#but that would have been too easy

[mrsthunderkin]

Did a new token for Issy as an experiment for the campaign visuals.

It was a success and now I need to do a whole set.

[humming-fly]

He was feeling left out

and the higher rez stills, since gifs always export as if you're sending messages through a metal can~

[vaguely-concerned]

can you even imagine what a fucking horror show the early game is from spite's perspective, though. not only is this funky forcibly severed little slip of the fade having to deal with the reverse cosmic horror of physical reality as perceived by a spirit and being trapped in it against its will -- existentially confused and disoriented and hurting and nothing makes any kind of sense, at the mercy of human cruelty at its most deliberately sadistic. and then the one source of comfort and compassion and some kind of safety and clarity that lucanis surely must have been to him in the ossuary despite everything just goes and shuts himself in his room inside with a seemingly passive aggressive number of locks between them and no explanation and won't speak to him and they're STILL in the fucking ossuary. rook came and found them and they could be free now (rook is here!) and still lucanis keeps them in the ossuary even though he PROMISED he promised they'd get out of there together!!! what the fuck DO you think at that point? like did he trick me that whole time??? he wasn't like zara before, so why is he doing this to me now? why isn't he saying anything? 'he won't move. I can't reach him'. at least in the ossuary they had a deal, a goal, a hope -- each other. at least he wasn't entirely alone, before.

this poor poor poor little spite spirit really was ferried into the real world like 'hey welcome to reality! as your first introduction to it you're first getting horrifically tortured and then getting to vicariously experience one of THE most distressing and harrowing psychological conditions the human brain can cook up for itself (a fully fledged and deeply entrenched freeze response flaring up with catastrophic severity due to an unbroken ongoing and unlikely to let up any time soon chain of Unfortunately... Recent Events). I think spite is being extremely reasonable and patient about the whole thing, when you put it into perspective. I'm not saying let him eat the self-lighting candles or anything, but he's got some extremely valid points along the way lol. spite is not only child-like, the metaphor work going on is a lot more pleasingly flexible and complex than that, but he is also helplessly existentially dependent on lucanis in a way that, if anything, is a heightened version of the way a child (or child part) has to depend on a parent to navigate the world and survive.

tl;dr: we truly don't give enough sympathy to spite for having to live in the head of lucanis dellamorte. a place even lucanis dellamorte would prefer not to be. to be fair to him I think lucanis would be the first person to agree with this lol

[demigods-posts]

luke fumbling in recruiting percy has to be one of his greatest failures. a beautiful thing the show does regarding luke and percy's relationship is building rapport between them through shared moments like settling into camp, eating meals together, but especially through swordfighting lessons. the swordfighting scene at the beginning of episode 8 not only reveals that percy and luke already share similar beliefs about the fear-based system the gods have cultivated, but it's clear the conversation stays with percy when he fights ares and later calls out zeus on his waning skills as a father and a king. however, luke's plan fell through the moment percy learned that the winged-shoes were meant to drag him to tartarus. not only that, but the shoes nearly killed grover, a friend percy cared for deeply. if nourishing loyalty and trust was the key to ensuring a partnership with percy, then it was luke's faulty planning, arrogance, and impatience that cost him the greatest ally he could ask for.

[payasita]

*drops a dead heretic at your door* Meow

yeah

[goodlucktai]

Uhuuh if you don't mind for the injury promo maybe 12 with splinter/lou and his boys, pls?

dialogue prompts

12. “Where are they? Where are they?!”

this one got away from me :') rise/2012 crossover babyyyyyyy

x

Splinter’s counterpart reacted to the news of their sons’ abduction with a level of dramatics that he would never ascribe to his own self. 

“What?” the shorter rat (“Call me Lou,” he had said, and then proceeded not to explain why) squawked at the disheveled humans still trying to collect their breath at the entrance of the lair. “When did this happen? How did this happen? There were TEN of you!”

Casey and April both winced in face of the not-unwarranted scolding. The children had had perhaps too much confidence as they left together earlier that evening. Donatello’s computer had alerted him in the middle of dinner to a new lead on the gang whose activity they had been following for the past weeks. Raphael had smashed his fists together, a wicked grin on his face, and said they should strike while their forces were doubled and make those ‘goons’ regret robbing every pharmacy in Manhattan north of The Battery. 

“Tiny feral Raph is hilarious,” Lou’s Purple had said in a deadpan. “And also alarmingly down to commit atrocities. I want to ride with him.”

And now, not even two full hours later, their human companions returned to report a resounding failure. 

Casey, scowling at the floor, said, “They got the drop on us. The door sealed as soon as we were in and the room started filling up with gas.”

“They said they were chemists,” April added. She couldn’t lift her head enough to look Splinter in the eye, staring hard somewhere near his shoulder instead. “One of their colleagues was mutated about a year ago and they’ve been studying the mutagen ever since. I don’t know what they want with the boys, but they made it sound like the gas was made with the turtle’s physiology in mind. That it would outright kill me and Casey, but shouldn’t harm them.”

Lou was bristling, tail lashing. “‘Shouldn’t’ is the word they used?” he gritted out. 

“Yeah. It hit them hard in seconds. But Blue—uh, your Leo—” Casey said, with an uncomfortable sideways look at Lou, “—he managed to get one of his swords out and portaled me and April away. We waited for like five minutes to see if he’d get anyone else out, but…”

But no one came goes unsaid. 

Splinter tapped his walking stick on the floor once to recall their focus, warm affection filling his chest for these little Hamato adoptees who fell haphazardly into his clan. 

“Lou is correct,” he said. “It is unfortunate that your team was so quickly overwhelmed. We will discuss how to better handle situations like this another time.” 

Both humans stood a little taller when it became clear that that conversation would be tabled for the time being, and April finally found it within herself to meet Splinter’s eyes. 

“For now—” he started, only for Lou to cut him off with a sound not unlike a cat whose tail had just been stepped on.

“Don’t put words in my mouth,” the shorter rat snapped. “I don’t care if they lost within two minutes, let alone two hours. I only meant,” he went on, with a hard look at the teenagers, “that you should have called the instant you were in danger! Why on earth would you run all the way home like this without letting us know what had happened, putting yourselves at unnecessary risk? This organization could have had additional members waiting to pick you off when you were alone! You could have at least made time to send a text!”

Casey and April looked absolutely bewildered. Their respect for Splinter was so deeply ingrained by now that it carried over to this odd likeness of him but they did not seem to know what to do with this manner of reprimand. 

“Uh,” Casey said eloquently. “Splinter doesn’t have a phone.”

“There was the cheese phone,” April interjected. “Sorry, I mean, he had a landline. But the wiring got messed up awhile ago and Donnie never got around to fixing it.”

“You have seven children,” Lou seethed, narrowing his eyes at Splinter, “and you don’t see the importance of having a working phone?”

Splinter frowned. He was taken aback by the number seven, but more so by this hostility that seemed to have sprung up from nowhere. 

“We have gotten along just fine. Donatello’s inclination towards technology was not inherited from me.”

“There’s no time to continue this conversation, and if we do I am liable to start screaming profanities anyway. Jones, O’Neil, take me to my boys.” 

Lou was still bristling with anger, only now that Splinter was looking closer, he saw that the shorter rat was actually bristling. His fur was standing up as though with electric static. 

“If even one scale on their shells has been harmed,” he added darkly, to no one in particular, “there will be hell to pay.”

April led the way to the garage at a sprint, hopping up without breaking stride to grab the keys from their hook on the wall just inside the door. She tossed the keys to Casey and claimed the front passenger seat for herself, leaving the two fathers to pile into the back of the van. 

It wasn’t until she was still that Splinter noticed her fingertips were red and raw from where she had bitten the nails down to the quick. As Casey started the engine, her thumbnail found its way back between her teeth, blue eyes feverish with worry as she stared into the middle distance. 

She was very anxious, for all that she seemed determined to keep it to herself in present company. Her sideways glance at Casey made it clear that she wanted to share her thoughts with him; a flick of her eyes toward the rearview mirror decided her continued silence.

On the bench seat beside him, Splinter watched Lou take out his own phone. It was a thin flat device, held in a protective case that looked like it would probably survive an apocalypse. The caller ID on the screen was a picture of that behemoth snapping turtle in a fuzzy pink hoodie, squeezed cheek-to-cheek with his tiny spotted brother so they both fit into the frame. 

“Red, this is no time to screen my calls!” Lou said when the tinny automated voice encouraged him to leave a message. “Contact me at once or you are grounded for a month! No, two months!”

“They are probably in no position to answer,” Splinter pointed out, Lou’s restlessness leaving him feeling ill-at-ease. “I am sure they are fine. My sons have been in situations like this countless times.”

Lou pinched the bridge of his nose. “Yoshi, I’m going to level with you. I don’t know how to explain that it’s weird you have become desensitized to the news that your children are in danger. My Baby Blue once locked himself inside a prison dimension with an evil killing machine, and less than a year after that he almost cracked his foolish head open on that ridiculous half-pipe mimicking some superstar skater, and my soul left my body in exactly the same manner both times. That never changes. It has never gone away.”

It was disingenuous of Lou to presume that Splinter did not worry after his sons. Of course he did. They were his greatest pride and it was a privilege he did not deserve to have raised them. 

But they were not the clumsy toddlers they once were; at some point, the parent must let go of the bicycle and step back, or the child will never learn to ride it. 

Splinter could not say he had ever taken the time to consider what it might have been like to meet another version of himself—one who had lived a similar life but had made different choices. He almost did not recognize himself at all in the fussy, short-tempered mutant sitting beside him. 

Lou checked his phone no less than eleven more times during the twenty-minute drive. By the time Casey finally announced, “This is it,” Lou was out of the van before it had even begun to slow. 

“The two of you must remain here,” Splinter told the teenagers in the front firmly. He couldn’t help but think of Lou’s scolding from earlier, and added, “If there is any sign of danger, escape at once and go to the Mutanimals. They will help.”

“I texted the group chat earlier and they haven’t seen it yet,” Casey said, flicking through his phone to double-check. 

“We can’t just leave you,” April added with enough stubborn loyalty that she could have been Raphael’s twin sister. 

“You absolutely can leave us, or you will be grounded, too,” Lou interjected from over by the door, his voice taking on that sharp no-nonsense tone Splinter had last heard directed at Blue over breakfast to curb his relentless teasing of Donatello. 

‘It is just how he and Purple show affection to each other,’ Lou had explained to Donatello, whose shoulders had begun to creep up towards his ears the longer Blue carried on. ‘That does not make it any less irritating for the rest of us though!’

‘Skill issue,’ his twins said in unison. 

‘I will cram all three of you into the get-along shirt! Do not test me!’ Lou had snapped in that particular tone that caused his children to grumble and sulk but ultimately obediently subside. 

Similarly, April scowled but did not seem willing to argue any further. Splinter would have expected her to give a Miwa-worthy retort that she was too old to be grounded and not Splinter’s daughter to discipline besides, but she only jerked her chin in a barely passable nod and said nothing more. An equally unhappy but unargumentative Casey turned off the headlights and twirled the steering wheel, backing the van up and parking it by the access road.

Lou had already kicked the reinforced door down by the time Splinter joined him, and he barely had a moment to think My seventeen-year-olds are stealthier than that before he realized Lou had not come with stealth in mind.

He had the first unfortunate human within his line of sight pinned to the ground with a knife in seconds, barking, “Where are they? Where are they?”

The human, caught unawares, coughed at the unforgiving pressure on her windpipe, and managed to wheeze out, “Wh-who do you—”

“You are a scientist, and therefore I know you are not an idiot,” Lou hissed, much like the animal he had been mutated with. “Do not waste my time acting like one.” 

The woman scrabbled at his arms, for what little good it did. Her eyes, behind the clear visor of the gas mask, were wide with fear. To her credit, she steeled herself enough to cling to whatever mission she and her associates seemed to have rallied behind, saying, “So many incredible things could be—be accomplished—if we had a chance to study the mutagen more closely, if we had test subjects with human-like intelligence. It’s closer to magic than science, and we could do so much—”

“You would experiment on children? My children? Turn them into lab rats?” The last he said with a very personal sort of dark anger. The scientist coughed again, and her renewed struggles were a desperate, animalistic thing as she lost the last of her air beneath the unrelenting press of Lou’s hand. “Is that what you think you should be saying to me? Is that what you think will save you—an appeal to the greater good?”

Splinter dispatched the handful of people who streamed into the room in a series of swift strikes. They were unconscious before they hit the ground.

“Lou,” he said, “that is enough. We are here for our sons.”

He was not unsettled by the shorter rat’s capacity for violence. He knew himself better than that. But he did not understand Lou’s hair-trigger temper, his turtle-shaped blind spot. He couldn’t speak for the other’s students, but Splinter’s own were experienced, and tempered, and incredibly skilled. After everything they survived and accomplished together up until now, he found it hard to believe that an organization of regular humans could pose much of a threat to their well-being. 

From the way Lou was acting, it was as if he was any ordinary parent whose ordinary children had been taken in the night. 

Splinter shifted to intervene when the woman Lou had pinned continued to choke. Finally, Lou released her enough that she could heave in desperate breaths. 

“You would not actually kill her,” Splinter chided him, no fan of theatrics. 

“Someone has not been paying attention,” Lou replied shortly. “If my boys are hurt, I will burn this building down with everyone inside it. Honor can go hang itself.”

With that, he removed the woman’s gas mask and informed her that she would lead them to the turtles without making a scene, or she would bleed to death on the floor and they would find the turtles on their own. White-faced, she wisely settled for the first option. 

Leading them toward the back of the building, where rooms that were once offices had since been repurposed into labs and testing areas, the woman said hoarsely, “I didn’t know they were kids.”

Like clockwork, Lou’s fur bristled with offense. “They are wearing matching Sanrio hoodies. They speak in memes. I am sure at least one of them called you a boomer to your face.”

“No, I meant,” she said, touching her bruised throat briefly before dropping her hand, “I meant I didn’t know they were someone’s kids. I’m—I wouldn’t have—sorry. We were trying to do good. I’m sorry.”

“Hmph. I will consider forgiving you in roughly one hundred years as long as my turtles are completely fine. This door here?”

He kicked it down before she could move her head more than one half-inch in a nod. There was a flurry of excitement inside, and then Blue’s voice rang out, “Daddy!”

He sounded ecstatic to see his father, but not at all shocked. His words were a little slurred as he went on, “I told them you’d be here any minute. Our cousins over there wanted to stage a break-out, and I was like. Just nap. You know? Just take five. See, Miguel’s got the right idea.”

“Hush, silly turtle,” Lou said, his tone now a complete departure from how he had sounded for the last half hour. “Come here, let me look at you all. I need to be absolutely certain no one in this building deserves to die before we leave.”

Splinter joined him inside the room in time to take in the sight of the shorter rat attempting to hold all four of his much larger sons in his arms. Orange was deeply asleep in Red’s lap, his smaller stature probably contributing to the higher concentration of the drug in his system. The twins were upright at a forty-five degree angle, and Red himself seemed groggy but alert for the most part. They were smiling as they absorbed their father's fussy attention, leaning into his hands.

Comparatively, Splinter’s own sons were swaying where they sat. Michelangelo’s eyes were open, but his head was resting on Donatello’s shoulder, Donatello’s cheek propped on the crown of his little brother’s head. Raphael was wired, digging fingers into his thighs to keep himself awake, while Leonardo seemed to have been startled out of a meditation by the door crashing down. 

They all lurched with surprise to see Splinter standing there. Leonardo in particular gazed up at him with wide eyes, as if he didn’t know what to do now that the task of rescuing the seven others was no longer his responsibility. As if he had no experience with a burden being lifted away once he had decided it was his to carry. 

For the first time all night, Splinter faltered. 

On the other side of the room, Blue said, “I’m, uh, sorry. I wanted to get us out, but I didn’t have time for more than one door.” 

“Dum-dum,” Purple said succinctly. “O’Neil and Jones would be dead if they were still here.”

“Dee’s right for once, Leon,” Red rumbled, “you made the only call you could.”

“But I should have been able to save everyone, right?” Blue said. “I’m the leader.”

“You,” Lou said sternly, holding Blue’s face in both hands, “are seventeen.” 

That’s right, Splinter found himself thinking, looking down at his eldest son. The brilliant boy he taught to read, the one he taught to fold origami flowers for his mother and sister’s shrine, the one he had stopped holding one day without even realizing it. He is. 

[quartergremlin]

Do you by any chance have any more ideas or plans for the leosagi babies comic

Do we get to see leo explain to Sagi? Or announce to the fam? Or stuffs like that

Its genuinely my favorite comic if yours to go back and reread it is so well written

vbdjhvbsfdj thank you 🥺

not really, at least not for now! I have one more ask that i'll probably answer, but other than that there's not much there for me - at least until i flesh out what the future actually looks like.

"I'm so happy!" "me too!"

I wanted to focus on a different turtle for each stage of development to avoid reiterating the same things over again - mikey (pre-baby) > leo (baby) > raph (post-baby) > donnie (post-post baby, otherwise known as a child).

"Baby Angst Hammer"

[icewindandboringhorror]

Pages from trying to keep a little sketchbook-scrapbook type thing going for two weeks lol. I gave myself specific rules in hopes they might all end up more cohesive/consistent seeming, but alas, scribbly chaos reigns, it seems

[marklikely]

the movie did such a good job at putting me in isabel/owens shoes honestly because i was looking at tara/maddys monologue scene through a lens of just not letting go of nostalgia so i was like 'oh my god do not get in that hole in the ground. this is crazy' but then two minutes later with hindsight i Understood and was like 'NO YOU SHOULD HAVE GOTTEN IN THE HOLE IN THE GROUND GO BACK'

[hellamorte]

do you ever think about how lucanis keeps losing and losing and losing — his entire life? losing his parents, losing his childhood because of the crow training, losing his freedom, his sleep, and one year of his life due to imprisonment. then the maker smiles upon him, and he's discovering something good (rook, the veilguard team, purpose), acquiring something back (his family, his life, his freedom, his job, his city), finding some peace in mundane things (coffee, cooking, taking care of others). it feels like the scales are finally moving, balancing — only for him to lose again. he loses caterina, he can lose his city to blight, he loses at weisshaupt, he loses grip on himself (thanks to spite), he loses control — he loses himself, piece by piece. rook can help lighten the load on his chest (thanks to spite), he gets caterina back, and breathing feels a little bit easier. but loss is not done with him. he loses illario, and it feels like losing a limb, a large piece of himself violently torn away. he's visibly shaken, but no one truly knows what it takes to string the assorted pieces of himself together and keep functioning. and then loss deals what seems like the final blow: some of his friends are dead or lost, and rook is gone, too. he failed; he only knows death, doesn't he? life only takes, and takes, and takes, giving only to tease and take it back. at that moment, he's falling apart completely — until they find rook, and there's a sliver of hope once again. the scales are moving, the team wins, they eventually go back to their lives — and that's when he realizes that the final blow is the life as the first talon.

[ghastlyaffairs]

for something as trivial and simple those feelings sure are hard to get rid of

also made a gif a version for fun + alt version with no tears under the cut

the gif is in very low resolution...this is a feature (i could make it bigger but that would require saving each frame individually and than glueing it all together. also i feel like low resolution suits it better. aesthetically and fits the mood)

[pa-pa-plasma]

hey i feel like we're really sleeping on that time Danny possessed Vlad & framed him for assaulting a minor

Editing with the clip because people don't believe me. Episode is 41: Eye for an Eye.

[yunmeng-jiang]

every day i wish there had been a better solution for the qin su marriage problem.

in my fix-it fics i either have some other sect leader claim that he was actually madly in love with her this whole time and sweep her away for jgy's sake, have her mom confess earlier, make jgy decide to tell her for her own good and have them work together, or not give them a chance to meet and fall in love in the first place (i guess i could also make qin su have a miscarriage, but that's really sad and awful and not my preferred option at all), but all of those require tweaks to the circumstances, sometimes early on so they don't meet or jgy feels safe enough to talk with her or another confidant, or sometimes later like madam qin finding out they're pregnant before the marriage prep is too far along and telling one or both of them right away so they can make other arrangements.

with the situation being what it was, jgy didn't find out soon enough to do anything that wouldn't involve either marrying her anyway (and he didn't think telling her about it would do anything except make her upset and depressed) or leaving her essentially a ruined woman with no prospects and an illegitimate child who would inevitably grow up fatherless, which is pretty much exactly what his dad did to meng shi. this would be a crueler option than pretty much anything else, and given that he clearly still cares about her, he couldn't do that in good conscience. jgy tries his best to protect the people he loves, unless there is literally no other way for him to survive.

it's one more example of jgy being faced with a situation where the only choices are bad ones, and making the decision that he thinks will hurt the fewest number of people. metatextually, it's one more example of women in fiction being shoved aside and not given agency in their own lives, and getting killed off instead of surviving and growing as people like the male characters are allowed to do. it's just a tragic situation all around and i wish there had been something they could have done.

[zipquips]

okay but the fact that dragon age veilguard has those little clarifying pop ups that tell you what conversations mean is so funny but also so appreciated for those of us with autism (me!)

[dreamerdrop]

An AU to consider: Nurse Ogawa transferring to Deep Space Nine alongside Miles and Keiko.

Ogawa has a really magnetic charm to her, it’s impossible not to like her. She is also very intelligent, a studious professional, and deeply dedicated to her work.

She also has several years experience in the field over her Chief Medical Officer, who is fresh out of the academy and a little too enthusiastic about everything.

She thinks Bashir is adorable. He reminds her a bit of Wesley, so she ends up mothering him without meaning too. Julian would stop her, but it makes him feel kinda fuzzy and warm when she’s like that. (He mistakes this for romantic interest in her, but she actually bursts out laughing when he tries to ask her out, and then spends a week apologising for it. Julian decides it’s probably not worth a second attempt, and they settle into a nice doting friendship instead.)

She, Keiko, and Garak have a wine & whine club on weekends.