watch shows like Streetdance of China without subs. I can watch some shows already without subs, but I often feel that’s more to do with galaxy-brain thinking, ‘reading the room’ and being lazy than actually understanding all the words. Despite shows like the Untamed having more ‘difficult’ vocab, I find them a lot easier to understand than variety shows etc because the audio is extremely clear and not too fast. Watching Nirvana in Fire without subs will have to be a goal for 2022 lmao; no way will that happen by this time next year. 

8) Learn the top 1000 traditional characters and practice reading traditional more. This is not as hard as it sounds: past about the top 500, many of them differ in very predictable ways. 

And here are three long-term goals I have no time limits on:

1) Read MDZS and TGCF in Chinese. Ahhh. The dream. 

2) Read lots of wuxia!!!!!!! All the wuxia!!!!!!!! Be able to read actual books, imagine.

3) Use Chinese for academic research on Chinese dialects and Tibetan languages. This is kind of...my career path...so! 

Thanks for the ask!! 

[cutemoniic]

a not so friendly reminder, because im pissed off as hell, that i keep a lot of stuff quiet to avoid ooc drama and stress. this is NOT one of these occasions, because i shut up about it for far too long. the person who is involved actually thinks that theyre getting off scotts free, but hoho and fucking HO theyre not.

i have despised those who played sweethearts, then revealed themselves as addicted to ic/ooc/whatever drama if it gave their muse(s) the spotlight, impulsivity and not really thinking about ic consequences over ooc and vice versa thus possibly harming their rp partners and the shared trust they have, those who only made their muses bond with fucking traumas because its the easiest way to both get attention and 'develope their character' (spoiler; its not!) and with people i cared about that revealed themselves as completely unwilling to take blame for anything that they caused unless it was to gather pity points and try to trick the other person in dropping it due to feeling bad for them waa waa waa. oh, and it includes trashtalking or making up sudden problems about other people who are supposedly close to them because its the easiest way to gather, you guessed it, attentions and pity points! its easier to blame things on people than to look at ourselves and say ''hey, maybe i am the problem, i should work on that...'' and while i can understand that you may not have the correct help network or even the meanings to help yourself, its very hard. but the moment you start hurting people, its when your mind should be dead set in getting actual fucking help. with ANY means necessary. bull-fucking-doze through everything just to get help.

the problem in this is that you promised me to try and change, or fuck off from our lives forever, which is a very convenient alternative of saying ''i do not intent in changing how i behave ever so ill leave you alone''. to quit rp because it was harming your mental health with various drama, and you said that ''you were plenty pissed at yourself'' for ''letting this happen'', when in reality you could have changed it around with a bit of spine put into it, but all the sweet words of support me and others gave to you were better than try and forcing yourself in an uncomfortable position of struggling to change and improve yourself. guess what you did? you never stopped rping. you took some days off cowering to see if there was gonna be backlash, then noticed that we werent going to call you the fuck out for your behavior, and went back to it immediately with 0 remorse, keeping the stuff our muses gifted you because we did not stopped you or told you anything about it so hey a loophole to exploit for muse purposes! it didnt mattered that another person was hurt by the fact that you were finicky and kept making up excuses to keep your muse in a cute uwu relationship as long as you had what you wanted and you could get yourself out of trouble by squeezing out a few tears. im very convinced that you only kept it around to have an excuse to have other relationship, so as soon as you got your #1 prize nothing else mattered to you, but you ALSO wanted that. for your impulsivity, you put muses and muns through uncomfortable, VERY alarming scenarios just to fullfill your need for your muse to be at the center of a fucked up show, and when confronted about it, you would pull the guilt trip card. im over that.

and not only this shitshow, you conveniently retconnected our muses from yours too, instead of addressing the situation properly or giving me more of a ''im sorry i suck sooooo FUCKING MUCH ill go now forget about me since im trash and please beat me to death on the way out''! you received 0 consequences for what you did, so you basked into it and ran like the wind back to what you were doing without a care that you hurt people who cared about you. you were ''still allowed'' to do things, making your final and victimistic speech to me completely and utter horse shit. you lied to me in your intentions because it got me off your back faster, despite me not being even remotely aggressive despite being pissed, but you never had any intentions of bettering yourself. it takes too much work, too many opportunities of attention wasted, so why actually sticking to it? you were deeply overwhelmed each time a muse was into drama, or better, when one of your muses wasnt at the center of attention, while stuffing your own muses FULL OF IT. FULL. OF. IT. i swear to fuck, i have never seen more drama filled muses than yours, and thats NOT a compliment or how a muse should even remotely be. a muse shouldnt be characterized by traumas and have them coddled and cuddled at every step if you want to bond with them. oh, and therapy for your muses to ACTUALLY solve their issues was a long, drawn out attention-filled endless journey that you forced my muse into, but the second someone else that you cared more about suggested it, you made your muse jumped over it like willy the fucking coyote would jump on beep beep, fully knowing that it would have appeared on our dashboards, since you were still following us and unfollowed me shortly after i unfollowed your muses. in case youre wondering, THIS THING was my breaking point. you are addicted to ic and ooc attentions both, and you feel no need to be better about anything until you can get what you want or need. this is entirely fucking malicious, and i cant stand it.

i dont have any other words for you, except that i could still very well give you an ample dose of backlash by simply going back into our chat, copy what you said about certaint people and how much ''trouble'' they were giving you, and paste it to them with no explanations. because, yknow, thanks to your inability of solving simple problems and blowing them WAY out of proportion to get sympathy out of it in hope to get peoples mind off other bigger problems, maybe caused me to misjudge some people who were probably clueless about ''what they were causing you'', because ooc communication is a thing from another planet, yeah? despite me actually CHEERLEADING you the fuck on to talk to them about the troubles you had with them, it never happened. im personally a very screenshott-y person in cases this shit happens. so no use going back and editing or even deleting the messages. i got what i needed already.

i know who i am speaking about. i will not name any names because i wanted this, originally, to stay quiet since it seemed ''solved'', but i know that this shit will reach them, and they will of course do absolutely nothing because of the reasons i listed upwards. maybe whine and moan and play victim as usual, probably trashtalk me around or twist the narrative instead of yknow trying to fix stuff. which i dont expect them to do, which they have NEVER done until they had no other way to receive attentions or to slip out of a situation, yadda yadda yadda. peace the fuck out. im done with this bullshit.

[dissidiacloudstrife]

[slides in to torment you with Way Too Many questions] 1 through 6 for honey, 8 through 12 for clover, 13 through 17 for bluebell, 18 through 23 for vale, 24 through 27 for baaby, and 28 through 30 for that morosexual mordrem

LONG POST AHEAD I GUESS

Honeysuckle:

1. Did you have a theme in mind when you designed them? What was it?  honey was originally made ngl, to have nsfw dealings with another friends oc. that sounds so bad now but i promise the other oc was also a horny bastard. but she grew into her own character!

2. How would someone find them in a crowd?  just look for her plants! on her head grows a huge japanese honeysuckle!

3. Do they dance at a party? What about when they’re alone?  honey used to be an assassin so she can pretty much do any dancing with someone, but alone she likes to do spins and get dizzy

4. What’s their ideal pizza? “are my husband, and datemates a pizza” honestly she probably wouldnt enjoy pizza v much

5. Post a song that reminds you of them. I HAVE A WHOLE PLAYLIST FOR HER....ITS SO LONG...but this is the song that rly jump started her into turning into her own character: Patchwork Stacatto

6. How would you describe their fashion?  honestly sexy! she likes to show off her body, but likes to wear huge ballgown type dresses. she likes the Attention.

Clover:

8. Would they have noticed there’s no “7″ in this list?  you motherfucker. no probably not at first, if it was something medical related tho he probably would!

9. What would they do with a large sum of anonymously gifted money? he’d be confused and wouldnt know what to do with it. he doesnt really need money because the priory pretty much pays for his expeditions as long as they get to publish his works, so he’d probably donate it to people he knew

10. Do they have a “type”? This can include preferences in friends. its apparently big sunshine men. absolutely beaming boys. full of love and positivity

11. If they were in a book, what genre would it be? What might their TVTropes page look like? medical drama! i sadly dont rly know much tvtropes to put him in any, besides like, anxiety, tired doctor. 

12. Are they a good cook? good enough for himself and his husband! theyre normal dishes, nothing fancy when youre traveling most of the time.

Bluebell:

13. Do they have any comfort objects? her armor and weapons! outside of that, the heirloom forgal gave her before he died

14. How do they see themself?    a strong woman who’s had to go through a lot of shit to get where she is. she thinks shes had to got through more than a lot of people should have, but doesnt know how to think about it, in and of itself.

15. How would someone best comfort them? sitting with her and putting your arm around her. she doesnt like talking unless its with very specific people. but silent, and gentle touches are welcomed.

16. What’s their ideal vacation? “going back home to my family, but i dont know who that is anymore” 

17. What’s their ideal meal? a vanilla ice coffee with some sautéed veggies and like some spicy dolyak meat.

Vale:

18. How do they respond to pressure and responsibility? hahaha he didnt! it was very much a kind “dont feel” for the longest time; his pressure was put on by his dad, and to be able to have a few kids. (which he has one and he regrets it a ton) it was always impossible missions and responsibility when your dad is bagnar :’) and he would expect vale to do everything to perfection.

19. Do they have a favorite animal, or an ideal pet? not really! thought vale likes minotaurs a lot as like a power symbol

20. What’s their favorite weather?  before becoming champion, it was the weather around grothmar. that was his home for a long time. so contemporary, and not much humidity. now its obviously Blizzard Babey

21. When their friends are in danger, how do they respond? with seriousness, and tactically. its to try and get them out of the danger ASAP, but not risking their own life if it was like, a 0% chance either of them would live

22. How do they feel about sailing or swimming in deep water, far from the shore? the swimming would honestly be a pressure off of him, despite deep water having pressure. he wouldnt have to worry about anything, nobody expects anything out of him, it would be blissful. 

23. How good are they are first aid? he could do military first aid, but nothing amazing. he wasnt a medic, and even as champion the most he can do is refreeze a team mate so they dont fall apart. 

Baaby:

24. How big is their friend group? How close? its pretty much only marigold and bubbles, and theyre family to each other. baaby didnt hate her family until she came out as trans and then it was hell for her, so she left. marigold and bubbles support her and she doesnt have to worry about them trying to sabotage anything she makes for competitions. 

25. What’s their relationship with their family? it was okay before she came out, they were pretty much turning the other way when she expressed an interest in music since she was still inventing other things. but being trans was just One thing too much, and she decided to leave rata sum, and found marigold. later on bubbles, and theyve all been best friends, and family to each other ever since.

26. If they find a lost dog, do they try to find its owner? Adopt it? Leave it? she’d try to find their owner first! if she couldnt she would just hold onto them and then give them to someone who would want a dog. she and the band dont really have time for one right now despite bubbles cooing at them. 

27. Do they have any scars? not really! shes taken pretty good care of herself during experiments, and is proud of her body after she’s able to make hormones for herself (idk if HRT would be a huge thing yet)

im just gonna call them Imposter for now bc thats their namesake:

28. Do they have any tattoos, piercings, or other body modifications? nothing identifiable! maybe later after mordremoth’s defeat, but theyre a infiltrator, and therefore their original form has no discernable features so its easier to illusion it

29. How well do they sleep at night? they dont! :)

30. Would they heat up canned food, or eat it straight from the can? they’d eat the can. like unopen, just, eat the can and the food inside. at once.