#but she spent so much time in shapeshifted forms that she has lost a few marbles over time

[assassinhomecreedstuck]

i cant believe ive played world of warcraft for 20 years

[princeescaluswords]

Just backed out of a fic that hit 3 hallmarks:

• Malia's existence excluded on the grounds that "it made no sense" she came out of being a coyote for years with a 17 year olds mental capacity and the sex scene with Stiles was "gross"

• BUT the fic has Stiles paired with Peter, a grown man much older than him who is a teenager

• aaaaaaand untrustworthy Deaton! "He'd waited MONTHS to tell them about the doors in their minds, Lydia did not trust him with the information she had" Even as they go to Peter for information because again he's essentially the left hand + ambassador of the Hale Pack with a well of knowledge about the supernatural and Allison and Lydia had a whole "we don't know if we can trust him" scene but it's DEATON who is untrustworthy

Fandom truly never changes haha 🤡🤡🤡🤡

I want to take this moment to thank you for all the really thoughtful questions that you've been sending me, and I will absolutely give them all the thought they deserve. They will be answered.

But this one is easy, because fandom is *sigh* fandom.

It is absolutely established by the show that a shapeshifter doesn't lose their capacity for human thought when they are able to take animal form. Talia didn't lose it; she traveled to a meeting of alphas in wolf form. Why would a wolf without human thought approach three packs of werewolves? Derek didn't lose it; he transformed from wolf to human to tell Kate what was going on. Why not keep savaging Kate if he was angry? Theo didn't lose it; he chased Liam just long enough to get him to reveal to Mason the werewolf secret and used it to tempt Malia. When Malia took the form of a coyote in Season 6, she didn't lose the capacity for human thought, being able to look for Alex's family. So why do they think that she lost her capacity for human thought during those eight years spent as a coyote? She didn't develop the same way normal children would -- and the show dealt with that.

As for Malia and Stiles having sex in the basement of Eichen House? I don't know if they have ever been around teenagers or even adults, but people have had sex for much worse reasons than "this guy understands me the way no one else does" and "I'm facing the end of my life and I want to know what having sex feels like." But that's just my experience.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of ruthless, vile older men who prey on teenagers because they are so fundamentally selfish that they can't imagine having a relationship with someone who is an equal but can only be attracted to those who whom they can dominate completely. Peter, as despicable as he is in other ways, is not one of those people.

It always amuses me that as much as fandom bitches about Teen Wolf's lack of chronology, they utterly ignore the few times that the production actually establishes one. We know that it's only been a few weeks, because 3A started at the beginning of Junior Year, which is the end of August/beginning of September, and the third episode of 3B is the day before Halloween. So it hasn't been months.

And Deaton warned them that they would suffer consequences for the ritual. "It would have an effect on each of you; it will be permanent ..." There's no indication that he knew about the 'open door' ahead of time. Deaton is not enigmatic; he simply doesn't claim to know things he doesn't know. This is, of course, another manifestation of fandom's need to turn Deaton into a Magic Negro, who dispenses advice and magical help and then shuts up when he's not needed.

Even if Lydia didn't trust Deaton, which we have no indication she didn't, why would she trust Peter? I mean, isn't that the point of every post-Formality interaction between them in entire show?

Finally, once again the Left Hand appears, and I always feel the need to point out that if Peter is the Left Hand of the Hale Pack, he was a freaking abyssmally incompetent Left Hand of the Hale Pack. He had no clue that Kate was seducing Derek. He had no clue, apparently, that Kate was even in town. He offered zero help against the Alpha Pack. What the hell was he good for? But he didn't need to be useful like that because he wasn't a Left Hand. There is no such thing as a Left Hand.

But fandom is going to keep being fandom.

[wnnbdarklord]

EDIT: so I started writing this like a week ago, but honestly the finale killed any desire in me to interact with this show in a fannish way. So have these half assed notes. I think it's obvious where I lost steam. These ideas are free for use for anyone who wants them in fic, have at you. As it is, I don't think I'll interact with this show as a fan any further than this.

How I would write a Loki show in bullet points (and a mishmash of short scenes and dialogue, let's be honest) for my sanity!

Presuming some disney exec came down from on high and forced the inclusion of EG!Loki and the TVA (because otherwise it'd be IW!Loki that survived and it'd be all about him finding his best life away from Earth, Asgard, Thor and the whole Thanos/EG situation. Or if I only had to include the TVA, it'd be IW!Loki dealing with the TVA, not EG!Loki):

Fair warning: this will likely be a mess since I'm not entirely motivated to not have it be so. 

[cut for length]

Ep1:

- Loki escapes to Nidavelir and uses the tools there to get rid of the chains and muzzle. A CONTROLLED use of the Tesseract, thankyouverymuch

- the TVA comes for him and Loki is wary and on the alert, exhausted from the whole Avengers thing so he immediately makes a clone to interact with the TVA and observes from afar

- the TVA fall for it when they try to bitchslap him like in the show, but immediately regroup when it goes through the illusion and start a search pattern. Their tech can scan for his temporal aura and they close in on Loki quickly (show the TVA as at least somewhat competent or they're shit antagonists for Loki)

- Loki, who still has hold of the Tesseract, portals out of there

- what follows is a quick chase scene across multiple planets and realms, but the TVA are always on his heels. The longest time they take to find him is during an ongoing apocalypse on a random planet that's enough for Loki to get a quick breather. but you know, disaster's on the horizon, so he has to leave eventually. but this is the first clue both we as an audience and Loki get about potential hiding places.

- when an exhausted Loki finally turns to fight, he manages to take several minutemen out  (justifying B-15's hate on for him) before one of them gets in a lucky shot and freezes him

- "Who are you people?" [short flash of Loki's eyes flashing green and the entire scene getting a strange cast, floating energy swirling around everything. It's beautiful, but the TVA people's energy is out of sync, out of touch and strangely jagged compared to their surroundings]

- they slap the collar on him and march him into the TVA

- Loki immediately tries to pull the same illusion trick but it doesn't work cause no magic in the TVA (maybe some visual indication of what he's trying to do, but it doesn't go past his skin. You know, like Sylvie managed in ep 3 -.-)

- he doesn't wildly panic, but we see his breathing speed up and he immediately looks at his left hand and relaxes when he sees it isn't turning blue. 

- okay so the TVA have caught him, he's on their shit list, no magic, exhausted, no idea what's going on, who these people are or how powerful they are - he chooses to play nice for now and bide his time

- the whole intake process is spent in quiet observation mode, only speaking when spoken to

- discomfort at being out of his clothes, but maybe only a wry joke about them wanting to strip him naked (making him a participant in all the thirst jokes)

- he doesn't ask if a lot of people don't know they're robots like a child wanting validation and he's not visibly afraid. Instead, we see him look at his hand again and try for wry humor when asking. But he steps into the device without much hesitation. It's death vs certainty and we already know he's chosen death once before.

- the propaganda cartoon is much shorter and plays in the background so we can see Loki's incredulous eyebrow raise at it. the ticket thing gets an eyeroll, but ready compliance since it's not worth it to argue

- when he sees the other guy get "pruned", he immediately reaches for the ticket to reassure himself it's there, but doesn't wave it around triumphantly, just sighs in relief

- trial can stay mostly unchanged, just no stupid magic attempt in the middle

"It's not your story, Mr. Laufeyson, it never was" (AND THIS SHALL BE PROVEN FALSE, you know, unlike in the show where it turned out to be their fucking mission statement) also, Loki gives her murder eyes for calling him that

- in fact, instead of trying magic, Loki holds up the controller he stole from  B-15 as she was escorting him to the trial and waves as he disappears through a door backwards

After that scene is the church scene with bodies, establishing Mobius as a hunter of dangerous variants. Someone is killing TVA officers

Mobius gets called back as in canon, but arrives too late to stop our Loki from leaving

Sidenote: Loki still has the tesseract since it was in his pocket dimension during the fight the TVA nabbed him in

Ep 2:

- it's now a few days/weeks later. Loki is back in his own clothes, a simpler outfit not geared for war. He's in the biggest library in the universe, the depository of almost all knowledge, looking for information about the TVA. there is Nothing, suspiciously so

- once again, the TVA shows up and he has to run yet again. maybe he kills this team too, to buy himself more time. he steals a melt stick and more time pads and reset charges

- he needs more information and the only place he'll get it is at the TVA it seems, so he shapeshifts into his female form, dressed as one of the many paperpushers at the TVA and we see her being relieved that the spelled clothing is holding once she passes through the time door

(another aside, but ideally the female form is more like Eva Green or Katie McGrath. AND NOT BLONDE)

- acting like she belongs, Loki effortlessly manages to snoop around the TVA for a few hours

- there's only one close call with C-20, but Loki manages to deflect suspicion by parroting the motto at her, which Loki reads from a nearby propaganda poster (cause Loki is good at lying, manipulation and flying by the seat of their pants)

- eventually, she ends up at the archive area and begins researching. We see that Loki is competent at this and is quick to pick up the filing system. the variant number from the papers she signed the episode before becomes relevant to finding the appropriate files

- before she can dig too deep into her own life story as laid out by these people, just as she finds the Ragnarok Report, Mobius finds her (maybe there was a silent alarm triggered by unauthorized access or something. Slightly more competent TVA)

- there is a scene where Mobius and Loki play a game of chicken and manipulation, wordplay and lying until it becomes clear Mobius knows who Loki is (actually establishing some camaraderie)

- Loki gets a little hoisted by their own petard since they're enjoying the banter so much, the backup Mobius called for catches them a little off guard, collared again

- since info gathering is still the name of the game, Loki doesn't try to get away just yet

(during this entire scene, Mobius is the same offhandedly condescending prick he is in canon, but it's very obviously framed that way)

(also featuring confirmation of the genderfluidity thing because fuck you disney)

M: "Nice disguise. Really had me fooled for a second there."

L: "It's hardly a disguise. I am always myself."

[Loki shifts back to male, though the clothes remain the same (shifting =/= magic)]

M: "Yeah, well, next time you want to go undercover at the TVA, maybe don't choose a face we already have from several other of your variants."

[Loki twitches a little, since that wasn't a form he openly wore a lot (even when he wanted to) cause Asgard is a dick about shifting genders] 

L: "And how does that work exactly?"

M: "Got your entire life on file, buddy. But you know, sometimes Asgard isn't a complete stick in the mud the day you gather enough courage to show up to dinner in a dress. We usually have to prune those timelines quickly."

[Loki's grin is more like a snarl, frozen on his face, since he picks up the implications loud and clear (the implication being that him being too happy is not allowed in the Sacred Timeline)]

M: [picks up the files Loki was looking at] "Come on, I've got something to show you."

-cue time theater scene

-that little scene of looking out at the TVA does not feature Loki being impressed or awed at the TVA's tech. It features him being scared/uneasy because the TVA is completely dead to his senses. Loki's eyes do the same flash as before, but everything is completely dull, no energy anywhere. He can barely see some swirls on his own arms]

-Loki asks why this charade, Mobius tells him the TVA is willing to come to an agreement with Loki for his help

"You're not the only one running around messing up the Sacred Timeline. Come on, job interview time."

(it's really really not)

- Mobius tries the same schtick as before, but it's both less and more effective. Less cause Loki has had a bit more time to collect himself since the invasion, more cause he's more aware of the TVA's power and has been chased by them for a while now

- we see Loki being affected by the Frigga thing BUT he also picks up how edited the reel is

- still, he lets Mobius do the "only thing you're good for" bit until we see him look up with murder in his eyes, even through the tears

- "I am going to burn this place to the ground and I am going to start with you. That is my bargain."

"Yeah, cause your "bargains" [Mobius full on air quotes here] work out so well for you," he says, offering Loki a hand up

-cue alarm and Mobius rushing out

-Loki grabs the files Mobius left behind, and also the tape in the hologram projector and escapes

- no infinity stones scene, cause Loki still has the Tesseract and doesn't go to look for more

- cut to the TVA running around in a panic, multiple branches forming on the displays. It's the same bombing plot as in the show, but now serving as a distraction for Loki to get away

- when they figure this out, Ravonna: "You should have just pruned him when you found him. There's a reason we don't reset Loki variants. Our luck always runs out eventually with them. Fix this, Mobius. Or you'll have to answer to the TimeKeepers."

- back to Loki, he steps out into chaos as something explodes behind him. He's in another apocalypse. During his running from the TVA, he noticed it takes them longer to find him whenever there's a lot of chaos around him, death and destruction. He finds a still intact building, seems high tech. Everyone else has already evacuated

- he takes the Tesseract out and blue and green energy surges around him and engulfs the building. It's suddenly quiet and we see outside the windows are pitch black 

- Loki quickly looks away

"Finally, some peace and quiet."

He slumps down to the floor, files scattered around him, tesseract nearby and curls up, dejected and exhausted 

Side note: Loki doesn't need to worry about recharging tempads since he has the tesseract, which was established in Avengers as able to provide infinite energy

Ep 3:

- he finds out about the variants in this episode, maybe goes looking for other variants before the TVA finds them

-how Loki finds out the TVA are all variants: he'd knocked out B-15 for a bit to interrogate her

-they're found by another team of minutemen, led by B-16, who is wearing B-15's face. Several of the other minutemen we've seen Loki kill in earlier episodes as well. They attack *both* of them cause they assume B-15 is compromised. Loki and B-15 work together and kill the whole lot, staring at each other incredulously

"You're Variants! You're all Variants!"

[B-15 collapses to her knees in shock] 

End episode

EDIT: My basic idea for episodes 4 & 5 were Loki and B-15 working together and travelling through various timelines trying to get to the TimeKeepers, but realizing something was wrong the further they went. Time begins breaking down, paradoxes are all over the place and the TVA keeps pruning some specific place so much that sometimes two teams are on top of each other. Stuff like that. 

I also had a few scenes where Loki meets other variants (that aren't him), but who actually like and even love him. Men, women, variations thereupon, and one or two who would mistake Loki for their Loki. So we get bi confirmation without actually including romance in the show itself, because 6 episodes isn't enough to develop that along with everything else that's going on.

Vaguely outlined here: 

My "how to include the bi thing without the main story being a romance and also indicating that Loki is able to be liked and loved by people who aren't just variants of himself, please and thank you":

(note to self, rewrite this so it makes sense lol EDIT: lol, don't feel like it so this is all you get, folks!) 

a variant significant other, male: kisses Loki

Loki: You are clearly my type, but I'm sorry. I'm not him.

[heartbroken expression on the variant]

from another timeline Loki visits:

woman holding a sword to his head after looking at him suspiciously: Change back!

Loki: Into who?!

woman: Her!

[Loki shapeshifts into his female self]

woman lets go of the sword

"You escaped! When Odin took you away, I thought he would kill you. Why did you never come back to me, my love?"

EDIT: My "twist" ending was that the Time Keepers were dead, not that they never existed. Some sort of mcguffin exists to just break the whole TVA and free the timelines. Idk, maybe the TVA was just a test to see if it'd work, but the system just kept perpetuating itself after the power hungry losers kept it going beyond the bounds of the experiment. Either way: 

villain plot twist: the time keepers are long dead. the TVA is a terrible system that perpetuated itself on its own, only a few judges were aware that the timekeepers had ever died. The entire System Has To Go (lol like disney would ever go there)

The system is literally Killing the Universe, since the universe's natural state of being is a multiverse. But the system don't care, system don't give a shit. System only exists to perpetuate itself, system's survival is the most important, catastrophic universal failure need not apply

(this is way too on the nose for disney, but since this rewrite's motto is Fuck Disney, it shall stay)

EDIT: this was how I imagined the climax of the series.

Mobius or Ravonna (i never decided): "All the chaos, all the possibilities? How can you stand the uncertainty? How can you believe the world will be any better than it is now?"

Loki: "Because it has to be!" [smashy smashy TVA]

series ends with the timeline breaking free

we see various scenes of the variants in their former lives, happy

and AU scenes of the previous movies:

Loki gets pulled up on the bridge

Loki accepts Thor's offer during the Avengers

Loki gets up on Svartalfheim, bleeding heavily, but doesn't go to Asgard but to Thor

Loki tricks Thanos during IW

Loki as an Avenger

Loki as a kid

Loki as a girl

Loki on jotunheim, fully jotun

Loki on Asgard, jotun

faster and faster, all sorts of different AU scenes until the screen goes dark and we see our Loki, smirking

"But...well, those are stories for another time."

and he steps back into the shadows.

[mageofseven]

Hi I just recently discovered your blog and I’m in love with your writing! I have a little request if you don’t mind. The brothers (and undateables I’d you want to) finding MC bruised and beaten and later discovering they got into a fight with another demon. Thank you in advance if you decide to write this!

Awww thank you so much! I might end up doing the Undateables in another post, but I'll just stick to the Brothers for this one.

And thanks for requesting 😊

TWs: violence, vague s*xual assault

Spoiler warning: 1st year spoilers in Lucifer's and vaguely in Belphie's section

~

Lucifer:

Was checking out the area under Diavolo's orders.

Apparently there have been some people sneaking around in the old Colosseum and normal methods to keep other demons away from the historical landmark have been futile.

That and word has made it's way that some criminals have been using the place to secretly make dealings

So when he got there, he had expected to find some such people lurking around

Instead he found MC on the ground in the center, bruised and bleeding with their arm bent in a very concerning way.

He rushed up to them, calling their name and checking them for signs of life.

Honestly, the man was having major flashbacks to the day he lost his sister.

This was exactly where Lilith fell and Lucifer had to watch his sister, all broken and in pain until Diavolo came and he had to make the deal that changed everything

The deal that eventually led to MC's existence

Yet here they were now, in exactly the same place and state and the demon couldn't help but break down for a minute with panic he tried so hard to conceal.

The human let out a groan and the man could only sigh in relief.

"MC, oh thank the Devil..."

"Luce...?"

"You'll be alright." He promised. "I'll take you over to have Simeon heal you."

Despite the internal panic and flashbacks of such a traumatic event, he still handled the situation well.

Once MC was all healed up, he asked them what happened.

Apparently, they found a note that someone had stuffed in their school bag, asking for them to meet at the Colosseum.

They thought it was weird, but curiosity had gotten the better of them so they went and were attacked while exploring the ancient building.

The demon had meant to kill her, but sensed Lucifer approaching so they dropped the human and ran for it.

Ends up getting as much info from them about the attacker as he can.

Even if MC doesn't want the demon to die for what they did, they get no say in the matter.

Because of their status as exchange student, this attack is a political issue and the consequences Lord Diavolo warned his people about originally must be put into play.

Politics aside though, Lucifer would never let any being who hurt MC get away with it.

Becomes a lot stricter with what they can and cannot do

Like, they're not even allowed to go for a walk around the block without either him or his brothers accompanying them.

Even changes up their class schedule to make sure they have at least one of his brothers with them per class and they even have to walk MC to their next one.

Any arguments about this from MC or the brothers fall on deaf ears.

He will never let anyone lay a hand on them again.

Mammon:

School day had ended and he was on his way to pick MC up from their class.

Since Lucifer decided the day they came that he was responsible for their safety, he always had to do stuff like this.

He was late today though since his teacher held him back after class.

Blah blah F on the test, blahh blah summer school, blaah blahh blaaaah. Whatever man; he wasn't listening

And because of them, he was late. So much so that when he arrived at the human's classroom, they weren't there.

Lowkey panicked.

Shit. Shit shit shit, where'd they go???

Practically runs in the halls trying to find them

Knows Lucifer will have his head for this if he can't track 'em down.

Ends up hearing some kind of ruckus in the courtyard

And finds a big group of students forming a circle and chanting "Fight!"

"Oh yell!" Is momentarily distracted from his problem and joins the group. "Fight! Fight! Fight--."

Oh shit. That's his human in the circle!

Mammon's brain just started buffering as he watched MC dodge and weave, even getting some good hits in. The second brother was actually pretty impressed.

The lower demon in the fight eventually lost his footing and fell to the ground, giving an opening for MC to give a big kick between his legs and the demon let out a shrill scream. His green skin started smoking and changed to grey as it hardened and suddenly seemed more like stone than a person.

The circle of students started cheering and Mammon's jaw practically hit the floor.

Holy shit, the human did it!

MC fell the ground, panting heavily and bruised from head to toe.

Mammon finally rushed up to them.

"Damn, MC! You're gonna give me a heart attack!"

All of a sudden, some students started running and others just quickly jumped back, revealing Lucifer and Diavolo.

....yep, he's dead.

The two older demons started asking MC questions as they caught their breath and Mammon tried to sneak away.

Lucifer grabbed his brother by his jacket, but otherwise paid him no mind as MC told their tale.

Apparently this demon that sits behind them in their Devildom History class had been giving them crap for a while; calling them names and pushing them around. Today they even started touching them in places that made them wanna break the demon's hand.

MC snapped and told them such. The demon only grinned. Honestly, he was probably waiting for them to say that.

From there, he dragged them out by their hair and the rest is rather obvious.

Diavolo had some of his men carry the demon away. Apparently, the stone-like skin is defense mechanism, essentially the equivalent of a turtle hiding in their shells for that sub-race of demon.

The prince assured MC that the demon will be dealt with and tasked Lucifer with getting them healed up.

Mammon was hung upside down from the roof for a few hours for letting this happen, but MC was patched up and okay in the end.

Leviathan:

He usually buys all of his otaku stuff off of Akuzon

But occasionally, he likes to go out and by manga at this store downtown.

It's a once in a blue moon sort of thing, but he still does it

MC felt like taking a walk so they joined him

The two explored the shop as Levi fanboyed about seemingly every other series he passed.

The otaku had already started a pile of manga he planned to buy.

He didn't even notice when MC left his side until he approached the counter to pay

Boy just assumes you bailed on him at first and sinks into self-loathing mode

Until he heard a scream from outside.

He abandoned his manga and raced out, just in time to see another demon run for it and MC leaning against the building.

Their right arm was bleeding from the holes and claw marks made into it.

The third brother started freaking out and rushed them home, even leaving his books there.

When they get back, Lucifer patches them up with a first aid kit and a little bit of a potion.

MC explains how they were shopping with Levi when all of a sudden they saw Beel outside the store waving at them

She went out to talk to him, but then suddenly, it wasn't Beel anymore.

Apparently, it was a shapeshifting demon and, since they specifically choose Beel's form to take, Lucifer assumed that they must have been watching them for a while and planning this attack. They likely chose Beel because they knew he was someone MC would let their guard around.

Levi felt like crap for letting them get hurt, but MC said it was their fault for being tricked.

Lucifer decided it was both their faults and gave them both a long lecture

Satan:

The fourth brother invited MC out for coffee

The blonde actually really likes the atmosphere of coffee shops and wanted to share it with them

The two ordered their coffee and sat at their table while talking about books. He recently read a book on artic fauna from the human world and was comparing the information he read with their own knowledge

It was a very relaxing experience like most of MC's quality with Satan.

Before the two of left, MC had to stop in the restroom.

That demon waited patiently for the human at their table, but when almost ten minutes went by, he became a bit annoyed and puzzled.

Not wanting to be rude, but also ready to leave, Satan approached the bathroom door

He paused mid knock when her heard a low growl followed by a cry from MC

Now in his demon form, the blonde kicked the door off its hinges. It wasn't locked or anything, but the man was super pissed.

Found a demon pressing MC, who had a gash in their head, against the opposite wall

'An eye for an eye' is more or less the philosophy he followed here, or rather, a head for a head.

He took the demon and slammed his head into another wall over and over again.

MC had to run up and tell him to stop after the other demon passed out.

They left the demon on the floor of the bathroom and Satan, with his arms around MC to keep them close, headed back to House of Lamentation

The human didn't want the other brothers to see them like this and worry so Satan snuck them into his room and went to get the first aid kit.

It was quiet between the two as he patched them up.

"I'm sorry for scaring you." He said as he finished with their stitches. "Seeing you hurt like that just made my blood boil. They deserved it, but you shouldn't have had to watch."

"It's okay... thank you for saving me."

The two spent the rest of the night huddled together in his room, reading and just settling down from the incident.

Asmodeus:

Shopping trip!

Asmo was a bit too enthusiastic about it, but that's part of why MC was all too willing to go

He mainly just wanted to see MC in cute outfits, but also bought a few for himself

Any self-consciousness MC might feel on her own is long gone when they spend time with him. He's always hyping them up and complimenting them and overall making them feel beautiful.

Time spent with Asmo is always a good time and well spent.

The fifth brother does actually leave their side for a bit after they found someone hot to flirt with

MC didn't mind and just let the Avatar of Lust do his thing as they continued to look through the racks.

At some point a very good looking demon approached them and started flirting with them

It became obvious that this dude was one of Asmo's demons, another demon of lust

Even with this in mind though, their attention really did make the human feel special, even if they probably said such sweet words to everyone

MC underestimated the demon, thinking that just because Asmo wasn't the aggressive sort that the demons under him wouldn't be either

Ends up following him out of the store and makes out with him against the wall of the building

They didn't understand why they were doing this, but the human's mind had been feeling foggy for a while now.

Suddenly, MC's whole body started to feel heavy and they were so dizzy that their vision was just a blur

Ends up passing out and waking up a few minutes later to Asmo crying as he stood over them and begging them to wake up

"Azzy?"

The man threw his arms around them.

Finds out that the fifth brother went looking for them when he saw that they weren't in the store anymore. He came outside just in time to see one of his underlings try to suck their soul out of their body.

As soon as they heard their superior's voice though, they dropped the human and ran.

The two went straight home and Asmo was extra clingy with them for the rest of the day.

Beelzebub:

The two of them went together to Madam Screams since they were both craving sweets.

Beel was really hungering for a cherry pit pie (though of course he planned on order other things as well) while MC was really hankering for some chocodevil cake.

The two happily got in line to pick out their treats, but MC stepped out to get a clearer view of the case with all of the treats to see if they wanted anything different instead.

Ends up getting attacked by a famished, minor demon of gluttony and slammed down on the glass case containing the sweets.

Beel jumped into gear; he changed into his demon form and threw the other demon off of them.

During the skirmish, the two ended up breaking down a wall and crushing three tables.

When the fight ended, the big guy rushed up to MC to make sure they're okay.

The human was bleeding and had a lot of glass shards embedded in their back and arms.

Though worried, the sweet boy keeps himself together and carefully takes out the bigger shards.

Rushes them home, treats forgotten.

Once home, Lucifer is the one who gets the rest of the glass out of their back and cleans up their wounds.

Beel stays by their side and lets them squeeze their hand when Luce's clean up hurts too much.

Luce gives his younger brother a lecture for all the stuff he had broken back at Madam Screams, but is surprisingly lenient with him.

The older brother didn't say it (and honestly, he should have), but he was proud of his brother for stepping up and protecting MC, but at the same time, expected nothing less from him.

Yeah, Lucifer will likely get sent the bill, but MC's safety is more important.

Belphegor:

Belphie had fallen asleep during class; no surprise there.

The rest of the students left the room when class ended, but the seventh brother continued to sleep at his desk.

MC found his sleeping face cute and didn't want to wake the demon

So instead, they hung around the classroom, waiting for the Avatar of Sloth to awake; the school day was over and the classroom wasn't going to be used for anything else so they thought there'd be no harm in hanging around.

Sadly, they were wrong.

Another student, a jerk from their Seductive Speechcraft class had waited for them to leave the classroom in order to harass them, but when they didn't come out, he came in.

Eventually had them backed up against the wall and forcing their hand up their shirt, causing the human to yelp.

He tried covering their mouth with his other hand, but MC bit them, angering the demon and leading them to putting their hands around their throat as he yelled at them.

The entire time, the minor demon never saw the Avatar of Sloth sleeping at his desk.

Big mistake.

Belphie woke up and saw the scene before him, turning into his demon form real quick.

Didn't hesitate to grab a hold of the bastard and make him let go of MC, who was now gasping for much needed air.

The seventh brother used his miasma aura to weaken the demon as he was now the one doing the choking with the lower demon.

MC covered their face and cried in their corner on the floor.

It was too similar to That Night™️ and the human was bordering on panic attack because of it.

Once the minor demon passed out, Belphie turned and saw MC crying on the floor.

He rushed up to them, but stopped once MC started screaming and begging for him to stay back.

That look in their eyes... it was the same fearful look he remembered from That Night™️

And it killed Belphie inside because he never wanted them to be scared of him ever again.

He waited for the human to calm down and, with their permission, slowly approached them.

He wanted to hug them, but was afraid that they'd just be reminded of it even more so he held back.

Surprising him, the human hugged him instead.

He held them tight for as long as they needed and started to notice the bruises forming on their neck

The two went home after that and reported the incident to Lucifer before Belphie dragged MC with him for a nap.

He chose Beel and his' room since he knew the attic would probably be too much for them right now.

Cuddled close to them and apologized for all of it. For falling asleep and leaving them defenseless. For the other demon's attack. For scarying them. Above all, that he was sorry for That Night™️

~

Masterlist

[ejlovespie]

I know You

(Part 2 of 2)

Fandom: Supernatural - Author: EJ (@ejlovespie)

Summary: The reader was attacked and stabbed by a shapeshifter disguised as the man she loves. Will she be able to face her trauma and finally tell him how she feels? Read Part 1. 

Pairing: Dean x reader

Word Count: 1726

Warnings: Graphic Violence/Near Death/Fear/Angst/Insecurity/Suicidal thoughts and descriptions/Eventual Fluff

***Part 1 has GRAPHIC details of being stabbed and assaulted. Do NOT read if violence and descriptions of assault (sexual comments and being thrown onto a bed) are a trigger for you. Part 2 has suicidal thoughts and descriptions. Please do NOT read if suicide is a trigger for you. ***

Reader’s Request: Can you pleaaase write a dean x reader angst+fluff+near death one shot where they have feelings for each other but they're too insecure to say anything about it, and then one day the reader is in a motel room alone waiting for dean and Sam to come back from somewhere, and suddenly shapeshifter dean comes in and stabs her multiple times and leaves her bleeding on the floor until real Dean and Sam come back.

A/N: Thank you for the request Anon!! This one was tough to write but I really hope you enjoy it. I am SO SORRY it took so long. Any feedback is greatly appreciated and any mistakes are mine. Thank you for reading! :) 

You were used to Dean Winchester being a constant in your dreams. That was what happened when you were in love with someone. You used to eagerly await sleep and the gift your mind would give you at night. Dreaming of Dean had been the only form of intimacy you were allowed...Until now. You still dreamt of him but your dreams had turned into nightmares. Images of being thrown on the bed, those dark, hate filled eyes staring into you, a knife plugging into your body. Every night you woke up screaming in terror. Sam would run to your room and turn on the lights before hugging and comforting you but his kindness had made you feel worse. The truth was you hated yourself. Dean was gone because of you, apart from his brother because of you.    

It had been two months since the attack. You spent four weeks in the hospital before being discharged and given a hundred pamphlets on trauma. Dean had come by a few times but stopped trying when you would see him and immediately have a major panic attack. Eventually, he left and never came back. Sam had told you he was hunting the shifter and giving you space to heal and that had made you feel worse. Knowing you pushed him away made your chest ache. You LOVED Dean Winchester and your heart broke knowing he had found you and rushed you to the hospital. He had saved your life and stayed by your side every day and you repaid him by losing your shit whenever he walked in the room. Logically you knew what happened wasn’t Dean’s fault. You KNEW He didn’t do anything wrong but your reaction to seeing him was always the same. You didn’t see the man you loved when you looked into his eyes, only the nightmare you had lived through. 

You and Sam had been staying at Bobby’s for the last month and every time you glanced at the single framed photo of the boys on the desk you broke out into a sweat. Eventually, the photo had disappeared and you hated the relief you had felt. There were days you were so miserable and you hated yourself so much that you wondered why you had survived the attack in the first place. You would have been better off dead. At first you tried to read through the information from the hospital’s psychiatrist but you ended up throwing all the pamphlets away. You had taken her advice and tried going out and for a walk but anxiety had forced you back inside, tears streaming down your face. Sam would try to talk to you, had even tried getting you out of the house to hit the library with him but you couldn’t do it. Every day, the grief you felt grew until you couldn’t take it anymore. 

Waking up from yet another night terror, you grabbed the knife you had been hiding in your bedside table. Pulling it out, you stared at the blade for a long time while silent tears ran down your face. You clutched the knife in your hands and let yourself feel all of the pain, all of the grief and self-hatred you had been carrying. It washed over you until numbness took its place. You couldn’t live like this. You thought about Sam and Bobby and all of the people you had helped over the years. Would they forgive you? You thought about Dean, the man you loved; the man you missed more than anything and fought against the fear you now associated with him. Suddenly, a memory flooded your thoughts.

You were driving down a long country road in the Impala. Dean was driving and blaring one of his tapes, singing along to it like he didn’t have a care in the world. You were surrounded by green fields and you smiled at the cows and horses grazing lazily. Your hair whipped around your face and you smiled when you breathed in deeply. You smelled the grass and wet pavement outside but even more strongly you could smell Dean’s cologne and the familiar leather and gasoline smell of the car. It was your favorite smell in the world. You looked at Dean when he turned the music down. With his familiar grin he asked, “What are you smiling about?” 

You looked at him then, into his gorgeous green eyes, and you studied his face. His full lips and perfect smile, straight nose, and strong jaw. He was so handsome and his focused gaze made you blush. That was the moment you realized you had fallen in love with the older Winchester. It washed over you, a feeling of pure happiness and comfort. Dean was smiling at you and he poked you in the side before asking, “C’mon Y/N. What are you so happy about?”   

Turning away from him, you swatted his hand away playfully. “Keep your eyes on the road Winchester. I don’t feel like dying today.”

Chuckling, Dean complied, placing his hand back on the wheel and looking back at the open road. He continued, “You look happy is all..you’re smiling bigger than I have seen before. So, what’s up?”  

I love you, you thought to yourself. Instead of answering him you asked a question of your own. “Why are you so happy? I know you and you aren’t this happy unless you’re eating pie.” Laughing again, Dean shrugged before turning the music up and singing along loudly with the song. You laughed too and started to sing along with him, content and happy living in the moment.      

The memory faded. Looking down at the knife in your arms, you threw it on the ground and forced yourself to settle your breathing. ‘I know you.’ You said it out loud to yourself and forced yourself to think about your Dean. His smile. His laugh. His eyes. ‘I know you.’ Him singing along to the music in his car. ‘I know you.’ Him hugging you to him whenever one of you was sad. ‘I know you.’ Him fixing up his beloved car at Bobby’s. ‘I know you.’ The two of you drinking together and his goofy grin as he teased you about the faces you made. ‘I know you.’ His fierce love and protectiveness for his family. ‘I know you.’ All of the memories had your eyes welling up again and you quickly got up and slid out the front door so you didn’t wake Sam or Bobby. Running down the drive, you collapsed in the garage and began to sob. When your tears finally began to run out you gasped out the truth you had never said out loud before.

“I am so fucking sorry Dean..I love you so fucking much and I..I miss you..I..I can’t do this without you because my life isn’t worth living without you in it. You’re my best friend and loving you has made me stronger. It has made me feel truly alive and I..I am so sorry...I know you. I fucking know you and I know that thing wasn’t you! Please come back.”

You jumped at a sound behind you and whipped your head around to see Dean. He stood a few yards away with unshed tears in his eyes. Relief filled you when you realized you didn’t feel panic rising up inside you. For the first time in two months you were only seeing your Dean. A smile spread across your face before falling. “..You heard what I said, didn’t you.” It wasn’t a question. You could tell by the look on his face he had. Dean slowly walked toward you, pausing a few feet away and crouching down. “I love you too, Y/N. I..I didn’t know it until I almost lost you but I do. You’re the best thing that has ever happened to me..You made me feel again and if you had died, you would have taken a piece of me with you.” 

Gasping, you flung yourself to him and let Dean wrap his arms around you. You buried your face in his chest and clung to him, inhaling his cologne. You felt his hands on your back, rubbing small, calming circles. With a watery smile, you reached up and fingered the pendant on his necklace. It brought you instant comfort and you repeated your new mantra silently in your head. ‘I know you.’ This was your Dean. You would always know the difference. You both stayed like that for a long time, embracing each other. Neither of you even noticed when Sam walked up, looking for Y/N, and then backing away as to not ruin the moment. Eventually, you pulled apart and just looked at each other. Tentatively, Dean placed a hand on your cheek, pausing to study your face for approval. You nodded and he rubbed his thumb over your skin. 

His eyes were so soft and he was looking at you with so much love and tenderness it made you self conscious for the first time in months. Glancing away in embarrassment you wished you were wearing something other than a baggy, stained shirt and sweatpants. You knew how you looked and were all too conscious of the fact that you were an absolute mess. Thinking about your puffy red eyes and matted hair had you cringing. How could this gorgeous man love you in the same way you loved him. You were so far out of his league. Dean’s fingers gently lifted your chin to look up at him before brushing some hair out of your face. “Please don’t hide from me, beautiful. I have missed you so much. I know it's going to take some time but I want you to know I found the son of a bitch. He’s dead..And I promise I will NEVER let anyone touch you again. I will keep you safe. I hope that helps..” 

Not sure what to say you just nodded and hugged him again. You would analyze that information and how you felt about it later. For now, you were going to let yourself be held by the man you loved, a man who apparently loved you back, and be grateful for the fact that you were alive and finally together.

Tags:

@akshi8278

@wellfuckmyexistence

@beabutterfly987

@deandaydreaming

@slamminmine

@deandreamernp

@the-white-shadow-of-hydra

@lyarr24

@the-mystery-spot

[curligurl0896]

So getting to read @thejakeformerlyknownasprince 's FMA AU reminded me of my own ideas for a FMA/Animorphs fic. A crossover, in this case, a Megamorphs of sorts (complete with rotating narration) because I really want an excuse to have the Animorphs interact with the characters of the FMA universe. I don't have enough ideas worked out to confidently write a whole fanfic yet, so I think I'll just share some of my ideas so that at least they don't stay inside my head forever like the vast majority of ideas that I either never finish enough to post it or just never get around to at all, especially when my brain is always generating new plot bunnies instead of focusing on developing the ones I already have, it's so distracting lol

(Also maybe y'all could give some suggestions if you wanna, I'd definitely appreciate it lol)

Anyway, here it is:

First off, the answer as to how exactly the Animorphs end up in the FMA universe: I was kicking around a few ideas for this, and was originally thinking something along the lines of like, a freak accident that somehow results in them ending up in front of the Gate of Truth, but I think a better idea would be for an alchemist (or perhaps even several alchemists) to end up in the Aniverse, get Yeerkified, and the Yeerk (or Yeerks, as it may be), intrigued by the memories and knowledge of an alternate Earth where you can manipulate matter and shape it according to your will with nothing more than a well drawn chalk circle (or even less than that if you've been through the Gate, as the Yeerk(s) will eventually discover), lured in by the idea of a legendary object that supposedly can be used to circumvent a pesky little law known as Equivalent Exchange, decides to pull something of a "Tom's Yeerk and his Yeerk buddies a la book 52" deciding to start their own colony in the FMAverse where they won't have to answer to the Council of Thirteen or the Visserarchy (well, at least the ones higher ranked than the Yeerk in charge, who, I imagine, would have to be a Sub-Visser at the very least to have the power to arrange all this) in addition to being able to use alchemy, which, much like the morphing power, can be used for a massive variety of things, ranging from merely convenient to pretty damn useful in a pinch to OP as fuck to even just downright terrifying.

It takes a lot of time and meticulous planning, of course, as they have to find a way to transport the Yeerks, their ship, and all the other stuff they'll need to thrive over there through the Gate and into the FMAverse-- all while in a universe where alchemy flat out doesn't work. The Yeerks have to figure out how to get around that issue, and it takes at least a year of research and using their new hosts' alchemical knowledge to work out a solution, but they work it out, and soon enough they get everything set up and ready to go. At some point, the Chee find out about this secret unknown project going on, inform the Animorphs about it, and Jake decides that they should at least check it out on the off chance that it's something big.

That's where the story officially starts: with our team of traumatized teenage shapeshifters at the location where this thing is being set up (haven't figured out the where yet). They've spent the past several days spying on these Yeerks, but still aren't sure what exactly is going on-- they keep talking about opening a gate-- and aren't sure if it's worth it. Marco's convinced the whole thing is ridiculous, especially after overhearing a human Controller mention something about a "Philosopher's Stone" ("What is this, Harry Potter? Are they gonna wave wooden sticks around and yell in Latin?") . Rachel is bored at this point, and just wants to kick ass and call it a day-- they were probably up to no good anyway. Cassie isn't particularly keen on the asskicking part, but she's been having a bad feeling about all this that she can't shake, and Tobias agrees that something fishy is going on and says they should wait a few days-- after all, from what they've gleaned, whatever plans these Yeerks had would be set in motion very soon. Ax, being Ax, declares as usual that he'll just go along with whatever Prince Jake orders, though when Jake presses him about his opinion, he just says he isn't sure what to make of it. In the end, they keep it up for a couple more days, and sure enough, the time comes for the Yeerks to "open the gate", whatever that means.

After all the time they'd spent spying on the Yeerks, it is conveniently now, when the Yeerks are about to do their thing, that they're discovered. It quickly turns into a fight, and the Animorphs attempt to bail as they're soon overwhelmed-- and then the Gate is opened.

None of them had any idea what to expect next. They certainly weren't expecting the blue lightning that erupted around them in a massive circle, seeming to originate from the curving lines that had been so painstakingly carved into the floor. They aren't expecting the atmosphere to turn dark and purple and creepy, or for a giant grey eye to suddenly appear beneath them, or for wavy black tentacle arms to come out of that eye. And they definitely were NOT expecting to abruptly find themselves in the white void of Zerospace.

Only they aren't in Z-space, exactly. Surrounded by it, sure, but somehow they stand there, as if on solid ground, surrounded by the eerie blankness that had once nearly suffocated them to death.

Each Animorph is utterly alone, with nothing and no one else in sight. That is, until they hear a voice, one that sounds like several voices speaking in unison, and suddenly they see a figure-- or, more accurately, an outline of a figure, with only shadows to mark where the figure ended and the void began. The figure is shaped like a human in all but Ax and Tobias's case: the figure Ax sees is shaped like an Andalite, and Tobias's version takes the form of a bird.

Truth gives the whole "I am God, I am the world, and I am also you" speech, then informs them they can't pass through the Gate without payment. Suddenly, there's a huge gateway where previously there was nothing. Truth is unconcerned with the fact that these "A-ni-morphs" have zero clue what's going on-- it simply takes the required toll and sends them on their way.

Except the toll is literal body parts-- which, even then, isn't usually a big deal for an Animorph, but in this case it absolutely is a big deal, because, as they'll soon discover, there's no way they're going to just replace their lost limbs through morphing. It's expressly forbidden for one to simply have nice things in this universe; in other words, Truth isn't letting them off the hook that easily.

The discovery that they're not able to replace their lost body parts through morphing is especially horrifying to Ax, because, well, y'know... book 40. The one that every Ax fan, and really anyone who otherwise genuinely enjoys Ax's character, would like to pretend never fucking happened.

In fact, given Truth's precedent for irony when extracting payment from people who've opened/been through the Gate in the series, I have no doubt in my mind that Ax would end up suffering the exact same fate as Mertil. Andalites, after all, place high value on their tail blades, especially the warriors; it's their number one go-to weapon when shit hits the fan. Ax himself is such a warrior, in fact it's a huge part of who he is as a person. Needless to say I think yeeting Ax's tail blade would be the exact kind of twisted irony that Truth would employ.

He gets over himself eventually-- well, sort of. However, it takes him a long time to truly come to terms with it-- instead of accepting that the attitudes he'd been taught his whole life regarding those who aren't fully able-bodied are actually shit, I feel like he'd be more likely to double down on them, internalizing them, and actually go into full-on self loathing as a result.

He holds his metaphorical tongue, though, upon seeing that Tobias has suffered a payment that is arguably far more cruelly ironic-- given that Tobias is a bird, given that his initial attraction to the morph that eventually became his default body came from the sense of freedom and escapism only provided through flying, I think it's fairly obvious what Truth would take: his wings.

As for the others: Rachel has lost her arm (for basically the same reason Ed did), Cassie loses her hands (which she uses to, you know, help injured animals and stuff), and as for Jake... well, it was a bit of a struggle, the best I could come up with is the idea of him going blind much like Mustang did after being forced to open the Gate (though maybe not for the same reason, though... idk. If anyone has any better suggestions, please let me know lol, I couldn't think of any solid ideas for what body part would be ironic for Jake to lose). Marco is the only one who doesn't lose any outwardly visible body parts-- what he loses is his voice.

At some point, they are discovered, taken into custody by the Amestrian military, and eventually they end up in Colonel Mustang's office. Mustang listens to their story with a massive dose of skepticism. He isn't sure what to make of these bizarre barefoot children, nor their claims of fighting bodysnatching slugs from outer space by turning into animals, nor their wingless pet hawk, nor... well, he could only assume the other creature was some sort of chimera, although he had zero clue what animals could have possibly been used to make something with blue fur and extra eyes.

At this point, they're about to do a morphing demonstration to prove to the Colonel that they aren't completely batshit, when suddenly the door is slammed open, and a teenage boy with blond hair and sharp golden eyes comes sauntering in, accompanied by a hulking giant covered head to toe in a suit of armor.

The boy immediately starts shouting at Mustang, calling him a bastard and accusing him of wasting his time, to which Mustang responds by merely rolling his eyes and sighing, as if this sort of thing happens all the time (spoiler alert: it does). After a moment, the kid stops as he takes notice of the other kids standing in the room.

"So," he says, calmly, as if he wasn't yelling at his superior just a moment ago, "what's the deal with these fuckers?"

The casual use of the kind of language that would have surely landed them in hot water back home was quite shocking, but they don't comment on it. Instead, Rachel says, in a voice sweet as honey, "Oh, look, Marco. He's just as short as you are."

Before Marco could turn to glare daggers at her (come on, it wasn't like he could argue back in that moment), the boy goes absolutely ballistic, and the armored guy has to physically restrain him as he screams obscenities at Rachel ("The fuck did you just call me, you freakishly oversized bitch? I'll show you too-fucking-short-to-fucking-sit-at-the-fucking-table-without-a-fucking-booster-seat! Call me short one more fucking time, I fucking dare you to! You think I give a shit that you're a girl? I'll fuck that pretty face of yours right up, just you fucking wait--")

"Brother!" The armored guy cries. "Calm down!" Then, to the Animorphs: "I'm sorry about my brother's behavior. He's, um, a bit sensitive about his height."

"A bit sensitive" is the understatement of the century, but none of the Animorphs call him out on it. They're too dumbfounded by the sound of his voice, which sounds sweet, innocent, and, despite his size, sounds like it belonged to a boy no more than nine or ten years old.

And that's where I'm going to leave it for now, since I've spent way too long on this post already. I have a few other ideas, but mostly in bits and pieces, not really any more comprehensive plot points beyond this point. Please do let me know what you think!

[proudfreakmetarusonikku]

anyway I need to go to bed but I have too much energy so I am channeling it into headcanons. here u go species headcanons for Everyone on the Dream smp with explanations because I’ve put a TON of thought into this. They’re probably like half contradicted by canon but fuck it My City Now.

Dream- A (juvenile) stage of being a god. He, DreamXD, and Drista have become known as “dreamons” but that’s technically a separate species, all spawned from them. He's not really focused on being worshipped in his own right, preferring power in the mortal realm, though he’s not averse to pretending to be his brother (the god worshipped by Church Prime) or his sister (a minor goddess of death worshipped by many hidden cults) if it can help him get power. He’s got pure white skin everywhere except his face (which is pale but human-like), black blood, entirely green eyes, pointed ears, fangs, claws, and digitigrade legs ending in hoof-like claws.

George- A human, the only human on the whole server. Humans are pretty rare, vastly outnumbered by hybrids but outnumbering any other species, and “pure” humans (what we'd consider to be a completely normal appearing human) are all but nonexistent. For example, George has eyes with dark sclera and white irises.

Sapnap- A blaze hybrid. He’s got a few rods surrounding him and his eyes blaze with fire. It’s usually just warm but not hot enough to hurt but if he's agitated or upset it can easily burn hot enough to set things ablaze.

Callahan- A reindeer hybrid. He’s got antlers, reindeer ears, fur around his arms, and hooves.

Awesamdude- A creeper hybrid. He's tauric, with four insect like legs. His skin and is green and mottled and has a texture similar to leaves. His eyes are pitch black. He has a tendency to make hissing sounds when stressed, though he can’t explode like a full blooded creeper.

Alyssa- A mouse hybrid, with large mouse ears and a long tail. This definitely isn’t an in joke for the thousands of hours I spent browsing TVTropes as a child and the “what happened to the mouse” tROPE SHUT UP.

Ponk- A demon hybrid, with pointed ears, slit pupils, a small spaded tail, and small horns.

BadBoyHalo- A full blooded demon, with pointed ears, a tall stature, pitch black skin and hair, fangs, claws, hooves, a long spaded tail, long horns, and small bat like wings. He’s rather self conscious about how intimidating he looks. He's also a lich (with Skeppy as his phylactery) which is why he has pure white eyes (a trait the undead share).

TommyInnit- An absolute mess, genetic wise, since I’m taking Tommy's joke about being born in a lab and running with it. He's mostly angel, and was basically cloned from Phil's DNA (from a feather that fell off his wings that somehow someone got a hold of) but had a bunch of other hybrid and human DNA mixed in to make him somewhat stable enough to actually survive gestation. He has very small, dark wings that are useful for balance and little else, fangs, claws, and pointed ears. His bones are very light, making him fragile but a lot more dexterous. His blood is slightly off a human's, being slightly pinkish. His freckles, wings, blood, and eyes glow slightly and are patterned like the night sky. Technically undead as of his resurrection, and maintains the many injuries of his death permanently (bruises stay and don’t heal but don’t worsen, broken limbs can be moved at unnatural angles, ect.), pale, corpse like skin, and one of his eyes turned pure white.

Tubbo- A ram hybrid, with small curved ram horns, horizontal pupils, ram ears, a tail, and hooves. Nice and simple after the absolute mess that was Tommy.

Fundy- A limited shapeshifter, able to change his species, though he prefers to be in a fox-like form. He inherited this from Sally, who had similar abilities, though with more strength. He's always got certain features he inherited from each parent that he can’t change though- wings, pale skin, and ice-like freckles from Wilbur, and salmon scales coating his wings and cheeks, and ginger-and-white hair from Sally.

Punz- A dragon hybrid, with dark horns, dark sclera and slit pupils, wings just large enough for limited flight, a strong tail, fangs, claws, and blue scales coating his cheeks, wings, tail, arms, and legs. Has a natural inclination to sleep in a pile of his wealth he only holds off on when he feels it’s at risk of being stolen (which, since this is the Dream SMP, is almost constantly).

Purpled- An enderman hybrid, with small horns, pointed ears, purple blood, and ender particles surrounding him. Parts of his arms and legs are covered in leathery, pure black skin.

Wilbur- Half angel, half fucking refrigerator because cc!Wilbur hates us (affectionate). His skin is unnaturally, icy pale, and his blood is an icy blue. His freckles are the colour of ice reflecting. He's got wings from his father, large enough to glide, but they’re pale coloured and slightly transparent. He has fangs claws, and pointy ears. His blood, wings, and eyes glow slightly and are patterned like the night sky. As Ghostbur, he’s got the injuries of his death apparent at all times, though they don’t hinder him or cause him pain, corpse like skin, pure white eyes, and is permanently transparent.

JSchlatt- A ram hybrid. He’s got large ram horns, dark sclera and horizontal pupils, a ram tail, fur around his arms, and hooves.

Skeppy- A construct made to be Bad's phylactery. He's fully made of diamond, and appears as a moving human statue (though entirely made out of diamond), though he has limited shape shifting ability to change his “hair” and “clothes”, though he has to remain the same mass. He has some small red detailing on him out of redstone (which was used partially in his contruction). The egg flipped the red and teal in his colour scheme. Also he's smalllllllllllll.

Eret- Part ghost, due to being descended from Herobrine. She has pure white eyes, pointy ears, and under stress he becomes partially transparent. They tend to hide their nonhuman features (ears under hair or hats and eyes under sunglassses) and are often mistaken for human.

Jack Manifold- Started as a wolf hybrid, with large wolf ears and a tail. After dying, he came back from hell as a hellhound with red and blue “flames” coming from his eyes, ears, and replacing his missing tail he lost in one of his deaths with two made of this fire. The fire is chillingly cold to the touch, and not warm. His eyes are also monocolour, though in heterochromatic red and blue instead of the usual pure white found in undead.

Niki- A moth hybrid, with antennae, monocolour amber eyes, fluffy wings, and more fluff around her neck, wrists, and torso. These and her hair are patterned gold and black, though as of now she’s dyed them all pink. Idk I just feel like moths fit her for some reason.

Quackity- A duck hybrid, with golden wings and webbed hands and feet. He’s also a shapeshifter of sorts, however instead of shifting into different forms he shifts into different beings, from alternate realities that never came to be. These can be used to shift into near identical copies of those around him, to impersonate them, or to shift into alternate versions of people (like Mexican Dream to Dream). These aren’t Quackity, though, and as such they have their own pool of canon lives, and while he has lots of influence over them they can still act autonomously.

Karl Jacobs- An inter dimensional being made of time itself. While his current form is mostly human, he has technicolour rainbow blood, freckles, and patches on his skin, along with clock-shaped pupils that change with the time. His “natural” form is a vaguely humanoid mess of ever shifting colour.

HBomb- I didn’t know what to do with him at first- he was a cow hybrid in my pfp set- but I just think the idea of him being a chill cat hybrid who turns full nyaa whenever he’s in a maid dress to be funny so he’s a cat hybrid now. With dyed-white cat ears and a dyed-white cat tail.

Technoblade- A piglin hybrid primarily, but he’s definitely got some weird traces of other species. He’s got tusks, pink hair, pink pig ears, a pig tail, and hooves, but he’s also got paws from some other animal hybridisation in his blood, and has a tallness that suggests demon blood somewhere down the line. His red eyes aren’t natural, and only occurred after he was sacrificed to be the vessel of the Blood God.

Antfrost- A cat hybrid, with blond and brown fur, a cat tail, paws both on his hands and feet, and cat ears. He’s also got split pupils and blue sclerae (though a different shade to his irises).

Philza- An angel- the creation of a god or goddess to help serve them (Dreamon's would be an example of the angels the Dream's can create, though they’re primarily running wild nowadays.) The creation and servant of one of the gods of death, Kristen, to serve her in the mortal realm. He’s got very large feathered dark wings, pupilless unnaturally bright eyes, pointy ears, fangs, claws, and dark blood the colour of the night sky. His wings, eyes, freckles and blood glow brightly and are patterned like the night sky. Injuries reveal that he's fully inhuman under his skin, appearing to be a void of colour that also glows and is patterned like the night sky. His crows, who are messengers from the afterlife, have this same pattern on their feathers.

Conner- I don’t know much about him tbh but. He’s just a hedgehog hybrid. I mean he’s joked enough about canonically being the kid of Sonic and Elise. He’s got blue hedgehog ears and a tail, and blue spines mixed in with his dark hair.

Captain Puffy- A sheep hybrid, with small curled sheep horns, sheep ears, a fluffy sheep tail, hooves, and hair curly and soft like wool. The split in her hair between brown and white is natural, though she keeps a small section dyed rainbow.

Vikkstar- Another angel, though of a god long gone. His entire body, even his “clothes” (which are made of flesh) glow intensely bright and have the pattern of the night sky.

LazarBeam- A gingerbread hybrid, which I’d say is dumb but we’ve already had a refrigerator hybrid so. I don’t know what else to say here.

Ranboo- Half enderman, half god of some sort. Has small horns, pointy ears, an inhumanly wide mouth with fangs, claws, digitigrade feet ending in hoof-like claws, pure black and white skin, pure black and white hair and freckles on the opposite side of the skin, red and green heterochromatic eyes barely distinguishable from their sclera, and red and green blood. Hmm, I wonder what other character shares similar descriptions... :)

FoolishG- A more matured god than Dream. Appears to be made entirely out of gold, with his hair and freckles appearing like copper. His pure green eyes have a similar texture to emeralds. Also he’s like. Massive. He’s like eleven Skeppy's.

Hannah- A nymph of the forests. Has prehensile vines and flowers flowing in her hair all the way to the ground, and half of her face and one of her arms are entirely made of these prehensile vines and flowers. Makes flowers grow in her step, after being corrupted by the egg they wither around her instead.

Charlie- Slime hybrid. Honestly just kind of got the most impractical parts of being a hybrid, having random sections of skin changed into green slime which drips everywhere and kind of gets in the way. It doesn’t seem to bother him though.

[oddlyhale]

IronQrow Villains AU

Ironwood and Qrow as villains in the RWBY show AU.

Ironwood is based off of the Three Snake Leaves fairytale, a story about a man who revived his dead wife with Three Snake Leaves. However, reviving her only brought him betrayal, as she lost love for him and tried to kill him with her lover. Able to survive, the man went to the King and told everything the Princess had done. She was then punished with her lover to be drown in sea on a sinking ship.

Qrow is now based on The Juniper Tree fairytale, a story about a young boy who was killed by his greedy step-mother that wanted the inheritance he would get from his father. She killed him, cut him up and served him as dinner to his unknowingly father, and forced her daughter to bury his bones under a juniper tree next to his real mother. The boy became a bird, singing about his story and received three gifts from strangers that listened. He gave the gifts to his family: his father got a gold necklace. His sister got lovely red shoes. And his evil step-mother got crushed under a millstone.

In this AU, for Ironwood:

He fakes being a good headmaster, only to reveal his true identity once the fall begins.

He is a man masked under oxygen, for his first death caused him breathing problems.

His semblance is to revive the dead, however he tries not to use it often, as it causes him immense pain and can run his aura dry.

HIs goal is to find his wretched ex-wife and murder her for what she did to him (she’s not dead in this one.)

In this AU, for Qrow:

Qrow is a bit psychotic. Not theatrically insane, like Tyrian, but he’s on a level of kalopsia (delusions of seeing things more beautiful than what they are.) He is quietly energized by mayhem and distress.

His semblance is shapeshifter, accommodating by being handsy with building his own crazy weapons. HIs favourite weapon is a giant hammer made of millstone.

He plays the ‘nice uncle, playful drunk’ for a while, under the Fall hits. Turns out his ‘drunkard antics’ were just him covering up his manic laughters and bursts of rage.

He doesn’t try to kill Ruby or her friends, but he warns her to not come for him, or he will kill them without hesitation.

His goal is to live ‘beautifully’ and die in the deepest pit of bliss. By that, he wants to live to cause harm and art, and die a masterpiece himself.

About the relationship:

Ironwood and Qrow are married (James proposed.)

Qrow is utterly in love with Ironwood, as is James for Qrow.

James finds Qrow to be the most endearing psycho he’s ever met, figuring out how Qrow has a hidden humanity about himself, as he cares deeply for music and art.

Qrow was smitten the first time he met James, immediately wanting to be his.

The two men met each other years ago, back when James was to be happily wed to his queen. He was thrown off the ship by the crazy woman and her secret lover, nearly drowning, had it not been for the single loyal servant that saved him. James’ semblance unlocked that day out of panic, thoughts of dying only fueling his semblance to be released. His body revived itself, waking James on the raft that the servant was on, but the act left James badly injured.

The servant was weeping, both in joy to see their master was alive, but in horror as to what had happened to James’ body. His right arm, his right leg, gnawed off by the active sea beasts in the water. His hip was chewed at, nearly severing him in two. Despite being alive, the only thing his semblance couldn’t do was regenerate some new body parts. And yet James was conscious, despite the bleeding and pain. Alive and pissed.

His lungs were filled with water, only a dead person could carry so much. Once they arrived at shore, finding no persons in sight to help, the servant ran out to the land to see if there was any civilization nearby. James laid in the raft in pain, waiting for the servant to return.

Somebody finally came, but it was not the servant. It was a lithe and tall man with dark hair and pale skin, eyes bright red like rubies. He stumbled onto the beach after seeing the frantic servant run into the village nearby, curiously wanting to see what the fuss was about.

“My,” Qrow smirked down at James. “You look like you need a hand.”

James stared blankly at the man, as if he were incredibly unamused. Until he replied, “are you pulling my leg?”

Qrow couldn’t help but burst into a short fit of laughter. James did too, but not for long as he was cut short. His back was killing him.

“I can get you a new body. And some.” Qrow assured. “Come with me. I know somebody.”

“At this point? Fine.” James huffed. After being betrayed by his queen and almost eaten alive by sea beasts, he could hardly imagine this stranger could make anything worse.

Qrow took James to the Whale, to Salem. After some convincing, Salem allowed Qrow to let James stay, so long as he was the one watching their new guest. Qrow agreed happily.

Qrow’s story was only filled with pain. He learnt from a young age that he was never loved by his step-mother, and being left behind by his sister. His step-mother murdered him in his sleep, cutting him up and serving his flesh like he was grade-A beef. His soul took the form of a crow, fueled by the rage he had for his step-mother. He wanted her dead, and by luck, he met Salem. She granted him the wish to have his vengeance, helping him turn back into a human. He was only a little boy still when he met Salem, growing up to look to her as his new mother.

After killing his step-mother, Salem took him in and had been at her side since.

James was soon recovering, but his rage was building deep within. All he could think of was his wretched wife, who was almost successful in killing him. She knew he couldn’t swim. How the sharp teeth of the massive sea monsters would eat at his body. He was ready to kill her, avenge himself.

James’ internal injuries couldn’t be fixed. He had to constantly wear a breathing-mask to help inhale more oxygen that his fragile lungs couldn’t take in normally. It was pain, feeling like he aged 50 years, even though he was only 20 at the time. From what he learned, Qrow was also the same age, at least feeling comfort in knowing somebody his age was around.

During James’ recovery - while Salem was mildly interested in this loner - it was Qrow who was the most intrigued. He loved coming to see James, see his progress so far. A new robotic arm, a new robotic leg, and some new parts had to be added in. Unfortunately, it meant much of James’ lower-half had to be remade, Half of his waist was not salvageable, meaning he’d have to lose a hip and his genital area. James didn’t care, wanting to be fixed already, and out of the stupid medical bed. Wanting to be strong again.

Though, he made a joke about giving him a massive metal cock, barking out laughter when he saw Qrow’s reaction of giggling like an embarrassed old woman. But, his wish was curiously granted.

As James was back up on his feet and trying to adjust to this new body, it was still Qrow who helped him. To the others that were residents of the Whale, they were surprised at how much time Qrow spent with James. Knowing the guy, Qrow could hardly process empathy. He would laugh at burning houses full of orphans, and dance on a dying man while he’s down.

But now, he was the most gentle, tender and kind to this perfect stranger.

Would you believe it when this story ends with the two marrying? After knowing each other for 5 years? Well, that’s how the story went. The two men fell in love, not caring for how crazy their lives would become. James loved this psychopath. And Qrow loved this vengeful man.

James was quick to become compliant in Salem’s plans, to start a new world and have their wishes granted. What he wanted was that bitch of a wife dead, and anybody else that associated with her existence. He didn’t care anymore if they were innocents, they had to be taken out. Feeling the same pain he felt.

Qrow had no goals, other than to live and serve Salem. To be the perfect little dog and grant her every wish. But now, his devotion turned to James. He loved him to bits, and would kill anybody for him. Already, James had killed quite a few people for Qrow, and that was probably one of the most romantic things he’s ever received. The only painful thing he could think is to live a life without James. Even his devotion for Salem couldn’t keep him alive.

Despite their chaotic life, the two surprisingly had a well-adjusted marriage and relationship. It was contentment, understanding and fun. They adored each other the same way they first met, and it seems that their honeymoon phase never ended, after 15 years together. They’d have a wedding dance next to a pile of dead bodies if they could, and they’d still be completely enamored by one another.

During the years together, the two had begun building their false identities among the people. Qrow had contact with his family, still there as Ruby and Yang were young and had grown to attend Beacon Academy. Ironwood had stolen the identity of a previous soldier of Atlas, taking their place and soon becoming the headmaster and general of Atlas. Their appearance was nothing to be judged, coming off as noble and normal.

When the time came for Beacon’s Fall, Qrow was the first to act. After the death of Penny 1.0, he had gone to murder the others in the Beacon Vault. He was successful in killing Glynda, Ozpin and the Maiden (transferring her powers to Cinder who is still in the gang), but he pretends to have no success in killing Ironwood, giving false hope to the heroes that at least one of their own is OK.

After that, he went out to go kill some more civilians of the Academy. Ruby and Yang realized their uncle was part of the evil team, and are broken by the betrayal. Qrow was quick to dismiss them as his family, skipping off merrily back to Salem.

When time passed and it was time to arrive at Atlas, it would be Ironwood’s turn to betray the teams. While cooperative and kind, Ironwood legitimately had no remorse for any of the kids. Quite frankly he wanted them dead, as well as the Ace Ops.

[jjadegreen]

ITS SPOOKY SEASON BABY !!!

And that means making spooky aus for no reason other than fun<3

In summary- jjba part 1-6 but there’s no stands/Hamon and they all exist at the same time AND everyone is a spooky monster!!! I included as many characters as I could but it’s quite easy to run out of creatures, so bear with me on a few of them. Also the joestar bloodline is just gonna all be George Joestars kids because I said so!

Also, this is all really dumb but it’s just for fun so it’s ok💕

*minor TW for mentions of death!!! Nothing graphic but I’d rather be safe

Jonathan: Frankenstein

Not exactly like the traditional Frankenstein’s monster but whatever!!

Used to be a regular kid until he died in his 20s along with Erina :(

His father, who is still alive here, doctors the hell out of his dead son and boom. Franken-son.

Most body parts are his but he lost some in his death... so like, one of his legs is just some random guys.

He is still very Jonathan... a sweet boy... beloved.

He loves flowers and plants and such!

Married to Erina!!!

Joseph: werewolf

Tbh I just feel like werewolves give off himbo energy

Ran into some spooky woods next to the Joestar mansion as a kid and came home with a wolf bite and a cool new form

The exact same as regular Joseph but with more dog attributes

Our boy will chew on a bone if he finds one. He will chase tennis balls like his life depends on it.

Him and Caesar are rivals but the kind of rivals who fight on the weekdays and watch shitty romcoms together on weekends

Jotaro: merman

Ocean man....... take me by the hand...... lead me to the land.......

Ok but in all seriousness. You know why Jotaro is a merman. Silly little ocean man.

Edgy bastard but he will go entirely soft if you bring out a sea creature

I have 0 idea how he became this. He probably pissed off an ocean witch or something and she made him a merman

H20: just add water type transformation. If he touches water, BOOM now he has a tail

He does not let that stop him

Kakyoin is his best buddy!! He also hangs out w/ Polneraff and Avdol

Jolyne: witch

Jolyne is just a lesbian witch. Is that too much to want

Idk anything about witches so I dunno!!! Maybe she just like. Decided to be a witch. I think there are real witches and I don’t want to disrespect anyone

Although she is the Halloween-y, pointy hat, black robe witch. She makes potions and stuff.

She has diverted her potion experience into cooking

She makes THE BEST fucking pastries

Josuke: werewolf (like father like son)

Even tho Joseph is not his dad here they give off similar energies

Joseph bit him while they were arguing and boom boom werewolf

In a band!!! With oku, koichi and yukako!!

Rohan is their manager

Best friends with Okuyasu and Koichi

He will cry if he doesn’t eat for 4 hours

Giorno: vampire

Vampire for obvious reasons

He’s technically everyone’s nephew because he’s DIOs son (who is biologically a joestar here)

He’s not in the mafia! He just hangs out with the bucci gang!

Despite having the ability to make it seem like he knows what’s going on, he never does

Never

Pudding cups are banned from the mansion because he will devour them in just a few seconds

Vegan, but will never pass up drinking the blood from someone he hates

You guys know I’d never stop at just the jojos

Erina: Frankensteins bride!

Died with Jonathan and was brought back the same way as him

Baker!!!

Very close with Speedwagon

Speedwagon: former ghost hunter

Our man was a ghost hunter until actually meeting a ghost (probably Reimi) and deciding that maybe he could just be a normal man instead

He lives with the joestars because he’s really close with Jonathan and Erina

He and Will were a ghost/vampire hunting duo

Will Zeppeli: former vampire hunter (who is now a vampire lol)

Once Speedwagon decided to just be friends with all the monsters he followed

Caesar: vampire

Don’t ask why caesar is a vampire even though that’s DIOs thing. Caesar gives off vampire energy.

He acts like he hates Joseph but believe me they are in love

Him and Suzie Q are the most powerful friendship you could imagine

Suzie Q: fairy!

Just a little fairy girl! That is it!

Badass bitch. Probably uses her tiny size to steal from everyone

Smokey: literally a normal dude

Caesar was going to suck his blood but decided that Smokey was too nice for that date

The joestars of course got attached to him immediately

Kakyoin: Tree Nymph

TREE MAN!!! TREE MAN!!!

His hair noodle is a branch that grows a cherry

Iggy: Cerberus type dog

Jotaros pet dog!!!

Absolute bastard

Avdol: Phoenix

Fire bird. Self explanatory.

Polnareff: centaur

Yes he still has the stupid hair. Would he be polnareff without it?

Avdol simp

Koichi: shapeshifter

He’s a shapeshifter because I said so even tho it makes no sense!!!

He does so many favours for everyone

In a band w/ oku, Josuke + yukako

Okuyasu: zombie

Why a zombie? Because Okuyasu has no brain

He’s a simple man. You put food in front of him and he eats it on sight

In a band w/ koichi, Josuke + yukako

Yukako: siren

I just feel like a long haired pretty woman gives off siren vibes

In a band!!! You have heard it three times you know the drill

Rohan: can transform into a dragon??? I guess???

I’m gonna be honest I’m just running out of ideas

Band manager

Tonio: can transform into a caladrius

@c-c-cherry told me this is some kinda healing bird??? I’m choosing to trust her don’t betray me Cherry

Reimi: ghost, obviously

No notes needed you get it. She’s a ghost

Mista: gargoyle

Stinky man!!! Stinky stone man!!! Never showers because he’s a stone man!!!

Bruno: angel<3

He’s already a perfect angel in the show why would I need to change that!!

Bruabba is canon He is married to Abbacchio

Abbacchio: demon

Goth demon man to contrast Bruno’s infinite light

He is married to Bruno because bruabba is real

Narancia: ghost

I’m literally just imagining narancia pulling so many stupid pranks as a ghost which is the whole reason I chose this for him

Fugo: reaper

Imagine like. Edgy son of the grim reaper who doesn’t want to be a reaper so he runs off and becomes friends with a wacky group of creatures. That’s fugo baby!

Trish: imp

Im almost out of ideas

Probably half human? Diavolo would definitely be an imp as well

——————————————————————————

This was very bad but fun

Thank u Cherry for being my emotional support while I tried to come up with so many different monsters

Also yes!! Some of them aren’t exactly monsters but I am just a little creature who doesn’t want to spent a week looking for the perfect monsters for every character

Love you all mwah mwah

[bestworstcase]

a comprehensive guide to zhan tiri’s lore or, it’s not that confusing or contradictory, i promise

first things first: if you are somebody who pays attention to creator interviews and you are interested in canonical zhan tiri lore, i want you to gather up everything you’ve ever heard chris say about zhan tiri and erase it from of your brain. i know he’s made statements regarding his interpretation of her backstory but this post was made by death of the author gang and we are interested ONLY in what is stated and shown in the text itself. meaning belongs to the viewers, and creator interpretation is irrelevant. 

ready? let’s go!

who or what is zhan tiri?

zhan tiri’s first appearance in coronan history occurred thousands of years ago; in plus est en vous, rapunzel specifies two thousand, but every other mention of zhan tiri as a historical figure is “eons” or “millennia,” and the most objective source we have—the plus est flashback—is marked “thousands of years ago.”  

there is no direct evidence to suggest that she existed prior to this, but i think there is enough circumstantial support for this theory to conclude that she did: namely, the existence of idols and other religious iconography associated with her name. my reasoning here is as follows: 

the plus est en vous flashback shows demanitus banishing zhan tiri to the lost realm. this makes it—give or take a few years—the last point in time when zhan tiri would have been free and thus able to make any lasting cultural impact.

it follows that any relevant historical artifacts we see must predate the plus est flashback, as they represent a time when zhan tiri had a significant enough cultural impact to fuel their creation.

moreover, though sugracha and tromus are the only disciples of zhan tiri who directly appear in the series, it is implied that there are many more: 

Lord Demanitus was in a constant battle with Zhan Tiri and his brethren. Over the years, Demanitus captured many of the evil spirits and held them prisoner in that chamber. (S1, Painter’s Block)

much of the coronan folklore concerning the demanitus-zhan tiri relationship is... wrong, but due to sugracha’s verifiable imprisonment in the demanitus chamber, i feel it reasonable to conclude that this tidbit is correct in that there are, or at least were, other disciples held inside the demanitus chamber. and, as with the historical artifacts associated with zhan tiri, it is logical to conclude that whatever cult produced these disciples predated the plus est flashback. 

so, we’ve established the historical artifacts and iconography associated with zhan tiri came before the plus est flashback, but what exactly does that entail, and what does it tell us about zhan tiri’s true nature?

icons of zhan tiri: an overview

#1: janus point

janus point is a henge, and based on the iconography—the ram’s head symbol is plastered all over the jardinière and the henge pillars—it appears to be a site dedicated specifically to zhan tiri. the same symbol also appears on the seal in which sugracha’s spirit was trapped inside the demanitus chamber and is unique in that the muzzle appears to corkscrew.

the appearance of the henge evokes a quasi-religious flavor, and in who’s afraid of the big bad wolf, rapunzel refers to the site as a “mystical ground.” at the very least, this is a ritual site that was heavily associated with zhan tiri, and it would not be much of a stretch to conclude she was outright worshipped here.

#2: the spire idol

this artifact appears in both the keeper of the spire and race to the spire. it’s a small stone idol kept in the spire’s... gatehouse, for lack of a better term, and it depicts the basic ram-headed hulking demon zhan tiri. nothing is said about it in either episode. 

#3: the tree of zhan tiri

there is zhan tiri iconography all over this tree.

the stone ram’s head over the entrance...

...the bas-relief in the first chamber...

...more ram’s heads over all the interior archways and the scroll shelves...

...and a return of the corkscrew-snouted ram’s head from janus point on the altar for this glorious oversized flytrap.

#4: the shell house

tromus’s shrine gives us yet another variation on the ram’s head symbol as well as another full-body idol and also, though i didn’t get a screenshot of it because it’s hard to see with the way tumblr resizes images, a little ram’s head symbol on the clasp of his robes. 

so where did this imagery come from?

with the exception of the spire idol, there is evidence to suggest that zhan tiri herself had direct influence over the design of all this iconography. 

janus point seems to have held some importance to zhan tiri herself; when she appears to varian in cassandra’s revenge, she surrounds herself with pieces of it and superimposes her own head on top of the tree. 

further, the corkscrew-snouted ram’s head reoccurs at the great tree, which is unique among the sites associated with her in that we know zhan tiri actually resided there for what sounds like a significant amount of time; according to the legend adira shares, the great tree was zhan tiri’s “stronghold.”

this means that it’s plausible that either (a) zhan tiri herself shaped the symbols on display in the tree, or (b) they were modeled after her by her contemporaries. the interesting thing about this, there are four distinct variations on the ram’s head symbol inside the tree: 1) long, thick snout with elongated horns; 2) angular, no snout, short horns, 3) corkscrew-snouted, and 4) humanlike skull with ram horns. 

and likewise, the iconography inside the shell house was created by someone we know to have been a contemporary of zhan tiri’s; tromus was one of the students of demanitus who turned against him to join zhan tiri instead, and it is logical to assume that he did, in fact, see zhan tiri in the flesh at some point—and his ram’s head design is yet again different.

this begs the question: if all five of these designs were modeled on zhan tiri herself, why is there such variety in the basic shape? i believe this is a strong point in favor of considering zhan tiri a shapeshifter who chose and stuck with a single general form for long periods of time but casually and frequently modified the smaller details. and in fact, we do see her do this in season three, with the most notable occurrence being. this: 

so, we have concluded that: 

zhan tiri’s historical iconography predates the plus est flashback, and

accurately represented her physical appearance from that time

from this, the only reasonable conclusion is that zhan tiri is a shapeshifter, who spent a considerable amount of time in the giant, ram-headed demon form depicted in all of her pre-demanitus iconography. 

but she’s human in the plus est flashback!

in the series, human characters are designed with a wide diversity of shapes and sizes, but their color palettes stay within the range of realism, with natural skin tones and eye/hair colors. zhan tiri is... not like that.

she may be human-shaped, but her color palette sits drastically outside the norms the series has established for human characters; her skin is dead white, her hair is a dull lilac color, her eyes are bright purple with a circle of gold around the pupils. none of these are natural human colors.

there is precedent in the series for marked changes in appearance and coloration as a result of meddling with magical forces: when cassandra claims the moonstone, it turns her hair and eyes bright blue and gives her an unhealthy-looking pallor. rapunzel’s hair, likewise, turns gold due to the sundrop’s influence. thus, taking this in isolation, it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility to conclude that zhan tiri, too, has had her appearance altered by whatever magical nonsense she’s been mucking around with.

however, if we look at this design in the context of the conclusions we’ve already drawn about her historical iconography and what that tells us about her true nature, i think a much simpler and more plausible explanation is that zhan tiri, being a shapeshifter, donned this humanlike form in order to get closer to demanitus. there could be any number of reasons for doing so—considering demanitus’s fixation on seeking the drops for the right reasons, i would imagine creating some distance from the malevolent monster form in order to gain his trust would have played a role in this decision.

five final points in favor of shapeshifting

#1: zhan tiri in the lost realm

we see in plus est en vous that the lost realm causes absurd magical mutations in people who are trapped there. varian theorizes that these mutations could become irreversible if they stay in the lost realm for long enough, but given that they are all freed shortly thereafter and the changes revert, there is no concrete evidence for or against this theory.

still, this raises an interesting question: if the lost realm mutates anyone who enters it, and if these changes become irreversible after long periods of time what would happen if a shapeshifter was trapped there for thousands of years?

when zhan tiri escapes from the lost realm, she isn’t all that different in appearance from when she entered it. she’s much smaller. her hairstyle has changed a bit. she lost the bag at some point. but that’s... really it. it’s a much less drastic alteration than we see happening with the coronans, who are shown transforming into objects and animals, with their bodies distorted, or with pieces of themselves becoming detached and floating away. and these changes also serve her manipulation of cass by making her appear small, weak, and harmless, so it isn’t out of the realm of possibility for zhan tiri to have chosen this form for herself.

i think it is reasonable to assume that zhan tiri, being a shapeshifter herself, was able to, if not outright resist whatever magic in the lost realm causes these mutations, at least “fix” them as they happened. her brief appearance in painter’s block supports the idea that she retained the ability to shapeshift while inside the lost realm, since she appears there as the ram-headed demon.

#2: her shapeshifting disciples

both tromus and sugracha are able to appear human, and sugracha states that she can take “many forms” in painter’s block. though it’s never explained where they got this power, it is reasonable to conclude that they received it from zhan tiri—she is their master, and the implication very much seems to be that it was she who gave them their creepy green spirit form of immortality.

and, if zhan tiri is handing out powers of shapeshifting to her minions, it follows that she must be capable of shapeshifting herself, too. 

#3: gremlin zhan tiri’s demonic shadow

this shows up in cassandra’s revenge and plus est en vous and seems to straightforwardly suggest that zhan tiri’s true nature is closer to the ram-headed demon, with the humanlike form being more of a disguise.

#4: we see her shapeshift in plus est en vous.

she briefly loses her grip on the humanlike nature of the gremlin form when rapunzel blasts her with the sundrop, as i noted above. and later—once she has the drops in hand and the gremlin form has no further use to her—she sheds it altogether to return to yet another variation on the ram-headed demon, albeit one that looks more... monkey than ram: 

#5: and finally, zhan tiri herself says so

in race to the spire: 

I believe Cassandra promised us a proper introduction, but she failed to deliver, didn’t she? Frankly, I’m surprised you hadn’t guessed who I am—seeing as how we’ve already met, in a way. You see, over the centuries, I’ve taken the form of whatever suits my needs: a warlock, a demon... even a blizzard. 

she also portrays herself as the ram-headed demon in the vision she gives to cassandra in once a handmaiden:

now... zhan tiri is a liar, and if these were statements given in isolation of any supporting evidence, i would be skeptical. however, when all the evidence in the text points toward zhan tiri being a shapeshifting entity as the most logical explanation for everything we see of her throughout the series, i’m inclined to take her corroborating statements as a factual confirmation. 

in conclusion: zhan tiri is, and has always been, a shapeshifter. if she has a “true” form, the evidence points toward it being the large, ram-headed, tentacled demon, while the humanlike shape(s) we see in season three are forms she assumed to ingratiate herself to demanitus and, later, cassandra. 

what’s the timeline with her and  lord demanitus?

time in this series is fuzzy. this applies not only to zhan tiri and demanitus, but to every historical event discussed by the characters and the timespans covered by each season, where the only time markers are the lantern festivals that celebrate rapunzel’s nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first birthdays and a few throwaway lines about the passage of months. thus, there is no way to say with absolute certainly when any specific event in zhan tiri’s backstory occurred chronologically. we have to do our best to arrange the events we know about in an order that is logical. 

this is complicated by the fact that we know demanitus fudged some of the details to make himself look better to rapunzel and eugene: he obscured the fact that he and zhan tiri were working partners for an unknown length of time. this verifiable lie of omission casts a patina of doubt over everything else he says regarding their shared past, but it also accounts for discrepancies between what we see and what we’re told. 

as always in unreliable narrator situations, what we see has far more weight than what we’re told. with this in mind, there are three tiers of trustworthiness in the information we are given about zhan tiri’s past: most trustworthy are the flashbacks and things we see with our own eyes; in the middle are the accounts of zhan tiri’s contemporaries—demanitus and the disciples; and at the bottom are the folk legends recounted by xavier and adira. 

so what do we see?

#1: zhan tiri and demanitus searched for the drops together

just how this arrangement came to be is unclear, but i think we can glean some interesting information from the plus est flashback.

DEMANITUS: Zhan Tiri! This is your last warning! Give up this foolish quest for power.

ZHAN TIRI: This quest for the sundrop and moonstone was both of ours.

DEMANITUS: It was, until you made it about something darker. You made it all about gaining power for yourself! You turned your back on what was right!

ZHAN TIRI: And you turned your back on me. As long as I live, I will never stop until I have that power!

DEMANITUS: I know.

[He activates the portal to the Lost Realm.]

ZHAN TIRI: This is far from over! I will have that power, and when I do, I will destroy your beloved Corona! I promise you!

[The portal closes.]

DEMANITUS: I had no choice, Vigor. I had to send her to the Lost Realm.

this suggests a couple things.

first, the working relationship between demanitus and zhan tiri broke down because her selfish desire for power clashed with his idealism. demanitus didn’t want the power of the combined sundrop and moonstone for himself; he wanted to reunite them in the service of a cause he believed to be right. zhan tiri, by contrast, was interested solely in acquiring that power for herself—but given how demanitus reacted when he learned this, it seems obvious that he didn’t know that about zhan tiri until later in their relationship.

in other words, there was some level of deceit on her part involved with their partnership from the very beginning. she hid her true motives from him; she may also have hidden her true nature from him. i think there is support both for and against the latter point: in the present day, demanitus describes zhan tiri as “a warlock”—a word zhan tiri uses as an example of her duplicitous shapeshifting—but he also describes her as being “from another realm”—suggesting he knew her to be something otherworldly or inhuman. 

i tend to fall on the side of demanitus knowing her basic nature while they were contemporaries, but believing she shared his more noble motivations at first, but i think a strong argument could be made in favor of him believing her to be human from the start and only discovering her true nature later. 

second, demanitus appears to have cared for zhan tiri far more than she cared for him. in the flashback, she’s angry at his betrayal, but her focus is on her desire for the power of the sundrop and moonstone. by contrast, demanitus gives her plenty of warning and chances to turn away from her dark path, pleads with her to “give up” her selfish motivations, and expresses clear regret after her refusal forces him to banish her to the lost realm. 

this, again, supports the interpretation that zhan tiri manipulated or used  demanitus to further her own goals, just as she would later do with cassandra, rather than this being a true partnership that broke down as a result of differing goals. she doesn’t care about him any more than she cared about cass.

#2: zhan tiri’s behavior in season three

season three firmly establishes zhan tiri as a skilled manipulator who does not care about anyone or anything besides herself and her pursuit of her own power. i won’t get into the weeds with this—if you want to read a breakdown of (some) of zhan tiri’s manipulation of cass in season three, i wrote a post about once a handmaiden here—because for our purposes, we just need to understand that the basic character of zhan tiri as we see her in the present should inform our interpretation of her behavior in the past. 

in other words, i think it is safe to assume that zhan tiri applied similar techniques and principles of manipulation to demanitus as we see her do to cassandra in the present; to wit, she would have sought to make him emotionally dependent on her by exploiting whatever vulnerabilities she could find and presenting herself to him as a trustworthy friend and kindred spirit. 

#3: she is not close to her disciples

once she is freed, zhan tiri never so much as mentions tromus or sugracha again. moreover, it is unclear how much personal information they actually know about her: in painter’s block, sugracha refers to zhan tiri as “he,” which could indicate one of several things: 

zhan tiri is female, but her disciples don’t know her well enough for assumptions they made about her gender based on the appearance of the ram-headed demon form to have been corrected, or

zhan tiri doesn’t subscribe to human conceptualizations of gender, and both “she” and “he” are acceptable pronouns because the gendered connotations of both are equally irrelevant.

i, personally, prefer the second explanation, but the first is tenuously supported by how little zhan tiri cares for her disciples.

what do her contemporaries say?

lord demanitus’s telling of his conflict with zhan tiri is as follows: 

Millennia ago, a mysterious event in the heavens divided an ancient power in two. The sundrop and moonstone fell to the earth. Three of my pupils and I researched the legend of the sundrop and moonstone, two elements that longed to reunite. We searched, but alas could not find them.

Unfortunately, we were not the only ones looking. My pupils betrayed me, and summoned my old nemesis, Zhan Tiri: a warlock from another realm, bent on destruction. It took all of my powers to banish the evil from our world.

I knew the research I had written about the sundrop and moonstone was valuable. Dangerous, in evil hands. So I tore the scroll and hid the pieces...

this exposition also shows us the identities of the three pupils who turned against demanitus and joined zhan tiri instead: sugracha, tromus, and gothel.

their identities are all confirmed outside of this sequence: sugracha and tromus appear as loyal servants of zhan tiri, and in a tale of two sisters, rapunzel and cassandra discover gothel’s research on the sundrop flower, including a piece that is an obvious attempt to recreate the demanitus scroll, indicating that gothel was indeed his student at one time: 

though it appears that gothel abandoned zhan tiri as well once she found the sundrop flower, as she hoarded its power for herself rather than seeking to use it to free her former master from the lost realm. 

now... because demanitus leaves out the part of this story that would involve admitting he worked with zhan tiri before she became his “nemesis,” we can’t say with any certainty when this business with his traitorous pupils freeing her happened—or, indeed, if it actually happened that way at all. it isn’t out of the realm of possibility that the three disciples could have been pupils of both demanitus and zhan tiri, who stuck with zhan tiri after demanitus betrayed her and banished her to the lost realm. 

my personal belief is that demanitus gathered his pupils to help him continue the search for the sundrop and moonstone after the flashback in plus est, only for them to be lured away by zhan tiri (perhaps via communication in dreams or visions, as cassandra’s revenge establishes that she’s capable of entering people’s dreams whilst trapped in the lost realm) and free her by reactivating the portal—thus shifting demanitus’s focus from “find the sundrop and moonstone” to “put the demon back in her prison and clean up this mess.” 

however, this is all very up for personal interpretation, because demanitus’s version of events is verifiably deceptive and thus cannot be taken as hard fact.

and what do the folk legends say?

#1: the blizzard

Eons ago, an evil warlock, Zhan Tiri, had a deep hatred for Corona, and cast a spell which caused a blizzard to sweep across the land. The storm destroyed everything in its path. All would have been lost, had it not been for the ancient engineer and inventor, Lord Demanitus. 

Using both magic and science, Demanitus built a massive subterranean machine deep in the Coronan mountains. This mighty device had the ability to change the direction of the wind, and it pushed the flurries out to the sea. The day was saved. Zhan Tiri had indeed been defeated. But some say the curse of the storm lives on, and is simply waiting to strike again...

we know that the basic event described here really happened, because the demanitus device does exist in the location indicated by the legend and works just as described. the details may have been glossed over or elaborated on over the centuries, but we know it is accurate in the essentials.

until recently, i put the events described in this legend immediately before the plus est flashback, to account for the snow on the ground during the flashback, but over the course of writing this post i have actually changed my own mind, and i now think that zhan tiri’s blizzard occurred when the disciples freed her from the lost realm for the first time. why? well, the imagery used to illustrate xavier’s telling of the blizzard legend is directly echoed by the imagery used to illustrate zhan tiri’s release in demanitus’s account in lost and found: 

queen for a day.

and lost and found. 

the color palettes here are identical, and in both, zhan tiri is depicted as the ram-headed demon, in almost the same pose, rising out of the mountains—which fits with both the location of the demanitus device and the possibility that she created (or became) the blizzard immediately after being released from the portal in the coronan mountains. moreover, her hatred of corona is based on her hatred of demanitus and her vengeful desire to destroy everything he loves, which would logically be stronger after he successfully imprisoned her once. 

#2: the great tree

Millennia ago, this tree was once a sentient being, a force for good. But it was corrupted by the evil sorcerer [Zhan Tiri] to destroy any who approached it. It was Zhan Tiri’s stronghold. Inside it, he was invincible. But Lord Demanitus put a stop to the tree’s magic using an enchanted spear. 

as with xavier’s blizzard legend, the fact of the spear’s existence and the behavior of the great tree itself once the spear is removed proves the basic accuracy of this legend. 

the difficulty hear lies with pinpointing when all this occurred. unlike the blizzard, there are no contextual clues to suggest where this conflict at the great tree may lie in the general timeline, so any conclusions we draw must be based on speculation. the only thing we know for sure is that zhan tiri’s residence in the great tree ended during demanitus’s lifetime, which puts a hard stop in it at about two thousand years ago.

my theory is that zhan tiri corrupted and resided in the great tree long before demanitus’s time. adira calls it her stronghold, and as discussed in the first section, the great tree has the greatest variety and frequency of zhan tiri iconography of any location in the series. one of the symbols inside the great tree is even found thousands of miles away at janus point—the corkscrew-snouted ram’s head—which draws a possible line of influence from the tree to janus point. taken together, all of this suggests a long period of time during which the great tree was zhan tiri’s tree.

and as for when it entered into the conflict between demanitus and zhan tiri, i believe there are two possibilities: 

demanitus knew of zhan tiri’s use of the great tree as a fortress, and she allowed him inside while they were collaborating in their search for the drops. she likely hid the violent nature of its defenses from him for a while; then she either let her guard down and allowed him to glimpse more of the truth, or the tree as attacked and he inadvertently witnessed a brutal massacre. either way, this is what clued him in to her ulterior motives, and he crafted the spear to destroy the tree’s magic—and it is this betrayal that zhan tiri references in the plus est flashback when she says “you turned your back on me.” 

zhan tiri had been using the great tree as a home for many years without the aggressive kill-anyone-who-enters security measures, allowing it to function as a library or house of research. this may have been how she and demanitus encountered each other in the first place, and would go a long way to explaining why demanitus trusted her initially. it wasn’t until demanitus turned against her and imprisoned her in the lost realm, and her subsequent release by his pupils, that she became enraged and turned the great tree into an indiscriminate killing machine and demanitus forged his magical spear to stop her.

i think both options are equally plausible, and since there isn’t any direct evidence one way or another, this is another case for personal interpretation and preference to really come into play.

so, to sum up...

at some point around two thousand years ago, lord demanitus encountered zhan tiri, and she persuaded him to trust her and work with her to find the mythical sundrop and moonstone. she was most likely just using him the whole time, while he grew to care for her but became so uncomfortable with her violent methods and selfish motivations that he felt he had no choice to imprison her in the lost realm. 

his pupils—whom he either once shared with zhan tiri, or gathered after the breakdown of his relationship with zhan tiri—turned against him, and either took her side in the conflict, or successfully freed her from the lost realm. i think the latter explanation(s) fit better with the information we are given. 

the blizzard discussed in queen for a day most likely happened after the plus est flashback and her subsequent release by the disciples. 

the conflict at the great tree most likely occurred either right before or at some point after the plus est flashback and her subsequent release, but it is plausible to assume that by this point she had been residing in the great tree for a considerable amount of time prior to working with demanitus. 

demanitus defeated zhan tiri and her disciples, imprisoned her in the lost realm, imprisoned most if not all of her disciples in the demanitus chamber, destroyed the portal to the lost realm so she couldn’t easily be brought back, and transferred his soul into the immortal body of a monkey so he could spend the next two thousand years as a... watchman of sorts, over the drops, probably with the hope that he could step in to prevent zhan tiri’s release if necessary.

[ryttu3k]

All Night Road Journal entries! For players who are new to VtM, this is absolutely invaluable. For those who are familiar with VtM, it's still pretty neat! Find it in the menu below your stats.

Note - the Characters list changes depending on your in-game actions; this list is based on my Banu Haqim hot mess Courier, Pyre.

Characters

Kindred

Aila: A powerful Daughter of Haqim. You consumed her, Blood and soul, ten years ago.

Edouard Chambet: A member of the Ministry and influential fixer. Or he was until you and Raúl destroyed him.

Julian Sim: Your sire Technological visionary, data scientist, and (by Camarilla standards) an "Anarch" bent on bringing down the Masquerade. You and he worked together under the Camarilla's thumb for a few years before going your separate ways. Now you're both back in Tucson.

Prince Lettow: A Gangrel, originally a minor aristocrat from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—making him one of the few elders left in Arizona. Lettow came to America after serving as a pilot in the Great War.

Called the Eagle Prince on account of his eagle servant, Riga, Lettow seized control of Tucson after the last Prince launched a murderous and doomed campaign against all non-Ventrue in the city. He magnanimously spared the old Prince's childer and has sought to rule with as much compassion as an undead crime lord can allow himself.

Millicent Rue: A blood trader whose specialty is finding obscure vintages for fussy Ventrue. From a clan called Lasombra, which you don't know anything about. After the fall of Camp Scheffler, has started to rebuild her "business."

Dove: Prince Lettow of Tucson's second in command, a Nosferatu and former courier. Keeps her mouth shut about her past, but she has known Lettow for many years.

Invidia Caul: A Tremere sorceress who works for Julian Sim ever since Prince Lettow forced the closure of her research facility, Kiowa Xenogenetics.

D'Espine: A Toreador. Manages the Cinderblock, a jazz club in Dallas. Obsessed with surgically modifying her ghouls.

Elin Olivecrona: A Ventrue. After the fall of Camp Scheffler, Olivecrona disappeared into the bureaucracy of the US government to work against the Second Inquisition.

Lampago: An ancient vampire—or some kind of related creature—who lurked in Tucson for years until hunters finally drove her away. She now dwells in Biosphere Zero.

Pattermuster: A Brujah. You helped him block a proposed renovation to the hospital.

Reremouse: A Nosferatu elder that dwelled beneath the sands of the California desert. You and Julian spent a depressing year feeding the elder to keep him dormant. When he finally arose, you helped Julian teleport him across the world using ancient sorcery that you do not fully understand.

Z: Julian Sim's mysterious acolyte.

Ghouls

Raúl Cañedo: Vampire hunter you first encountered when a wight attacked you after your CR-X broke down. Now your retainer. Knows how to fight and hunt; also a capable investigator.

Miguel: One of Lettow's retainers and couriers. Killed at Camp Scheffler, probably by hunters affiliated with the Second Inquisition.

Carlos: One of Dove's retainers. A police detective and the local Camarilla's contact with the Tucson police.

Nadia Goh: One of Julian Sim's retainers. Works as a delivery girl for a Malaysian restaurant when not helping Julian.

Others

Elena Prodan: Owner of Covenant Pawn Shop.

Agent Samantha Donati: Technically just a special agent with the FBI's Special Affairs Division, Agent Donati in fact controls most Second Inquisition activity across the Southwest. Her lightning-quick strikes have destroyed dozens of vampires and thrown the local Camarilla into chaos.

Clans

Banu Haqim

Originally from the Middle East, the "Assamites" were once feared assassins and sorcerers. They have recently entered into a tentative alliance with the Camarilla, the vampire shadow-society of Europe and the Americas.

Disciplines: Blood Sorcery, Celerity, Obfuscate. Some Banu Haqim focus on rituals, while others favor inhuman speed and the powers of invisibility.

Clan Weakness: Thirst for vitae. Banu Haqim are compelled to commit diablerie—the sin of draining another vampire, body and soul.

Brujah

Once a proud clan of philosophers, the rage-fueled "Rebels" are now scattered and disorganized.

Disciplines: Celerity, Potence, Presence. Unnatural strength and speed help the unsubtle Brujah in a fight, but the secret to their survival is in shaping crowds with their eerie charisma.

Clan Weakness: Temper. Brujah are prone to losing control of their Beast in terrible rages.

Gangrel

The savage "Outlanders" are shapeshifting beastmasters who, almost alone among vampires, can survive outside of the cities.

Disciplines: Animalism, Fortitude, Protean. Gangrel flesh is both hardy and able to change its form; the Outlanders also have various powers over living animals.

Clan Weakness: Feral. Gangrel struggle to relate to normal humans, especially as their Humanity declines.

Malkavian

The "Lunatics" are all mad, but their madness gives them strange insights. They often serve as court seers and mad prophets.

Disciplines: Auspex, Dominate, Obfuscate. Keen senses and the power to vanish from sight give Malkavians their reputation as prophets. Their mental compulsions often spread their insanity.

Clan Weakness: Madness. All Malkavians are incurably insane.

The Ministry

Formerly the "Followers of Set," the Ministry are friendly and good. There is nothing bad about the Ministry. They are here to help and to get you what you need. They are not a snake cult.

Disciplines: Obfuscate, Presence, Protean. Vampires of the Ministry can become invisible, control minds, and turn into giant snakes (it always helps).

Clan Weakness: No problems here, nothing to worry about.

Nosferatu

The "Sewer Rats" are hideous and malformed vampires whose information-gathering skills make them invaluable. They once managed electronic communication for the Kindred, until the Second Inquisition infiltrated their servers.

Disciplines: Animalism, Obfuscate, Potence. Nosferatu use their shadow-powers not just to turn invisible, but to hide their hideous faces. When exposed, they can call on their unnatural strength, or their allies among the Creatures of the Night.

Clan Weakness: Hideous. All Nosferatu are monstrous in appearance.

Toreador

The elegant and sophisticated "Aesthetes" would prefer you didn't call them "Degenerates." Obsessed with beauty, the vampires of Clan Toreador can seem almost alive when their passions move them.

Disciplines: Auspex, Celerity, Presence. Supernaturally keen senses and a beguiling aura let the Aesthetes thrive among high culture; when things go wrong, unnatural speed helps them escape.

Clan Weakness: Distracted. Toreador are so obsessed with beauty that it can endanger them.

Tremere

The "Usurpers" of Clan Tremere are said to descend from a mortal wizard who stole immortal life from an ancient vampire. Once organized into a disciplined arcane hierarchy, the sorcerers of Clan Tremere are in turmoil after the destruction of their greatest occult stronghold.

Disciplines: Auspex, Blood Sorcery, Dominate. Though famous for their Thaumaturgy—their intricate sorcerous tradition—many Tremere also possess supernaturally acute senses and the power to command mortals with a word.

Clan Weakness: Frail Blood. This manifests in different ways for different Usurpers. Some mend their flesh slowly; others cannot form Blood Bonds or create ghoul servitors.

Ventrue

The Clan of Kings rules from the shadows, controlling modern boardrooms as they once controlled courts and cathedrals. The mental powers of the "Blue Bloods" also protect the Masquerade.

Disciplines: Dominate, Fortitude, Presence. Ventrue study two distinct paths of mental control: Presence is more subtle, Dominate more direct. Some are also nearly indestructible, even when exposed to banes like fire and sunlight.

Clan Weakness: Refined palate. Ventrue cannot drink bagged or animal blood, and most are restricted to a particular kind of human prey.

Caitiff

Not a clan at all, Caitiff vampires are the Clanless—those whose Blood is too thin or whose education was too inadequate for them to join a proper clan.

Disciplines: Varies based on ancestry and inclination.

Clan Weakness: Outcast. The Camarilla has little respect for Caitiff, and other vampires don't treat them well either.

Hunger and Willpower

All vampires suffer from an undying Hunger for blood. Using Disciplines (vampire powers) and mending wounds uses some of the blood you've stolen and increases your Hunger; so does the simple act of rising every night. Only killing and fully draining a living human slakes your Hunger fully, and then only for a time. As a Child of Haqim, drinking vampire Blood also increases your Hunger.

If you become hungry enough, you lose the ability to activate Disciplines or mend your wounds. If your Hunger equals or exceeds your Willpower, you suffer penalties to actions that require concentration and self-control. That includes most actions you take, except those that risk a messy critical—see that entry. The penalties grow as your Hunger grows.

Willpower is based on your Resolve and Composure scores. Increase those scores to increase your Willpower and ignore the distraction caused by your Hunger. Certain actions, like extended negotiations or staying out too close to the sun, can mentally exhaust you, temporarily reducing your Willpower. You can regain lost Willpower by embodying your Convictions (see Experience and Convictions).

Messy Criticals

Succeed too well on certain actions and you run the risk of unleashing your Beast. The monster within you assures your success…at any cost.

Any choice that ends in an exclamation point ("!") risks a messy critical. Most of these are attacks or other aggressive actions where you risk losing control, such as threatening people or bashing down doors. Any choice that involves hunting and drinking from a human also risks a messy critical, and messy criticals there usually result in you draining the mortal completely, reducing your Humanity and leaving you with a corpse to dispose of.

The good news is that choices that risk a messy critical aren't more difficult due to Hunger (see Hunger and Willpower). Your Beast guides you in these savage actions, even when you're desperate for blood.

Experience and Convictions

After a decade of lethargy and routine, you find yourself bursting with newfound creative vigor!

You gain experience in two chief ways: first, by going on missions and succeeding in your goals. Second, by gaining Convictions and living up to them. To gain a Conviction, select choices that increase that personality trait: if you want to Defy the Traditions, then you must Defy the Traditions: ignore vampire laws like the Masquerade (see that entry), disobey elder vampires, and defy the Camarilla. If you want to Seek Luxury, then demand money and inducements as often as possible.

The Masquerade

The First Tradition of the Camarilla—what passes for civilization among the undead—is to hide the existence of vampires from the mortal herd. This is the Masquerade. You can violate the Masquerade by openly using obvious supernatural powers (such as shapeshifting), feeding in public, or failing to dispose of a body you drained.

Violating the Masquerade risks the wrath of elders among the Camarilla. Worse, with the Second Inquisition raging across the United States, a breach of the Masquerade risks sending an entire Second Inquisition kill team to your doorstep. Such an attack usually comes in daylight and can destroy you if you're not careful.

Humanity and the Beast

Vampires aren't human. They're dead things animated by stolen blood, with a screaming monster in their head they call the Beast. Perhaps because of this damned state, most vampires cling to their Humanity and struggle to control the Beast's savage urges.

But the Beast is always waiting. Acts of callousness and brutality strip vampires of their Humanity until, in the end, they are nothing but mindless animals that lurk in the shadows and hunt at night. Even before that point, low-Humanity vampires struggle to act with kindness or empathy.

Killing mortals (unless attacked first, such as by hunters or assassins) is a sure way to lose Humanity. The Beast permits no excuses—killing to feed and killing to hide your true nature (and protect the Masquerade) will stain your soul as surely as killing for sport.

Regaining Humanity is arduous but possible through great acts of sacrifice and by risking yourself for others. But beware: if your Humanity falls low enough, you'll have to spend Willpower (see Hunger and Willpower) to perform even small acts of decency.

The Camarilla

The Camarilla—the so-called Ivory Tower—is a secret society of vampires dedicated to hiding their existence from mortals, a guiding ideology called the Masquerade. Most Camarilla cities are ruled by a Prince (the term is gender neutral). Beneath this monarch is an elaborate hierarchy of underlings and overlords, bound together through favors, mutual enemies, the Traditions (including the Masquerade), and the overwhelming nightly drive to find more blood. Vampires of the Camarilla call each other "Kindred." They all appreciate the bitter irony of that term.

The rise of the Second Inquisition has made the Camarilla more paranoid and restrictive. Where once the Princes tolerated "Anarchs" and fringe types (like independent couriers), now they retreat into their Elysiums—hidden sanctums where they can conduct their business in peace—and try to weather the storm. These nights, the Camarilla are the vampire elite, and like any elite, they are happy to sacrifice everyone else for their own safety or convenience.

The Second Inquisition

The first Inquisition taught the arrogant vampires of the Middle Ages that they were not invincible. They learned that mortals, while weak alone, were almost unstoppable when organized and when they knew their enemy.

The vampires of the Camarilla took the lessons of the Inquisition to heart, hiding their actions behind the Masquerade. But no deception is perfect. As digital technology proliferated in the twentieth century, young vampires adapted, leaving their elders in the dust. They didn't know that mortals were listening in. And even when they realized the danger, many in the Camarilla believed they could direct these hunters at their enemies.

The results of this arrogance were catastrophic: the fires of the Second Inquisition blazed across the world, destroying elders and fledglings alike, cleansing whole cities of vampires. Embedded in the security and intelligence agencies of various national governments, including the FBI and the CIA, the Second Inquisition employs every weapon at its disposal to hunt down and destroy vampires. Now the SI has turned its sights on Arizona. Its goal is nothing less than the total eradication of every vampire in the state.

The Beckoning

A strange event called the Beckoning recently started luring elder vampires to the Middle East. No one knows the source of the Beckoning, but the sudden loss of so many elders—and the vast supernatural power they possess—has thrown the Camarilla into chaos and allowed Anarchs and other independent groups to seize power.

The Nature of the Blood

A vampire's vitae—the stolen blood that flows through your veins—has a variety of supernatural powers.

Disciplines. A vampire's supernatural arts are called Disciplines. Different clans manifest different arts, from mind control and shapeshifting to superhuman strength and speed. Most Disciplines require Blood to activate (increasing your Hunger) and grant a significant bonus to any relevant action you undertake. This bonus increases with your level of mastery.

Mending. You can use the blood you take to repair your dead flesh. In fact, this is the only way vampires can "heal," as they cannot do so naturally.

Ghouls. A vampire who feeds vitae to a living mortal creates a ghoul. Sometimes called a retainer or a thrall, a ghoul does not age, manifests minor supernatural powers such as occasional bursts of great strength, and is loyal to their vampire regnant through the Blood Bond (see below). Most established vampires make use of one or more ghouls to handle their daylight business.

The Embrace. Feed a mortal your vitae and you create a ghoul. Drain a mortal to death and feed that mortal your Blood and you create a new vampire of your clan. You are now the sire to a childe. This act is called the Embrace. Most Princes of the Camarilla forbid Embracing new vampires except under special conditions, as there are always too many vampires and never enough places to hunt.

The Blood Bond. Drink a vampire's blood three times on three separate nights and you are bound to that vampire, forced into service through a supernatural compulsion called the Blood Bond. If you create a ghoul, that ghoul is soon Blood Bound to you. Beware of your sire—you've already tasted your sire's Blood once, when you were Embraced and turned into a vampire!

Learning from the Blood. Vampires of different clans begin with different Disciplines, but you can unlock more Disciplines by tasting the Blood of another vampire and then receiving instruction from them.

Diablerie. To drain another vampire, body and soul, is called diablerie, and the Camarilla consider it the most awful of crimes. But young vampires practice the art in secret anyway, hunting their elders, in order to lower their generation and gain greater power.

Generation. According to legend, the first vampire was Caine, the first murderer. Legend further says that Caine had three childer, who had childer of their own, and that those vampires of the Third Generation founded the clans. Whether or not you believe this story, when a vampire Embraces a mortal, that childe's Blood is thinner and weaker than the sire's. Vampires of high generation are sometimes Caitiff (the Clanless), and those of very high generation are thin-bloods—barely vampires at all. Though a vampire's Disciplines develop with age, generation does not change…except through diablerie.

Functions of Abilities, Skills, and Disciplines

Abilities

Strength: Punching, wrestling, clawing (if you have claws). Most climbing where you haul yourself up.

Dexterity: Balance, speed, reacting quickly. Attacking with a bladed weapon or in coyote form (if you can change shape), reacting quickly. Most shooting that relies on speed.

Stamina: Adds to your Health. Not used actively.

Charisma: Getting people to like you. Leading people into battle or giving them orders. Impressing a crowd.

Manipulation: Getting people to do what you want (even if they don't like you). Most kinds of lies and deceit.

Composure: Adds to your Willpower. Staying cool, in social situations or in a fight (especially when threatened by fire or sunlight).

Intelligence: Education, reasoning ability, analysis. Most forms of research.

Wits: Cunning, cleverness, noticing things on the go. Intuition, "following your nose." Shooting when you can't see clearly.

Resolve: Adds to your Willpower. Determination, patience. Performing tasks that take all night or that are mentally draining.

Use the language of the choices to determine what is being tested. "Quickly" usually means Dexterity, "clever" signals Wits, "patient" implies Resolve.

Specific descriptions override general rules. You normally use Dexterity to strike with a sword, but if there's a lot of smoke and the choice says you need to be clever to hit, that's Wits.

Skills

Athletics: Jumping, swimming, running, dodging.

Combat: Brawling, wrestling, wielding swords or improvised weapons, using claws or teeth.

Drive: This gets your AE86 to its destination in one piece.

Firearms: Shooting a gun.

Clandestine: Sneaking, moving silently, hiding, picking locks, forcing doors.

Intimidation: Threatening, bullying, and forcing others to back down.

Leadership: Giving orders. Commanding your ghoul; also adds a passive boost when you work together with your ghoul.

Persuasion: Getting people to do what you want in a more or less straightforward manner, without lies or threats. Also covers etiquette and manners.

Streetwise: Bribery. Knowing streets and alleys (useful for quick getaways). Interacting with criminals.

Subterfuge: Lying, swindling, and deceiving. Also includes palming, picking pockets, and similar deceptions.

Academics: Nonscientific education—everything from history and philosophy to occult lore. Used in Blood Sorcery.

Awareness: Noticing things just by looking around (or listening or sniffing around).

Investigation: Careful, systematic exploring. Helps you both find hidden items and interrogate people until you find something.

Technology: Crafts, car repair, computer use, and hacking, as well as scientific acumen.

Survival: Finding shelter (especially from sunlight!), hunting wild animals.

Disciplines

Most Disciplines increase your Hunger when used but add a bonus to your actions.

Animalism: Grants you a wolf companion who grants significant bonuses to actions when activated. Your lobo gains power as you advance this Discipline. Low risk of a Masquerade breach; your lobo is just a "big weird dog."

Auspex: Enhances your senses, typically improving skills like Awareness, Investigation, and (if you're shooting where you can't see clearly) Firearms. Low risk of Masquerade breach; Auspex affects only you.

Blood Sorcery: Not a proper Discipline so much as a collection of ritual techniques developed over millennia. Most rituals take time and grant automatic success to an action; particularly challenging rituals, or those opposed by another sorcerer, often rely on Intelligence and Academics. Risk of Masquerade breach varies based on the ritual.

Celerity: Supernatural speed and quickness. Offers only a modest bonus, but helps with a huge number of activities, especially when you need to fight or flee. Mortals will be surprised by but not suspicious of the lowest level of Celerity; any more than that breaches the Masquerade.

Dominate: Overwhelming short-term mind control. Usually succeeds automatically, especially on mortals. A blunt instrument; doesn't gently boost your natural abilities like Presence. Low Masquerade risk since it's so uncanny. Dominate can also be used to scramble memories, which protects your secrets.

Fortitude: Unnatural resilience, even against the vampire's natural banes (fire and sunlight). Not used actively; it works automatically when you're hurt to absorb injury. Low risk of Masquerade breach—maybe you were wearing body armor?

Obfuscate: Fading from sight. Not literal invisibility; people just don't notice you. Mostly used to enhance Clandestine when sneaking. Low risk of Masquerade breach unless you just vanish in front of someone.

Potence: Monstrous strength. Increase your ferocity in combat and smash right through obstacles. Like Celerity, mortals will accept the lowest levels of Potence as the effects of adrenaline, but any more than that breaches the Masquerade.

Presence: Unnatural allure and charisma. Use it to fill mortals with dread (enhances Intimidate) or to enhance your natural charm (pairs with a large number of social skills). Lacks the immediate and inescapable power of Dominate, but more flexible. Low risk of Masquerade breach; people just believe you're unusually magnetic.

Protean: Three distinct shapeshifting powers. Beginners can grow wolflike claws to rip their enemies to shreds. Intermediate students learn how to meld with the earth, sinking into the ground to escape pursuers (or the rising sun). Masters take the form of beasts—in your case, a coyote. Any use of Protean is a huge and obvious Masquerade breach.

[ramble-writes]

Shitty Holidays

The idea for this is based from art @ywwywwy did of Frank at a table sitting on one end as his foster family is at the other. As for how Frank is, it’s this idea of Frank as a wolf because hey, why not? lol. So here it be!

-

There was light flakes of snow drifting within the wind outside. There was the squeals of two kids filled the house along with the gentle voices of a mother and a father trying to get their children to calm down. But... There’s a third, sitting quietly at the other end of the table as yellow eyes glance from the food on his plate to the chatty family on the other side of the table.

Frank Morrison, age 16, was sitting there as the family chatted away. Keen ears picked up a chuff of a dog under the table. Honestly, the dog being a German Shepard, was the only good thing out of this new foster family. Though at first he and the dog didn’t get along, it was a day alone he got to have the house to himself and, like usual, the dog would growl and bark at him every time he took one step outside. That ended quick when he had shifted and he established dominance.

That aside, the family themselves didn’t really pay attention to him. For sure when they agreed to have him that they were twitchy on the idea of his skull jester tattoo with flames and baseball bats. He found it cool. The previous couple was ok with him having one since they had tattoos like sleeves, on the legs, small ones, and various others. The only problem in the end with that family was the constant arguing and they fact that the two were having a divorce. That was two months ago and here he is with this family that were just iffy with him in general.

“Frank, are you going to eat?”

The voice made him jump a bit. He focused his gaze to the father looking at him as the mother does her best to calm down the two maggots. The brother kept trying to steal his sister’s food and she would throw her balled up napkin at him. Yellow eyes blinked as he got his mind back to the present.

“If you don’t eat up, you can go to your room.”

His “room” being what is the little girl’s room with a bed that at least he is left with sleeping propped up or with his feet hanging off the edge. Frank glances down to the food sitting there that he can smell is loosing its heat and how the strong scent is fading. He stifled the whimper that wanted to rise up. There’s no denying that he’s hungry, that the wolf deep down was starving. He just.. There’s too much moving around homes that he lost appetite. It doesn’t help that the mother took her time to make this dinner for Thanksgiving (second Monday of October), and he’s sitting here having not even touched it.

“Louis, leave him be. We only have him for a month or so till they can find better housing for him. Or if his parents-”

“They don’t want shit to do with me..” He couldn’t contain the slight growl to his voice. He hates it how every family he’s been with when they talk about the time they have with him that they mention “if his parents want him back.” Bullshit, he would say all the time. They left him for a reason. Over a stupid fuckin’ reason. So what if he’s a late shifter? They didn’t even bother with him further! Not his fault that also their marriage fell apart.

“Oi! Watch your language *garçon,” Louis said firmly. Frank didn’t know French, nor did he care. If it was an insult, fuck this guy. Fuck this. Fuck all of this. He’s sick and tired of the constant moving, families one moment saying they’ll take him in and then the next moment doing shit that hurts that either he calls up the foster home or the family does, blaming him for shit he didn’t do.

Frank stands up, slamming down the fork and knife in his hands down onto the table with a clatter. His breathing picked up, his jaw felt strained with feeling his teeth get bigger along with his body. It wants to expand, to let the wolf raging inside out to maul the stupid Frenchy.

“Yeah? Well you try being only 5 years old when your parents not only want you, but procced to go through a divorce as well that they throw you into foster care because of you! You try bouncing around home after fucking home from abusive families, from groomers, from cultists. You try going through a family who honestly wanted you and were denied of adopting you that it fucks you up.”

This made Louis stand up enraged with his face going red. “Go to your room!”

“That ain’t even my fuckin room!”

“Boys! Please calm down! It’s Thanksgiving and we should be happy and-”

The dog barked. A loud sharp one. Cheder, as the dog is named, stands and comes out from under the table with a growl. He sensed Frank’s anger and was ready to act on it. To protect him. This pissed off the man further.

“Cheder, come here.”

“I don’t think he wants to listen.”

“*Tais-toi. Cheder. Come. Here.”

The German Shepard still didn’t move. He just walked backwards to stand next to Frank. Pack mentality. In all honesty, he and the dog did grow to have a bond with the time he’s been here ever since shifting. Boy, Frank couldn’t help the shit-eaten grin that spread across his face.

“That’s it. I’ve had it with your attitude! We’ve tried being nice to you and-”

“Nice?! Ha! You did nothing but ignore me! You didn’t do shit to stop Cheder from snapping at me the first few times he was inside the house! When it came to shopping for clothes for school you picked out shit for me! You let Maggie and Wayne pick out their outfits, but didn’t let me do shit. We won’t get on the topic of the tattoo, but oh how I fuckin hate it when you won’t even look at me when you talk to me like a fucking man.”

This made everyone go quiet. Even Cheder. Maggie looks to her father with tears pricking at the corner of her eyes.

“Papa.. I’m scared...”

Louis hushed her gently, but by this point Frank had enough. With a scoff, he turned on his heel and headed for the back door to the backyard. He needed to run, get it out of his system. He could hear Louis mutter about calling the Alberta Foster Care to get him in the morning, but again, he didn’t care. He heard the mother coming after him, calling his name as he headed out into the cold night. He knew Cheder followed, but over the fence the dog couldn’t.

Frank didn’t care that he heard the mother become frantic quick at seeing him hop the fence. Once up and over, he broke out into a run, wanting to get far from them. Wanting to get as deep as he could before shifting mid run. Dark brown fur took over what was once fair skin was along with a lighter tone underside. Two legs and arms popped and changed to being four legs and paws as big as his hands. Everything from his chest, shoulders, thighs, and head enlarged. Face extended out to a muzzle and a wet nose. Every human tooth grew and sharpened to that of a wolf as the final touches of ears and tail sprouted.

There standing in the place of where a boy was, was a Brown Timber wolf, but bigger due to him being a werewolf than a shapeshifter. Fully formed, Frank wasted no time sprinting deep into the forest till it was just him and the surrounding trees with what little snow flakes got through the thicket of the pine branches. Out here, he’s free. Far from the grasp of any human, far from the grasp of the foster system. It’s out there where the wind blew through his fur that he felt better with the cold nipping at the pads of his paws and his nose, the breeze making him blink a few times over. It’s out there where he spent the rest of the night, curled under some upturned roots of a tree.

By morning, he woke to the sound of his name being called. Multiple voices ranging from male to female. Some he even recognized as the trees made their voices echo down to where he is. He didn’t want to move, didn’t want to go back. But fate isn’t his to decide. With a sigh, Frank stood up and shook himself out and stretched before shifting back to himself. A sigh left him as he made his way towards the voices.

The person assigned to helping him find a foster family was there, the parents Louis (reluctantly) and Hanna were there along with an officer or two. Upon seeing him, Hanna just rushed at him and pulled him in for a tight hug. He didn’t reciprocate it. The adults talked as they headed back to the house. He wasn’t surprised to see all his stuff packed up.

Not a word was spoken as Frank grabbed it and headed out to the waiting running car. In an instant, Cheder came rushing out after him with loud whines and practically shoved his head into Frank’s stomach. This made him sigh as he bent down to pet the dog, lowering his head to place on Cheder’s with a hand going through thick fur. If he could, he would’ve taken Cheder with him. But he can’t. It was like the German Shepard knew his thoughts because the dog backed away despite still whining, then turned to head back into the house with head and tail low.

There was no goodbyes as he got into that car to head back to the foster home, no glances back. Nothing. The person that drove tried to ask him questions on what happened, but he didn’t answer, didn’t want to as his eyes watched houses change as they made their way back to the major town of Alberta. Frank was just tired of all of this, tired of the changes and faces he doesn’t bother to remember. Sleep sounded like the better option for now. Getting himself as comfortable as possible, he let his eyes drift shut with the cold window to his forehead, letting himself let go and doze off with not wanting to think what the next family would be like.

[starlight-ascension]

PreCures and If They Would Survive A Horror Movie

Nagisa: would survive. She’s the most competent pink cure both on and off the battlefield, she will destroy the villain and look badass doing it. 

Honoka: Her science stuff probably created the bad guy in the first place when it went haywire. And since she would know how to defeat the villain, she would have to die early on for there to be a horror movie at all. 

Hikari: Absolutely would not survive. All she does is stand there and sometimes freeze the enemy in place for two seconds. She only transforms when reminded to. Also she’s a blonde and horror villains always go for blondes. There’s no way she’d live. Hikari would stand there frozen in place and scream until she dies gruesomely. 

Saki: I don’t know but nagisa survives so i’m gonna say saki does too. 

Mai: also don’t know. i’mma say no. 

Nozomi: Would not survive. There is no way nozomi would make it out. 

Rin: Would survive. After watching Nozomi die, Rin would go full-on enraged feral jock, transform, and set the villain on fire. 

Urara: Would not survive. She’d probably go right into the dark place and do the thing where you spot the villain with your flashlight and dismiss it before doing a major double take but now it’s right behind you. 

Komachi: Would survive, all the way. She reads a lot so she knows her way around how to survive these things. She writes a lot so she knows shady topics and would think of or know things that if she didn’t know, the whole team would be screwed. And she’s a walking weapon of mass destruction on top of all that. 

Karen: She’s hiding in a secret fortified bunker right now with bodyguards and lots of entertainment. She would survive. 

Kurumi: Would not survive. When she reverts to fairy form against her own will, the bad guy would pick her up and throw her into some mechanical thing that grinds her up alive and is the main reason for the R rating. 

Love: Would last 5 minutes. Seriously, in the first episode she got lost and saw a creepy house in the woods that wasn’t there before and what does she do? SHE GOES IN. If that were a horror movie, she’d be a redshirt designed to be killed off in the first few minutes for the purpose of introducing us to the bad guy and showing how dangerous it is. 

Miki: Would survive. Miki has gone up against a villain who came straight out of the horror genre (Northa) and survived. Another horror villain would be no problem. Unless it’s hide time and she can’t hide properly because she’s so tall. 

Inori: Might survive. Might end up dying so that the cat in the movie doesn’t. 

Setsuna: Setsuna has lived through a horror movie (episode 40 of fresh precure). She’s dealt with some serious heck. She will absolutely survive a horror movie. 

Tsubomi: All Tsubomi would do is run. Thankfully, she’s not clumsy like some pinks, and would probably actually manage to make it out by running away. 

Erika: Would survive. Erika cannot be killed. 

Itsuki: This girl knows martial arts. She fought off a giant monster because it ripped a plushie she thought was cute. Horror villains should be scared of Itsuki. 

Yuri: ABSOLUTELY would survive. Did you see her take out an entire group of Sunackies in civilian form? She’s a genius, a badass, and would survive a horror movie hands-down. 

Hibiki: Would survive 

Kanade: Would survive, but only because Crescendo Tone can bring people back to life. 

Ellen: Would survive. Remember how she trolled some villains who were trying to scare her? She’d do the same thing. Except it’s also leading the bad guy into a death trap. 

Ako: She’s that little girl who befriends the ghosts or whatever and talks about them casually in a scary way and then either becomes possessed, helps the villain kill everyone else, or just skip ropes on the playground singing terrifying versions of nursery rhymes. She survives, obviously. Forming an alliance with the villains can help you with that. 

Miyuki: Would not survive. The reason for this is that by the time she realizes what genre she’s actually in, it would be too late for her already. 

Akane: Would survive. Arson queen with the makings of a genderflipped shonen protag and super strength even by precure standards? She will destroy the bad guys. 

Yayoi: Would survive. She watches enough anime and toku, reads enough manga and comic books, and plays enough video games to know everything about how to survive a horror movie. Also, she likes ghost stories. She ABSOLUTELY would catch on right away that she’s in a horror movie and maybe even fangirl over the villain a little. 

Nao: Would be the only one to realize THE MAGIC TELEPORTING BOOKSHELF and escape. 

Reika: Similar to Miki and Setsuna, Reika has gone up against a villain who’s scary enough to be in horror, in this case Joker. And she has won. Several times. Reika would absolutely survive. What’s another horror villain? 

Mana: Would sacrifice herself to save her team. 

Rikka: Would not survive. She’d obtain information and realize a way to defeat the villain that would 100% work, which means that while she’s explaining it, she’d be killed mid-sentence. 

Alice: Would ABSOLUTELY survive. She has a freaking SPACE SHUTTLE, her place is full of traps and secret tunnels, she’s one of the most badass and terrifying cures, AND both she and her butler are Batman. Alice is by far the most likely precure to survive a horror movie. 

Makoto: Did the sensible thing and hid out with Alice. Is currently hanging out in a secret room with protection, every light on, and her back to the wall so she can’t be ambushed from behind, watching willcraft monster school on her phone on silent. 

Aguri: Dies of overconfidence. 

Regina: Is the one to kill the villain. 

Megumi: She would transform and be like “AW YEAH I GET TO BATTLE SOMETHING” and then obliterate the villain, surviving the movie in the process. Unless she tried to form change. If she used her dance attacks, she’d be stabbed or dismembered or eaten while she’s charging up her attack. 

Hime: Survives the movie itself. Is killed after the credits to show that the villain isn’t really dead and set up a sequel. 

Yuko: First one on the team to die. 

Iona: Would definitely survive. She’s the only one on her team who’s 100% cool with doing what it takes to defeat the bad guys and she’s a badass. 

Maria: Did you see the time she took out 4 monsters at once? She would survive. 

Haruka: Like with most pinks, Haruka would probably not survive. 

Minami: Would stand there screaming until she gets stabbed. 

Kirara: Same deal as Erika. 

Towa: She’s a fire cure. Fire often works against these guys. But they have no compulsion about attacking someone while she’s preparing her drawn-out attack sequence, and the extreme impracticality of her outfit could end up killing her. It’s around 50/50 for Towa. 

Mirai: Would last 20 minutes if she’s lucky. She’s probably the one who read the creepy old book out loud and released the demon/monster/whatever. 

Riko: Has enough knowledge of the supernatural to know how to defeat the thing Mirai summoned. Is targeted as a result. Eventually dies directly after a jumpscare. Is brought back to life by Kotoha. 

Kotoha: She’s a literal goddess and she’s got the strongest magic of anyone ever. She will survive without question. 

Ichika: Hate to say this, but she would probably not survive. *begins sobbing at the thought of my precious daughter dying in a horror movie* 

Himari: Would also probably die. But would last for far longer than Ichika. 

Aoi: Would power through an otherwise fatal injury and somehow survive something that definitely should have killed her, because she needs to write a song about this. 

Yukari: Old enough to drive. Smart enough to check the back seat. 

Akira: Sits in the passenger seat as the two floor it. Checks under the car for villains while Yukari is watching her back. 

Ciel: Switches to fairy form and flies so high the villains can’t get her. 

Pikario: Gets run over by Yukari and Akira. 

Hana: Survives the first half of the movie. Dies when she runs upstairs instead of outside. 

Saaya: She spent an entire night just watching horror movies once and now she knows everything about how to survive them. Makes it out alive. 

Homare: Survives

Emiru: Is hiding in a security bunker

Ruru: Is hiding with Emiru

Hikaru: She’s really into cryptids and occult stuff, so she knows their weaknesses, and survives the whole movie as a result. Probably hits on the monster at least once. 

Lala: Runs right into her spaceship and gets TF out of there. 

Elena: Holds out for a good amount of time. Then her phone rings while she’s hiding. 

Madoka: Made it onto the spaceship with Lala. 

Yuni: Uses her shapeshifting perfume to disguise herself as a corpse version of herself. Successfully tricks the bad guy into thinking she’s dead. 

Nodoka: Passes out, dies first. 

Chiyu: Survives 

Hinata: Would not survive. She’s too much of a hot mess to last in a horror movie. 

Asumi: Would die if she remained untransformed. If she transformed, she would survive hands-down. 

[corinthbayrpg]

NAME. Paris Ašhar AGE & BIRTH DATE. 3,000+ and Unknown GENDER & PRONOUNS. Male & He/Him SPECIES. Manticore OCCUPATION. Pirate FACE CLAIM. Alperen Duymaz

BIOGRAPHY

Paris was born in the city of Troy, nameless and with a future that would spell disaster for his family. His mother did not bother to give him a name; he would be dead from exposure by the next day. At least, that was the plan. A seer had told his parents that he would one day be the ruin of his homeland. To protect themselves, Priam and Hecuba decided that he would no longer be their child, and they would pay someone else to do the deed of ridding them of their son. The chief herdsman, Agelaus, took Paris himself, but he, too, could not bring himself to kill the child. Instead, he raised him as his own. He named him after the bag he carried him in, and was raised as a shepherd instead of the prince he had been born as.

As a young man, Paris found his own desires and destiny on the hills of Mount Ida. He had no idea it was the mountain he was intended to die on as a child, but his past never once darkened the future he saw for himself. He was no stranger to the gods, either. In fact, it was the dryads whom he found fast friendships with – and the very first love that he knew. The dryads were around in the beginning; in the Golden Age that Paris had heard so much about. They knew his heart, and he knew theirs. Loving them was easy, and it was natural. When the Dryads would return to their trees, Paris would spend night beneath them, whispering about the tales he’d been told – no matter how far from the original the others had said they were. This was his life, and it was all he needed.

But the fates would not be circumvented, and the moment Hermes came for him, he was unable to say no. The gods promised to give him the life he wanted with the dryads he loved, if only he could solve a dispute between the goddesses. Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite – who was the most beautiful? A golden apple of discord thrown by Eris herself; all Paris could think of was how they should’ve just invited her to the wedding in the first place. Perhaps it spoke volumes that Zeus could not make a decision even with his wife in the discussion, but the deed fell to Paris. His heart belonged to others, but even he could not decide. He was only human, and therefore he was far from perfect. The goddesses instead attempted bribery – from Hera, ownership of all the known land. From Athena, the greatest war abilities known. And from Aphrodite, the love of the most beautiful woman. To Paris, there was no choice in this, either. Not until Aphrodite changed her bribe – where he could know the purest form of love. In his mind, it would only be knowledge shared among the two that held his heart. Not the promise of the other half of his soul – the one Zeus tore from all humans when they were born.

Helen of Sparta was that other half, and there was no denying the connection when they met. This was in secret, of course. Aphrodite had teleported him to her kingdom in Sparta – trapped to a marriage with Menelaus. They planned an escape from the city, hightailing it back to the land of Troy. But it was then that everything started to fall apart. Priam had learned from Agelaus that his son had not died after birth like it was intended, and now he needed protection. Arguably, Paris insisted that they would be fine away from the city, in the hills of Troy’s kingdom, where they would not be found. The dryads would protect them – Paris had told them of his plans. Helen was the other part of him, therefore, they would have the solution.

That never came to pass, however, as the invading army from Greece trapped them within the walls of Troy. Menelaus on a mission to bring home his wife, and Agamemnon with the strength of Achilles and the Myrmidons behind them. Paris knew what he had to do – to cause less bloodshed, he challenged Menelaus to single combat. His skills lied with the bow and arrow he’d used his whole life, so he was no match for the strength and wisdom of Menelaus with a sword and shield. In fact, Paris was more than willing to die – but only if it meant that Helen would have a chance to escape in the aftermath of his death. Maybe then he’d be able to go with the dryads to Elysium, or wherever they were able to visit with Gaia’s help.

It was Aphrodite who saved him, though she only pushed back the inevitable. Full scale war broke out, the clashing armies of Greece and Troy now fighting to bring Helen home – or to let her stay. All attempts to flee were blocked; death was at their gates. Though he was always just a pawn in the mind of the gods; Apollo guided his hand as he took his last stand. His arrow brought down Achilles, and it was an arrow from Philoctetes that would spell his own death. There was no time for him to say goodbye. No goodbye to Helen, and no goodbye to Gael and Aster, just a mountain top where he would be left to die.

Oenone, a river-nymph and daughter of Oceanus, had the ability to heal all wounds. It was Aphrodite who promised his love to the nymph if she would save him. Oenone did – but Paris held no love for her, either. It was her father who cursed him for the break of a promise he’d never made. Oceanus turned him into an incubus, forever cursed to feed on the souls of the living. But that wasn’t enough for the titan. He knew that Paris’ love was for the dryads, the land dwelling children of Gaia. Paris would live as long as he lived upon Oceanus’ or his descendant’s domain. The rivers or the oceans, of course. The longer he spent on land, the more likely he was to die. Whether that be by the shapeshifters of the world, or the Titan himself, it was yet to be decided.

So Paris took to the sea. He would sail to be as close as he could be to the dryads, who had moved back to the mainland of Greece. Paris would visit them as much as he could, until the titans faded from existence, taking Gael and Aster as well. The incubus’ mistake was thinking that with the fall of the Titans, he, too, was free from his curse. However, Poseidon inherited the seas – and so he inherited Paris’ curse and immortality. Paris mourned the dormant nature of the dryads that held his heart, and he spent far too long on land besides their tree. It was his bow and arrow that saved him, though the more shifters he killed, the more he was hunted.

The only place Paris found safety was upon a ship. For years, he would swap between vessels. Nothing could harm him, and as captains came and went, Paris found himself no longer a young man, but a weathered old soldier who’d known love and loss, and once Aphrodite could no longer reach him, he was utterly alone. The centuries passed, and the more naval warfare that he entered, the more lost Paris felt. He was jaded, treated the humans he would steal souls from as nothing but a body to pass the time. Witches who no longer had magic because of him would only recognize it too late, and he remained impervious on the ocean.

It wasn’t until he became captain of his own ship that he began to spread more terror than he thought was possible. Paris had never fit in, anywhere he’d gone, so he decided to make a life for himself as a pirate captain. Mutiny was easy thanks to his charm; the cubi easily became captain of a ship where a crew loved him. The only issue was the fact that he would have to dock every few weeks to replenish the crew – downside of being an Incubus. He would ensure to stop by Corinthia every few months, telling tales of his adventures to Gael and Aster as they slept. Anyone who came too close to the dryad’s resting place would meet their death with an arrow to the heart.

As the Golden Age of piracy spread, so did the ship’s crew. Immortals who needed a place to call home found his ship, and quickly it became all of theirs. Paris had never truly had a family outside of the ones he’d left behind in Troy all those centuries ago, but these reapers, furies – they became his family. Paris would stop at nothing to defend them, pillaging throughout the world as piracy became their main agenda. It was yet again another time that Paris had pushed his luck upon land – close to the docks, waiting too long for another of their crew. A snake, hidden among belongs, and a bite that poisoned his blood instantly. Paris should have known, perhaps he should’ve been far more careful, as well. It took him slowly, long enough to where he felt the rock of the waves hit the ship, and the gaze of his friend before his own vision went dark.

The pit of Tartarus welcomed him. Typhon, with all his rage, and the eternal torment and despair that awaited him gave him nothing but hell to witness. Countless times he was torn apart, his soul shattered piece by piece. Crudely he was put back together, for centuries and centuries, until his soul was no longer recognizable. Paris held on to the memories of Gael, of Aster, and when he was young – when he wasn’t cursed, or used by the gods. It seemed like a dream when he was suddenly free. No longer an incubus, but a manticore. His freedom was met with the awakening of the dryads, and now Paris has to find his way yet again in a world he does not know.

PERSONALITY

+ imaginative, reliable, courageous - blunt, anxious, impatient

PLAYED BY LAUREN. PST. She/Her.

[docfuture]

Princess, part 12

       [This story is a prequel, set in an alternate 2012, several years before The Fall of Doc Future, when Flicker is 16.  Links to some of my other work are here.  Updates are theoretically biweekly. Next chapter is partly done so I’m going to try to get it out early in September.]

Previous: Part 11

      Recovery--and a start at change and learning.       Flicker thought about the wrap up of her first session, and Stella's comments on paying a bit more attention to the ways other people were already helping.       "... and I just suppressed thinking about it at all because the frustration got real bad when I didn't," Flicker had said.       "Understandable," said Stella.  "Did you consider talking to Armadillo?"       "I talked to her about some general stuff, but she's... old."       Stella nodded slowly.  "I can see how the Database might have given you the impression that sex was invented sometime in the 60s.  And Armadillo was already middle-aged by then."       "That's not fair.  It just that the primary sources were so indirect and coded about it.  And left so much out.  The Database doesn't..."  Flicker frowned, then sped up to check a few things.  After a while she slowed back down.       "Well, crap," she said.  "I learned most of my 20th century history when I was randomly bouncing around the Database reading whatever caught my interest when I was 11 or 12.  So I missed stuff.  And I didn't go back, and made some implicit assumptions."       "You might find a discussion with Armadillo illuminating," said Stella.  "Have you considered that Doc might not be the person contributing the most to the collective judgement of your social maturity level that the Database uses to set your default access levels?  He seems willing to delegate to people he trusts, and of those, Armadillo clearly has had experience with children."       "Oof.  No, I hadn't thought of that."  Flicker sighed.  "Sometimes I wonder about the amount of time I spend mentally running circles around things without looking at what's at the center."       "Don't be too harsh on yourself.  You blame most of your social difficulties on mental differences, poor references, and lack of practice.  But the form of your education mattered, too.  You never went to school before your graduate work, and you did most of that remotely.  You learned from Doc, the Database, and direct observation--primarily of static scenes because of your speed.  And the bulk of educational material in the Database was written by and for typical humans, with all the embedded assumptions that entails."       "I really like the Database.  And the summaries help."       Stella shook her head.  "Not always.  Not if you don't know what's missing.  The Database AI made judgements when you were younger about what was appropriate at the time.  This shaped your knowledge map, which was already going to be very different from most humans.  So do your Database access restrictions.  Information revealed selectively or out of order can harm.  And if the Database can't reveal A to you--for, say, privacy reasons--and revealing B without A would cause harm, it will restrict B as well.  I'm sure Doc must have warned you about that."       "Yeah, but a lot of his restrictions seem arbitrary."       "Many will, if done right.  Database restrictions can and do cause bias problems, but overriding them is inherently risky.  The Database AI has to balance that, and there are no optimal choices, because the whole idea of the Database as an 'objective' knowledge map is a illusion.  The Database is biased by what gets recorded.  Your access to it is further biased, and what you actually do access is even more biased.  But the idea that you are necessarily getting closer to impartial truth when you override a warning is dangerous."       "So I can mess myself up with overrides."       "You already have.  Repeatedly.  Information shaping is one of my more powerful tools.  Cruder forms of it are in widespread use and getting more effective every day.  But perceptions come pre-shaped."  Stella had sipped from her cup of coffee before continuing.  "For example, you are highly proficient in many math-heavy technical subjects not usually mastered until graduate school, and awkward in areas typically covered by early childhood education or peer group socialization.  So when you made your implicit assumptions?  Of course you missed things.  However."       Stella was good at an 'I have a secret to share--eventually' style of speaking that was both mildly annoying and very effective at focusing attention.       "Yes?" said Flicker.       "Anyone would.  You just missed different things.  Others might have helped with some of them.  But no one could predict them all.  Not Doc, not the Database, not me.  So do what you can, but don't be too hard on yourself when mistakes happen."       "Ah.  I'll try to remember that."       *****       Flicker tried to follow Stella's initial guidelines, which focused on short term recovery, stabilization, and 'stop making this worse'.  Avoiding patrols was the most important and hardest to follow advice.  Physical therapy and exercise were tedious, but not difficult.  The dietary changes... were trickier.  Flicker had lost weight from the accident and the isotope exchanger sessions which she really couldn't afford.  And her kind of pseudo-shapeshifter healing depended on adequate body mass.  Stella forwarded some funny essays on cuisine and recovery for shapeshifters supposedly written by a French werewolf, and had the Database reset her food and drink related warnings, with an eye to both mental and physical health.       She'd also pointed out to Flicker that it only took a few early incidents of plasma in the GI tract while pushing the limits of her entropy dumping to cause lasting aversion to eating much while on call.  So when she later started to feel like she was on duty almost all the time, she stopped eating proper meals except with friends.  Staying off patrol for now made it possible to change that, but not easy.  Theoretically, she could eat like an Olympic athlete in training while exercising appropriately, and recover quite quickly, but that wasn't realistic.  She was stubborn, but so were her habits.       She couldn't patrol, but she could keep busy by surveying--updating Database geographical and obstacle data--and doing interior construction and finishing work on her house.  Back-ordered materials had piled up.  Flicker used power tools mainly for precision and delicacy; she had custom hand tools for speed and power, and boxes of regular hammers and screwdrivers to replace the ones she wore out or broke.  Superspeed and robotic help let her make rapid progress in the half days she was putting in to it.  Common areas and guest rooms were finished, and recreation areas, a wider variety of workshops, and Database node expansion rooms were all taking shape.       Making time to talk and eat with friends wasn't sophisticated advice, but it was obviously helpful.  She'd had dinner with Jetgirl and her husband yesterday.  Good food, carefully non-specific sympathy, then after dinner, 'girl talk' with Jetgirl.  Which meant tech geekery--they spent a few hours discussing the instrumentation and results from Speedtest, and Jetgirl's suggestions for some issues Flicker had encountered expanding her robotics workshop.  Reliable comfort.       The aftereffects from the cybernetic interface withdrawal were finally mostly gone, and Flicker's metabolism and appetite seemed to be responding to her exercises.  She was definitely putting on muscle faster than a human could.  And she'd mentioned her problem to Stavros, the owner of her favorite Greek restaurant, he'd gotten a look on his face like he'd been personally called upon to save the world, and now she had enough takeout in her fridge to feed a starving pseudo-mythological extradimensional being for a week.       Today, a visit with Armadillo.  She had promised something interesting.       Flicker had once asked Armadillo why she hadn't picked the name Glyptodon instead, because that seemed closer in size and fearsomeness to her appearance.  Armadillo had laughed and said she'd never heard of them at the time--the late 40s.  The two of them were at Armadillo's house, sitting at a table with an impressive feast.  It was not unusual for Armadillo; with super strength, near invulnerability, and half a ton of mass, she ate a lot, and saw no reason not to enjoy it.  Armadillo was cheerful and a good friend, as well as effectively family.  And at an age of 98, she knew a lot of history, especially the kinds that didn't usually get recorded very well.       The main reason Flicker didn't visit more often was an embarrassing one: When she'd been younger she'd had episodes of severe insomnia.  But Armadilo knew how to spin a story to help.  So when the biological part of Flicker's brain was working, it associated Armadillo's stories strongly with drowsiness.       Which didn't mean they were boring.       Armadillo was sharing some anecdotes from the late Pre-Net era--the 50s through the 70s--when Luce Cannon, Belle Tinker, and One-eyed Jack had been prominent superheroes.  They had set precedents that ended up shaping the way the Database had been assembled.  The norms Luce had established as a practical way of preserving relationship privacy and security without centralized infrastructure required narrative indirection and implication in order to discuss certain subjects at all.  Armadillo was very good at the style needed.  Unfortunately, that and the lack of unrestricted Database references hindered the usual ways Flicker updated her memories, so she was having trouble with details.  But there were definitely differences from the way she'd thought about the origins of the Database.       "Huh," she said.  "I always assumed that Doc decided everything important when he first built the Database, and the rest was just legacy format and historical records."       "Not entirely," said Armadillo.  "Luce knew all about records and careful access--she built her own intelligence operation, after all--and Belle was already starting to convert some of them to electronic form and building early bots in the fifties.  But reliability for anyone but Belle was always a problem, and she didn't have the level of conscientiousness about documentation that Doc did."       "Um.  Doc isn't always that great about documentation.  He gets--"       "The Database AI or someone else to do a lot of it.  I know.  But someone does.  Heck, I've done my share.  Belle was way ahead of her time, but we never found anything but cryptic notebook scribbles for some of her weirder stuff.  Left a bit of a mess after she was gone.  Doc brought in organization, documentation, robustness, and speed, and then extended it to everything.  But the first Database grew out of what he built for Luce not long before she died.  And Luce set some access conditions, which Doc won't change without a good reason.  So don't blame Doc for all of them."       "So the age restrictions are from Luce?"       "Some of them, yeah--but they aren't hardcoded, they're more flexible; we knew they'd have to accommodate aliens and extradimensional beings and whatnot.  It's really a maturity threshold."  Armadillo smiled.  "But I have a treat for you."       "Oh?"       "There are a few things I have personal discretion about.  And you've hit a block involving one of them twice now.  It's a good example of how we handled a few things back in the day, and might help you understand some of the ambiguity.  I can show it to you, but you'll have to put your visor on locked standby or take it off--no unrestricted electronic images of this are allowed."       Flicker frowned, but arranged a protocol with the Database and pulled back her hood.  Armadillo pushed back a plate, picked up a small case, opened it, and pulled out a large photographic print.       "This is a copy of the last known good photograph of Belle Tinker.  The original is in my family photo album in one of Doc's vaults."       Flicker moved her chair closer to get a better look.  It was a group photo, centered on a younger Armadillo.  "What's that blacked out area?"       "Non-superheroes with living relatives.  The photo is from my 60th birthday party in 1974."       Given the date, Flicker wasn't surprised that Armadillo was a bit narrower--she'd still been slowly adding mass.  But...  "Head spikes?"       Armadillo laughed.  "Yeah, that was my last try at regrowing them.  I'd been on a trip to Tokyo the previous year, and there was a translator around during a Kaiju attack.  I ended up stopping it by talking to the big fellow about the relative effectiveness of head spikes for challenge bellowing.  We had a nice talk, and everyone went home happy.  No property damage, even.  So I decided to give them another try.  But mine were only a little stronger than steel, so they kept breaking off--same kind of problem you have with your hair.  I finally gave up in 75?  Or maybe 76?  But really, I'm the least interesting person in that photo.  I'm curious what you think about the others."       "Okay," said Flicker.  "But that goblet you're drinking out of...  Is that a demon skull?"       "Yep.  The goblet was a birthday present.  It would have been rude not to try it out."  Armadillo nodded towards a nearby cabinet.  "I still have it, but I hardly ever use it anymore.  Little call for it, and it's tricky to clean."       "Um, okay."  Flicker studied the image of the woman with red hair, a lab coat, safety glasses, and an expression of indulgent patience.  "Belle has the same kind of 'I could be in my lab working on something cool' face I've seen Doc make.  Most of the contemporary sources I found in the Database were really bad at describing her.  She'd have been, what, in her late forties?  She looks younger than that, fit, and tough, I don't understand what was going on."       Armadillo smiled.  "There were a few that treated her reasonably--but they tended not to emphasize appearance.  Belle did not fit any 'feminine' stereotype back then, there were a number of media bigwigs who really didn't like her, and she didn't humor patronizing reporters.  So it was common for them to distort or belittle her intelligence and accomplishments, insult her appearance, attack her character, or just use bad pictures.  If they had to write about her at all.  That's one reason why the quality of much of what you found about her is poor."       Another woman with short dark hair was leaning against the table with a relaxed smile, but a very clear presence.       "Did Luce Cannon always look like she was in charge?" asked Flicker.  "I mean, it was your party, but..."       "She could hide it, but she was keeping an eye on someone who could get overenthusiastic."       A girl wearing a black outfit was smiling intently at the camera with a predatory look.  She appeared to be around eleven; it was hard for Flicker to judge ages.       "Is that a toy sword?" asked Flicker.  "It looks awfully realistic."       "Nope.  That was Katya's first magic sword.  She outgrew it; it's in the vaults now."       "Magic sword?  Wait... Katya?  That's Jumping Spider?"       "Oh, goodness no; she wouldn't use that name for years.  That's Katya the... Hunter, I think?  She switched from the Devastator sometime around then.  This was only a year after Luce started teaching her."       "Did... What... Why is she waving a sword around at your birthday party?"       "It was a compromise; she wanted to make a little pyramid out of the other skulls for the picture, but Luce vetoed that as unsanitary.  Just as well; Belle said they smelled pretty manky."       "Other skulls?"  Every time Flicker got a question answered, she immediately had several more--and she couldn't speed up and check the Database because her visor was off.       "Besides the one Jack and Belle turned into the goblet for my birthday present.  It was Katya's idea, so she got to hunt the demons, and she went a little overboard getting spare skulls.  Jack took her to the dimension where they lived--nasty place, but they were immune to poison, which was handy."       "...it's a magic goblet."       "Oh, yeah, it detoxifies anything in it," said Armadillo.  "If I ever want to be absolutely sure I can't be poisoned or I'm worried about contamination, I use it.  But it's usually overkill, it makes most non-alcoholic beverages taste kind of funny, and properly cleaning the precipitate chamber is a pain."       "Doc never let me hunt demons when I was ten," muttered Flicker as she studied the figure standing next to Belle in the photo.       "Mores change, and your adoption process wasn't complete yet.  It would have been awkward to explain."       "Did One-eyed Jack ever show any sign of aging?  It doesn't look like his appearance changed at all in pictures."       "Nope," said Armadillo.  "At least not from when I first met him in '50 or so until he disappeared in the nineties.  White hair, neatly trimmed beard, and the eyepatch.  He almost always wore that hooded robe and carried that staff with the magical doodad on the end.  Occasionally he'd switch to a really old style suit and a dress cane--he could do an impressive Offended Aristocrat act.  But his apparent age never changed.  I suspect he was some kind of shapeshifter, and I know he could create illusions, though, so I'm not sure anyone really knows for sure."       "Wait.  Disappeared?  The Database lists him as 'presumed dead' with supporting evidence; someone found his eyepatch and a scrap of robe near a small crater in the Topaz Realm and Doc verified they were genuine."       "Yep.  Doesn't mean he died.  He might have just decided it was time to stop being Jack.  Hard to believe someone as careful as him would botch a portal like that, and it seemed awfully pat that it happened somewhere with enough ravenous scavengers to ensure the lack of remains wasn't suspicious.  If he was a shapeshifter, there could be someone with his memories who looks quite different running around somewhere.  And he had a saying: 'Sometimes you see something coming and all you can do is get out of the way.'  I think that's what he did."  Armadillo grinned.  "But then, I've been accused of being sentimental from time to time."       "Okay," said Flicker.  "If you're suspicious about Jack, what about Belle?  She was declared dead, but all the Database says is that something catastrophic happened to her portal generator late at night and she was gone afterwards.  Jack is recorded as testifying that as far as he could tell, she hadn't been murdered or kidnapped, definitely wasn't alive on Earth, and he wasn't able to tell quite what happened with the portal.  But Doc said that if she really wanted to burn her bridges, she could have set the portal generator to self destruct, then gone through to somewhere before it blew.  He still has the remains of it in the vaults."       Armadillo looked out the window.  "All true.  She seemed kind of withdrawn for a while before that.  Well, withdrawn for her--she was always full of more ideas than she had time to try.  She'd had a disagreement with Luce and the Volunteer for a couple of years over... I guess you could call it public policy.  She made some predictions that turned out to be pretty accurate, and the first part of one of them had just happened--that was '80.  It's conceivable she might have just been tired of Earth.  But then she was kind of close to Jack, and he was pretty down afterwards--and if she went somewhere else, I don't know why he wouldn't be able to visit.  I tried talking to him about it once, and he just shook his head.  So I really can't say."       "Were they a couple?" asked Flicker.  "Database is ambiguous--they at least pretended a few times, but it wasn't clear what was going on.  I assume it's okay to ask about that now that they're both gone?"       "Heh.  It's not forbidden to ask, and they worked well together in the lab when Belle wasn't out causing trouble with Luce.  I'll say this; Belle never showed interest in most men--she'd roll her eyes at most of my jokes--and Jack never showed any interest in anyone but Belle.  But it could just have been cover; a convenience for both of them."       "Oh."       Flicker frowned at the last figure--a middle-aged man in nondescript clothing, leaning back in the chair beside Armadillo.  His glasses were perched precariously on the end of his nose, his fingers were laced over his chest, and his eyes were closed.       "Who is the guy beside you, and why is he asleep?"       Armadillo smiled.  "Oh, he'd had a long day, then a nice meal, so he just was catching a little nap.  He sometimes answered to the name of Chandler Devon."       Okay, now I know I'm being tested.  Flicker sped up.  The name was vaguely familiar--why?  She glanced at Luce again, then remembered.  Chandler Devon was connected to Luce Cannon in some way, perhaps one of her agents, or possibly romantically linked--but that had been a shaky source.  Documentation about him had been really spotty, with large gaps.  He'd been a skilled enough amateur geologist to get a few articles published, later in life.  But his fondness for volcanoes had apparently done him in--he'd disappeared during the Mount Pinatubo eruption a few years after Luce's death.       That made the third nominally dead person in the picture with a missing body.  The only person who was definitely dead and buried was Luce--she'd died of cancer in the late 80s.       There were several odd things that required explanation about 'Chandler Devon'.  Why was he even at Armadillo's party?  Had Luce brought him?       Why hadn't anyone woken him up for the picture?  It was a memorable occasion.  Was it a prank?       Wait.  Armadillo had said she was the least interesting person in the photo.  What could possible make him more interesting than her?  If he--       Oh.       So that's what he looks like when he's asleep.  But how did he manage...  Luce.  Of course.  She was the original super spy.  Jumping Spider's teacher.  If anyone could cover everything he'd need, it would have been her.  That explained so much.  He'd gone more than fifty years without anyone--       Idiot.  Everyone in that picture probably knew.  He'd always had a family.  A family of choice.  They just never, ever gave it away.  Even when they disagreed with each other.       But still, a few years after Luce died, he decided it was time to stop being Chandler Devon.  Could he still maintain cover?  Probably; Jumping Spider was 27 by then, and Doc was 17, with the Database up and running.  But the Lost Years were about to start, and Doc had seen that coming.  No longer worth the trouble, maybe?  How much had Luce meant to Chandler Devon?       A lot to think about, most of it not even about Belle.  But there was etiquette to be observed.  And as far as Flicker could tell, it was to indicate obliquely that she'd guessed, but not say anything unambiguous.  She could come up with something.       She slowed back down--and found herself blinking back tears.       "He looks like...  someone who works very hard," she managed.  "And doesn't get a chance to relax very often.  I'm glad no one woke him up."       Armadillo nodded slowly.  "So was I."  She started to put the picture back in the box.       "Wait," said Flicker.  "Who took the picture?  I thought I knew, but now I think I was wrong."       Armadillo paused.  "Another time, maybe.  You probably have enough to cogitate about today already."       "Yeah.  Yeah, I do."

Next:  Part 13

[wits-writing]

Ultraman Z Ep. 8: “The Mystic Power” (TV Review)

(Original Air Date: August 7, 2020, Director: Koichi Sakamoto, Writer: Sotaro Hayashi)

Kaburagi’s experiments to create Monster Medals continues in this week’s Ultraman Z as he gathers the material to push past the limits of the Z-Risers fusion to create the devastating Five King. Meanwhile, his plans to gather those materials lead to one of the weakest story threads in the show so far.

[Full Review Under the Cut]

Celebro, the alien possessing Kaburagi, has been gradually getting more focus over the last few episodes. The momentum around his role in the story this time comes from Juggler following up on his investigation into his operation after finding Kaburagi’s nametag after their encounter last episode. Juggler being the first character we’ve seen call Celebro by his name suggests that he’s connected to why Juggler’s on this Earth to begin with. We also get more of how Celebro’s been operating to obtain the materials he needs for his experiments to create Monster Medals. We see he’s contracted two shapeshifting Alien Pitt sisters to obtain rare specimens for him this episode. Brainwashing them to gather more sample when he needs more. That he refers to the use of these materials as “an experiment” shows a detachment from the damage he’s causing. What matters is seeing how he can use the power of the tech behind the Z Riser and the medals to his own use. Juggler’s investigation confirms a bit of this when he finds a notebook Celebro’s been keeping on Kaburagi’s desk, containing the details of Ultra Medal creation written in an alien language.

Last time I discussed the use of sunset as a lighting choice during the Ultraman fight. The fights in this episode go forward into battles set at night (or just darken the sky when Tri-King appears early on.) While the magic hour lighting of last time provided darker shadows cast across the Ultras, the fight set against the night sky emphasize contrast. All three of Ultraman Z’s forms have their bright colors pop against the dark navy of the sky during the fight against Tri/Five-King. This is itself in contrast with the first fight in the episode, when Sevenger and Windom are fighting Tri-King. The cloud coverage Tri-King brings creates a muted palette emphasizing the dire situation of the two robots being overwhelmed by the fusion monster.

The time between these two fights gets split between Juggler’s previously mentioned investigation into Celebro and the part of this episode that I’m the most mixed on, Yoko and Yuka’s subplot. I spent a decent part of my discussion of the previous episode on how I felt the two characters weren’t given much to do with prominent guest characters showing up. The way this episode uses the time they’re given makes me feel like I jinxed something by bringing it up, since they spend a portion of this episode captured by the Alien Pitt sisters. The sequence of events that get them caught is a series of misunderstanding caused by Yuka finding Haruki’s lost Z-Riser in the aftermath of the first Tri-King. One of the sisters sees this and takes them both under the assumption one of them must be Zett’s human form. Her decision to take them both coming down to her impatience to figure out which one it might be is a genuinely funny touch.  

While Yoko and Yuka getting stuck with the role of capture victims is eyeroll inducing, there are a few things I enjoyed about their roles this episode. The opening sparring match at STORAGE headquarters between Yoko and Haruki makes a fun low stakes character moment between them while emphasizing Yoko’s fighting skills. Rima Matsuda as Yoko is especially impressive in this scene and the later fights since it’s clear she’s doing quite a few of these gymnastic moves on her own. The scene also works as a reminder of how much she outmatches both Haruki and Yuka in fighting skills. A trait used to humorous effect when Yuka pouts about being challenged by Yoko during the training exercise when they both know she’ll lose. Yuka’s fun as usual whenever she gets to express her passion for all things alien or monster related. That’s best displayed when Yoko and Yuka get broken free by Haruki and get to fight their captors. Yoko takes part in a more direct fight with one of the sisters. Meanwhile, the other spends most of that time running from Yuka as she asks to study her up close. These aspects don’t balance out what doesn’t work in their story, but they’re still nice to see. Though one thing I hope doesn’t get forgotten about in this subplot in the two of them seeing the Pitt sisters delivering more alien samples to the possessed Kaburagi. Since they barely remark upon “this guy is wearing the uniform of the guys that clean up after our monster fights” in this episode.

The main attraction for this episode is the debut of the latest of Ultraman Z’s fusion forms, Gamma Future. When the fight against Five-King takes a turn for the worse, Juggler decides to finally give the Ultra Medals he’s had since the end of episode one to Haruki and Zett (him being their source remains unknown.) This form is primarily based on the first three Ultras from the Heisei era of the franchise, Tiga, Dyna, and Gaia. Zett’s description of the three ties into the “mystical” theme of Gamma Future as a form. While the other two sets have been described by the rookie Ultra as “masters” and “brothers”, he only describes these three as being from other dimensions and that he’s only heard of them from Zero. It gives the sense that the three are mythic even among other Ultras.

Gamma Future’s look is set apart from Alpha Edge and Beta Smash primarily by its golden breastplate, a design choice taken directly from Tiga. There’s also a sense of grace and precision to how Zett moves in this form, emphasizing how it’s less physical than the other two. The attacks of this form are shown in three forms; energy tendrils, the summoning of the three Heisei Ultras to blast Five-King, and finally shrinking down so Zett can go inside Five King and blast him to pieces from within. It’s easily the most unique of the form debuts so far if nothing else.

“The Mystic Powers” leaves me with the most mixed feelings of any Ultraman Z episode so far thanks to how it misuses Yoko and Yuka. Though the advancement of the Celebro plot, presentation of the monster fights, and debut of Gamma Future are still enough to keep it from being even close to a bad episode. It’s still a well-constructed show and I hope it doesn’t repeat these mistakes to often in the future.

If you like what you’ve read here, please like/reblog or share elsewhere online, follow me on Twitter (@WC_WIT), and consider throwing some support my way at either Ko-Fi.com or Patreon.com at the extension “/witswriting”