#but now that I can put mods in my weapons

[witch-and-her-witcher]

azris | e | mod au, college | ao3

part 2

Eris has a vendetta against the mysterious man who snuck in to take naked pictures on his photography equipment and he doesn't care if he has to filter through every dick pic available through Grindr, Tinder or Snapchat to bring him to justice (or, at least, to his bed so Eris can do some further investigating.)

Thanks to @climbthemountain2020 and @popjunkie42 for beta reading!!!

preview under cut

smokeshow: meet tonight? findmeintheshadows: im down

Fucking finally.

Azriel lets out a deep exhale from where he’s sitting on the couch, legs spread and one hand shoved down the front of his pants. His other hand drops his phone onto the couch cushion so he can bring his hand up to run through his unruly hair. He’s been trying to get smokeshow to meet for days, but he’s been dodgy as hell about setting an actual time.

He’d been given the guy’s @ from a co-worker who said smokeshow has been pervasive around campus, this mysterious entity creating elaborate role play games to get dick pics — but never following through with a meet up. Emerie had cocked a brow and challenged Az, asking if he thought he had what it would take to finally get smokeshow to show his face.

With a cock like this?

Az had scoffed and immediately taken a bet over the next Saturday morning shift.

But when smokeshow was still playing hard to get by Wednesday, Az had started to get nervous. Saturday morning shifts ate the absolute worst because he, Em and Cass all bounce at the same club Friday and Saturday nights too. It makes seeing the shining, silver spoon-fed, trust fund baby faces that came into the cafe that much harder to deal with when they flip shit over “too much foam” in their cold foam latte.

Yeah, with all the energy he puts in at school and then between his two jobs? He deserves this. A treat, for not bitch slapping those trust fund babies when he’s running off of two hours of sleep and an ungodly number of energy drinks.

“That’s a happy face,” Cassian says as he comes back into the room with his protein shake. He plops onto the couch beside Az, not caring when their legs rub up against each other’s. “What’s got you looking slightly less constipated?”

“I’m going out tonight.”

“Hey!” Cass cheers, leaning forward to clap Az on the shoulder enthusiastically. “That’s great, man!”

Az nods, dodging the next bear paw aimed at him. “Yeah. Do you still have that ski mask I can borrow?” 

“God. You’re so fucking kinky.”

“Don’t start.”

“What? You’re risking your scholarship for what — a bet with Em? You’re letting her play you, should’ve countered the bet that she had to get one chick’s number in the same time frame.” He taps the side of his head of sweaty, post workout hair. “You’ve got to think ahead, brother.”

“I’m not risking my scholarship. Whoever that asshole is using that room never bothers to lock it, that's not my fault.”

“Being on campus after hours?”

“Project. Studying. Got lost looking for the library.” Azriel shrugs. “The options are endless.”

Cassian raises a disbelieving eyebrow at him. “And if you get caught with your dick out and a ski mask on?”

Hauling himself up from the couch, Az shoots his roommate one of his rare smiles. “I’m a fast runner.”

Snorting, Cassian turns on the game and pulls his phone out of his pocket. “With your dick out? You’ll get charged with assault and battery next when you run by and slap the officer in the face with that weapon.” There’s not much Az can say to that, so he just smirks. Cass is looking at his screen intently but says, “The mask is in my closet on the shelf. Don’t get pregnant, yeah?”

“Don’t get rug burn jacking off later.”

Cass clicks his tongue and drops his head back in exasperation. “Shit. You’re right. I forgot to buy more lotion. Can I take some from your room? Nes still won’t agree to meet up, but she sent me a new pic today and sheesh.”

“Yeah, I’ll leave it on your bed, heathen,” says Az, grimacing slightly. At least Cass is asking now and won’t go rummaging through his stuff later when he’s probably had his hands all over his dick already.

[keldae]

I know Xaja has all of the outfits, so let’s see…

👕

KORIN

All right! Smuggler-bro, who has ALMOST as many outfits as his favourite big sister does! ;) He has ENTIRELY too many outfits to put in here, so I'ma just pick my favourites of the bunch...

First off, his go-to jacket for hanging out on Carrick Station and making frenemies in Republic Space! Exiled Revolutionary jacket and pants, Advanced Slicer boots.

And, for when he's doing some work around his ship or HQ... Impulsive Adventurer shirt, Frontline Slicer pants, Canderous Ordo gloves, GAME Security Wristguard bracer, and the Advanced Slicer boots again.

Feeling more like his Corellian Jedi roots? The Kanan cosplay/Frontline Slicer set has him covered!

Got a run taking him out to Hoth? He's gonna bitch and complain the entire time, but he'll at least be stylish (and somewhat warm) in the Winter Outlaw outfit!

More relaxed at home or around the base? The GAME Security Jacket is his go-to outfit!

And, when he's gotta look business-like and professional, the Cad Bane suit aka Outer Rim Drifter is his look!

And in all of these, he's using the Mischief and Anarchy blasters. When he's in his Operative loadout, he uses the Amban JP blaster rifle and enough knives to make his dad proud.

[bellshazes]

dreaming up a syllabus for an imaginary course on metanarratives about gameplay, which i think would go something like:

unit 1: who do you think you are i am - auto-documentary & games

Vlogs and the Hyperreal, Folding Ideas

The Slow Death of Let's Play Videos, Meraki (to ~10:00)

World Record Progression: Mike Tyson, Summoning Salt

ROBLOX_OOF.mp3, hbomberguy

Life as a Bokoblin: A Zelda Nature Documentary, Monster Maze

optional: Braindump on the History of Let's Plays, slowbeef

unit 2: what like it's hard? - intro to challenge narratives

Chapter 26: Games as Narrative Play: Two Structures for Narrative Play, Rules of Play

A different kind of challenge run: Minimalist 100% (BOTW), Wolf Link

Surviving 100 Days on Just Dirt, Mogswamp

Can You Beat DARK SOULS III with Only Firebombs, the Backlogs

Is it Possible to Beat Super Mario 3D World while permanently crouching?, Ceave Gaming

The Pacifist Challenge - Beating Hollow Knight Without Collecting Soul [CHALLENGE] - Sample

optional: How to 100% Snowpeak Ruins in under 15 minutes, bewildebeest

unit 3: nelly you don't understand, i AM the narrative - form and function

The Future of Writing about Games, Jacob Geller

Can You Beat GRIME Without Weapons?, the Backlogs

Mushroom Kingdom Championships, Ceave Gaming

My Life as a Barber in Hitman 2, MinMax (Leo Vader)

MyHouse.WAD - Inside Doom's Most Terrifying Mod, PowerPak

optional: Mega Microvideos, Matthewmatosis

the theme and structure is mostly intended to introduce at least one critical or historically contextual work followed by examples of the type of narrative in question.

in unit 1, this is the idea of "How do people talk about their own experiences in the context of YouTube and playing video games?" across three rather different kinds of documentaries. unit 2 is intended to take that lens of who is telling what tale and dial in on challenge running, where i first noticed the way some videos turn the story of overcoming a challenge into its own narrative that is distinct from but related to the narrative events of the game itself. unit 3 circles back to the bigger picture with a variety of examples that, to me, are maximally metanarrative, the emergent story of the player-narrator now functionally replacing the game's embedded narrative.

bonus unit: broken narratives

Glitch & the Grotesque at the MLA, Sylvia Korman

Watching time loop movies to escape my time loop, Leo Vader

The Stanley Parable, Dark Souls, and Intended Play, Folding Ideas

Breaking Madden, Jon Bois

The TRUTH about the Pizzaplex in FNAF: Security Breach, AstralSpiff

this one is highly underdeveloped, but i'd love to work out something more robust building on randomizer challenges that produce intentionally bizarre, semi-ironic "lore," and bois-esque endeavors to break games so hard the story itself crumbles. but that's really out of scope so i'm just including the links to things i couldn't bear to get rid of. more rambling abt the challenge runs I chose under the cut.

Challenge runs represent one of the most obvious places to start, due to being extremely plentiful and having a hook that makes a "here's how I did X thing in Y video game" format almost unavoidable. Minimalist 100% is an underrated and sweet straightforward example that I mostly include as a baseline for reporting-out style narrative; here are the facts, here's what happened, this is the thing that it is. Mogswamp's 100 Days on Just Dirt is similar in style, but the physical measuring of days is a delightful and, more importantly, external narrative device.

Now oriented, we get a taste of Ceave Gaming's narrative approach to Mario challenges with the no-crouching run, and while we still aren't at the degree of player-characters being constructed for the narrative's sake, the spirited belief in crouching sets the stage for other rhetoric in more extreme cases we'll see later.

The Backlogs' entire body of work qualifies here, but GRIME is the strongest inspiration for putting this list together. I include the DS3 firebombs run because what was initially a factual description of how his wife's use of firebombs inspired him to play differently in the original DS1 firebombs run has developed into full-blown multi-game narrative arc with the Firebomb Goddess (his wife, who also voices the character) compelling his in-game character to achieve his destined quest. Grime takes that even further,

In-Game Documentaries

I include Life as a Bokoblin mostly as a contrast to My Life as a Barber - there is a level of fictionalization and roleplay involved in the Zelda in-game documentary that highlights exactly what I want to single out when I am talking about metanarrative, the story about a story.

[randomwriteronline]

"Ah! You're one of those," a voice came to his ears.

Nuparu turned to find a tall Gaquri standing at the entrance, looking at him curiously.

"I am a Toa," he corrected.

The other nodded: "Yes, I do know that. Forgot the name is all. You're a, uh... Ko?"

"Onu."

"Hm! My mistake. Which element is that, again?"

"Earth. Do you need something?" the inventor cut their small talk short, lightly tapping a tool similar to a wrench against the skeletal frame of what appeared to be a heavily modded chariot: "I'm working on a project."

"You know where Berix is?" the Gaquri asked. He raised an arm: an interesting weapon, with a jagged light blue blade at one end and some kind of projectile mechanism attached to the handle, dangled from it casually. "Wanted to drop this off to him. The thornax launcher's been jamming up more often and I know that boy can make it work like a charm again."

"He's getting parts," Nuparu answered. His eyes rested once more on the blade and he added, tilting his head intrigued: "You can leave it here if you want."

"So you can study some original Bara Magna manufacturing?" the other joked.

"It's not really my field, but it looks remarkable."

He watched the organic being laugh heartily as he approached - with a fairly heavy limp, he noticed: "Remarkable! Now that's a bit of an exaggeration, kid. I made these from some bones, whatever viable scraps I could find from wrecks of the Core War, and a few patches across the years when I could afford it. It's held together by spit and whatever Ackar's friend did to make it spurt water."

"From what I understand, spit doesn't seem like a good adhesive."

"That's what we say here to mean something's parts are real shoddily connected together."

"Hm! Like dried mud. Or aluminum sheet."

"That's the idea. Ah, where should I put this, anyhow?"

"There is fine. What's with your leg?"

The Gaquri gave a grimace: "Nothing much - just my knee acting up," he replied, patting the guilty joint. "Something must have gotten rusted. It happens."

Even through the lack of expression of his mask Nuparu treated him to a baffled look.

"What?"

"Organic parts don't rust," the Toa sputtered. "At least, ours don't."

The other eyed the tendons and muscles peeking through black armor, and his lips perked up in a little smile.

Without a word he placed his weapon on the least cluttered corner of Berix's work desk before redirecting his now free hands to the side of the faulty knee, messing with what appeared to be the graceless stitching of a large wound: his fingers sank deftly into it and pried through the gaps enough to loosen the whole thing, and before the less organic being's flabbergasted eyes pulled down the fake skin and meat to reveal a fully mechanical joint, complete with pistons and springs and even what seemed like wires.

"Don't worry," he chuckled with a wave, "Ours don't either. But most crusty old Glatorian like me haven't been completely flesh and bone in a long time."

If the inventor's attention had been piqued before, he was completely captivated now. He was leaning on his seat towards him, vehicle project all but forgotten, intently studying as many details of the prosthesis as he could see from that distance.

His eager interest made the other laugh again: "Why all that surprise! Don't you see something like this on you every day?"

"Yes, but I'm not you!"

"And what's that mean?"

"You're all flesh! And meat! And skin! How does that work?"

The Gaquri considered something for a moment. "If you can get me a seat and figure out what's wrong with it, I'll be glad to let you have a closer look," he offered at last.

Nuparu pulled the stool from right under himself so fast that he fell on his ass.

He then placed it down with extreme care and patted it insistently.

The other barely held back a snort.

His implant hadn't caused this much of a scene since the first day it had been up and functional.

"The name's Tarix, anyhow," he introduced himself as he sat down a little heavily. "Since you'll be rummaging knuckle-deep through the insides of my leg for the next thirty minutes."

"Hm," Nuparu replied as he kneeled until his mask was all but grazing the joint.

Tarix waited a dozen seconds, and added: "You got one too, Toa?"

"One what?"

"Name."

"Nuparu."

"I see. Ah - nope, nope, don't-" his fingers quickly pinched the mechanical being's and lifted them away from the scarified tissue binding the meat to the metal: "That's real flesh, don't peel that - the nerves still work, you'd put me through the pains of Plude."

"What's that?"

"You folks have a place in your lore built just to torture you forever?"

"Yes, Karzhani. I've been there."

"Huh. Well, I've been to Plude too back when it still existed, and I'll just say that the only good thing the Lord of Sand might've done was collapsing it on itself. So, you get what I mean about the pain."

"Hm. Yes, I can imagine. But how do I - see, to check the individual parts, I'd need to pull them off..."

"Oh - hold it, let me just..."

Angling his leg in an uncomfortable position and hunching down with a hiss, the Glatorian set to work carefully pulling screws loose with the help of an empty pipe he'd fetched from his pocket. The small parts dangled from their sockets without falling, just distant enough from the point the metal touched to allow the top and bottom pieces to be pulled apart without needing to pull the much more easy to lose components out of the whole.

"Hold the calf a moment, will you?" he muttered with the pipe now stuck between his teeth. Nuparu complied, holding the lower half of the leg still as Tarix worked his magic on the inner wires. At last, satisfied, he unfurled his back up once more and puffed satisfied: "There, pull."

When the Toa did so, the prosthesis came apart as easily as a house of cards. Suddenly, in the mechanical palm was a whole calf, still warm with life and undoubtedly organic.

Tarix watched genuinely amused as Nuparu tested the ankle in his hands and on the ground, miming an attempt at a walk as though playing with a very concerning doll with nothing short of pure unadultered fascination.

He posed it as if stuck in a sprint: "Can you feel this?"

"Not a single thing," the Glatorian replied. He patted the metallic femur's exposed head: "And neither can I here. The connections are all in the wires, they go right into the nerves, see? So long as they're apart I can't feel crap anywhere from over here," and he pointed to the flesh that stopped around the middle of his thigh "To the rest of the leg underneath. Not that I should be able to, frankly, if we wanted to abide by nature's whims, but luckily for me us Spherus Magna natives never cared much for that."

Nuparu hummed: "How'd you get it like this, anyways?"

"Oh," the Glatorian shrugged as though it were the most normal thing in the world, "Blew up."

"It just exploded?"

"Not by itself, of course, someone shot the whole thing out of me."

The Toa treated him to an appalled look.

Tarix waved a hand harshly, chewing on his unlit pipe: "The Core War was absolutely barbaric, kid! I've witnessed stuff I wouldn't wish on a Skrall. When I saw that half you've got there in your hand fly over my head as gracefully as the ugliest bird known to any being with eyes, I thought I was going to die of shock like a Mountain Striker with a broken wing. I still have no clue how I managed to keep awake through the bloodloss and pain long enough for the fixers to figure out I was still alive enough to be taken down to the medic."

Nuparu regarded the half of a limb in his grasp with newfound horror and fascination. A whole portion of leg, shot right out... He wasn't sure if even the Vortixx could have had something capable of doing that. Oh, sure, they had plenty of possibly worse things, but even the most blunt tended to have slightly more complex effects than just 'blows a chunk off of you'.

And the fact that they had managed to rebuild the broken joint and connected it to the rest of the nervous system was nothing short of miraculous, compared to the same thing done on a mechanical being - whose organic components regenerate, too.

"And all Glatorian have something like this?"

"Us older ones, yes," the other nodded. He watched with a sort of lazy interest as the Toa turned his attention to the mechanism of his prosthesis, checking for damage as he had promised. "The rookies tend to have the usual stuff, thank goodness - scars, plaques, maybe a limb, some fingers..."

"Fingers?"

"Yes, some of them. They tend to nip 'em a lot during training, you know, when they start to get the hang of it and stop holding their weapons like they're gonna grow a mouth and bite them - they cut tendons often those first few times. Or just the whole thing."

"Really?"

He chuckled, playfully waving his fingers: "Gresh keeps losing them. If you look closely you can tell which phalanxes are still his."

"I thought he was good at fighting."

"He is. He's just young. And a little too brash at times."

Nuparu hummed, moving onto the piece of implant attached to his thigh: "You mentioned limbs, too," he noted absentmindedly: "Is that also common, during training?"

"Losing them? Oh no, that happens out in the desert. Or, used to happen... Well, the desert's still out there, just smaller, so I guess - point is, you'll sooner get one cut off by a Bone Hunter or chewed up by a Vorox than find a fellow Glatorian who'll do that to you, on purpose or not. We made sure to try and avoid that sort of thing when we made the rules for the job."

"And plaques?"

"Oh, these," and he tapped some strange metallic protrusions on the top of his legs, on the side of his arms, and on his shoulders. "Nothing special, they keep armor in place. Easier than having to strap it on. We install them when we come of age."

Their shape was somewhat familiar: "Berix has them too, I think."

"I think everybody gets them - Agori, Glatorian, Skrall..."

"They are pretty useful," the Toa nodded.

He couldn't really imagine how they could have managed to stick armor to themselves otherwise. Maybe through some cloth? But then it might chafe their joints, and they'd have to find a way to insert it in the metal anyways...

He hummed thoughtfully, wracking his brain as he tried at once to figure out both the logistics of putting armor on fully organic beings and whatever was wrong with the implant.

So concentrated he was that he actually jumped a little when the pipe gently smacked his shoulder.

Tarix had a strange look on his face as he pointed down at a spot on his prosthesis: "Don't - it's nothing to be worried about yet, just, watch it," he warned, "That coil there you've got near your index, she's real frisky. Won't be a problem now that it's taken apart, but when you stick it back together you'd better avoid even just so much as grazing it - it'll pull my calf back at top speeds to kick my ass. Been like that since the start."

"Oh! Sounds painful."

"It is!"

With a hand already rummaging through a box of springs, Nuparu offered: "Since I'm here already, I could replace that..."

"Ah, there's no need really," the Glatorian quickly stopped him.

"But it's a liability."

"If it's out in the open like this, yeah, but - well, when it's covered it's a lot more manageable, and the wires-"

"It's still a malfunction. I can fix that without any trouble."

"I get it, but it's - I - hm! Let me explain. See, when - if I cover it up, see, with my-"

"The fake flesh?"

"Yes, that - it still jerks back if touched, but not as hard, you get me?"

"But it still does."

"Yes, and here's the - the thing is, I also have my nerves connected, right? Right, and when the coil gets touched and makes my leg jerk, it... Er... See - have you ever - hm! Hmm-hm. Hold on. Do you... Is there something that you know is not good for your body, but when you do it it just feels nice?"

"No."

"Alright, this complicates things."

"Oh! Oh, no, wait - when I cut metal with a saw, I like to keep myself as close to the sparks as possible so they can hit me because they tingle. It's fun. Do you mean like that?"

"Eeeh, close enough! That's what's going on with that coil."

"It tingles?"

"It... Uh... Sure, let's. Call it that."

The change in tone was weird, and he seemed to be somewhat embarrassed about having brought the subject up.

Now, in regards to asking personal questions, Nuparu tended to be as uninterested in other beings' private matter as much as a Kofo-Jaga is in lightstones.

However, this was directly related to the machinations of an impressive, if a little primitive, handmade mechanical joint.

So yes, he would have loved to pry.

The mental manifestation of Turaga Whenua repeatedly smacking him over the head with his drilling staff was currently the only thing keeping him from inquiring on any activities Tarix might have enjoyed dabbling in outside of his work hours, but luckily for the Glatorian that singular imaginary scenario was also an extremely effective deterrent for any Matoran or Toa that had ever at some point of their lives resided in Onu-Koro.

As such, the Toa just shrugged and diverted his attention onto the object the Gaquri was now nervously twisting in his hand: "What's that, by the way?"

The total swerve in subject matter destabilized the Glatorian briefly. He looked down at his fingers, then back at the Toa.

"A pipe?" he replied.

Nuparu squinted at it a little better: "That does not look like a pipe." he decreted.

Tarix lifted an eyebrow, curiously: "It's just an Agori pipe."

"That's not a pipe," the inventor insisted.

"And how should a proper Toa pipe look like, then?"

"Matoran pipe, maybe-" the Toa scoffed, rolling his eyes and making the other chuckle a bit while the mechanical hands went right back to checking on his implant in the midst of his correction: "First of all, it's far too small to be of any proper use; second, that seems to be made of wood, which is the worst material for this kind of thing - even if you could fit that tiny piece in a proper hydraulic system, long time usage will lend it to rot and come apart much faster, which is why we used to trade iron with Le-Koro to avoid the whole village from caving in on--"

"Oh!" Tarix interrupted him all of a sudden, smacking the object on his palm with a hollow sound: "Oh, you meant - no no no, it's not that type of pipe! It's a, uh -- pipa! Nagele! Sghitt!"

"Don't curse at me, please."

"I'm not cursing at you, it's just different names for this! You really don't have a word for-?" then he cut himself off as he seemed to remind himself of something evidently obvious: "Ah - well, I mean, you don't have a mouth, of course you can't smoke..."

"Yes we do."

"You do?"

"Yes? How else would we hold our masks?"

Tarix blinked, briefly wondered if he should have asked, and decided it didn't matter: "But you don't smoke? At all?"

"No? Unless we get catastrophically overheated or are set on fire," Nuparu replied as he attached the disjointed calf into the thigh again. "Both of which in all fairness have happened before. Not very often, but they have happened."

"No, I meant... Ah, hold it, hold it..."

He stuck the unlit pipe back in his mouth, puffing out nothing a few times with a thoughtful expression on his face.

"See - it's a bit like the coil and the sparks again, the matter with smoking," he decided to start explaining: "There's certain plants, if you dry them and burn them well, that make really pleasant smoke."

"How is smoke pleasant?" the Toa muttered.

"The smell can be," the Gaquri shrugged, "And the taste too. Wait-" and he gently knocked the foot of the pipe on the top of the Volitak before the inventor could interrupt him again "-Wait a second, I can't very well clear this up if you keep cutting in. Alright, so the bigger part here, the bowl we call it - you need to press the dried plants in here and light them up, only a little before the whole thing burns up; once they're charred nicely, you inhale through the shank, and then you puff it back out. That's how the smoke gets in your mouth and you can taste it."

"And how does it taste, then?"

"Ah, depends on what you smoke," was the whistful answer. "Same goes for the smell. The Lebori have a certain bark that gets real flexible when wet - they make whole pipes with it, they burn up real well, but it's a bit too sour for me. Before the Shattering there used to be a type of kelp I liked, and Kiina said they had River Eyes up near the Dormus that made some terribly sweet smoke."

"River Eyes?"

"It's a flower! Small, round, blue, and it grows on river banks. Never got to try them, though, and it's better I don't go around asking for some with the lungs I've got. Like I said, smoking's the same as the coil and the sparks: feels good to do, but it's bad for the body."

Nuparu hummed deeply, rummaging inside the knee as he handled the hanging wires carefully.

"I think I figured out the problem," he announced.

At that Tarix perked up: "Rust?"

"One piston has developed a limestone growth that makes it much harder to move properly, and as a result one of the springs is bent out of shape and chafes right against the nerve."

"Ah! Well, damn. You can get limestone in there?"

"If it's humid enough, it can build up over time."

"Hm... Alright, I guess all those years sweating in arenas and whatnot were bound to do the trick eventually."

"Also there was rust."

"Hm. Where?"

"Three screws. I changed them already."

"Wait, really? When?"

"While you were talking about the Core War."

"Huh! You're quick. And quiet."

The Toa shrugged: "I like working."

He pulled the prosthesis apart for a second time, laying the calf down on the floor. He then leaned back to search through a tool box brimming with bits and pieces - bolts, nuts, coils, springs, and all sorts of other things - with what his mask's stillness still managed to convey as a focused furrowed brow, evidently still thinking about what course of action to take now that he had pinpointed the anomaly to fix.

Changing his mind, he stood up and made his way to one of the various piles of junk and assorted more or less useful knicknacks to start looking for something in there instead.

"Speaking of the Core War," he said, implying he wanted to start a conversation but without really adding to that sentence.

Tarix waited a few minutes, puffing out in silence while watching him shift towels or bottles until he found what he was looking for (a clean enough rag and flask containing a murky liquid), before figuring that he was waiting for some kind of permission to continue on the admittedly not particularly pleasant topic: "Yes?"

"You said other older Glatorians also got implants like this from it."

"I implied it, but yes, that's the case."

The Toa hummed as he settled back before him: "And they're all knees, like yours?"

"You want to ask what their own prosthesis are?"

At that, he got no response.

"You can, by the way," Tarix reassured him, "It's been a damn long time by now, it doesn't hurt as much as say, eighty hundred years ago. We've been living like this long enough to joke about the whole thing and whatnot."

Nuparu mumbled something indistict as he soaked up the rag and began scraping the limestone off of the metal with it.

"Don't act all shy now, kid! As I said, it's no trouble." the Glatorian repeated. A sly smile curled the corners of his lip: "You can't get embarrassed like this every time you have to ask about new possible clients, you know," he jokingly reprimanded him, "Otherwise you'll have a hard time getting any."

"I don't want to be paid!" the Toa replied. "I'm just curious, is all! This is... Well, I didn't expect it to be something you'd have."

"Oh, don't worry, not everybody's missing a whole chunk of leg like me," Tarix chuckled. "We Glatorian like to keep ourselves distinct from one another."

"In implant too?"

"Of course! Let me think, now..."

He inhaled a long breath through his pipe, leaning back a little as the kid continued on with his work, and exhaled with a whistle.

"So, let's see - Vastus, he's got a good chunk of his lower spine replaced and, oh, 'bout three quarters of his intestines," he began: "Kiina had her hip crushed and put back together, and that should be... Ah, nope, nope, half of her left hand and the whole ulna too. Telluris I haven't see in a long while now, but unless he's figured out how to place his brain in a tin can I'd bet his head's all that's left. Certavus, bless his memory, I don't think he had a single original organ left by the end, and Gelu's got bionic feet - one foot, one leg, right, a whole leg, so then Strakk was the one who got his eye shot out and his nose crushed. And the jaw, of course. I don't remember if it was him or Malum who cracked his head but I do think it was him, because Malum had the femur that got split in half and it worsened with that problem with his ribcage where the metal was corroding and messing with his blood... Which is why he had to get his marrow replaced in his leg later on. Oh, and Ackar also had to... Ah, wait, which one was it? Right, right. Ackar, poor guy, his back itself is worse than a Plude street but his real problem's his right shoulder blade, which got essentially pulverized - I was there, ghastly sight - so they had to replace the whole thing, and that was bad enough; but then, and this is the fucked thing, the implant actively degraded the rest of the arm, so he had to keep replacing bits and pieces of it until it was just completely gone."

Nuparu lifted his head, eyes wide and flabbergasted: "The fixing made it worse?"

"It did! He kept having trouble moving it."

"How?"

Tarix raised his shoulders: "Beats me," he replied just as baffled. "It's a common thing for Tapyri, honestly. It's hard to tell if the material's bad quality or has trouble with the heat. Perditus too - after he got half his leg replaced, the damn thing somehow managed to melt halfways and left him limping almost worse than he would if he just didn't have it."

"And he can't replace it?"

"It's grafted onto the bone and the muscle has grown over it. They'd have to carve the whole thing out with it, it's just not worth it."

The Toa stared at him positively appalled.

"That is horrid," he spat, punctuating the adjective with a harsh yank of his hand over the faulty piston, thus launching a loosened piece of limestone to skid across the floor.

"You're tellin' me, kid."

"That's - it's inadmissible. It's insane."

"And I haven't told you about the Agori."

"What about the Agori? Were they fighting too? Do they-?"

"No, not fighting, usually - it's something we got in common with your lot: we're basically the same species, but we are much bigger and they're much nimbler. So you had us larger folk tearing one another to bits properly, while they tended to work as scouts if they weren't busy trying to put us back in one piece."

The Gaquri interrupted himself to stretch his arms up, pulling one towards his head.

The movement produced a loud 'crock!' roughly around the height of his shoulder, followed by much softer pops crackling all the way up towards his wrist as it twisted.

Satisfied with the sound (which instead made the inventor a little uneasy considering their conversation), he moved to massage the sides of his spine with his knuckles, rolling his neck: it seemed to make a curious ticking noise in place of a meatier sound, filling in the quick pauses of Nuparu's rag scrubbing the limestone away.

At last he puffed into his unlit pipe: "If you look at the older ones - the Agori, I mean - you'll see they've got less lower half than upper."

"That makes no sense."

"It does if you don't count implants. We've got them a bit everywhere, I told you, but an Agori with an arm prosthesis is a real rarity. They've got them mostly between their soles and the top of their hipbones."

"And why's that?"

"It's 'cause the lucky ones stepped on mines."

The Toa hummed thoughtfully.

He did not raise his eyes from the almost clean piston: "And the unlucky ones?"

"Well, we were trained to aim for either the neck or the head."

Ah.

Those certainly had been unlucky.

For every thing Toa and Glatorians seemed to have in common, a complete opposite came around. To imagine a Toa willingly kill was already hard, though not impossible - the Mahri themselves had been met with the chance to do so once or twice, and it had been tantalizing to say the least; but to envision a group of his brothers and sisters being not only instructed but even trained to kill, and especially to kill Matoran...

Well, he was glad he did not live in that kind of world.

"That's just how life is," Tarix sighed in the end. "Nobody wins. They've got their metal hips, and I've got my leg held together by wires and pistons. And an artificial diaphragm."

That snapped Nuparu out of his unpleasant musings: "A what?"

"That one wasn't the war's fault, though - well, it was, but it came in later. See, I had some sharpnel that got stuck in there but nobody noticed, and then one day I got a shove in the wrong spot during a match and just stopped breathing. So I had to get a mechanical one, and when I have to put myself under any sort of strain I need to hook myself up to an oxygen supplier to make sure it doesn't collapse under the effort - you know, that tube thing you might have seen on me, sort of like yours."

"Your gills?"

"I..." the Gaquri briefly did a double take. "You call those gills?"

"Yes?"

They blinked at each other briefly.

"Yeah," Tarix conceded, "Yeah, I guess those would be gills for you folks, huh. Makes sense."

"What was it that you had to replace?"

"My diaphragm."

"What is that?"

"... The muscle?"

"Which muscle?"

"The... The one that makes the... Lungs? Work? I understood you did have lungs?"

"Lungs work on their own."

"No they do not?"

"Yes they do. They are muscles."

"No they are not??"

Before Nuparu could further argue his point by lifting his chest plate and forcing Tarix to behold the disquieting spectacle offered by his very much clearly autonomously moving lungs, the unmistakeable noise of a small variety of hollow brass objects gracelessly crashing on the floor and being hurriedly chased after by stomping feet attracted their attention elsewhere.

Berix did not notice them as immediately as they noticed him, since he was busy making his entrance on all fours as he scrambled to pick up a bunch of scrap metal that had spilled from his arms.

The other two beings made no sound as they watched him curse to himself after stepping on a rogue bolt. They decided to simply observe him in silence much like an equipe of entomologists observes a particularly frenetic spider panicking for some kind of fault in its web, making no motion to lend the young Agori any help as he crawled along the ground to collect the scattered pieces of his scavenged treasure of junk.

It was particularly fascinating when he accidentally shoved several bolts in his mouth to the point of almost stuffing his cheeks with them, realized his mistake, and spat them in what looked like an exhaust pipe.

He almost cried when they fell out of it and rolled away again.

Then he lifted his eyes briefly to the other two silent beings in the room and failed to recognize them.

Meaning he then proceded to jump almost three whole bio straight in the air once he figured there were people looking at him - landing on a screw.

"FUCK!" he whimpered.

Tarix waved: "Hello to you."

"Do you need help?" Nuparu asked with a notable delay.

The Agori kneeled to the ground and skidded across it: "No no no, I'm good! I'm good, I'm - hey, hi, Tarix, hi, when did-? What are you-? Uh," he said nervously as he tried to catch as many nuts and springs as possible, "What is going on there? Is it, did I interrupt or, should- should I leave? Again? Should I leave again?"

"Nuparu's fixing my leg."

At that Berix snapped his head with a deafening gasp to look directly at him, the most betrayed expression to ever grace his face plaster across it.

"But I wanted to do that!" he cried out in anguish like a desert fox cub experiencing the horrors of its mother's tongue bath for the first time: "I told you I could do it, I- I replaced Gresh's ribs and, and I fixed his lungs when the Skrall got him and he hasn't had problems with them since, I told you I could do it, I'm good at fixing-!"

"I know that, and Gresh told me you did real well," the older Gaquri stopped him, "But - don't take it personally, kid, you're good and all, but when it comes to my leg I only trust you as far as I can throw you and believe me, it ain't far."

"But then why does he get to do it!" Berix wailed, pointing at Nuparu still scrubbing off the limestone.

"He's got a whole body like this, I'd imagine he knows what to do."

"But I know what to do too!"

"I told you, I'd rather have a specialist on it."

The Toa briefly wondered if being a descendant of the Water Tribe had something to do with how outstandingly wet Berix could will his eyes to look, or if it was just a specifically Berix thing.

Mabe it was an Agori defense mechanism. After all, it would have been pretty hard to want to hurt something that appeared to be the personification of the verbs 'to whimper', 'to whine', 'to sob', and last but not least 'to wail'.

Whatever the origin of such an expression of anguish, Tarix was not immune to its effects: "Oh, don't be like that," he finally pleaded with a tired but guilty tone, and pointed off to the cluttered desk not too far away: "There, I've got something for you too, alright? I came in 'cause my Thornax launcher's busted and you're the best with 'em. Could you fix that for me? Pretty please?"

That was enough to light the younger being's face up again.

With the sort of excited thin howling laugh that a mischievous ghost might have, he scuttled away to the mess of a table that was the headquarters for most of his projects: onto it he dumped the rest of his scraps, not caring even in the slightest that it only helped to worsen the general situation he already had going on as he was already completely absorbed by the thought of the inner mechanics of the weapon at hand.

The perfectly good chair right beside him thoroughly ignored in favor of sitting on the ground in a curled position that would have made a shrimp suggest booking an osteopathic appointment, he immediately started tinkering around to figure what the problem was with the drive and precision of a blood hound.

That had been perhaps one of the best things their unplanned collaboration had brought Nuparu - aside from all the knick-knacks and thingamajigs and vehicles and tools he'd been able to make or just plan out with the Agori, of course. Watching Berix work on something was such a fun and fascinating experience: his intensity gave his body language a sort of visceral desperation that contrasted his careful fumbling motions, pulling pieces apart with his scarred skeletal fingers and letting them fall all around him as though discarded carelessly - yet he somehow always knew where to search when he needed them again, and if in the middle of his fixer's frenzy you asked him for a specific nut or a gear he could pick it up without even looking, always on the first try. The thunderous act of creation and its rhythmic symphony played on rough instruments whisked the both of them away from the world at large, but when the Toa managed to pull himself back to reality (whether done or stumped or just in need of a break) it was enjoyable if not just all-together mesmerizing to observe the other hard at work on his own project.

A loud bang was not enough to deter him from the launcher either.

The equally loud voice that followed with an exasperated bark did, however: "BERIX! THE DOOR!"

"RIGHT! RIGHT- RIGHT, HOLD ON!" he squeaked hurriedly, abandoning (with a little more care) the weapon to scuttle away as fast as he could to the entrance of their laboratory.

The figure that emerged from the held open door replied to his rambling apologies by grunting every few steps - not without reason, seeing as they were carrying the carcass of an older model of chariot intertwined with some other mean of transport that had clearly gotten lodged sideways in its back, trying to balance the hellish thing on their shoulders in a way not too dissimilar to how a shepherd might carry a too small Mahi tired from a day of running wildly.

The mess of a car accident was dropped rather gracelessly onto the first largest spot of floor available; freed from their herculean weight, the being sighed and pulled back their arms, making the rather dull metal vertebrae poking from their skin creak in a somewhat unsettling fashion.

Nuparu briefly wondered if they were encrusted in limestone too.

They sort of looked like it.

Hm.

Now he had to wonder if it was a common yet not very well-known problem for organic beings with mechanical implants. Maybe it had to do with an excessive production of sweat?

While he was busy pondering that, Tarix grinned at the sight: "Hello, my beautiful wife who sucks at killing me," he crooned lovingly.

Vastus turned to him with a smirk, thin feathers raised and brows slightly furrowed in a manner that was much more fond than annoyed: "Hello, my beautiful husband who can't aim for shit," he replied; upon noticing the Toa kneeled before him, he cheekily added: "Committing adultery, I see?"

His partner wheezed a loud gurgling laugh: "Twelve thousand years we've been married! Twelve thousand years and now you mistake me for Gelu!"

"For who?"

"What, you haven't heard about--?"

"NOT IN FRONT OF MY PROJECTS!" Berix shrieked.

The Lebori chuckled - it was a strange sound, some kind of hiccuping hiss - and reached out to rub his hand all over the younger Gaquri's head; the kid swiveled away from him with a soft rattling noise as his annoyed trembling arms shook his scales against one another, face contorting into a piqued grimace, and returned to the launcher to tinker the other two away from his conscious perception.

"And where'd you get that?" the Glatorian inquired, pointing at it with his chin as it was common to do in his tribe and getting no answer.

"It's mine," his husband reassured him, "He's fixing it."

"Jammed again?"

"Seems like it."

"Bet you just didn't clean it properly."

"You don't know that."

"But I'm right," Vastus teased him as he approached to steal the pipe from his mouth. "And over here, what's going on?"

"He's fixin' up my leg. Nuparu, by the way, that's his name - he's a, ah, Ko- nope, Onu-Toa, he said - thought it was rust but I had limestone in it."

"We can get limestone?"

"Might be the sweating," Nuparu interrupted them suddenly. He fixed his unmoving mask onto the Lebori: "Can you turn around, please?"

Tarix snorted at the other's brief baffled blink: "Hey now, kid, I get you've put your hands in me and all, but you shouldn't go around just checking my wife out like that!"

"NOT! IN FRONT! OF THE PROJECTS!"

The Toa looked between the three of them with no clue what any of them was going on about: "I thought there might have been crusts on the vertebrae," he explained. "Since I have the solvent at hand already, I could handle that already if it's the case..."

"That's what they all say," the Gaquri snickered.

His confusion was palpable.

Vastus flicked a playful finger at his husband's head, warning him: "Berix is gonna kick you out at this rate... But I'm sure it's just some dust, kid, nothing to worry about."

"It still would not hurt to do a simple visual check."

"He's right," Tarix interjected while trying to snatch his pipe back and failing: "Maybe you've been building up a limestone deposit this whole time without knowing it."

"I don't have limestone."

"You don't know that."

Vastus smirked at him as he turned around for Nuparu to check: "But I'm right."

"You can't keep answering that and get away with it."

"I can if I'm always right."

The inventor gave a high pitched hum: "False alarm. That's just dust," he confirmed.

A triumphant grin briefly met the Gaquri's eyes as he rolled them.

Nuparu reached into a box to pull out a short variety of springs in order to compare their size with that of the one that had been bent by the affected piston, now cleaned and hopefully ready to work smoothly; careful not to dislodge anything else, he carefully pried the ill piece out and hooked up its replacement.

Satisfied with how the procedure had done, he pulled himself back a little and announced: "I have another question."

"Shoot," Tarix answered instantly.

"What do 'wife' and 'husband' mean, exactly?"

A hot second of silence passed in which the Glatorian regretted opening his mouth.

He glanced at Vastus.

His wife glanced back.

The quiet persisted.

"We're married," he answered lamely at last.

The question he dreaded slapped him in the face with outstanding punctuality: "And what does that mean?"

Having had his fun of seeing his husband's best full-body impression of a yam turning exponentially smaller when fried to a crisp piece of coal, the Lebori finally intervened: "You folks have contracts?"

"We do."

"Marriage is a contract between people where you become part of one other's family. And tribe, if you're from different ones like us."

A vacuous gaze met his explanation.

"Alright, what's confusing you?"

"The 'becoming part of' thing."

Vastus shrugged, his feathers puffing out for a moment before returning flat in a way similar to how certain avian Rahi did before starting a very long song: "It means we become relatives," he tried again. "Here, look - Tarix is a Gaquri and I'm a Lebori, so my family and hers come from different tribes. By marrying me she became a sort of honorary member of the Jungle tribe, and everybody treats her almost as though she was my brother, or my cousin; in the same manner, I became an honorary member of the Water tribe and I'm treated like her sister or cousin."

"So... It's sort of like assembling a team?" Nuparu tilted his head, puzzled: "There's no need for a contract for that. All Toa consider each other siblings already."

The other clicked his tongue as though he'd bitten it by accident: "I shouldn't have used that metaphor," he muttered.

"Why not?"

"First of all marrying your actual blood-siblings is frowned upon."

"Why? What's a blood-sibling?"

"I'll tell you when you're older. Secondly, I can assure you marriage is nothing like siblinghood."

At that, the Toa frowned: "It sounds the same to me."

"Your knee and Tarix's look the same to me, too," Vastus argued: "They're both made of metal, so they're the same thing."

"They really aren't." then he blinked, bright eyes flashing briefly, looked to the ceiling to recollect his thought, gave a loud hum, and met his gaze again: "I see your point."

The Glatorian smiled: "Good kid."

"Back to the point - how do 'wife' and 'husband' fit with all that?"

"That's just how you call someone who's married."

"So they're synonyms?"

"Yes, pretty much."

The answer seemed to satisfy the inventor greatly.

"I'm learning so much about your species today," he commented in a giddy tone. He returned to the discarded robot calf on the floor, dusting off its mechanical parts to make sure not even small amounts of debris would interefere with its functions; just as he plucked it back into the bulk of the implant, he looked again at the two Glatorian and told them with complete and total earnestness: "You know, if you were significantly smaller, quadrupedal, perhaps vaguely insectoid and incapable of speech, Turaga Whenua would have the best day of his life writing down and trying to decypher your absolutely incomprehensible habits."

That was the highest compliment an Onu-Matoran from the island of Mata Nui could bestow upon someone.

It was not categorizable as such by perhaps any other being in the entire universe, considering the source of such an idiom had been cut off from all other known civilizations and it was generally not considered particularly flattering to be told that you would make for a great petri dish for one's paternal figure to microscope if you were any less sentient, but luckily his tone did manage to properly convey the positive nature of his otherwise insane sentence.

So instead of knocking his head off with roundhouse kick, Tarix and Vastus smiled awkwardly in an attempt at not laughing in his face and just replied: "Thanks."

His Volitak did not have a mouth, but Nuparu's grin was blinding.

Berix chose that moment to shriek triumphantly.

"Fixed!" he declared, Thornax launcher hoisted into the air like it was the second making of the Element Lords.

The older Gaquri turned to him with eyes wide: "What, already?"

"It was encrusted with Thornax juice!"

Not even the time to feel bashful about such a silly and easy to fix thing hindering his battling performance so much that his wife was already leaning down into his line of sight with a smirk so wide that he could have just bitten his whole head off with it.

"What did I say?" he teased.

Tarix sighed, a weary smile on his face: "You cannot keep getting away with this."

"Yes I can," Vastus gloated, "If I'm always right."

[rallamajoop]

More random details from the depths of RE8

With the excuse of trying some shiny new mods, I've been replaying RE8 lately for the umpteenth time. Given the number of hours I've already poured into this game, you'd really think there'd be nothing left to find by this stage ‒ yet here I am, finding still more details I'd somehow missed the first half-dozen times through.

For one, there's the fact you can actually find Eva's grave in the graveyard outside the church. As the only photo we ever see of her shows her as a baby, I'd assumed she was still a baby when she died, but turns out, she was ten years old.

"Eva, June 1909 ‒ August 1919

May you slumber for only a short while"

As expected, her death of the Spanish flu took place in 1919. There's some semi-legible text on the stone, but it doesn't match the caption ‒ it's just the same generic filler text you'll find on half the gravestone assets in this game.

For another, there's Rose's baby monitor. I'd noticed Ethan turning the thing on when he puts her to bed, and even found the assets for its screen ‒ but since I'd never found the monitor itself, I assumed they must be unused.

Until this playthrough, when suddenly I'm just like, oh, there it is, sitting right on the table. You can even interact with it!

How did I miss this so many times? It is pretty easy to overlook, given you'll trigger the cutscene with Mia if you go much closer to the kitchen, but I'm still surprised I never spotted it before. (And you do have to wonder if there was ever any plan for it to show a glimpse of something more sinister than just a still-image of Rose sleeping.)

In other minor details, there's the bit where Ethan arrives on the outskirts of the village at 8AM. You can hear a clock striking 8 times as you get your first view of area.

Granted, this is not going to excite anyone who hasn't spent as long as I have putting together an hour-by-hour timeline of everything that happens in this game, but I still do love that they give you enough detail that that's even possible ‒ and this new timestamp fits right into that timeline. (And why yes I have just gone back and updated that post, what do you take me for?)

Speaking of assets I thought were unused, you know that hidden room under the castle you can't get into until later, where you have to solve a puzzle that involves setting a moroaica on fire? Have you ever looked closely at the tapestries decorating this place? Because I found them in the game files ages ago, and have been trying to figure out if they're actually in the game ever since.

Because seriously, look at these things!

Yes, that is a indeed a man with a sword and spear, wearing a hoplite helmet and sandals and nothing else. And the women seeing him from the front seem to be having a whole range of reactions to all that, er, weaponry being brandished their way. Isn't fine art wonderful?

Another asset I'd innocently assumed was unused is this wonderful bit of bullshit which was labeled simply 'antibow'. It wasn't until I took a long look at it that I realised what they meant was more like 'anti-B.O.W.', as in Bio-Organic-Weapon.

Yes, that is indeed a knife taped to some kind of grenade. Sure is one high-tech outfit we're working with here!

Only now do I spot that this is actually the bomb Chris chucks at the Megamycete in the cavern. It doesn't even come with the knife already attached, he just kind of sticks the knife onto the bomb and presumably straps some tape around them while the camera cuts away.

I still have so much more to share from my ongoing free-camera adventures, but I think we'll leave this one there for today.

[bloingy-land]

dawg I just had to move all my shit to a brand new world because calamity loves me and decided to do its worldgen weird.

i am going to share this tale with you for the haha funnies. i am not complaining. in fact this made me so incredibly joyous and i thought it was HILARIOUS

ryder is currently pre-skeletron. so i decide that now is the time so i can go into the dungeon and get some nice and tasty weapon upgrades. with that as well comes the time for me to get some sea prisms. i think "huh, i've been neglecting going to the sunken sea. perhaps now is the time!" i say, having no idea of what would unfold for the the next hour

i find my prisms. i start exploring. i find some honey and realize "oh hey, i'm right next to the jungle." a jungle shrine is to the left under the sunken sea and i think "oh hey! nice!" so cool! my sunken sea's next to the underground jungle!

HOWEVER. and i mean HOWEVER. this. this is where it begins. the tomfuckery begins here

as i'm exploring the place, luiafk does me its nice little favor of bringing nearby items towards me. it is great for collecting blocks from dynamite holes while i'm busy actually mining. BUT.

i suddenly collect the Mother Fucking Lihzard Altar

as in The Thing you use to fight golem later in hardmode.

my brain COMBUSTS. it lights on fire immediately and alarm bells start ringing as a single, one (1) thought is imprinted in my mind:

what the fuck

so i go to the side, thinking, did my world come out weird?? did something merge??

and to no one's surprise

BITCH.

basically my sunken sea collided with my jungle temple which yeah is bad on its own but i feel like where it went the most incredulously wrong is that the sunken sea ate THE ENTIRE BOSS ROOM FOR BREAKFAST.

i leave and reenter the world with victor to check out the temple because it's post scal and can handle it compared to ryder's small little prehardmode body

i think "huh. do i have some weird mod that puts the boss room at the top?" NOPE. no you do not. You wanna know what you do have?!?!

a Significant lack of GOLEM'S ROOM

i immediately realize this means i cannot naturally fight golem. you see that fucking clam down there? that's my prime suspect for this CRIME. this THEFT. why would Amidias be enough for the clam. why eat that seahorse looking ass guy when it could just turn at my jungle temple and HHHERMRMPGHHHHGGHBNMN NNNABMANN ÑAM ÑAM ÑAM ÑAM yknow. Just *roblox mm cheeseburger sound effect*. for what reason? perhaps the funnies? perhaps it wasn't satisfied with its already plentiful meal? god knows? it despawned before i could ask it!

moral of the story worldgen does very funny things and i was laughing my ass off and thought perhaps this would be a little funny enough to talk about. i love modded terraria

[teecupangel]

Ok so I have had an idea. This is a bit of reference to the ratatouille au continuation of Desmond being able to hear us in the animus servers. So picture this, after a while of us talking to Desmond checking up on him and the others. Someone the group chat somehow makes a mod that gives the players (us) avatars to pilot in the servers for a short amount of time, but instead of the bodies being human they're just random animals from mise to crows to hawks and eagles. So here kinda how I think this would go. So all the ancestors are asleep or resting in the servers, meanwhile the person who made the mod adds it into the server and there's a bit of commotion as the person tells everyone else, and so the players get to work making the avatars. Then morning comes around, Desmond and the others wake up and see this excessive about of rodents just gathered around everyone. After a moment of panic and shock for our dear assassins and templars they come to find out that now the voices "inside" Desmond's head are now here ready to try And cause some havack.

Oh don't forget to drink water and eat something l. I hope you have a great day/night

Thank you, nonny! I hope you're having a great day/night too! (And yeah, I'll be eating my dinner after this hahahaha) The Ratatouille AU where the ancestors can hear Desmond while ‘playing’, its more unhinged cousin, the Ratatouille AU where Desmond can hear us and the outside POV of Al Mualim thinking the Apple broke Altaïr and the sidestory of Altaïr accidentally connecting with Ezio while looking for Desmond

Here’s the horror-esque version of this AU for this interested in that kind of setup.

.

Alright, confession time. When I was writing for the voices, my brain immediately to the ‘chat windows’ that popped up in Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint and in The Perks Of Being An S Class Heroine.

Then I thought, you know what would be funny? If it was like an actual chatbox with our preferred avatar kinda like this:

To make this stranger, all the avatar are like stock photos of animals and plants. This way, when their avatar finally comes to form, Desmond will be surrounded by various animals.

What happens to the ones who chose plant avatars?

My initial idea was that they would be floating plants like a leaf or a flower just floating in the air.

But then I realized…

We’re crazy enough to band together and create a ‘strange’ unique flower crown to put on Desmond’s head.

The ones that transformed into animals would go “That’s not fair! Why do you guys get to be that close to Desmond?!”

“Plant ftw, bitches!!!” A dandelion of all things would shout out, accidentally blowing itself up and floating away from Desmond, “Fuck!”

A second passed and the dandelion glitches out of existence.

Only to glitch back into the (technically floating) flower crown on Desmond’s head.

“Hey, guys, did you know it cost 1000 Helix to respawn? Fucking Ubi████.”

For those who don’t care about Ubisoft’s monetization scams (as you should), 1000 Helix is more or less $10 and they don’t sell 1000 Helix, they sell the small pack for $9.99 and it gives 1050 Helix. For reference, AC Valhalla’s complete sets (full armor + 2 weapons + mount and raven skin) usually cost around 1500 Helix.

So yeah… even though the ‘players’ have spawned in Desmond’s world, they are still haunted by monetization. (This does mean Desmond has gotten himself an immortal army of plants and animals)

[fordtato]

Gffan has done the following:

-Letting people comment transphobic stuff on his Server

-associating with a reddit mod whos known to be transphobic

-openly showing weird distaste for the Dipper being Trans headcanon (didn't he also say: "I hate the Dipper Trans Theory" to us once?)

He also believes there’s only 2 genders

Hello. So. I do not normally respond to anonymous discourse like this in my inbox as a rule (especially given this site's proclivity for seeing anon callouts weaponized against trans people and women and people of color), but I felt it was important to do this in this case, since I am publicly working on a project with ThatGFFan.

I have known GFFan for over a year now now (in an exclusively online capacity), and in that time, he has not only never misgendered me (a nonbinary trans person, someone outside the "2 genders" framework) but has also actively corrected people who have misgendered me. I have witnessed him speak against transphobia in the fandom and against transphobic content creators. The idea that he "believes there are only 2 genders" is inaccurate by every account I have of him.

As for other accusations in this ask, such as him "associating with a reddit mod who is known to be transphobic" I don't have any evidence for this presented to me, and even if I did, association in a public online space is not the same thing as sharing transphobic sentiment. There is room in any online space for a conversation about the optics of this kind of engagement, but if I had to apologize for every person I've ever engaged with civilly who I later learned was problematic in some way, I'd be here all day, and that would be an unproductive use of my time, and would not undo any harm done by that person.

Lastly, I hope ThatGFFan will not mind me saying this, but he is a young person (younger than you think, I assure you). If he has engaged with unsavory people in the past, or has indicated any kind of transphobic sentiment (neither of which I have any evidence of) it is my belief that we need to allow people to grow, especially when I have actively witnessed that growth firsthand. And in that case, I do think (and maybe I'm putting my faith in the wrong person here, so I hope this doesn't bite me one day), that he has made an active effort to learn how to do better, even if he makes mistakes in that process.

What you have done, anon, is entered my inbox with accusations against a person of color, half of which have no evidence behind them, and the other half that I personally know to be demonstrably false. Nobody who is a victim of this transphobia has come forward, at least that I saw, and if they did, that would be up to ThatGFFan to respond to - not me, a trans person unrelated and far-removed from whatever incident you are talking about (an incident that likely occurred when ThatGFFan was a minor, in any case).

I don't have a big platform. I am a small creator (much smaller than ThatGFFan), and a trans Palestinian person. Why am I being called upon to answer for a cis person's (alleged) missteps as they grow into an adult? Why am I being called upon to publicly shame and renounce a person who has shown me kindness and allyship? Is it so I can prove my dedication to the fight against transphobia? My entire blog, my entire body of work, my entire existence, has been an active fight against transphobia.

I mean, by God, all I can do is hope I'm doing the right thing here, but I vouch for him. Or I at least vouch that he is trying.

(p.s. I hope this goes without saying, but someone disliking a specific queer headcannon does not indicate one's political beliefs, and this is not going to be an accusation that I really engage with, because it sets a bad precedent. This is not a moral wrongdoing. This is an opinion you are suspicious of.)

[swaps55]

Mass Effect Vanguard Guide

Other Guides: Guide to Basic Infiltrating | Shield Gate and YOU | Adept Guide | Sentinel Guide | Soldier Guide |

First and foremost, this is exactly what it says: a guide. It is not the right way to play this class; it is a way that I have found very effective after well over a thousand hours spent running different builds and different classes in campaign and ME3 Multiplayer. If you build it differently and like your style better, great! If you are having fun, you’re doing it right.

But if you are struggling at all with the Vanguard class or don’t click with it, this guide might help you. The build, loadout, and strategy are designed with higher difficulties in mind. This kit can easily make quick work of insanity and is a lot of fun if you enjoy using your face as a weapon.

THE BUILD

Shepard has 8 skill trees + a Bonus Power. At Rank 60, you can max out 8 skills and have enough points leftover to take the 9th to level 4. For this build, I recommend only taking Cryo Ammo to rank 4 (or skipping it entirely), and maxing everything else. 

Prioritize Charge, Nova, Incendiary Ammo, Assault Mastery, and probably a few points in Fitness here and there.  

Breakdown under the cut! 

Incendiary Ammo: Incendiary ammo might be one of the most brokenly overpowered skills in the game. The explosive evolution adds a flat damage value vs. a percentage on every other shot, which is insane. On rapid fire weapons that do less damage per shot, like the Tempest or the Typhoon, you're basically doubling the amount of damage you're doing. Add the area of effect you get with the explosion? You're now inflicting this chaos on anyone else who’s nearby. Are you using a piercing mod (the answer should be yes)? You now have a shot at another roll for another explosion, because the damage call can pass through the armored target and torment the cannon fodder behind it. A piercing mod reduces the damage on your bullet, but not the explosion. This is super insane on shotguns, because you get a shot at the extra damage roll per pellet, not per shot. Shotgun blasts have multiple pellets per shot.

Have I mentioned that this is affected by increases in power damage? So any power damage increases you take in Assault Mastery make incendiary ammo better.

Rank 4 – Damage. To hell with your squad. I mean, your squad is amazing. But trust me, you want to be selfish with incendiary ammo. You can do so much more with it than your squad can.

Rank 5 – Are you handy with headshots? Take Headshot damage. Would you rather have more ammo capacity? Take Ammo Capacity. Whatever makes you happy.

Rank 6 – Explosive Burst. Always take explosive burst. There is no universe in which you want anything other than explosive burst.

Cryo Ammo: This is your dump stat. I don’t even put my leftover points in cryo ammo, because the circumstances in which you would choose cryo ammo over incendiary ammo do not exist, if you are going for maximizing damage. Cryo ammo is really nothing more than a debuff, and you know what’s better than a debuff? Killing it. Now, if you just want to snicker at enemies with a health bar freezing solid and toppling over, that’s different. 😊 But when it comes to higher difficulties, cryo ammo just doesn’t stand up to the effectiveness of other ammo powers.  

Pull: Pull doesn’t provide nearly as much benefit as your other skills, so I suggest speccing into it last. It can, however, be a fun way to toy with mooks if you’re bored of scattering them like ninepins, and offer an alternative for dealing with Guardians if emptying a shotgun full of fire into their mail slot doesn’t quite do it for you. Pull will also prime biotic explosions. It’s not elegant, but you can do it.

Rank 4: Duration vs. Radius: I go for Radius, because as a Vanguard nothing stays alive long enough for duration to matter. But if you are having trouble with timing to get biotic explosions, you can choose Duration here.

Rank 5: Lift Damage vs. Expose: Go for Expose, which increases all damage to the target, including biotic detonations. Again, things don’t stay alive long enough for lift damage to do much for you.  

Rank 6: Recharge Speed vs. Double Pull. DOUBLE PULL. Why would you choose one pull when you can have two? This skill already has one of the fastest recharge speeds in the game, so choosing recharge speed doesn’t gain you anything.

Biotic Charge: Biotic charge, of course, is the signature skill of the vanguard, and while there are plenty of playstyles you can use that don’t hinge on charge…why would you? Charge is stupidly fun. You can be reckless, silly, and stupid, and no one can stop you. You’ll make so many things explode you can hear colors. There isn’t a problem your face can’t solve, unless the problem is on a platform out of bounds.

Charge is also a detonator power, which means you can set up biotic explosions by painting a target with warp, reave, dark channel, and even pull, and then slamming your face into it. Charge will also create a fire explosion when you ram your face into something that’s on fire from incinerate or….incendiary ammo. Hey, who has incendiary ammo and can make their own fire explosions? VANGUARDS. 

Rank 4: Force & Damage vs. Radius. Dealer’s choice. Do you want to smash for face against one thing with all the force? Or smash your face against all the things with less force? ME3 tends to emphasize cannon fodder over high tier enemies, so if you’re a little shy about running straight into the arms of a banshee and prefer to use yourself as a bowling ball into a pile of husks, go for radius. Otherwise, go for damage.

Rank 5: Weapon Synergy vs. Power Synergy. For most playstyles, power synergy is what you want here, especially if you like to spam Nova, as power synergy makes your nova hit harder. However, if you prefer to charge into something and then stick your shotgun down its throat to set it on fire with fire bullets, take weapon synergy.

Rank 6: Bonus Power vs. Barrier: I recommend barrier here, because the number one problem vanguards have is not giving a fuck, and having charge give you your shields back when not giving a fuck lands you in a sticky situation will generally save your life. Also, the cooldowns on this kit are so fast you really don’t benefit that much from randomly getting a free one to justify giving up those shields you really need because nova.

Shockwave: Shockwave is another detonator for biotic explosions, and it’s a handy mid-range attack when you’re stuck in cover or don’t want ravager goo all over your face.

Rank 4: Force & Damage vs. Radius: Shockwave’s biggest weakness is its short reach, so I choose radius here. NOTE: In the Original Trilogy, this skill is bugged on PC. Choosing radius actually causes this skill to do ZERO damage. So if you are playing OT on PC, choose Force. This bug appeared to be fixed in LE when I tested it.

Rank 5: Detonate vs. Reach: While reach would be great, because again, range is this skill’s biggest shortcoming, detonating combos is what makes shockwave so good. I recommend detonate, unless you find yourself not using it for explosions.

Rank 6: Recharge vs. Lifting Shockwave: Either one will work here, really. Lifted shockwave is cute, and can help you set up explosions, so I tend to choose it.

Nova: The companion skill to Charge! A lot of people are afraid of Nova because it depletes your shields. But I encourage you to practice with it, because if you get comfortable with the pattern of charge + nova + shoot it on fire until it’s dead, there isn’t much of anything a vanguard can’t handle.

Yes, even banshees.

Rank 4:  Force and Damage vs. Radius: You can choose either here, though I will give the lean towards force and damage. If something manages to evade the radius, stick a fire shotgun down their throat to make them think about what they’ve done.

Rank 5: Power Recharge vs. Half Blast: I recommend power recharge here, because decreasing the effectiveness of nova means it dies slower, and Power Recharge speed increases your recharge speed by 25% across the board for 15 seconds. That means CHARGE recharges faster. Which means you can lock yourself in a continuous loop of faster recharge by charging and nova-ing until everything is dead. Remember, this kit does not have a grenade power because SHEPARD is the grenade. Realize your full potential and blow everything up.  

Rank 6: Pierce vs. Sustain: Don’t be tempted by Sustain, and the allure of sometimes not using up your barrier. Choose Pierce. Not only does this make you more effective vs. Armor and Barriers, but also shields, which is something biotics aren’t great at. If you feel naked without your shields, remember you have a FIRE GUN that can protect you until Charge is primed and ready to give you your shields back, and Rank 5 means that recharge is faster.

Assault Mastery: Here’s where things get stupid. Assault Mastery makes all your badass shit even more badass.

Rank 4: Damage vs. Influence & Force: I understand that the Influence bonus is really attractive here, but we’re focusing a build that services combat, not story, and Damage brings you to a 20% power bonus vs. the 10% if you choose I&F. Remember, power damage not only affects your biotic powers, but also your ammo power. Remember how stupid Incendiary Ammo is? This makes it stupider.

Rank 5: Squad Bonus vs. Weight Capacity: Be selfish. Your squad is great, but Shepard is a god, and do you know how your make gods even more badass? Let them bring heavier guns.

Rank 6: Shotgun Damage vs. Power Intensity: Even if you primarily use a shotgun and don’t rely heavily on powers, the 20% power damage bonus from Power Intensity is better, because it also applies to Incendiary Ammo. And it gives you the freedom to use other guns if you want to.

Fitness: Let’s make this short and sweet: As a vanguard, you are not punching things with your fists, you are punching things with your face, so for ranks 4, 5, & 6, go Durability, Barrier Recharge, and Durability.

Bonus Power: I recommend any biotic power that sets up combos, since setting up combos is what Vanguards are not great at. Between Reave and Dark Channel, I prefer reave, because you can paint multiple targets, it staggers the target, it stacks, and it gives you damage reduction. I do NOT recommend Flare. While it is a really cool power, it has a painfully slow recharge speed, and vanguards need to move fast.

Reave:

Rank 4: Duration vs. Radius: I choose radius, to paint more targets. It’s not gonna live long enough for duration to matter.

Rank 5: Damage Reduction vs. Recharge Speed: The recharge speed is a little painful, so if you aren’t having trouble staying alive, you can choose it. If you’re dying, damage reduction will help.

Barriers & Armor vs. Damage & Duration: You can go either way here, but I prefer Barriers & Armor, because you can fire a reave at a banshee and then ignore her while you go bowling with the cannon fodder. When all your toys are dead, you can then ram your face into the banshee so she explodes.     

The Weapons

The weight capacity bonus you can get from Assault Mastery means Shepard can be this powerful and carry some REALLY good guns. I recommend weapons with a high rate of fire to take advantage of Incendiary Ammo. Shotguns are the obvious choice, but any weapon with a high rate of fire that keeps you close to or at a 200% cooldown is good.

My favorites are the Piranha and the Hurricane, the latter of which can take advantage of a power mag bonus. But since you are already giving up a valuable mod slot for the power mag, if you need a stabilizer to use it comfortably, I’d recommend going with something else. The Talon is a good choice because it is lightweight, fires quickly enough, and it has a damage bonus to shields and barriers. Basically, it’s a pocket shotgun. The Reegar is a weapon that can be REALLY dumb, since it melts shields, and it benefits from a piercing mod, but its drawback is that it is very short range on a class that already struggles at range. If you want to use it, I suggest the piercing and thermal clip mods.

Speaking of the range issue. I have two words for you: The Indra.

The Indra is an automatic sniper rifle, one of the absolute best weapons in the game, and Shepard can carry it and STILL HAVE A 200% COOLDOWN. Also? It costs 10k credits on the Citadel at the beginning of the game. Is it counterintuitive to carry a sniper rifle on a Vanguard? Yup. Is it immersion breaking? Possibly. But remember, this is a combat guide, not a story guide. Put the Indra on Shepard with Incendiary Ammo, and congrats! You are now invincible.

How to Play

Vanguard is a high risk/high reward class. It’s designed to play fast and at close range, so if you are trying to play it like an adept, you might not get good results. Get comfortable playing with your shields down (you’ll get them back with the next charge), don’t be stingy with medigel, and don’t fret too much about top tier enemies like phantoms and banshees. You might occasionally get sync killed, but truthfully, your damage output is so high you can often stagger them out of their murderous intent. Even turrets can’t stand up to this kit:

Turn on incendiary ammo the moment you load into a mission and leave it on. I suggest mapping charge, nova, and reave (if it’s your bonus power) to the hotkeys so you don’t have to use the power wheel for each, and make it a muscle memory. Charge everything. Nova with impunity. Shoot everything that isn’t dead until they’re on so much fire they wish they were. Use the power wheel to pause the game and get your bearings or figure out what’s shooting you. Use your squadmates to either strip shields or set up biotic explosions. Use and abuse combat roll to get out of trouble if charge is on cooldown. If you’re about to die, charge first, then medigel. Reload canceling is your friend. (If you are not familiar with reload canceling, I plan to make a post about it.)

A vanguard should rarely stop moving, except for the occasional stint behind cover to regroup, reload your gun, or set up an explosion. If you stop charging, you’ll probably die.

This class is a hell of a lot of fun if you let it off the chain and go hog wild. Don’t be afraid to die. Taking the risk – even if it doesn’t pay off all the time – helps you get comfortable with the batshit playstyle if it’s not something you’re used to.

I love all the Mass Effect classes, but this one is my favorite because this is how I really love to play the game. I hope this guide helps!  

[memyselfandmya]

JWCT PROMPT COUNTDOWN

Jwct countdown May 16-17 -> post-nublar shenanigans:

So, I had so many ideas for this prompt, and ended up only doing two. I will be writing more of them and maybe I'll put some of them on tumblr but a lot of them are going to go towards my fanfictions. I'm not used to this multiple point of view thing with limited action and so many characters so the 1st part is a little wonky. I really love the 2nd one; it's shorter than I'd like it to be but I'll probably end up lengthening it later on. Enjoy!

I

“I mostly play with the dinosaur mods,” Darius says. “Can we add—”

The loud chorus of “No!”s is unmistakably noticeable especially with his headphones on. He has to lift them from his ears for a moment while the group settles down.

“No offense, D, but I’ve had enough dinosaurs for a lifetime,” Kenji tells him. “I’m gonna make the server.” 

Brooklynn groans. “Don’t name it anything stupid, Kenji.” 

“I don’t even know why you bother,” Yaz says, propping her bandaged ankle up on her desk chair leg rest.  

“Too late,” comes Kenji’s response. “I just sent you guys the server invite.”

Groans are heard all throughout headphones when they see the server named “trauma-craft.”

“Really, Kenji?” Sammy questions. “That’s not even remotely funny.”

“Yeah, yeah, just join the server.”

“Hey, guys,” Ben says. “How do I join the server?”

Brooklynn sighs. “Oh my God, Ben really?”  

“I’ve never played!”

Darius and Brooklynn give Ben the run-down while the others join the server. 

“What I’m most surprised about is that Yaz, of all people, has already played minecraft,” Kenji teases. He’s loaded into the world but so far it’s just him.

“Shut the hell up, Kenji,” is what Yaz tells him. She’s next to load in and the first thing she does is punch Kenji.

Sammy giggles. “You have to admit, Yaz, you’re not the type of person you'd think plays minecraft.” Her character spawns right next to Yaz.

Yasmina scoffs. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, Darling. Don’t worry about it.”

“All right, I think I got the hang of it,” Ben says. He, Brooklynn, and Darius finally join the game. 

“The gang’s all here,” Kenji says triumphantly. He makes his avatar run around in circles as he sips from a (non-carob) juice box. 

“Well, I think it’s obvious what we do next,” says Sammy. They all respond at once. 

“Go mining,” Yaz says. 

“Build a house,” comes Darius’ response.

“Make weapons?” Is Ben’s suggestion. 

“Explore the map, obvi,” Brooklynn says.

There’s a moment of silence. Then comes Kenji’s voice. “Guys, guys. I think it’s obvious what we do first: punch a tree.”

“What I was going to say was we should go looking for a cute biome to live in,” Sammy answers. 

II

Hey guys, Ben texts the group chat one day when he’s visiting Yaz in South Carolina. Yaz and I are going to get our ears pierced together.

It was a completely random decision that they made. Ben’s mom just so happened to have some work in South Carolina to take care of so Ben tagged along to pay one of his closest friends a visit. They had been hanging out at Yasmina’s house all day, just chilling and playing games, when Ben says, “We should get our ears pierced.”

Yasmina looks up from the deck of cards she’s holding. “I already have my ears pierced, Dummy.”

“Okay, well yeah, but I’ve been thinking of getting mine done.”

“Sick,” Yaz says. “Do you think your mom’ll go for it?” 

“I mean, yeah probably.” He flops down on Yaz’s bed and stares at the ceiling. “My mom has been crazy nice to me lately. I think she feels guilty about sending me to Nublar.”

“Sending your kids to their presumed death will do that to you,” Yaz hums. “But yeah, my mom feels guilty about it too but it’s not their fault. We should be blaming Wu and the maniacs who made that place.”

“Oh, believe me. If I ever see Wu’s face again, I’m jumping his ass.”

Yaz smiles. “Perfect, we can tag-team him together.” The two fist bump and Yaz sets down her set of cards. “Now that you mention it… I wouldn’t mind getting a second piercing and Mom would totally let me. Do you think Sammy would like it?”

Ben laughs at the question. “I think Sammy would like anything you do. You could shave all of your hair off and she’d still love you. Have you guys said it yet, anyways? The “L” word? And no, I don’t mean lesbian.”

Yaz clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Yep, we have.”

“Yaz!” Ben exclaims, gripping Yasmina by the shoulders and shaking her while she fights the smile growing on her face. 

She ducks her head down to hide the blush creeping onto her cheeks. “Anyways, let’s go ask our moms about getting our ears pierced.”

And that’s how Yaz and Ben end up at a tattoo parlor (don’t go to Claire’s, kids) sitting next to each other as they wait to get their ears pierced. 

WHAT!? OMG SEND PICS WHEN YOUR DONE, comes Brooklynn’s reply. 

When Ben sets his phone down he begins tapping his finger against the seat’s armrest. “Is it bad I’m getting kind of scared,” he asks, watching the man prepare the needle.

Yasmina rolls her eyes and laughs. “Man up, Pincus. What happened to the Ben who defeated Toro?”

At that Ben’s face reddens. When he said it back on the island a kajillion times, it was like a badge of honor, but back home on the mainland, whenever he told anyone they looked at him like they would a person who just lost an arm in a war: with pity.  “Yea, yea. You’re right,” he says. 

Their parents are waiting up front so it’s just the two of them until the piercers come up to them, needles primed. “Are you guys ready?”

Ben looks at Yaz for a split second and then nods to them. “Hold my hand,” he says, stretching his arm out towards Yasmina. She groans but holds it anyway. 

Ben takes it like a champ. He hardly even notices when the needle pierces through his skin and the earring he chose is placed in the new hole. The second ear goes just as smoothly.

Yasmina isn’t as lucky. 

She’s gotten her ears pierced before, back when she was younger, so she’s relaxed up until the point the piercer disappears behind her head. She’s right by Yaz’s ear and on the very edge of her sight to the point where Yaz can’t even see her, but her presence is certainly there. 

Deep down, she knows that she’s not on Nublar and the woman right next to her isn’t a dinosaur coming to sink its teeth into her neck but her mind is a sick little thing that loves to seize her with fear. Yasmina closes her eyes but the image of Nublar won’t disappear and she’s certain that Blue is approaching her, hunting her. She has to run—but she can’t.

Ben’s calm until he notices Yasmina’s hand tighten around his and he glances at her to find her eyes shut tight and her knuckles turning white from gripping the armrest. The woman finishes with her just as quickly as Ben had but even when she walks away, Yaz is still hunched over and what hair that’s not in her ponytail shades her face. 

“Yaz,” he says, hesitantly. “You good?”

“Mhm,” she responds, but Ben can tell that she’s not really there. He doesn’t know why he bothered asking when the answer was so plain to see, however he does know that he has to help her in some way. He knows Yaz isn’t one for touch but when he tries to pull away, her grip tightens around his wrist. “It’s over, Yaz,” he says. “You’re okay, I’m here.”

It takes a moment but eventually Yaz’s grip loosens and she sits up a little straighter. She’s still staring at the floor, though, and avoiding his gaze. 

 “Do you want some water?” Ben asks, before digging through his fanny pack which he still makes a habit of wearing. He takes out a mini water bottle and hands it to Yasmina who accepts it gratefully and downs it all in one gulp. “Thanks,” she whispers once she’s done. 

“Of course,” Ben tells her. 

[sangoqueenkoko]

VARIOUS

how and what they build in minecraft

headcanons

MAIN MASTERLIST

(other masterlists listed on main^^)

.

Summary: minecraft. you can make just about anything in that game. well what do some genshin characters make?

Warnings? Nope! But Wanderer’s and Xiao’s aren’t as long as the others because i don’t have them and i am not interested in getting them so i do not know what they are really like. sorry!

Contains: (in order) Kaveh, Alhaitham, Albedo (featuring Klee), Itto, Wanderer, Xiao and Diluc.

Mentions characters above, as well as Dori, Cyno, Tighnari, Jean, Kuki Shinobu, Nahida, Kaeya.

Modern AU!

Kaveh

- this man is a literal architect, so it is easy to say that he will do great. he can make a lot of things, and they look amazing.

- i can imagine he would try to recreate his ‘magnum opus,’ aka The Palace of Alcazarzaray, in the game. he even put chairs down for people to wait. because there aren’t any in genshin.

- if he could, he would so get some furniture mods to make the place really pop.

- he would and has, no doubt.

- give him a few ideas and a prompt and he will be away building within minutes.

- i can see him making a security system so that Alhaitham doesn’t come in and.. do anything.

- he is so independent in minecraft it is unreal, because he can’t get into dept, he is loaded with gold, diamonds, emeralds, etc.

- he would definitely build with those materials.

- if he was in a server or realm, he would definitely work with Dori, and they would hoard all sorts of loot, of course make The Palace of Alcazarzary again with emerald and gold, it may take time, but they’re so committed to it.

- has quarrels over discord with Alhaitham about him even coming near the premises.

- “Alhaitham?! Why are you here?! You better not take any of our stuff!”

- “hm” he was merely looking around, he was interested, but never made it known.

Alhaitham

- definitely a casual gamer, and his favourite game mode is survival, or if he’s feeling adventurous, hardcore.

- if on creative, he’ll probably make a library with actual readable content, it’s a lot of work to do, but it’s something he’s definitely willing to commit to.

- ahem

- if on a new survival world, with Kaveh of course, they would have to share a house until they get enough resources to split and make an area their own.

- however, Alhaitham would make a normal, somewhat aesthetically pleasing house, and Kaveh… would either make a hole in the ground so that mobs won’t find him, or make a room in the house which is bigger than Alhaithams.

- “ugh, what now Alhaitham, can i not make my area of the house mine?”

- “i never said you couldn’t”

- but his face and tone did.

- if on a server or realm, he would go solo.

- definitely get shoo’ed away if he was near Kaveh and Dori’s place.

- he was only curious.

- definitely hangs out with Cyno and Tighnari in the jungle biome Tighnari insisted he and Cyno make their base.

- definitely has a dog that follows him around, and it goes by the name of Wafi, and so help anything that hits that poor creature, because Alhaitham will go full Feeble Scholar.

-also give him a chance and he would install an emerald weapon mod so that he can have his sword in game. sadly, you can’t attack with dendro.

Albedo (and Klee)

- Albedo is the redstone and potions master, no doubt about it and you can’t ever change my mind.

- if his world was expanded beyond, with complex things made, he would have to have certain permissions disabled for Klee who frequently visits his world, because he spends so much time on some things, the pride he holds for them all are obvious, and if something were to happen… uh…

- he has a world especially for Klee, where she blows things up until it reaches bedrock, and of course she tried to break the bedrock, but Albedo has to break it to her that it can’t be broken.

- “but you’re a scientist, surely you can break it!”

- “th-that isn’t how it works” he smiled as he spoke.

- he would test potions on Klee, the good kind, like night vision, leaping and others.

- on the topic of leaping, she would definitely have a place in Albedos main world full of rabbits, and would try to name them all Jumpy Dumpty.

- on a server or realm, Klee would have a piece of land all to herself so she can blow things up without it damaging everyone else’s areas.

- Albedo’s base is home to the Nether portal, so whenever others would come to the portal, they were always welcome to get some fire resistance potions or enchanted weapons, etc.

- oh, and as well as the End portal.

- he is the keeper of the Ender Dragon egg so that no one else loses it, he builds an entire hidden room for it that literally no one else can find.

- shares his base with Jean, he has the scientific side of it.

- she observes Klee too to make sure she doesn’t clash with others.

- Jean and Albedo are the owners of the server/realm.

Itto

- two words, cow farm

- this man has as many cows as one could imagine, in his house, a cave, he lives with a cow named Ushi.

- of course still the Gang are there.

- they have their own houses, in a small town like area near a village, and they actually are at peace with them, they don’t take things from their chests.

- the worst they do is take their crops, but they do eventually plant more in its place.

- their best type of weapon is stone, mainly because they don’t have the best luck when it comes to mining, they either find iron or better but lose it after falling down a ravine or die from a mob

- especially in the Nether, they were a magnet for mobs.

- Itto has died the most in game out of them all.

- however, Kuki is the exact opposite, she is extremely lucky when it comes to mining and general in game experience, but is hesitant to share her things with the gang because of their luck and probably of forgetting where they put things. she doesn’t want to risk it.

- she learnt her lesson after she let Itto borrow her diamond pick axe to go and get some materials from their nearby mine, but he accidentally fell into some lava and lost everything he had on him.

- thus him begging Kuki for forgiveness, just like every other time.

- in a server or realm, Itto forgets to put some sources of light in places, so some mobs will spawn, he freaks out when creepers spawn, thus him not killing them, and thus a part of his home blowing up.

- i can see Itto fending off a creeper and it blows up in his storage room, and the chests are full of torches, thus making his game lag when they all drop, making Itto’s microphone audio cut out when the lag spikes.

- hey, his computer isn’t the best, but he’s saving up for a better one, trust me.

- he’s doing his best.

Wanderer

- he doesn’t have a set base, he has weapons, torches, food and a bed for his travels.

- sometimes camps in a cave when he doesn’t know where to go next.

- if he gets blown up or killed by something else in a cave or anywhere else, he will rage quit, and i mean rage quit.

- definitely the one to go to the end and find the boat that has the elytra, and uses it all the time.

- definitely doesn’t get lost, while trying to find the portal back.

- this goes for the server and realm too, if you see him glide past your base every now and then, then no you didn’t, he chooses not to hang out with anyone.

- but word spread around about the game and caught Nahida’s ears, so she joined and played with Wanderer a lot, her base is made of quartz and emerald, she even made a small base by hers for Wanderer for whenever he visits her.

- he doesn’t show it but he is grateful for it.

Xiao

- the sole reason why Albedo makes the leaping potion, Xiao has satisfaction of sneaking behind mobs and attack them.

- the mob he has tension with most is the enderman, as they can both sort of teleport, even if Xiao uses ender pearls for the skill.

- he solely comes out at night, and his base on the top of the highest mountain in his world, even if it’s small, it’s a place he can hide until night time, however, this doesn’t work well in a server or realm when others want to sleep and pass the night, Xiao is out hunting for loot, especially endermen.

- has come across Wanderer on his travels, they sometimes travel together, but they don’t communicate to each other, only on some occasions.

- “Huh! You!”

- “Hmph” Wanderer muses.

Diluc

- on his own, he is fully capable of taking down pillagers and over taking the woodland mansion to make his own, and always makes secret rooms despite it only him playing on the world, these rooms contain valuable look, this look containing many fire aspect weapons, especially swords.

- when he first started this world, with it being survival, he struggled to find food and make it edible.

- but when more steady on his own, most definitely never runs out of food as he has plenty of farms to work on.

- and most of them are automated.

- like Xiao, prefers and goes out a lot during the night.

- he tested himself and put his game mode on hard, the mansion is by a decent size village, so he protects it all he can, even with iron golems.

- he definitely trades with the villagers too, and of course gets the ‘master’ trade level on each one too, and STILL has stacks of materials left.

- this guy isn’t scared to go to bedrock level and risk himself to get materials. Like Alhaitham, he has dogs, not mentioning them because of how many.

- oh, i forgot to say, Kaeya visits. Diluc isn’t happy (when is he ever) about this, but instead of banishing him from the premises, he has general rules, which Kaeya does respect and follow, thus them both getting along… sort of.

- in a server or realm, Kaeya does visit, but still respects rules and boundaries of everyone else, he stays with Jean, Albedo and Klee.

- apart from that, Diluc has enough food for everyone in the in game world if in need of emergencies.

- believe me when i say this, i can see him trading with Dori and Kaveh frequently, food for high valuables.

- even if they don’t really ever meet, all three of them are on good terms.

[thefirstknife]

Getting real sick of a certain subset of Destiny players complaining that it’s a baby game and crying to Bungie to nerf exotics and abilities when their ENTIRE POINT IS TO BE STRONG in specific ways as if they are being locked into using them.

IF YOU WANT AN EXTRA CHALLENGE STOP BEING SUCH A DPS GOBLIN AND JUST EQUIP SOMETHING THATS NOT TOP TIER META AND STOP COMPLAINING JESUS FUCKING CHRIST

MOOD. Go off.

It's incredibly annoying to me. They always use the argument of "the game should FORCE me to do things, I should not SELF-IMPOSE challenges." And like. ? I'm sorry but what? It's a video game for a big audience, it's here to be playable and accessible to the widest possible playerbase. There are plenty of ways to make the game difficult for yourself, so knock yourself out if that's your thing, but don't force others into it.

Like, I enjoy hard content, I regularly at least attempt day 1 raids, I do master raids, GMs, solo and solo flawless content and all that. But only when I want to. Sometimes I don't and I don't want to suffer in a patrol zone or struggle in a seasonal activity I'm doing for the story. The majority of the players don't want that. Designing games for the professional gamers only has NEVER been a good idea and never will be. Fifty streamers can't sustain a video game. It needs casual players who will want to come back to the game instead of feeling defeated.

One of the reasons I really enjoy helping others is because I know that casual players tend to struggle in stuff that's basic activity for me. I've seen people unable to get through a strike. I've sat for 10 minutes rezing someone who couldn't do the jump in a seasonal activity. I want those people to be able to play basic content without feeling frustrated and I want them to know that there are people out there who will help them out.

And this doesn't apply just to basic content, although it should start with that. I think all dungeons and raids and everything should be things that all players can complete. Fine, doing a master raid with all challenges should be tough, but it should be achievable with time and practice, not impossible. What a lot of these "pros" want is just completely divorced from reality.

It takes days and days of practice every time a new master raid is out for me and my team (all with thousands of hours of playtime) to get comfortable to finally finish it. We're far from casual players and it still takes a lot of time to be able to finish hard content. Making it even harder is insane to me. Like, if something is so hard that my team full of people, each with 5000+ hours of playtime and a coordinated team that's been raiding together for years now can't finish it, that means it's absolutely impossible for probably 90% of the playerbase. That's wild to me. Raids and GMs should have more people playing them. If master raids are too easy for you, Mr. I-Play-Destiny-For-A-Living, that's on you buddy. Unequip the super god tier god roll meta guns and loadouts or play something else.

And ofc, another excuse they make is "if I don't use meta, I am not going to win a raid race!" Then don't. Idk. Let me play you the tiniest violin. This affects literally nobody except a grand total of 50 people. Run your meta in day 1, and play with random shit otherwise. Play raids with all white weapons. Play without mods. Play without a HUD. Do things solo only. I don't know, make up a way to spice things up for yourself. I'm not interested in that and neither are 99% of the players out there. The game is genuinely hard enough for the majority of the players. On top of that, I am here to feel like a powerful space fantasy superhero. I am NOT here to die to dregs in patrol zones. If there's ONE thing that I know for a fact that put people off from Lightfall (as in this year of Destiny), it's the difficulty changes. They're annoying, frustrating and for some a barrier to entry more than anything else.

[sailorsplatoon]

Here it is, the prologue for the dedfour fanfiction, which I only just now realized I never announced the title of.

Everyone, this is Watch the Sky With You. I am very excited to be posting this and I hope you all like it! If you missed my post on the schedule for this fic, you can check it out here.

Without further ado, let's get into the fic!!!

Next

Read it on ao3!

(Fanfic under cut)

Agent 4 loaded into the Memverse for another test run. Marina wanted to make sure everything was working properly before it went fully online, and she knew she could trust them with the task. Once it was completed, they would be a protector there, making sure everyone in it stayed safe… or something like that. They weren’t entirely sure, but they were happy to help with whatever they could. Especially if it meant restoring the minds of the santitized octolings that were still in the Deepsea Metro. When Agent 8 told them about what that weird phone thing did, Four wanted to help in any way possible. 

They weren’t doing any protecting right now, though. At the moment, all they had to do was run a few tests in the Spire of Order, the giant building that looked kinda like Deca Tower, to make sure the floors were working properly. 

But something was wrong. The code felt different than it normally did. As their digital avatar— which looked almost exactly like them in real life— slowly loaded into the Order Sector, they heard a voice they didn’t recognize.

“You are Agent 4, yes?” As the rest of the world materialized around them, they found a face to match with the voice. It looked like some kind of blob of black code… with a face? Marina hadn’t said anything about something like this.

“Yeah, who’re you?”

“I am Order itself. A conscious generated from the processes or many who yearn for stability.”

“Umm okay. What’d Marina put you here for?” If this thing was supposed to be a part of the Memverse, why hadn’t Marina told them about it? They were given full access to all information regarding this weird digital world, so why didn’t they see anything about this guy?

“I am here to bring order to the world.”

“Riiight well I gotta go get some beta testing done now soooo…” they tried to get around Order, but it blocked their path to the Spire.

“You will be assigned an alternate task.”

“Marina didn’t say anything about something else I had to do.”

“These orders do not come from Marina.”

“Then I ain’t following them. Now let me through,” they tried yet again to push past the mass of glitching code. And again, it moved to stop them.

“Do you not want to become the greatest being you can be? To become perfect? To lose all negative emotion and memory in favor of total order?”

“Say what now?” That sounded all too familiar. That was exactly how Eight said sanitization was marketed to unsuspecting octolings. They had to stay on their guard. This might not be good.

“You will be greyscaled in the name of order.” The blob glitched then shot into the air. Upon landing it transformed into a massive octopus creature. This definitely wasn’t good.

Four was just here for some minor beta testing, not a legit boss fight. They took cover behind some coral and pulled up the mod menu Marina had given them in case of emergencies. They equipped themself with a splattershot— or order shot as it was called here— a splat bomb for the sub and a trizooka special. They’d be at a significant disadvantage since they didn’t have a drone with them, or the chance to fill their palette with color chips, or any hacks. But with a weapon build made just for them, they had a shot at winning.

“Look dude, I don’t know why you’re here, but if you’re trying to take away people’s free will then there is no chance I’m letting that happen. That is the exact opposite reason why Marina made this place!” Four shouted, running out from the cover the coral provided to begin their attack.

“Commencing greyscaling.” Order began to shoot massive blobs of black ink right at Agent 4. The thing wasn’t even acknowledging them anymore, how rude! Whatever. They’d take it out and then warn Marina about whatever was going on that caused this mess. “Agent 4, aren’t you tired of being seen as inferior to the other agents? Tired of being forgotten? You can help me bring order to this world, and no one would forget who you are again.”

They hesitated for half a second, but that was all the time Order needed. There was a sudden, intense pain in Four’s right leg. One of the ink blobs had hit them, and it stuck on. They felt their leg going numb the longer it stayed. This was so so not good. Another blob hit their shoulder and they cried out in pain as they stumbled to the ground. The ink didn’t do any damage but they felt it spreading more and more. It seeped through their skin and travelled along their veins. It was cold and stung like dry ice. But how could they feel it if this was all digital? Unless it was somehow happening in the physical world too. They tried to reach to rip it off, but their arm wouldn’t move. Their whole body wouldn’t move. The ink was spreading faster now, up their neck, over their chin, into their eyes. It hurt more than anything they could imagine. 

And then suddenly it didn’t anymore. Suddenly all the pain melted away.

“Greyscaling complete.”

[actorsmask]

"Even an organization like the Masked Fools sing praises of their Aeon. The Aeon will never give you up, never let you down, or run around and desert you. They will never make you cry, say goodbye, or tell a lie and hurt you.”

— Ast Rickley, super popstar of the Epsilon XII System

Also run by: @galat1c-bas3baller

Alias: Ahanon

Pronouns: They/them

Age: 23

Path: Elation

Element: Fire

Affiliation(s): Masked Fools, Wildfire

Birthday: 08/12

Weapon: Sickles +a gun

Character Details / Character Relationships / Voicelines: OCs / Voicelines: Playables

Character Story I / Character Story II / Character Story III / Character Story IV

On the Run, a Home Found.

Credits: @SkT_7an on twitter/X and sk.t7an on IG

Okay, mod speaking!

Hello! This is a blog for my HSR OC, Ahanon or Blythe! FYI, if the character interacting with Ahanon is close enough, they may call them Blythe!

Finished event(s)!

50 Follower event / Event ended!

Now, about the mod!

What do you call me? — Call me Ryoko!!

Pronouns? — She/her

Nationality? — Filipino!(it’s always funnier in the Philippines)

Sexuality? — Bisexual

Reminders!:

I will not tolerate homophobia, racism, or misogyny. It will be an immediate block.

You may have your own opinion, but if I see a hate comment or just something disrespectful, it will be deleted and you will be blocked.

Mod is a minor, so please do not send anything NSFW. I can do slightly suggestive but that is the deadliest line drawn.

I am fine with the gory stuff and violence(Blythe has done a lot of stuff as a Fool after all), but put a TW!

Mod has a life guys!!!! Though I am a phone addict and answer very quickly, there will be times I will not answer immediately, so if I don’t respond quickly please do not spam or I will ignore your ask.

Pls discuss with me in DMs if you wanna do a ship!

If you want me to write something, you can hop into the asks!(though I can’t guarantee it’ll meet your standards)

Think that’s everything, have fun!

Tags!

actor’s mask does actor’s mask shit!=OOC

actor’s mask loses her primos!=Genshin talk

actor’s mask loses her crystals!=hsr talk

actor’s mask loses her fingers!=prjsekai talk

actor’s mask tries to write!=(poorly written)Drabbles or small fics

actor’s mask shares media!=reblogs

RP People!

actor’s mask talks to anons!

actor’s mask talks to fan club anon!

actor’s mask talks to lenoraven!

actor’s mask talks to crimson ashes!

OC’s!

actor’s mask talks to Hanako!

actor’s mask talks to Warau!

actor’s mask talks to Etsuo!

actor’s mask talks to 🌷!

@/rayne-carnation

actor’s mask talks to hyenapriest!

@/hyenapriest

actor’s mask talks to astral timekeeper!

@/sor33ne

actor’s mask talks to the architect!

@/arc1t3ct

actor’s mask talks to Hatsu!

@/4a-t5u

actor’s mask talks to amberlynn!

@/cat-lover-amberlynn

actor’s mask talks to elinoir!

@/riddler-elinoir

actor’s mask talks to the cursed one!

@/thecursedooone

actor’s mask talks to simon!

@/masked-genie

actor’s mask talks to phyvas!

@/phy-v4s

actor’s mask talks to artificial fury!

@/artificial-fury

actor’s mask talks to space oddity!

@/spaceoddity

Moddie!!!!

actor’s mask talks to yin!

@/yintsukareta

HSR RP blogs!

actor’s mask talks to mr-cold-feet

@/mr-cold-feet

actor’s mask answers silly sampo!

@/silly-sampo

actor’s mask talks to unmasked fool!

@/unmasked-fool

actor’s mask talks to life of a faker!

@/life-of-a-faker

actor’s mask talks to s1lvermane!

@/s1lvermane-capt

actor’s mask talks to ask lynx!

@/ask-lynx

actor’s mask talks to Bronya!

@/bronya-official

actor’s mask talks to the underworld-doctor-natasha!

@/underworld-doctor-natasha

actor’s mask talks to Pitch-Dark Hook The Great!

@/pitch-darkhookthegreat

actor’s mask talks to six phasedice!

@/six-phasedice

actor’s mask talks to Argenti!

@/argenti-of-the-beauty

actor’s mask talks to blade official!

@/blade-official-hsr

actor’s mask talks to the lucky coin!

@/aluckiicoin

actor’s mask talks to aventurine official!

@/aventurine-official

actor’s mask talks to audhd-aventurine!

@/audhd-aventurine

actor’s mask talks to trashcan loving raccoon!

@/galacticbaseballbatter

actor’s mask talks to dr vrat1o!

@/dr-vrat1o

actor’s mask talks to dr ratio official!

@/dr-ratio-official

actor’s mask talks to veritas ratio!

@/veritas-ratio-rp

actor’s mask talks to the bird unable to fly!

@/bird-that-cannot-fly

[ironstakes]

Naturalized Etho design sketch for my thing. I figure totems and maybe some armor can be jewelry but I'm working on that, hence the totem armband. More rambles under the cut.

I'm pondering about modded armor that the narturalized Hermits might be able to wear and I think that enchanted jewelry could be pretty flexible with connecting the minecraft mechanics to how Naruto's world works. Impulse is a gem merchant outside of Hermittown if you remember all the way back to chapter 1 and I think it'd be cool if I could tie that back in to minecraft logic. Plus it would mesh better with locations I've described like the marble bridge- what if the gems light up or ward away endermen or protect carved details from the elements? As of now Kakashi has no explanation for the opulence and with how capitalistic Hermits can be I need a reason for them to not have tanked the economy of the elemental nations. So the gems need to have some kind of function beyond tool making.

If you guys saw the (now kinda outdated) Grian design then you might have noticed that the workgloves are shorter... a lot shorter. I'm debating glove lengths and drew them short here but I'm considering giving Etho long gloves. Notice the marring on his arm- that's a redstone burn. My thinking is that redstone is dangerous to non-minecraft entity peeps and so the naturalized Hermits that work with redstone regularly would have larger, thicker work gloves to protect their hands and arms. I am toying with the idea of having gems in the gloves. I'm not sure what they'd do yet but gem gloves feel very modded minecraft to me.

The belt is pretty thick... but that feels minecrafty to me and I hate drawing the edges of well fitted shirts. So thick leather belt. The sticks with the gems in the tops (and the bottoms) are the modded tools (they are collapsible and the gems correspond to the material the tool/weapon is made of) and the book is basically an inventory, but can store more. The naturalized hermits may not be minecrafters at the minute but that's not going to stop them from emulating their normal selves to the best of their abilities.

I've been going back and forth on long v short hair designs for Etho and I've narrowed the designs down to two different possibilities... but one is still long and one is still short (this one actually). Ugh. I'm working on fleshing it out.

Etho doesn't have a red eye, he's got a "blind" eye. Basically with the mods of the Naruto world the replacement eye looks physically blind but is functionally a regular eye. They haven't figured out/haven't looked into how to change its color (yet). Why does he have a replacement eye? Well, that'd be because Etho had two eyes after being naturalized, the world recognized that's not what the real Etho looks like and put him in a position to get it "fixed" (and the same is true of other traits in this universe, like Scar's scars which were gained in the same event actually).

Similarly to the glove dilemma I'm trying to see if I can work in patterns onto the Hermit's sleeveless shirt things. But as I look into Naruto's design choices and such it seems increasingly unlikely; it'd be too distinct in-world. Originally Etho had a creeper-face pattern on his shirt.

But I am giving every naturalized Hermit ugly leather boots, no way around that.

Etho is 32 here and I want him to be just slightly taller or shorter than Kakashi... I haven't decided which.

[nowandthane]

Mass Effect Trilogy Tag

tagged by @menacingmetal thank you!!!! <3

tagging @grim-starling @stormikins @vakariansvixen @westernlarch @illusivesoul @drelldreams @xoshepard (i know you already got tagged but tag me in yours too if u do it i wanna see it xD) <3 and anyone else who wants to do this!!

I am a fan since: I first played in September 2022 and it's consumed my life since! I had the OT since like 2018/19??? but i couldnt play because it gave me motion sickness kjdfhgkdf then I got MELE free cause amazon was doing a thing and by that point i had friends who taught me to mod the game and i can play with relatively few issues now :3

Favourite game of the series?: oooh idk i love them all and i played them first time all in a row so theyre kind of like one game to me... probably me2?

MShep or FShep?: femshep. ive yet to complete a game with anyone other than femshep. well, anyone other than sarani specifically lmao but hopefully that'll change xD

Earthborn, Colonist or Spacer?: earthborn!! (sarani again xD)

Biotics or Tech: tech (again... sarani. she is not a biotic)

Paragon or Renegade: paragon choices, renegade dialogue xD

Favourite Class: infiltrator!! ive never played a class other than infiltrator (yes, you guessed it, sarani :3) but im trying out vanguard like anytime now so we'll see?

Favourite Companion:

Least favourite Companion:

you could put a gun to my head and i still wont answer those two i will not choose

My squad selection: i dont really have a main i think? it depends on who's narratively appropriate for the mission, then on who will help me most with their build. i try to make sure everyone has equal time cause i wanna see them all....

Favourite In-game romance: well it's def thane if youve known me a while youd know i used his name for like over a year while i was figuring out my gender stuff xD also garrus and tali ofc <3 but tbh they're all good!! with the exception of jacob cause bioware did him so dirty ugh

Other pairings I like: joker/edi, miranda/ashley, miranda/jack are some of my faves but tbh this world is my playground i WILL mix and match them xD

Favourite NPC: jenkins nihlus and aethyta, i kind of really want her to [liara shoots and kills me]

Favourite Antagonist: Saren for sure i need him to choke me

Favourite Mission: Priority: Tuchanka probably... i love mordin so much and his arc... beautiful

Favourite Loyalty Mission: Tali!!!

Favourite DLC: arrival. ok no lmao. omega probably!

Control, Synthesis or Destroy: destroy i guess but only because i pretend the geth and edi dont die lmao.

Favourite Weapon: black widow!!!!!

Favourite Place: Rannoch

A quote I like: Tali's 'The difference was you.' and 'I got better. I got you.' (very romance specific i know i love her okay) garrus's 'gray... i dont know what to do with gray.' legion's 'do these units have a soul?' kolyat saying 'the prayer was for you' when wrex says shepard is a sister to him

im gonna go cry now