#card style mints

[chiropteracupola]

another frisbee au scribble! @seaglassandeelgrass suggested that a passion for metal-detecting might be a suitable equivalent to Hagman's skulking-and-lurking poacher ways — what do you think they've discovered?

[batshit-auspol]

What about that time Australia hired a furry artist for the Olympics. Still better art than the ACT centennial hot air balloon.

2021: The Royal Australian Mint puts out a call for artists to submit portfolios of "Japanese style" cartoons, in preparation for a commemorative series of coins and artworks to be released for the Tokyo Olympics.

The campaign would have a cross promotional tie-in with Australia's largest supermarket, Woolworths where 24 million collectables themed on the artworks would be given away.

It wasn't until the final artist was selected that they realised the people at the Royal Australian Mint had somehow mistaken the anthropomorphised animal-humans that seemed popular on the internet for a popular children's cartoon franchise.

“They knew exactly what they wanted," explained the artist, "we worked together to make sure they got what they envisioned, I tailored what I made to their examples/feedback. They just didn’t know there was a word for it, basically, or that it was SO popular.”

Needless to say, when the artworks were released online people immediately called a spade a spade, headlines were made around the world, and the furry community expressed bemused joy that the Australian government had apparently just released an official fursona.

Unfortunately for those innocent soles that had planned the campaign, given they had just minted $24 million worth of furry coins they couldn't exactly scrap the whole thing, and they were forced to just push ahead while doing their best to ignore the large community of internet oddballs salivating at their every move.

Anyway, here's some of the art:

Here's some of the collectable cards given out free to kids by Woolworths:

[cherry-luvz]

Cockwarming with K.MJ.

Genre - Smut and fluff.

Warning- G!P Minji, just cockwarming, Don't be a dud- wrap your bud.

Paring - GP!loser!Minji x gf!fem!reader.

Synopsis - Its winter, and Minji needs warming up. You’re her only option.

Word count - 1.4K

MINJI - Red.

READER - White.

It was a chill einter eveling and Uni had just broken off for two weeks of holiday to enjoy Christmas with loved ones.

You where on your phone when you got a text, It was around 07:45PM when your phone pinged you decided to check as saw that it was your gf texting you.

Min Min 💬

-> Baby? 🤭

-> Yes, minji?😑

-> Can u come over, to my place? 🫶🏻🫶🏻

-> no. 😾

-> PLSSSSSSS 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

-> still no, Its freezing cold outside! 💀💀 I ain’t walking in that cold ur crazy ☠️☠️

-> PLSSSS BABY PLSS!! 😿😿

-> Give me one gd reason y I should go to ur house..😑😑

-> Bc yk 😏😏

-> Ik? Wdym..? 🥸

-> 🙇🏻‍♀️🙆🏻‍♀️ ❤️😏

-> 😰😰😰😰😰

-> so watcha say bbg? 😼😼😼

-> nty I’m gd fr 😊👍

-> 😔😔😔😔 please love 🥺

-> Bro u just wanna get freaky min.😑

-> That’s not true! 😞

-> Yh sure. 🙄

-> please!! I’ll give cuddles..! 😖❤️

-> U promise? 😑

-> I prowmiss🥺

-> Fine i’ll come but u have to come pick me up.😑

-> YAYYY.. wait do I really..?😽😦

-> yh u do i ain’t walking in the snow🙄.

-> okay okay i’ll be there in 40😖.

-> aww ty see ya!

-> See u soon bbg, luv u😽😽

-> Ily too ❤️

You sighed and got up from your bed, you put on a pink skirt, nude coloured tights, a crop top, a white puffer jacket with a scarf and you small bag which held your phone, lipstick, lipgloss, Vaseline, mini perfume and your purse.

You styled your hair and then put on log warmers with socks then you put on your Ugg’s. You grabbed your keys and exit your apartment complex

It was snowing outside and you waited for your gf to pick you up as she said she would. Around 10 - 15 mintes later a black BMW pulled up in front of you.

The person rolled down the window, “Hey baby, hop in..” She said with a smile and leaned over to the passenger side opening the door.

“New car..?” You said, climbing into her car.

You then closed the door and put on your seat belt, “Yeah, my nice new sweat baby!..”

“Hmm but I thought i was your baby.?” You pouted looking up at her as she put her hand on your knee, her touch was cold, you shivered.

“You are, but this is my like.. ‘car’..”she said and you nodded.

You looked out the window, watching the snow fall, Minji had her left hand on the wheel and her right on your lap.

40 MINUTES LATER

Minji parked outside the gate, minji was from a wealthy family so she lived in the luxury apartment.

You watched as she beeped a black card and ths gates open. “We’ll be at my place soon..” She said gently gripping your thigh.

You nodded, “Okay..”

She drove for another 5-10 minutes and you guys reached a huge luxury apartment. “Were here baby..” she said as she parked the car in the in the parking lot.

You undo your seat belt at the same time she does hers, she got up and got out of the car doing a quick jog to your side opening the door for you.

“Thanks luv,” You said getting out as you held her hand, “Ha anything for my princess..”

She closed the door and you waited for her to lock the door, she then took your hand and you guys walked into the building.

After a few minutes You where at your gf’s house, she took off your shoes for you, put on your puffer jacket down as well ad you’re scarf and sat next to you.

Minji were cold from the snow so she shivered, you look at her. “You cold.?” You asked her and she yawned.

“Yeah.. i’m freezing..” she leaned back in her chair and you looked at her, she the smirked looking at your thighs.

She like you wearing skirts, it was a complete turn of for her. You looked her hear, feeling her gaze on yo, “What are you looking at, luv?”

She wrapped her arm around your waist, squeezing it gently. “I love your skirt baby~” she said looked at you with a smirk.

“Perv.” You muttered as your face heated up, she chuckled. “But you love it don’t you..?”

You did, you did love it. You felt as she pulled you closer, her gaze going towards your lips. “Mhm so soft..” she rubbed the bottom of your lips.

You blushed as she came closer, leaning in to kiss you. As you guys lips met you blushed even more, you felt as she pulled you into her lap making you straddle her.

You guys continued to kiss as she placed her hands on your waist while you had your hands on her shoulders. She pulled away and smiled at you, “You’re so pretty baby, but I’m a little cold.. you wouldn’t mind cock warming me?”

You felt the boner she had your breath hitched. “I-i..” you stumbled over your words. “..o-okay..” she smiled and pulled down her sweatpants.

You looked down as you saw her cock, it was a pretty pink colour. She smiled and kissed your neck.. “A-ah b-baby..” you whimpered as you clutched onto her shirt.

You felt her move your panties to the side and teased her cock to your hole. “Hmm so wet for me princess.. so fucking wet..”

She pushed into you and you sat down on it, “a-ah!” You moaned.

“Fuckkk princess..” she grunted.

You sat there cock warming her, you wanted to move so bad. You felt her hold your hips down not letting you move at all.

You whimpered as you clenched around her, placing your head on her chest. “Oh gosh thats a dangerous game to play bbg..” she said gripping onto your hips.

You clenched again, “Ahhh.. hmmpf..” you moaned.

She gritted her teeth, “if you do that one more time I’m gonna fuck you till you can’t walk..”

You clenched around her one last time and she, keeping to her words, pinned you down and pulled up your crop top up and sucked on your breast as she pounded into you.

“Hmmpf a-ah! Mommy fuck.. ah” you moaned and your eyes teared up from too much pleasure. “You’re my cock slut isn’t it? Fucking slut.”

You nodded as she continued to pound into your tight cunt, “Ah mhmpf.. mommy..”

“Hmm oh gosh baby..” you felt as she pulled you closer and pounded into you deeper and deeper.

You felt her cock touch your cervix, “Oh gosh ah.. yeah mommy ahh hungggg right there hmpff!!..” your eyes rolled back.

Minji noticed, she had hit your g-spot and continued to do so, “Mhm your so gushy and warm~”

Your mouth formed a ‘o’ shape as you felt a knot in your stomach. She continued to bully her huge cock into you tight cunt, you whimpered and felt her grip getting tighter.

“Hmpf mommy..” you moaned as you felt the knot slowly coming undone. “You gonna cum?” She asked you and you nodded, slowly opening your eyes.

“C-can i cum mommy..? I’ve been hunggnnggg.. a g-good hmpfffff g-girl..” you clenched more onto her shirt.

She leaned down next to your ear, “Hmm go on baby girl, cum for mommy..” she whispered as she moved even faster.

You felt the knot come undone and you cumed, “Oh gosh minji fuck..” your body shivered and you cumed all over her cock which she was still moving in and out of you, letting you ride out your orgasm.

“Now let mommy cum you.. ya?” You nodded and felt as your vision became hazy and she smug, she knows you were brain fucked.

It was a bit sore at first until you felt another orgasm creeping up apron you, “M-mommy i-I’m gonna a-ah cum.. a-ah..a-again..” you mentioned.

“Me too, get ready for mommy’s fat load.” She said as you fell her cock twitch a bit in you.

You felt as her thrusts become more and more sloppy. “H-hmpf.. baby.. mommy’s gonna cum..” she whimpered.

You whimpered, “Fuck cum with me baby..”

And you did so, you felt as her load filled you up as your leg twitched, your cunt throbbing and Minji lying on top of your chest.

She then sat up after catching her breath. “Fuck”

She gently pulled out watching as your pussy gently pushed out you and her’s cum mixed together. She saw the creampie and chuckled.

“Hmm.. best sex ever babe. Loved it..” she said as she put your panties back on. You rolled your eyes and gently sat up, “I feel sticky..” You said and got up but your legs gave away.

Minji quickly caught you. “Gosh..” you muttered.

She chuckled, “Hmm i did really fuck you till you can’t walk..”

[fratttymatty]

You're Smoked

(All characters are 18+)

It was just another quiet Tuesday evening when everything changed for Quinn, Eric, and Alex. The three 29-year-old nerdy best friends had always been inseparable. They spent their nights playing video games, debating superheroes, and diving into comic book lore. Life was predictable, comfortable, and easy.

That was, of course, until Quinn discovered a peculiar game at the local thrift store. "The Alteration," the box proclaimed, adorned with strange glowing symbols that beckoned them like some irresistible mystery. The trio wasn't into supernatural gimmicks or odd fads, but it was a game, and that was all the convincing they needed.

They gathered at Quinn's apartment, excitement buzzing in the air as they set up the game on his coffee table. It was more complex than they expected—dice with too many sides to count, cards, and tokens scattered across the table. But there was something captivating about it. The kind of feeling that made you ignore any misgivings and dive in.

Each took a turn, rolling the dice, drawing cards, and following instructions. The game progressed—strange, but harmless enough. That is, until they each drew the same card: "Transformation."

In an instant, the room seemed to warp, and a tingling sensation spread through their bodies. It wasn’t painful, just dizzying, like waking from a dream where everything felt off. And then—poof—it was done.

The trio looked at each other in confusion, but the first thing they noticed was how completely different they looked.

Zane—formerly Quinn—was the first to speak, his voice a low, cool drawl that didn’t even sound like him anymore. His once-thin frame had morphed into a broad, muscular build, and his hair was now a wild, tousled mess of brown waves that looked like they hadn’t been touched by a comb in years. His sharp jawline was prominent, and his once-framed glasses had disappeared, replaced by a pair of dark sunglasses that now sat comfortably on his nose.

He was wearing a white t-shirt, but it was simple—just a plain, snug fit that clung to his chest and shoulders. His jeans, baggy and worn-in, hung loosely from his hips as if they were the most natural thing in the world. Everything about his new body felt strong, confident, and unmistakably cocky.

Zane didn’t even think twice before he reached into his pocket and pulled out a vape. Without hesitation, he took a deep drag, the cool mint flavor swirling in his lungs before he blew out a thick cloud. He smirked at the feeling of the nicotine buzz. It felt right. Too right.

Brad—formerly Eric—looked down at his body, which had transformed in ways he could barely comprehend. His hair, once neatly styled and short, was now a tousled brown mess, still kind of messy but somehow perfectly styled in that carefree, too-cool-for-school way. His chest was now broad, and the sleeveless hoodie he wore was so tight on his biceps, it looked like it might rip at any moment. The rest of his body was covered by black sweatpants that hung low on his waist, his legs thick and athletic. His confident grin was now permanent, like he was daring someone to challenge him.

Brad's hands automatically went to his pocket and pulled out a vape of his own, the smooth, sleek device fitting perfectly in his grip. He took a puff, exhaling the smoke slowly, and felt a rush of satisfaction flood through his body. He looked at Zane, nodding in approval. "This is living, man."

Jared—formerly Alex—felt the change as well, looking at his reflection with a stunned grin. His hair had transformed into a messy, tousled dirty blonde wave, perfect for someone who spent their days outside and had no care for combing it. His physique was now long, lean, and athletic, with strong shoulders and toned legs. He wore a white t-shirt, but this one had a yellow and purple design on the front—loud and attention-grabbing, exactly the opposite of his old style.

His jeans were baggy, the kind that hung low on his hips, and they felt more comfortable than anything he’d ever worn. He wasn’t used to the carefree, devil-may-care attitude, but right now, he didn’t care. It was like he had been reborn, and he liked it. A lot.

He pulled out his vape, taking a smooth drag as the buzz filled him. "Dude, this is awesome," he said, watching as the vapor swirled in the air before dissipating. "We’re unstoppable."

The three of them looked at each other for a long moment. The lives they had known—playing board games, chatting about nerdy topics, debating superheroes—felt so distant now, like they were from someone else. Instead, their new reality—their new selves—felt exciting and irresistible. They felt alive, like the world was theirs for the taking.

"Let’s hit the gym, grab some food, and maybe hit up the beach later," Zane said, already starting to walk toward the door, his voice confident and smooth.

Brad nodded. "Hell yeah. I feel like I could bench press a car right now."

Jared laughed, taking another long drag of his vape. "Yeah, let’s go mess around. I’m down for anything."

And just like that, the three of them—Zane, Brad, and Jared—walked out into the night, completely unconcerned with who they used to be. Their new lives were everything they had dreamed of, and they were ready to embrace it all.

But as they made their way toward the local gym, they didn’t expect what happened next: the moment they stepped onto the sidewalk, a group of girls appeared out of nowhere.

They were tall, blonde, and bubbly, their smiles wide and bright. They giggled as they approached, their eyes locking onto the trio with obvious interest.

The first girl, a bubbly blonde with a ponytail, nudged her friend and giggled. "Hey, guys! You’re looking cute tonight," she said to Zane, her voice sweet and airy.

Zane grinned, the cocky smirk never leaving his face. "Thanks, babe," he said, flipping his sunglasses down and taking another puff from his vape.

Brad raised an eyebrow at the girls and winked, adjusting his sweatpants. "What’s up, ladies? You want to hang out?" His voice oozed confidence as he looked them over.

Jared chuckled, his hand moving to the back of his head as he rocked on his heels. "Yeah, you girls look fun. Wanna come grab some smoothies or something?" he offered with a mischievous grin, his tone laid-back.

The girls giggled in response, looking like they’d hit the jackpot. "Totally," the blonde with the ponytail agreed. "You guys are so cute. We should hang out!"

It was a perfect moment—everything was exactly how they’d imagined their new lives would be. And as they all walked off together, Zane, Brad, and Jared realized that the changes weren’t just physical. They were free—free to be the people they had always wanted to be, no regrets, no looking back.

There was no turning back now. The past was nothing but a distant memory. And with their new, ditzy valley girlfriends in tow, life had never felt so thrilling.

(from left to right: Brad, Jared, Zane)

[weaselandfriends]

The Making Of: When I Win the World Ends

(For my previous Making Of post, see The Making Of: Cleveland Quixotic.)

I. 1999

It was the year of the cubicle movie. It was the year of Fight Club, of Office Space, of Being John Malkovich, of Three Kings, of The Matrix, and of American Beauty. It was the year of suburban malaise, of eternal sunshine, of ceaseless normality. A year of United States hegemony; a year whose chief terror was that THIS WAS IT.

Before the millennium turned and the towers fell, there was an initial challenge to this order, a completely inconsequential one made consequential by a newly minted 24/7 news media machine running out of noise to fill dead air now that people were sick to bursting of the Clinton impeachment. This challenge came not through war, revolution, or violence, but through entertainment. Children's entertainment.

And I was a child. Unaware of any cultural context, I knew only one thing: I loved Pokémon. I really, really loved Pokémon.

I owned Red Version, Blue Version, Yellow Version, Pokémon Pinball, Pokémon Stadium, Pokémon Snap, Hey You Pikachu, a Pokémon Tetris sort of puzzle game, even the Pokémon TCG game for Gameboy. I had ten to fifteen strategy guides for the games, an encyclopedia of the 151 Pokémon, a choose your own adventure book, an I Spy-style book. I had Pokémon figurines, Pokémon plushies, toy Poké Balls, toy Pokédexes. I had Pokémon stamps and Pokémon stickers and a deck of Pokémon cards. Not trading cards, just a standard 52-card deck with Pokémon pictures on it. Of course I also had the trading cards. A complete set of the first three runs, plus a special Mew card you could get from I dunno Toys R Us or something as part of some promotion. I had a guide for the card game that explained which cards were good or bad even though I didn't even play the card game. I had a Pokémon Tamagotchi and Pokémon pencils and Pokémon erasers and Ash Ketchum's hat and I dressed up as Ash Ketchum for Halloween. Of course I watched every episode of the anime, and in notebooks I drew doodles of existing Pokémon and came up with names for new Pokémon. My father had died that year.

My father was a sports fanatic. Traditional sports. He, too, collected. Sports memorabilia, baseball cards, figures of famous stars. When I was an infant, he drove me on a cross country road trip to Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where I became a part owner of the Green Bay Packers. He had always wanted me to grow up and pursue professional sports. When I was born, the doctor apparently said to start looking for football colleges, a quote he saved in a scrapbook of baby photos. He had played sports himself, in college; he was a baseball catcher, until a hitter accidentally struck him in the head with a full force swing.

Almost everything I personally remember about him involves him dying. He was sick for a long time, and I remember hospitals and hospital beds and strange smells and gauze. And then one day my mother told me he died.

He was a charismatic man, very social and very popular. He had many friends and a lot of family, all of whom had constantly been around our house. Once he was gone, they stopped coming around. Then it was just me and my mother, who was not a fanatic for anything, except maybe her job as an elementary school teacher, which consumed her time as she assiduously prepared lesson plans and graded tests until late at night. When my father died, she got into some argument with his side of the family, the details of which I still don't fully understand, and afterward they no longer spoke. Her own family lived far away, out-of-state, seen only at Christmas. The house became quiet.

And I… played… Pokémon.

II. The Electric Tale of Pikachu

Toshihiro Ono was a mangaka primarily known for shotacon and futanari hentai. His credits such as Innyou Megami and Anal Justice made him a no-brainer pick for the officially licensed Pokémon manga, Electric Tale of Pikachu, as it too would feature a 10-year-old boy as the protagonist.

This manga would be the foundation for my conception of what Pokémon was, narratively. Though I also had the Pokémon Adventures manga that ran concurrently and which has by now long outlasted it, Electric Tale left a significantly deeper imprint on my memory.

In summary, Electric Tale is a retelling of the first two seasons of the anime. Ash Ketchum is the main character, he's accompanied by Misty and later Brock, his rival is Gary, and Team Rocket harangues him.

What sets Electric Tale apart is its tone, which is far more adult than Adventures and the anime. Obviously, part of this comes from the author's primary area of expertise being hentai. Even in the censored English version, there is a sense of sexual playfulness in how every single female character is an older woman who likes to tease Ash about his romantic interests.

But there are other elements that creep in unrelated to sex, due to the perspective of someone only used to speaking to adults who suddenly has to speak to children. Ono doesn't really get the childish fantasy of leaving at 10 being normal in society, so he introduces an element where Ash can only get a one year deferment from school and will have to return unless he hits it big. Team Rocket are former competitive hopefuls who flamed out and then, with no education or work experience to speak of, had no choice but to turn to crime. The Pokémon are depicted more realistically, often eschewing the toyetic mascot elements of their designs.

And the landscapes are often wistful, even apocalyptic in their presentation:

This more sedate, mature, realistic depiction of Pokémon became what I wanted Pokémon to be, what I projected onto an original Red and Blue version that left everything open to interpretation, and what would increasingly frustrate me with the series as it deviated more toward bombastic villain groups with goofy destroy-the-world plots. (Which was what put me off Pokémon Adventures.)

Amid all this, one panel stuck with me in particular. One panel I would think about ever since I first saw it as a child, that would turn around in my head and keep coming back. That panel would eventually—over two decades later—become the basis for When I Win the World Ends, the seed from which an entire story grew:

III. The Unkillable Demon King

But in the interim, the seed remained dormant. 1999 fell away. I grew up. I played later Pokémon games and increasingly lost interest by around Gen 4 and 5. Then I went to college.

That's when I started playing League of Legends.

I was something of a psychopath in college. I operated on a strict schedule and did not deviate. Wake up, read 50 pages of classic literature, write 2,000 words, go to classes, study, and then by about four in the afternoon all my obligations were done and it was League of Legends until midnight.

I wasn't actually interested in the League of Legends esports scene in its infancy. In 2012, I was actually invited to attend its World Championship in Los Angeles and refused. (When I received this invitation, I had just finished reading Homestuck for the first time, and was caught in a month-long haze in which I could do little but bask within what I considered the greatest artistic achievement I'd seen in my life. It was this month that inspired Modern Cannibals.) I only liked playing the game and watching Dunkey videos.

It wasn't until the next year, when a girl I was interested in recommended I watch, that I tuned in to my first professional League of Legends game, at the 2013 World Championship. It was there that I got to watch this new, hyped, upcoming Korean player who had apparently taken the pro scene by storm that season. That player was Faker.

It has seemingly become essential to the narrative of any sport that there is "the man who always wins." American football has Tom Brady, and the moment Brady retired, he was replaced by Patrick Mahomes. Basketball has LeBron James, picking up the mantle from Michael Jordan. It's as if someone being "the best" validates the skill-based promise of the sport, the fundamental top-down fairness of its premise, the idea that the person who wins is the best and deserved it. Faker would become the backbone of League of Legends esports and his ascendance correlated to that of the sport itself, from its humble roots at small-scale tournaments in places like Jönköping, Sweden, to max capacity arenas in the biggest cities in the world.

It's surprising, though, how the legend of Faker had already begun even before he won his first World Championship. League of Legends was designed as a clone of Defense of the Ancients (DotA), a popular mod for Warcraft III that emphasized competitive play. In its infancy, the competitive scene was mostly dominated by players who had migrated from DotA to League. They were older, winning thanks to a fundamental conceptual understanding of the game that was superior to everyone else, and frankly not very good in the aggregate. As League of Legends esports exploded in popularity from 2013 to 2015, these old pros would get filtered out swiftly, with even the biggest and most popular names retiring after only a couple of years in the scene.

Even once the new generation of League-grown talent ascended, though, careers were nasty, brutish, and short. The best players only remained on top for a season, as game patches dramatically changed viable strategies. Internationally the sport was dominated by Koreans, with the Korean regional league sometimes being seen as more difficult to win than the World Championship, where Koreans often breezed through uncompetitive Chinese, European, and North American squads.

This possibly affected the demographics of the professional scene. South Korea has mandatory military service, and leaving the pro scene to join the military was basically the end of a Korean player's career. This meant that it was rare to see a Korean player older than 25. Retiring in your early 20s was and remains common. Korean organizations, which had an infrastructural leg up on other regions due to the popularity of StarCraft 2 esports in the country, became adept at scouting promising players at 15 or 16, building them into top level competitive pros, wringing them dry for a few seasons with brutal training regimens, and spitting them out.

Faker was the exception. Though he had been discovered young by SK Telecom, a major Korean telecommunications company that did esports on the side, and gone through the training regimen, he refused to be spit out. He simply didn't stop. He won in 2013, then with a completely new four-man squad around him won again in 2015 and 2016 before narrowly losing the 2017 finals in a nail biter. Given League of Legends esports had only existed since 2011, he basically accounted for half of the championships up until that point. Nobody else, except for his teammates, had won more than once. And it was like it was known he would be this juggernaut the instant he manifested ex nihilo. Like it was known, even in 2013, that he would always win.

Then, Faker stopped winning.

By 2017, League of Legends esports was a titan. Venture capital firms, seeing the millions of eyeballs, thought that this was the next NBA in its infancy, and decided to get in on the ground floor. Multiple millions of dollars were pumped into the scene as even mediocre players in weak regions like North America pulled seven-digit salaries. In China, where League of Legends had become the national pastime, the nation's richest oligarchs ran teams for fun and vanity, outbidding Korean organizations for top Korean players in pursuit of a trophy that had gone to Korea every year since 2013. Riot, the studio developing the game, pumped tons of money into creating a professional sports product, with skilled announcers, dedicated arenas for regional leagues, live performances by musicians like Imagine Dragons and Lil Nas X, and all the other bells and whistles one might expect from a program watched on ESPN.

In this milieu, it seemed like Faker had finally reached his limit. He was still good, but not the best. Even as an individual, while everyone still considered him the "greatest of all time," he was considered outmatched by newer pros like Chovy and ShowMaker. 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 passed with no championships. In 2022, on a team of mostly rookies, he reached the world finals, but was ultimately beaten. Korea's stranglehold over the sport had been shaken by China, which had finally strung together some championships. People wondered if Faker would retire, although he had managed to avoid mandatory military service by representing Korea in the Olympics-esque Asian Games. He'd dealt with wrist injuries and his level of play dropped year over year. He just didn't seem to be that good anymore, potentially holding back his team of talented young players rather than leading them to victory.

Then, in 2023—

And in 2024—

In the end, never count out Touchdown Tom. 11 years of professional play, 5 world championships.

From this longwinded explanation, you might have realized that after watching that game in 2013, I became a League of Legends esports fanatic, fulfilling the prophecy set before me by my father though perhaps in not the way he would have expected.

And the things I become a fanatic about, I want to write a story about.

IV. Modern Cannibals

There's a deleted scene in Modern Cannibals, as Maximillion is driving Z. and her friends through the Utah desert. He starts to talk about Pokémon.

"I bring it up because my university thesis was about Pokemon in particular how Pokemon has basically trained an entire generation of children to think in a completely different way than preceding generations my generation for instance our fad was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles now I don't know how much you know about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles but from an educational standpoint we're talking absolute bankrupt complete and utter goose egg but Pokemon now Pokemon you see it's more like there's some substance to it you know that refrain Gotta Catch Em All right?" "..." "Well to most parents it looks like a marketing gimmick you make one hundred fifty-one characters and structure a game around collecting them the merchandising potential is astronomical kids buy one hundred fifty-one trading cards stickers coloring books figurines uh collectable lunchable toys I'm sure you've got some yourself."

He continues:

"But really you look at the game itself before the big toy explosion the game itself the focus is placed less on the collection and more on the catalogue you're given a blank encyclopedia to fill and you fill it by capturing one hundred fifty-one Pokemon but the goal is to create a complete database of each and every one and this is what I argue is the educational core of the Pokemon series." His hands left the wheel to conceive of his idea in the cool air of the car, which remained steady on its ever-forward path. "Our modern era is no longer one of singular isolated knowledge it is one of the catalogue the database which is most clearly personified in the advent of the internet because now all knowledge can be at the fingertips of any one human being all that is needed is someone to go and put the catalogue together and presto whiz bang it's there think about it Z. when you catch a bunch of Pokemon where do you store them?" Z. didn't need to think long to remember the game's mechanics. "In the PC." "Exactly now isn't that odd consider it in real life terms you have real life creatures made assumedly of flesh and bone and yet you store them in a computer how does that make sense you'd expect a farm or a holding pen but no it's the computer and that too prepares the budding portion of the millennial generation to become cognizant of the linkage between the computer the encyclopedia and the database structure of knowledge in a new era." "So," said Z. "So you're saying Pokemon taught kids how to think in the digital age?"

There's also a deleted character in Modern Cannibals. Well, mostly deleted—he still shows up, unnamed, in a couple of pages. He is Cole Coulter, Z.'s older brother, a popular League of Legends streamer. Before I deleted him, his role was to accompany Mrs. Roddlevan and Frederick in an attempt to bring Z. back home. He had POV scenes that gave insight into the weirdness of his cotravelers, but ultimately, I decided he didn't add anything to the story and removed him almost entirely.

Even then, though, I was already considering the future of Cole Coulter as the protagonist of a story about League of Legends esports. Playing under the ID MadKing, he would be a North American professional top laner, once known for his aggressive duelist style but recently forced into playing boring tanks as the esports metagame became more sophisticated and tactics-based.

The story would be simple, something I envisioned as a "sports story" only about esports instead of regular sports. It would start with Cole's team being relegated from the league, only for Cole to get a last chance signing to a new team with two promising Korean imports. One import, the mid laner, would be a charismatic and eccentric player in the mold of Doinb/Ganked By Mom/Huhi, while the other, an AD carry, would be introverted and pissy and elitist, in the mold of Piglet. The team would initially struggle, cultures would clash, then a mid-season replacement to sign a psychopathic Tyler1/Tarzaned style streamer as jungler would revitalize the team, put them on a major run, and get them to the World Championship. Though they would eventually fall after a miracle run, Cole would get a moment to truly shine on the biggest stage when he won a pivotal game by aggressive split pushing rather than tank play.

Thematically, the story would be about two things. First, a counterpoint to the idea of American exceptionalism, featuring a league where Americans are particularly bad compared to Korean or Chinese players. Second, an exploration of what it means to be exceptional at all. Cole would be an all-around mediocre person. Middling at school, at (real) sports, at the various popularity contests of being a teenager. League of Legends, this niche sub-sport, is the one thing he truly excelled at, the one place where he was good, better than 99.9 percent of all players, and yet even within that statistical greatness he wound up, ultimately, in a professional scene where he was once again mediocre, relegated to "tank duty," to facilitating other players to carry.

What does it mean to be the best? How can someone be so, so good, only to reach a level where they were still nothing special? Is there any way to win if you're not "the man who always wins"?

I remembered that panel from Electric Tale of Pikachu. The last people filtered before the final champion. It's certainly no walk in the zoo!

This idea was pretty detailed for a story I never wound up writing, something I mostly blame on the years 2018 and 2019, when a lot of bad things happened to me and in retrospect I consider it a minor miracle I managed to finish Chicago at all. As a human being, I would be decimated for the next three years, and so a lot of stories I might have written in that time never came to fruition.

Meanwhile, League of Legends esports reached a peak, then the venture capital bubble burst as investors realized there was no monetization scheme in place for any interested party except Riot Games. Money hemorrhaged out, Riot shifted resources to Valorant, and a sport that had been overinflated based on projected exponential growth in perpetuity fell back down to earth.

Also, Players came out.

Players was a 2022 mockumentary about a fictional League of Legends team competing in the North American league. Conceptually, it was doing a lot of what I had planned for my story: following a single team on a rags-to-riches run, focusing on the interpersonal drama of the team members, asking questions about greatness and its pursuit. It's a pretty good show if you're familiar with League of Legends esports at all, with a lot of on-the-ground fidelity that gives it an authentic feel, which is exactly what I had been hoping to use my esports fanaticism to accomplish. It completely took the wind out of my sails; it was like my idea had already been done.

So by 2022, the idea of a League of Legends esports story was dead. But there was still a drive to create something with that spirit, that would delve into those themes.

What remained after all these years of sifting the sieve, letting sand slip through, was that one panel from the manga. The number of people pursuing greatness slowly filtering until only one remained. And if I wasn't going to pursue that idea through League of Legends, maybe I could pursue it through another vehicle. Maybe the vehicle through which the idea had originally been exposed to me. Pokémon. It all came back to Pokémon.

V. Everything Evolving Into Crabs

I knew immediately that if I were to write a Pokémon fic, it would be a tournament arc. This was the natural evolution of my esports story idea. Also, if I were to write Pokémon, I wanted it to be a story about utopia, immersed within Pokémon's near-future ideal world, where everything is clean and healthy, where society is neat and ordered.

This idea caused me to remember the novel Eyeless in Gaza by Aldous Huxley, which I had read a few years back. A mostly autobiographical bildungsroman written on the precipice of World War II, the novel ends with the young protagonist on a journey to Central America, where he meets an idealistic doctor who believes sport to be a proper substitution for war. He tells the story of two tribes locked in internecine conflict through generations, able to replace that violence with soccer matches.

And wasn't that what the world of Pokémon was, a utopia revolving around neutralizing weapons of war by using them for competitive sport?

This tournament, I envisioned, would not simply be about deciding who was best, but an ideological battle for the future of the Pokémon world. To that end, I imagined a war between an entrenched trainer class, who competed as philosopher-warriors, intense individuals with deep connections to their Pokémon, and an upstart commercialization that sought to replace the ideological underpinnings that made their society so safe and prosperous with economic accumulation. It was from this kernel that the character who would become Aracely Sosa arose: charismatic, appealing, human-empathic, and propped up by a support staff who did all the hard work of teambuilding for her.

I imagined the story having an ensemble cast, focusing on nearly every competitor equally, with the Aracely character not having any especial focus until her improbable rise to the top. I imagined a final round where she faced off against "the man who always wins," and though she would lose to him, she would seem to have won the ideological battle, altering the course of society as major corporations scrambled to employ her formula for success at a much grander scale. The story would end with this realization of the earth-shattering importance behind her run, only for Aracely to sink in disappointment. Because in the end, all she really wanted was to win.

The more I thought about it, though, the less I liked the idea of an ensemble cast. The ensemble cast element of Chicago hadn't gone over very well (though I like it), and I figured it would wind up inflating the length of the story considerably. I was coming to the end of Cleveland Quixotic, after all, and once more wanted to write something smaller, tighter, and denser.

So I oriented my thinking to instead have the story revolve around Aracely and one major rival, to give an interpersonal mirror to the ideological war being waged. Thus, Toril came about as an antithesis to everything I had imagined Aracely to be: gruff, antisocial, independent. Their rivalry would culminate in a semifinals battle, before Aracely went on to fight "the man who always wins" in the finals.

I forget exactly when the gender theme came into the equation, but it evolved as an outgrowth of (once again) my competitive League of Legends expertise, where women are essentially nonexistent despite there seemingly being no biological blocks against them. This dovetailed nicely with Pokémon, a world where women seemingly could be powerful competitors, but where—in the anime at least—none ever are. For instance, look at this chart of every major tournament in the anime:

Every known winner is male. Every known finalist and semifinalist is male. Only a handful of female characters have reached the quarterfinals. What possible in-universe justification could there be for that?

This question was actually far more prominent in early planning and drafting than it wound up being in the final work. Initially, I had Aracely's personal motivation revolve around a drive to be the first female trainer to win; this would increase the ideological conflict between her and Toril, who attempted to ignore that she was female altogether. Over time, this theme would see diminished importance in face of the last piece of the thematic puzzle: cults.

It came from reading Underground by Haruki Murakami, a nonfiction journalistic account of the 1995 Tokyo sarin gas attacks carried out by the cult Aum Shinrikyo under the direction of its leader Shoko Asahara. Japan in the 90s was experiencing its own End of History, one taken literally by those disaffected with modern society's grand narrative. The prophecies of Nostradamus became fashionable among the young, who believed that 1999 would be the final year before the world was destroyed. Murakami interviewed both survivors of the gas attack and members of Aum Shinrikyo, collecting worldviews of people who simply thought they were "different" and who were willing to give everything in their lives to the one place that seemed to accept that difference.

The 1995 attacks were a watershed moment in Japanese culture. In their wake would come pivotal works of Japanese pop media, like the titan of otaku culture, Neon Genesis Evangelion:

(What's scary about Nostradamus' prophecy is that it might not come true. A year whose chief terror was that THIS WAS IT.)

Pokémon, whose first games released in Japan in 1996, also emerged within this post-Aum world where fixation on the minutiae of pop media was becoming a primary pillar of meaning for the youth, and it's hard not to see echoes of cultism in the evil teams that dot the series' landscape. Even Team Rocket, originally more modeled on organized crime than occultism, veers that direction in Gold and Silver, and afterward the organizations and their world-ending plots become increasingly absurd, to the point where it starts to become unclear why anyone would ever follow, say, Lysandre.

As I mentioned earlier, my personal interest in Pokémon was at odds with these clownish, Saturday morning cartoon villain organizations, but Murakami's account of the Aum attacks recontextualized them for me, made them make sense even within the framework of a "realistic" utopian world. The last elements snapped into place, and I knew my main character would be the member of one of these cults. A cult dedicated to, what else? Evolution. A core element of the Pokémon series, a perfect metaphor for the frustrating lack of movement of the End of History 90s. I imagined a cult leader as a surrogate mother figure for Aracely, who would have a strained relationship with both of her own parents, and deciding on that, the idea of making Pokémon's canon evil mother Lusamine the villain was a no-brainer. I imagined a post-SuMo Lusamine, unable to move on from her experience merged with Nihilego, languishing in Kanto after being sent there to consult with Bill, who had his own experience being merged with a Pokémon... It didn't take long to figure out how all these pieces connected.

The full form of the story had taken shape.

VI. Showdown

I knew immediately I would be following Showdown rules for the battles. No alternative even crossed my mind. I had dabbled in Showdown a few times over the years, first in Gen 3 OUs, then later in Gen 7 OUs, and I knew from experience that Pokémon is a monumentally more interesting competitive game when operating at a high level compared to either its depiction in the anime (shounen logic, mid-fight evolutions) or the general playing experience (spam your best move on your overleveled starter). I knew I would use competitive rulesets before I even considered the thematic or worldbuilding aspect I would eventually take in the story itself (i.e., that the specific rulesets prevent battles from becoming bloodsport and enforce order on the world). I simply thought doing battles this way would be far more entertaining.

To prepare, I started playing Gen 9 OUs under the guidance of a few friends who were into the competitive scene. I grinded the ladder for months, eventually getting a good enough grasp on the metagame to reach 1500 Elo on the Showdown ladder, which is not very good but generally higher than someone can reach with dumb luck.

Crafting the tournament format and rulesets used in the story wasn't difficult. I modeled the tournament format on the League of Legends World Championship, with region-based seeds (having been selected due to performance in regional tournaments) competing in four groups before the highest performers advanced to a single elimination bracket. Initially, I envisioned a 32-competitor bracket instead of the 16-competitor bracket that would appear in the final draft, but otherwise the format came quickly and easily.

In terms of the rulesets and available Pokémon, my considerations were made primarily in terms of what would be most entertaining to read. I decided to include Mega Evolutions and not include Z Moves, Dynamax, or Terastallization, because Mega Evolutions are cool and those other gimmicks are not. The bring-9-pick-6 format, while unusual in Showdown rulesets, is similar to the rules in Pokémon Stadium and VGC tournaments, and also adds a level of intrigue to which Pokémon each competitor uses. (It also enabled Red's Zapdos at the climax of the story, which was something I knew I would bring out from very early on.)

With the help of one of my friends who knew competitive Pokémon, I scripted out each battle assiduously before I wrote them. Every battle was tested using Showdown itself, with only a few turns mocked up to account for luck. For instance, in Aracely versus Jinjiao, Slowking is meant to stay asleep for three turns. Rather than rely on luck to ensure Slowking actually slept that long during the test, I could give Slowking a useless move and have him use that instead to simulate being asleep.

The only thing that couldn't be tested in Showdown was the 7 PP Kingambit trick Red uses at the end of the story, because it's impossible to set a Pokémon to have fewer than max PP in Showdown. This led to one of the bigger mistakes of the story, as it turns out that Encore would simply wear off if Kingambit ran out of PP, rather than forcing him to use Struggle like I assumed. Luckily, even if this were the case, it wouldn't change the outcome of the battle, so it's not an error I lose too much sleep over.

Character teams were chosen to thread the needle between a few considerations. The team needed to be competitively viable, reflect the character's personality in some way, and be distinct from other teams for the sake of variety. (Variety is somewhat unrealistic in real top-level competitive Pokémon, where you'll often see many almost identical teams in the top ranks. But that would be boring.) Some lack of optimization was allowed under the conceit that actually training these Pokémon to peak form would take a lot of time in the real world, compared to Showdown were optimization can be determined quickly due to the ability to immediately adjust stats and builds.

I also tried to give some preference for Pokémon that would be more familiar to layman fans, though this was difficult because Gen 8 and 9 have outrageous power creep and many popular early generation Pokémon have been completely phased out. (Using Megas helped with this issue.) It was this consideration that led to Azumarill being Aracely's ace. There was also an innate challenge to imagining what the competitive scene would look like without legendary Pokémon. Zapdos and Landorus-Therian have been inexorable staples of the competitive scene for generations. What happens in a world where they aren't used at all?

In the original 32-person bracket, I imagined Aracely competing against Jinjiao in the first round, then minor characters Adrian da Cunha and Jacq Ray Johnson in the next two rounds, before facing Toril in semifinals. I imagined Adrian da Cunha as a "hometown hero" whose team wasn't great but he was plucky with a lot of grit, and Jacq Ray Johnson as a self-aware heel who liked to use cheesy strategies and gimmicky Pokémon like Smeargle and Ditto. Condensing from 32 to 16 occurred around the same time I had settled on Lusamine as my villain/cult leader, which led to replacing those two with Gladion. I developed full brackets for both the 32-man and 16-man iterations, with character names and regions, just in case I ever needed to mention them.

All that was left to do was write the story.

VII. Unbroken Line of History

I began writing in September 2023 under the tentative title Unbroken Line of History, which I would later change to simply Lines. In the original drafts, I opened the story with a modified version of the panel from Electric Tale of Pikachu detailing how people are filtered over time in their pursuit of being the best, this time starting with all 8 billion people in the world until only one remains. The story then cut to Aracely's perspective in the restroom as she mentally prepared for her final group stage match.

At this point I was more set on Aracely being the clear protagonist of the story, so she had a few facets of her personality designed around that. First, as I mentioned before, there was a feminist angle where she was motivated specifically to be the first female trainer to win the championship. Secondly, I threw in some more generic nervousness/fear of failure. The other major difference is that I did not lead with the cult prophecy of the world ending. I originally envisioned the cult reveal to be a mid-story twist, and only obliquely hinted at it.

The scene still played out with Toril appearing and the two getting off to a bad start. Then, Cely's father tried to talk strategy with her while she ignored him, before the battle transpired in much the same form as it does in the final draft.

I showed this early draft to my friends and most disliked it. My girlfriend at the time told me Cely sounded like an edgy 13-year-old boy, while my neuroscientist friend whose aspirational idol is Bondrewd from Made in Abyss wanted to know more about the oblique hints of a cult, finding everything else boring. Another friend said it was stupid that there were 30 seconds between turns during the battle and that the Pokémon should just go at each other; nobody would actually want to watch a battle that was paced so slowly. (I vehemently disagreed with that take. Basically every popular sport balances between slow-paced moments of strategy and fast-paced moments of action and execution.) Some people I showed it to did enjoy it, though. Gazemaize, the author of Chili and the Chocolate Factory, was especially enamored by the Brittany/Gardevoir reveal and the Bud Light Analyst Desk, and implored me to keep both of those elements at all costs. 7th, one of my friends who helped me with the Showdown stuff, was so into it she drew fan art of all the characters (which I've posted before) and also wrote eight pornographic short stories about them.

I rewrote the same opening scene several times across October and November, though these were minor iterations without significant adjustments. Frustrated with the lack of progress, I decided to take a break from writing to simply think about the story for a few months.

During this time, to fix Aracely's edgy 13-year-old voice, I decided to lean into her being from Pokémon Los Angeles (with her native region, Visia, being a play on "visual" as a reference to Hollywood) and gave her a Valley Girl accent. To prepare for this, I listened to hours and hours of ASMR videos of people speaking like Valley Girls and took notes on their inflection and syntax. It was here where I decided on Aracely's underlining quirk, as a way of capturing the unique style of emphasis Valley Girls used.

This also made me realize I needed to adjust Aracely's personality. Despite the tone of her voice, she was still acting antisocially. She didn't want to talk to her father, she didn't want to talk to Lachlan Nguyen, she didn't even really want to talk to Toril. Toril herself was a lump of coal. My own misanthropy kept leaking into the characters, even when I conceptually didn't want them to have it. I thought back to Cleveland Quixotic, and how what made the Jay and Viviendre romance work was that they actually both liked each other, and figured—even though I didn't have explicitly romantic plans for Aracely and Toril—that I needed to do something similar to make their rivalry truly pop. Rather than avoid people, Aracely would lean into talking to them, even if they were annoying. Although Toril remained frigid, there would be a part of her yearning for emotional contact, a way to coax her out of her shell.

I also thought deeply about the structure of my stories in general, and my inability to come up with good hooks. It was around this time that someone I knew was reading Chicago. They pointed out that the plot of Chicago doesn't really start until Chapter 26; that I was "burying the lede." I considered this. My logic, when writing Chicago, was that the Empire moving to take over Washington would be a twist, something that would shock and excite people and change their perception of the entire story.

But did that make sense, when really the story was "about" that twist? Didn't that just make everything before the twist harder to get into for a reader? Chicago might look radically different if I revealed the Empire's goals immediately, but it would also probably be a more immediately engaging work. I'm a big fan of delayed gratification in storytelling, but had I taken it too far?

This was a major revelation for me, and immediately I understood what I needed to do for my Pokémon story: move up the cult plotline. Place it front and center. Name the whole story after it even. I decided on framing the opening scene from Toril's perspective, depicting Aracely initially more as an alien other, emphasizing the fact that she was in a cult rather than hide it behind foreshadowing. This could also lead to Aracely and Toril having more of a dual protagonist setup, which would make my planned two-half finale (one half where Aracely battled "the man who always wins," one half where Toril got involved in stopping the cult's doomsday plot) work even better.

Confidence resurged. At the end of January 2024, my girlfriend of seven years  and I broke up. A few days later, I started writing the sixth—and ultimately final—draft of When I Win the World Ends.

VIII. When I Win the World Ends

Now it's the part of the Making Of where I actually make the thing I'm supposed to be making, but there's a lot less to say about it. Once I have a plan, the actual writing of the story is the easy part, and most of what I wrote—with a few exceptions—looks similar to the story as it exists now.

There were some oddities. I wrote the first seven chapters (everything up to the end of the Jinjiao battle) and then had to take a two week break to write a short piece for a writing contest I had entered in December as part of an effort to stop overthinking WIW. After this interruption, I returned to WIW writing perhaps a bit more perfunctorily than I usually would, leading to an original version of Chapter 8 (the chapter where MOTHER makes her first real appearance) that was short and abbreviated. Later, in editing, I would rewrite most of this chapter.

A few ideas emerged while writing, like the motif of serendipity/Logos, which I felt tied nicely to the ideas of evolution and history. It was also in this draft that I introduced Cely's friends Haydn and Charlie, as a nod to an earlier work of mine also featuring a fashion-obsessed girl from Los Angeles. (Speaking of nods to earlier works, in the original 32-man bracket, Cole Coulter featured as one of the competitors, but he didn't make the 16-man cut.)

The process went smoothly. I finished the draft at the end of May, a little under four months after I started it. I had envisioned the full story as being about 70,000 words, but the draft ended up closer to 115,000. Underestimating story length is just an essential element of the trade, though.

A few days after finishing the draft I went on a four-day Oklahoma Darkness Retreat where I had access to zero electronics. The goal was to think about my story deeply and how it could be improved in the editing process.

In this time chamber, where I did nothing except complete crossword puzzles and read The Recognitions by William Gaddis, I came to a realization. There was one element the story needed that wasn't already there.

That element was Sabrina. In the original draft, Sabrina was not present during the scene where Aracely meets the Old Man. She was mentioned obliquely a couple of times in conjunction with Aracely's "psychic powers," but it never really built to anything. There was still a scene where Aracely was interrogated due to her relationship with MOTHER, but only by nameless goons, and the scene lacked tension as it was clear Aracely could talk circles around them.

When I returned from Oklahoma, I prepared for my conception of Sabrina as a character by writing an 8,000 word short story from her perspective, which hashed out an entire backstory for her. Then, I started editing the draft.

For me, a lot of editing is just polish. Usually, cutting out needless sentences and fixing clunky ones, as well as emphasizing a few of the more understated themes and motifs. For instance, during editing, I made slight additions to emphasize the thematic connection between Aracely's suicide attempt and the global war that almost destroyed the world, as well as the connection between the moon and cyclical insanity (lunacy, etymologically, being related to the moon). I made the Old Man more of a Walt Disney-esque figure (from my notes: "a dying Disney"), rewriting much of his dialogue to either be direct quotes or to evoke his ideals. I also expanded on several of the scenes where Toril and Aracely interact to make their relationship more complex and nuanced. I gave MOTHER some new dialogue, including her speech in Chapter 18 about loving a child for the potential it promises, while also paradoxically wanting it to remain a child forever.

The largest changes were in the three chapters I almost fully rewrote. The first was Chapter 8, which as I mentioned earlier was overly terse. In the original draft, it depicted MOTHER as more pathetic, more dependent on Aracely. I decided to make her a more threatening figure, and incorporated a few references to the Moloch sacrifice scene from Valle Verde to make her seem more like a false idol. Similarly, I rewrote Chapter 12, which was originally a very short chapter that focused solely on a conversation between MOTHER and Nilufer that ended with the order to kidnap Aracely. In rewriting the chapter to include Fiorella, I gave myself more opportunity to flesh out the respective philosophies of her and MOTHER (including some of the story's most salient discussions about why cults exist), as well as give more of an insight into the inner workings of RISE as an organization. And lastly, I fully rewrote Chapter 19 to include Sabrina.

The last changes I made in editing were to the final chapter. When I finished the final draft of the story, I sent it to several readers, many of whom had looked at the original drafts of the first chapter, as well as julirites, the author of a Fargo fan fiction called London. There was an immediate and minor backlash to the final chapter, which was originally much more pessimistic, from most people who read it. In the original version, Aracely and Toril were not still in communication. (Fiorella was also dying of cancer instead of jockeying to replace the Old Man.) The finale had a much more somber, sedate, tragic note. Juli and 7th disliked this sad ending, while Gazemaize wanted me to cut the final chapter altogether. I felt confident that the final chapter was necessary, though, and revised it to its current version, which was much better liked.

And then... the story was finished, near the end of July. I crunched the numbers and realized that if I posted two chapters to start and then did a twice-weekly posting schedule, I could end the story serendipitously on October 12. So I did.

IX. Names and Special Thanks

In my Making Of post for Cleveland Quixotic, I had a fairly extensive list of where I got all the character and place names from. The list is a lot less extensive here; most names I constructed for the purpose of sounding evocative, rather than taking them from someplace specific. For instance, I chose the name Aracely Sosa because it sounds like whistling with its repeated S sounds, compared to Toril Lund which is a lot harsher with its consonants. You can see a similar rationale behind names like Fiorella Fiorina, Yui Matsui, and even some of the background characters, like Jacq Ray Johnson, Jr., where there is a lot of emphasis on alliteration and rhyme.

There are a couple of exceptions. Jinjiao is the in-game ID of a longtime Chinese League of Legends pro of middling notability. He picked the name (which means "Golden Horn") as a reference to the Golden Horned King, a villain from Journey to the West.

Lutz, Fiorella's cameraman, was named after an extremely minor character from Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, who is not playable and only appears in a singular cutscene before being killed. They are so irrelevant that despite naming a character after them, I actually forgot their name, which is Lotz, not Lutz.

Haydn is named after the famous classical composer.

Special thanks to 7th and Elick320 for helping me with the teams and battles. Thanks to Gazemaize and julirites, among others unnamed, for reading and providing feedback. And thank you all for enjoying the story.

[ender-girl-13]

Thoughts on Palworld

Leave it to the internet to miss the entire point of people disliking Palworld. It's not because they are taking money from Pokémon. It not because they think Pokémon but with guns is stupid. IT'S ABOUT ARTISTIC INTEGRITY AND ORIGINALITY! Some of the Pals are just blatant rip-off's/fusions of existing Pokémon. If people try to steal Pokémon's designs and actually sell that as a commercial product that may give the impression that it's ok to steal others art and encourage it! If all of the Pals they made were original I would love to play it!

P.S

Apparently the accusations of them ripping Pokémon models was false. (Sorry about that) But they did basically do the 3D modeling version of tracing which is still bad. Also I've watched more videos on this game and it is very POSSIBLE they have stolen fan Fakemon designs and changed them up a little which is still shitty of them.

Again I will reiterate I would love this game and it's success if it wasn't so creatively bankrupt and plagiarized.

Here are some alternative Pokémon-esce games to play!

Cassette Beasts - Try to find you way out of this land and transform into and fuse Beasts!

TemTem - Very cute art style and can play online with other people! Also has a Nuzlocke/Randomlocke Mode.

Ooblets - Have card dance battles with other Ooblets and have them help you on your farm. You can also run your own shop!

Coromon - You're a newly minted Battle Researcher and your job gets attacked on your first day of work! Track down the invaders and discover the rising threat around Velua! Has different difficultly modes and customization.

Monster Sanctuary - A Monster Taming Metroidvania Sidescroller

Here are some Pokémon fan games to try!

Reborn - Has decent difficulty/One of the most difficult fan games I've come across. Has new Pokémon Forms

Uranium - Original Region and Pokémon

Insurgence - Has an option for a slightly darker twist on the traditional Pokémon story. Has new Pokémon/Forms

Xenoverse - Haven't play or watched it but looks very promising. Originally in Spanish but has a English translation as well.

Phoenix Rising - Still in development and only has one episode. Has new Pokémon Forms and amazing art and visuals

Red Adventures - From what I've seen it seems to be a game version of The Pokémon Adventures Manga

Castaway - Your plane crashes and you are left to discover the secrets of a mysterious island.

Mewyou - A game where you play as Mew!

Axis - You are teleported from our world to the Pokémon world/You're still human

Ethereal Gates - Still only a Demo at the moment/Unsure if they are still making it

I will add more to this list if asked!

[the-dumpster-fire-of-life]

Stop i feel like it would be so cute if you wrote about how one of the twins (bill or Tom) fell in love at first sight with reader and just became infatuated with them since

I feel like Tom would be such a cute option tho because YKNOW he’s a playboy BUT I FEEL LIKE IT WOULD BE SO CUTE IF HE JUST FELL IN LOVE WITH READER AND NEVER LOOKED BACK

Love at First Sight

It felt so weird for everyone involved

Tom Kaulitz, the fucking playboy, was in love??

It was so shocking that even Bill feared what was going on

Tom didn't even know how to feel at first

He was used to flirting with fans, living how he wanted and not giving a shit

Until he saw you

He saw you and immediately it felt like something paused the entire world and he could only see you

He didn't even talk to you yet! 

You just looked so MF beautiful

He couldn't help but stare at you

Especially when he heard your laugh along with seeing your smile

He couldn't help but freeze up for a minte

It was probably at a concert you went to

You asked for a autograph and legit had to ask twice to break him out of his staring at you

Once he got over that, he started flirting a bit to try and see what was going on

You even flirted a bit back, but not like the other fangirls did

Not tryna be that girl, but you caught his attention quickly

Be it your personality, your style, how you looked, carried yourself or confidence

You did something right that night

Tom legit was pacing wondering if his heart was broken because it didn't seem the same

He seized his opportunity and somehow got your number

The rest I shall leave up to you

After y'all get together he is so smug and flirty and proud he got you

Fans were so shocked when they saw he was in a relationship

Especially when pictures of you guys were leaked

And you can tell he was visibly whipped!

You guys were shopping? 

He's holding your bags with his card in your hand

He's holding your hand, hugging you, kissing your cheek, has his hand in your back pocket, dodging paparazzi with you and almost shamelessly making out practically 

He is not scared to flaunt this mf relationship because he can and he is somehow so happy in it

He didn't think he would actually find that specific great love

You somehow changed his perception of love

He will kiss you, hold you, be held by you, bring you onstage, run back to you backstage

Somehow he will always find you and you cannot escape

So many pictures of him just staring at you with somehow such a loving look in his eyes

He changed somehow so much and the band is almost thanking you

Fans are always up your ass for "changing" him

Mostly crazed fangirls, but neither of you can give a shit

He found you, and somehow, you let him have his chance

Treats you so well as to not risk losing you

Feels so bad in arguments

Like, babe, don't fight

And mother fucker snatched it and will not let go

He turns into such a child

Wanting his hair played with, somehow making you match with him, sleeping on top of you on the bus, sharing hotel room

Will do what you ask no matter what it is somehow

Nobody shall dare get in his way

Tom has a mission when it regards you and he shall complete it no matter what

He turned into such a loveable simp and we cannot handle

Will legit carry you around if you want

Buys you whatever the hell you want, ho don't care about the cost

Has fuck you money that he will willingly go broke spending on you

Loves the smiles and the laughs you bring him

He feels like such a sap at times but loves having you hold his face

He legit wants to just be so close to you that he can crawl into your skin at times it's so clingy

You have literally fell asleep almost inside of his shirt, both slithered inside of the giant oversized shirt on a couch

He loves the nights you guys just stay up and do anything and everything

He is secretly so corny, flirty and charming it's like a total other persona

[love-takes-work]

I got to go to the Cartoon Network Hotel a couple weeks ago when I was traveling. We did not stay there overnight but we got to eat in the Cartoon Kitchen and shop in the gift shop.

[Image: Cartoon Network Hotel front shot featuring Finn and Jake from Adventure time--Tumblr blogger love-takes-work standing in front with two Cartoon Network shopping bags]

During our visit, the restaurant was very limited in terms of food and none of it was themed like I'd heard from other visitors, but that was no big deal. The selection in the gift shop, while exciting because they have items there that you can't get anywhere else, was a little disappointing because in some cases I was only able to get, say, a Garnet cup and a Steven cup when I knew Amethyst and Pearl cups of the same style also exist. I'm both excited I could get what I got and frustrated that I don't know how I'll ever get a complete set if I ever can. (Maybe I should make some friends in Lancaster, Pennsylvania?)

[Image 1: Wall of Steven Universe merchandise at the CN Hotel. Image 2: Laid out merchandise bought by love-takes-work, featuring hats, a bag, a shirt and hoodie, travel cups, a mug, a ball, two sticker packs, a water ring toss game, a mint tin, a keychain, and a deck of playing cards.]

What was really cool, though, was the concept art of CN shows framed around the building! I had never seen some of these drawings.

[Image 1: Sketches and color art of the Temple. Image 2: Two framed We Bare Bears sketchy art pieces. Image 3: Various sketchy Steven Universe art, some on colored or white paper and sticky notes, featuring Steven running, Lion, Opal, different angels of Steven, and Pearl, Amethyst, and Garnet. Image 4: A closer image of the Pearl, Amethyst, and Garnet art on pinkish paper. Image 5: A closer image of sticky notes and shaded sketches of Steven in different poses.]

Even the BATHROOM had themed art! Yes I took photos. I couldn't not.

[Three images: a large black runner across the top of the CN Hotel bathroom featuring various simplistic drawings in white of characters and objects from CN shows]

It was really fun to see it in person and I wish I could go back to the gift shop to check periodically on whether they have merch I don't have in my collection!

Bye-bye, CN Hotel!

[Image: the Cartoon Network Hotel outdoor sign, photographed from our Uber]

[cosmic-ghost-hermit]

Past Life Reading

Hey fellas! Please please please donate to my CashApp or interact with my post so I can do this full time! If you can't donate please interact with this post. We made it to 200 followers and I can't thank you all enough. Also if y'all wanna suggest readings go ahead and dump those recommendations in my ask box!

⚡Donate to my CashApp☀️

Decks used are the Archetype Oracle, the Anime Tarot, and the Starseed Oracle.

This reading will go over one of your Past Lives and how it affects your current incarnation. Remember reincarnation isn't linear and there are other planets with life on them. HAPPY FULL MOON IN CAPRICORN!! Take what resonates and leave the rest behind but always be open to new experiences!

______________________________________________________________

PILE ONE

Astrology: Taurus, Cancer, Scorpio

Past Life Song: Pale Blue Dot by TWRP

Current Life Song: 3 Strange Days by School Of Fish

Vibes: Black, white, ocean blue, pearl, moldavite, coral reef, seagulls, gold rings, gray hair, globe, strong aura, childlike wonder, peanuts, almonds, sunflower seeds, Zues, Posideon

Cards: The Fool, The Hierophant, Queen of Cups, Justice, The One, The Seed, Perspective, Child of the Cosmos

Welcome, pile one! I am feeling some kind of royalty from this previous life. I think you were a spiritual leader in this life too or you were very involved with spirituality. I think you were probably really superstitious and trusted the divine more than you trusted humans. You had a strong faith in tradition and routine. I see this is a huge contrast to your current life. In this previous life, you were very connected with your guides. I see you could probably communicate with them easily and often. You have many sea spirits that look after you that you connected to in this past life. They followed you because of how much spiritual work you did in this past life. I see in this life you were guided by your living ancestors into the role you took. You had to learn that walking a path for the sake of the collective is a high honor and it is not a role for the weak. You had to give up a lot of opportunities that would have been for selfish gain for the sake of others. You have lots of built-up anger from this past life of sacrifice. You were extremely noble in this past life. In your current life, this behavior still pops up from time to time. You are learning how to serve yourself over serving others. I see you have some people-pleaser tendencies that leak into this life. You are still meant to be spiritual but you are also meant to learn about your own opinions/morals and hold them above the beliefs of the many. I see in this life you are finding your own moral compass. I see you have been betrayed by mentors you thought you could trust with everything. They withheld information that would have been extremely helpful if you had known ahead of time. I see that your parents were not kind to you. Despite these hardships' you still have a pure heart. Except now you are more capable of ruthlessness. Be ruthless in your morals. Serve justice out on a silver plater so your enemies look at their reflection while they face your wrath. In this life, you will release the anger you held from the last. You must be selfish. You must harness your wrath. Seek truth. Do not follow without knowing why you follow.

______________________________________________________________

PILE TWO

Astrology: Libra, Aquarius, Leo

Past Life Song: Run Boy Run by Woodkid

Current Life Song: Being Real is the New Fake by Toni Jones

Vibes: Mint green, lavender, pink, gold, painting, flower crown, lightning, Celtic knots, ribbon, modesty, alchemy, museums, strawberry, smoking, drinking, dive bars, Hermes, Persephone

Cards: The Empress, The World, Death, 2 of Swords, The Creator, The Riddle, You're Not Alone, Cracked Open

Hello, pile two! I see you were a traveler in this specific past life. I see you traveled in style and luxury. You didn't start in luxury though. You earned it. You worked hard for the opportunities you gained. I see you had to jump many obstacles that didn't make much sense, in the moment. Some of them were difficult for you to pass but others were a breeze. I think you were a pilot for the military. You earned many awards while in service. You saw the most beautiful sights in situations that didn't allow you to appreciate them. You lost so many friends to a nasty war. This made you feel really alone. After you finished serving in the military, I think you became an airline pilot. This allowed you to be in the sky and make more friends along the way. I see you enjoying tourism and seeing the sights. You got to experience so many different cultures and learned to love every part of the planet for its different aspects. I see you took many lovers in your travels but never settled down. You picked up a creative hobby in your travels. I see maybe a martial art also became a hobby of yours in this life. You learned in that life that humans can be scary and life can be hell but you also learned that humans are wonderfully creative and life can be heaven. You had the pleasure of seeing every part of what it is like to be alive. The good and the bad. In your current life, I see you still are quite creative. You pull a lot of inspiration from other cultures. I feel you miss the sky a lot. You might create lots of art relating to the sky. In this life, you are learning how to connect with your fellow humans. You traveled so much in your past life, this definitely made it hard to make permanent connections. Now you must adjust to stay grounded and learn to live in mostly one spot. Don't fret though. You will still travel spiritually. Your soul is a free one and needs to see the stars once more.

______________________________________________________________

PILE THREE

Astrology: Sagittarius, Virgo, Pisces

Past Life Song: Sunday Candy by Nico Segal

Current Life Song: Live Your Life by MIKA

Vibes: Cyan, periwinkle, peach, orange, butterflies, Jupiter, Saturn, tigers-eye, winter, sports, yen coins, peregrine falcon, feminity, Hestia, Hera

Cards: Page of Wands, 10 of Cups, 5 of Pentacles, 4 of Swords, Agape, Gnosis, You're Not For Everyone, The Void

Hey there, pile three! Welcome to your reading. I see in this past life you were a romantic. You were perhaps a mother in this life or you took the role of one to your community. You had an abundance of love that you handed out like candy. I see you were very spiritual and read many religious texts in your spare time but this wasn't something you shared like your love. You supported many youngins in their dreams but never got to fulfill your own. You were too busy making food for your children and community. You were planning events and hosting parties for your family reunions. You were the glue that held together your loved ones. I see you went under-appreciated a lot of the time but you were immensely respected by everyone you knew. Even when you grew old you still had the heart of a spry little one. It surprised everyone how active of a person you were. I see you lived a loooooong life. You learned how to lead and how to see the love everywhere you went. In this life, you are meant to fulfill the dreams you couldn't in the last one. I see you seeking knowledge. Maybe you are a student. I see you putting aside your studies to help teach others. Old habits die hard I guess. Make sure you are spending your current life on yourself. Your community was assisted enough in your previous life. You definitely reincarnated into the same family. I see you have both a grand trine or a grand square in your astral chart. Allow yourself to learn for the sake of you. Learn that selfishness isn't as evil as people say it is. I hope you find the information you are looking for in this life. Your soul is determined to gain knowledge so allow it to learn. Allow yourself to be an oddity. Allow yourself to be the black sheep that isn't understood. You don't have to take the same role you took in your last life. You can serve yourself. You should be your priority.

______________________________________________________________

PILE FOUR

Astrology: Capricorn, Aries, Gemini

Past Life Song: Discovery Album by Daft Punk (yes the whole album)

Current Life Song: Me@U by Middle Milk

Vibes: Soft pink, rainbows, yellow, owl, pyramid, egg, horns, mountains, quartz, karma, star clusters, long hair, short bangs, malachite, copper, Sirius, mental health issues, Iris, Apollo

Cards: The Devil, Queen of Swords, Ace of Pentacles, 8 of Wands, The Vision, The Starborn, Messenger, Star Ancestors

Hey there, pile four. Welcome to your past life reading! You had it pretty rough in your past life. You spent a lot of it seeing weird visions and remembering other worlds. I see you could have been suffering from intense mental health issues. You were most likely hospitalized for a lot of your previous life. Your body was chained to earth but your mind was elsewhere. Your soul was being pulled into the astral realm by your guides and ancestors. Meanwhile, your body was facing incarceration. You could have other past lives on other planets and your last life consisted mostly of your soul adjusting to Earth's energy. Your soul is not new at all but it is semi-new to Earth. You were learning how wild Earth can be. You had to acclimate to the lower vibrations. There is nothing wrong with low vibrations by the way. They were just different than what you were used to. I see in this life you still have crazy dreams and visions. You are really attuned to the spirit realm. You are just now experiencing Earth for the first time consciously. You are meant to be a seer on earth while simultaneously learning all you can about what it is like to be human. You serve as a messenger for those who don't have the skill to hear the spirit realm as well as you do. You are learning very fast that it is rough out here. You are just starting to feel the weight of karmic connections. You will be learning a lot here but your main mission is to bring as much harmony and balance as possible to Earth. You understand how sick Earth is right now and it hurts you to think about but you have the wisdom to help her feel better. You have the wisdom to assist humans. It is hidden in your soul, friend. This is an opportunity to heal her and her citizens. I know it is tough out here and I'm really sorry that it is. I wish you could have had a warmer welcome but this is a fantastic opportunity.

[batfambrainrotbeloved]

The Sleepy Kitten Cafe 🐱💤 

(The Drakes Spoiled Brat. (im sorry dad))

Ill solidify an actual layout design later (since this will become a major setting for most of the fic) BUT for now you get a shitty collage design Edit- Fuck it I was gonna wait till post chapter 7 but I decided to publish now so here you go!

Info (may or may not become relevent in the fic, I just think is neat also for my own reference)

Located on The Narrows of Gotham city

All utensils and containers are thrifted so none of them match

Upstairs lounge is a mini library/book store

They sell baked goods and have a shitty service window where you can order diner style food/snacks

Regular game nights/other events (including jazz night which Tim vehelementaly refuses to attend)

Not uncommon for random strays to come hang out (no one tell their manager)

Have a photo wall of regular customers (it took several weeks of begging before Tim allowed Gwen to snap his pic and pin it up)

They have a whole buisness card holder on the counter people can advertise their shit

Owned by a former hippie from Washington and her husband from Sikkim

Almost gets robbed once a week but hey its Gotham, what can you do? (emphasis on almost)

Employees (named thus far, who I will also probably draw later)-

Gwen Parkins she/her- Main Barista Alans (Tims) BFF, utter sweetheart, but will cry if yelled at. Also plans like 80% of the work events. Wears clips in her hair that are "on theme" for whatever event is for the day (cat ones for work obvi) Never checks her bank account so doesnt notice Tim slipping in an extra 500-3k every month (tax free of course) and she ends up saving or donating half of it anyways. From the Narrows.

Zeek (Ezikel) Zoref he/they- Cook/Security Very open stoner, likes bullying his friends (kinda an asshole, but will apologize if too far), also loves Gotham for the fact he can and will fist fight customers given the oppertunity, and there are PLENTY of oppertunies. Carries around a bat. Almost became a Joker Goon out of nessesity but by sheer happenstance he tried robbing Alan who somehow got him an interview at the Cafe, even with zero experience. (Owes his life, but will never admit it) Allergic to mint and mourns mint gum everyday. From Crime Alley.

Obsidian Fowler they/them- Manager/Barista The reason shit gets done, newly recognized artist, meticiously does inventory because they find it fun. Gets stressed about hygine when his coworkers keep sneaking random strays in the cafe, but weak to begging. Did not give in when they brought in a Raccoon. Keeps offering Alan a job because "Please I cannot be the only competent member here" From Old Gotham.

[storkteller]

I would like to debut my first mc.

Name: Reuben Burke

Face claim: @/reubenlarkin on Instagram

Age: 16 (5th year)

Gender: Male

House: Ravenclaw

Blood status: Pure-blood

Social status: Discarded son of the Burke family

Wand: Cedar with dragon heartstring, 13", unyielding

Patronus: Ferruginous hawk

Favorite class: Potions, Astronomy

Favorite spell: Accio

Favorite professor: Fig

Favorite animal: August, his owl

Hair color: Brown

Eye color: Grey

Height: 5'10" (will grow to 6'1" in adulthood)

Distinguishing features: sulky

Clothing style: Upper-class and impeccable, observing details such as pocket squares, buttonholes, cufflinks, and watch chains.

Traits: Solitary, brooding, perceptive, ambitious, has something to prove

Likes: Books, constellations, late nights, mints, chocolates

Dislikes: Mint chocolate, loudmouths, Dugbogs, prophecies

Good at: Card games, Astronomy, Potions, serving cunt

Bad at: Quidditch, socializing, Gobstones, Transfiguration

Hobbies: Petting cats, stargazing, gathering potion ingredients

Fears: Cramped spaces

Family: The Prosperous House of Burke

Reuben was born into the main line of the House of Burke. Although the Burke family is a member of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, it is considered inferior to other notorious pure-blood families -- the Malfoys, the Blacks -- due to acquiring its wealth as merchants and tradesmen.

Some years before Reuben's birth, a prophet spoke of a "lion" that would soon be born to the family and secure its future. When Reuben's mother became pregnant, the family believed this "lion" to be him. There was much celebration when he was born, and with the baby's light red hair and stark grey eyes, it seemed he would indeed galvanize the Burke's reputation.

As Reuben grew up, however, he failed to show any signs of magic. His hair darkened to a deep shade of brown and he became a somewhat anxious boy, unable to shoulder great expectations placed upon him by the family. When his eleventh birthday came around and his Hogwarts letter failed to arrive, the family finally declared him a squib and sent him away to live with faraway cousins. A year later, his mother gave birth to his brother, Vincent, who came out with bright blue eyes and flaming red locks that never darkened.

Adopted family: Primroses and the Rosebery

Cousin Clara had been politely distant to the family after a controversial courtship, but she had married well. Her muggle husband was Henry Primrose, younger brother to a Lord Primrose, Earl of Rosebery. They lived together (and happily, if rumors were to be believed) in a spacious country house not far from the Primrose estate. Their daughter, Alice Primrose, had also turned out to be a squib and was the same age as Reuben, so it was decided that he would go live with his noble cousins.

Cast out by his own mother and father, Reuben's anxiety quickly soured into sullen ambition. He liked his relatives well enough, especially Cousin Alice, who, while preparing to be presented to Society in two years, also exhibited a natural and refreshing curiosity of magic and the world; at the same time he felt sick with jealousy, for, as a commoner in the muggle world, he had no such Society to enter as an alternative to the wizarding world. Though without magic, he decided that there were still some things he could do. Squib or not, anyone could look into a telescope, and he was hell-bent to prove himself a capable astronomer to eventually stick it to the "lion" of the family.

Fig.

Reuben loved Fig. How could he not? When the silver-haired old man knocked on the oaken door of the country house and stood awkwardly to be announced by the butler, then cleared his throat to tell Reuben (and Alice -- more on that elsewhere) that he was magical after all -- how could he not be overwhelmed by joy and gratitude? From then on, Fig would always be his mentor, friend, and the man who brought Reuben to the wizarding world. He would follow Fig anywhere.

(And he did, right up to the very end.)

Friends: Amit Thakkar, Garreth Weasley

Reuben's friendship with Amit was natural. Both were astronomy lovers, and they spent many a late nights in the freezing Astronomy Tower and weekends roaming the highlands looking for astronomy tables. Reuben was calm where Amit was nervous, and Amit did the talking when Reuben fell quiet. Professor Shah once called them her dynamic duo. The nickname stuck.

Reuben's friendship with Garreth Weasley was anything but natural. With his mane of red hair and his tendency to brag, Garreth at first reminded Reuben of the brother that replaced him, whom he had never met but frequently pictured in his mind. Garreth spoke loudly and proudly of himself and bothered and prodded Reuben when he wanted to be left alone and constantly got him in trouble, but Garreth, as Reuben began to realize, was probably nothing like his lion brother. Garreth spoke proudly of everyone. And Garreth prodded him into doing things he never would have done on his own. Thanks to Garreth's ingenious discovery of the passageway that led to Honeydukes, Reuben had a completely free (though unethical) supply of rare potion ingredients. That is not to say, however, that they never got caught. Once Garreth's kind but unsparing aunt had caught them padding into the Potions classroom past curfew, and another time she had found them stuck in the prefect bathroom after Peeves locked them in, and another time with dungbombs on the third floor suspiciously close to the gargoyle that led to the Headmaster's office... she once called them the partners in crime, and the nickname stuck.

Ancient Magic:

Ancient Magic was cold. It dripped into his bloodstream like glacial meltwater, that hollow feeling when the wind blew on the mountain and he hadn't worn enough layers. Then, when he released its power, it was nothing short of supernovae rebounding off of dying stars.

Quotes:

"I could have been a candle, but because you have neglected me I will grow into a wildfire."

"Amit, wake up. What do you see?"

"Millions of stars."

"And what does that mean to you?"

"The infinite grandeur of the universe, ever expanding --"

"No, you idiot, someone stole our tent."

"I may not be a lion, but I have talons too. They are as long and sharp as yours."

"Garreth, would you shut the fuck up?"

Thanks for reading!

[divine-crows]

A Short Witchy Gift Guide for Non-Witches

Hello! I'm a witch. I also have a partner who's... not a witch? Lol. Anyways, I was thinking about how awesome it would be if people who are supportive of their witchy partners had a guide to help them with buying gifts (and it may help some witches fill out their wishlist)!

The following information is subjective and it's going to take your knowledge of the other person's likes and dislikes to ultimately pick what they like!

Now, books can be hit or miss. You'll want to be careful because a lot of books will have the same regurgitated basic information, and it might have content the gift-receiver doesn't really care to have or might already know. For book gifts it's probably best to just ask them if they have any books they've wanted for a while, but I have some ideas on how to look for good books regardless.

1. Books

LOOK FOR. . .

- Books with exercises (even if they can't use the content they can at least use that!)

- Books that are about a topic you know they are interested in but may not have a robust knowledge in.

- "Encyclopedia" books can be really good reference guides!

- I often get books that're published by Llewellyn because I've rarely read a book published by them that I didn't like; however, it's not a die-hard rule and you can definitely look elsewhere!

AVOID. . .

- Books with reviews calling them too simple

- Reviews that point out any gaps in the material the author is speaking of

- If they're not a beginner-- books marketed towards beginners (it'll have beginner in the title, or even will have it in text on the front cover)

2. Tarot Cards / Oracle Cards

Trust me, if you're big on divination, you can never have enough cards. The nice thing about buying cards is there's a wide variety of designs, themes, and styles so you're bound to find something. I'd recommend checking out Etsy, they have some amazing creators on there that make beautiful cards.

- cards with styles your gift-receiver will like

LOOK FOR. . .

-cards based on themes they may appreciate (for example: maybe you find a self care oracle deck for them after they talk about wanting to do more self care)

- Reviews praising the quality of the cards, and the ease of understanding the cards

- sometimes you can find mini decks which are great gag-gifts or can be perfect for divination on-the-go!

AVOID. . .

- cards with a lot of reviews complaining about the cards being made with low quality materials, fuzzy images, or complaining about them being hard to read/understand

- cards that have any themes they may not like (for example: if they're uncomfortable with nudity, you might be better off looking for a deck that doesn't have it!)

- Unless they've specifically stated wanting it-- avoid getting a Raider-Waite deck... it's the 'classic' design, which can be charming, but a lot of people already have it and a lot of people would prefer a more specialized design over it.

3. Make them a Mini Altar Kit

Perfect for travel, and is easy to find ideas for on pinterest. This one is good because you can buy a lot of "applicable to all" resources and it's all easily compacted in an altoid tin. Pinterest is a great place to go for ideas!

You can buy them witchy herbs, plants they have an affinity for... so many possibilities!

4. If they have a green thumb-- Buy them plants!

AVOID. . .

- any plants that may be dangerous to pets if they have any

- if they plan on planting in the soil-- avoid invasive plants such as mint.

While not an outright witchy gift, there's something beautiful about how the glass bulbs create rainbows when in the sunlight.

4. Sun Catchers!

From the research I did, I couldn't find anything on their origins (aside from an article that didn't have any sources), and nothing suggested a connection to closed practices (if you have sources that say otherwise please correct me!), so from what I'm aware they're just a pretty decorative piece.

LOOK FOR. . .

- reviews with pictures showing the product works as intended

- I suggest checking out small creators on etsy, there's a lot of beautiful glasswork creations!

AVOID. . .

- creations with a lot of reviews talking about them coming broken

- buying similarly named dream catchers (unless supporting a native creator)

5. Crystals, Pendulums, Scrying orbs, Etc.

Trust me, you cannot go wrong with beautiful, shiny rocks!

- crystals from reputable sources

LOOK FOR. . .

- crystals you know your gift-receiver will like

- honestly if they're pretty and shiny you're probably good

- make sure you find a guide on some tells for fake crystals!

- sources known for selling fake crystals

AVOID. . .

- dyed crystals (they're all most likely quartz or dyed glass)

- if ordering online, make sure there aren't a lot of reviews talking about them coming broken/chipped/etc.

6. Witchy Candles and/or Wax melts

Etsy has a plethora of dressed candles, and I've even found wax melts! You can even diy some as a gift!

Note: please practice fire safety and watch your candles, especially if they're dressed with herbs which can easily spread fire!

LOOK FOR. . .

- colors, scents, themes they'll like

- if you're unsure about color, black and white are typically neutral colors

AVOID . . .

- getting them a candle if they're not allowed to light them

- buying them a wax melt if they don't have something to melt them with

So that's all for now, Also I'm 99% sure this isn't a new theme of post, if anyone knows a similarly done post, please reblog with it linked so people can access more ideas! Likewise, please reblog with your own ideas for gifts!

[omori-neon-black-au]

OFFICIAL NEON BLACK SPLASH ART IS HERE AFTER LITERALLY A YEAR. REJOICE. details and design notes and whatnot under the cut you know the drill

black: the plot never got to this point, but yeah the book of death would’ve allowed him to summon white space hands. also small thing about the mask i never mentioned - it’s asymmetrical to represent both sunny and omori. sunny’s side is a lot softer, with the broken horn and smaller fangs, while omori gets the fucked up eye and significantly sharper points. idk. fun detail.

orange: his rabbit’s foot is visible now, yay! the streak of light behind him is highlighted yellow instead of green because like. yes his card is torn yes he’s activating stomp’s discard but consider - stomp discard is hard to visually show. just pretend he’s doing it. also his shoes are supposed to resemble a paw, to lean into the dog aesthetic.

navy: i never want to draw guns again. the boots are more styled after green’s, but that’s basically the only change.

pink: oh yeah, other than her bat her signature would’ve been illegally modified fireball cards. that’s why their halos are so shaky. the actual modification would’ve been making them double barreled as opposed to the in-game single barrel. didn’t draw her with them because guns suck and i hate them.

lavender: did i ever mention she’s a non-combatant? she does the bare minimum to qualify for the 10 days of judgement but otherwise does not participate. that’s why she doesn’t have any cards.

mint: like black, mint uses the book of death to summon extra help. his is vines instead of hands because duh, it’s basil, he’s a gardener, that’s his whole thing.

[lady-severus-snape]

Headcannon #5 (sevxfemale...i think I made it vague enough aside from the obvious she pronouns)

Severus is a supportive bf who let's you practice on him during your cosmetologist training. He uses his knowledge to create potions that are compatible with the chemicals you use. He got the idea after noticing you get a chemical burn on your hand because the gloves were crappy quality and tore during a hair bleach appointment.

🌠it was summer break and Severus was walking down the street. A sneer on his face from having to do what he currently was enroute too. The potion experiment he was working on went awry, leading him to have wonky hair. Couldn't fix it with potions or magic. After a week of trying he begrudgingly caves in to get it cut at a muggle hair salon.

🌠He searched for the cheapest place and found the academy about 20 min from his current place. (There was no way in hell he was going to shell out almost 3 galleons worth of muggle money for a damn hair cut)

🌠walking in, he tells the receptionist that he was there for a haircut. The receptionist chirped that it would be discounted due to the students being on the clinical floor for that day. (Severus is happy that it would be cheaper than he originally expected. How much more could a student botch it than it already was)

🌠the receptionist has him sit in the waiting area and pulls the name from the list. It was y/n turn for a live haircut.

🌠y/n was at their clinical station working on a faux curly perm when they here the receptionist call their name for a service ticket.

🌠y/n walks out from the side clinic and sets up their station for the haircut. Once satisfied y/n walks up to the waiting area "Severus Snape" they call. "Hello sir, I am y/n. I will be your hair dresser for today. Follow me"

🌠severus looked up from the pocket book he brought with him to read while he waited. Looking up at his name being called, his breath stuttered at the person before him. Standard height, sun-kissed skin, dark hair braided, dark eyes, curvy built. He could only nod and follow y/n to the station.

🌠y/n adjusts the stylist chair so he faces the mirror. "OK, what are we doing today for a hair cut? Are we evening it only or going for a style all together?" After a bit of back and forth, semi irritating him, severus gave y/n creative freedom as long as he didn't look worse and it was maintenance free.

🌠y/n combed her fingers through his hair letting it cascade down naturally. Noticing the the heaviness on the strands, not oil per say but definitely something. "May I wash your hair? Its complimentary and totally optional. I can feel a heaviness to it, not oil or grease" she hurriedly assured. "I need to see how it falls without whatever build up is in it"

🌠Severus felt embarassment crawl up his throat before he ruthlessly squandered it. Y/n had yet to express disgust at the condition of his hair and had not stopped carding though it.

🌠nodding his consen, y/n escorts him to the sink and has him lean back in the seat. Grabbing a clarifying shampoo with a light moisture one, y/n went down town on getting rid of the build up.

🌠Severus was in heaven, y/n had the right amount of nails and pressure against his scalp. He had to several times bite his tongue to keep himself from moaning. Y/n started by his temples with rubbing little circles, slowly and thoroughly working the clarifying product it. It smelled of mint and ginger.

🌠tension he didn't even know he had melted away, his eyes sliding closed against his will. Y/n grinned knowingly and made no remark or idle chatter. It took 3 clarifying washes before she was satisfied. The light moisture shampoo adding vitality and bringing out the little silver streak.

🌠Severus felt a light nudge and his name being called softly. His eyes fluttered open, flushing with shame, he had been so relaxed his fell asleep. Y/n simply smiled, understanding shining in her chocolate eyes. Coaxing him back to her station, she gently detangles his hair before sectioning it.

🌠studying how the uneven side laid, she opted to give him what she loved to call a gentleman's hair cut. "May I tuck your collar down? That way it doesn't end up with as much hair pricklies. I can tuck a towel around if not."

🌠Severus watched at y/n glided through his hair cutting section by section until it was all done. Y/n grabbed her hair dryer and dried it. "If you wish to grow it back out, you will need to get maintenance trims every few weeks to avoid the weird outgrown stage. Even if it's just to soften the edges. Most times around the ears it will do a flip outward" she explained. "What do you think?" Severus looked into the mirror again. His eyes refused to accept what he saw.

🌠the cut she gave him fell in a feathery wave, naturally away from his face. You would never know it had been botched. It flowed very well and had lift and life to it that he hadn't seen since he was a child. The streak of gray hair blended seamlessly as if he purposely placed it there. He literally aged backwards. He looked every bit of a 38 yr old instead of nearly 50.

🌠Severus was assured that it would be maintained free. If it began to get weighed again all he needed was a good clarifying treatment every other month or a good shampoo every other week. He carded his fingers through it, saw and felt the difference as well as the lack of product. There was nothing and his hair flowed and laid flawlessly.

🌠he thanked y/n for their time and cut. He cashed out, leaving her a hefty tip. Total cost was 15.00 but he gave her a 50.00 on top of that.

🌠walking out he heard the other students complain at Y/N. How were they going to get their live men's haircut marks if she kept stealing all the good ones. "Guys I don't pick them, take it up with janelly. She's the one that hands out the tickets." That got Severus thinking. He wouldn't mind returning to her again. So with his mind made up he walked back and asked to schedule the appointment and what other services were offered.

🌠leaving with a brochure in hand his eyes glanced down the column of services y/n would be able to provide. Haircuts, color, facials, bread trimmings, waxing, curly perms, straightening perms, various hair treatments, manicures, pedicures, the list was almost endless.

🌠Every 6 weeks, Severus was back in Y/Ns chair for haircut or another. His newfound secret joy was the facials. His skin glowed, less wrinkles, and even his beard stopped growing in patchy.

🌠 Severus and y/n became friends. Severus would stop by almost every single day. He brought y/n food or coffee, anything really.

🌠During this, Severus unsurprisingly fell in love with Y/N. And when it got out that they were dating the others tore into y/n (age gap), until they saw how Severus selflessly volunteered so y/n could get marks. Waxing was like a super mild form of a crucio, poker face was flawless. He looked so cute with the curly perm in his hair. "Hey lambchop" you chortled out before softening the curl a bit. He looked good in waves.

🌠soon the others kept trying to convince y/n to let them borrow Severus. "Y'all quit asking me, ask him. It's his decision if he wants any of you to work on him" y/n scowled at the group. That led to a whole movement amongst them. Boyfriends, husbands, brothers, fathers, guy friends started showing up because Severus unknowingly raised the bar. Thus, the men came to 'protect' their women/men from his apparent scheme to make all of them look bad.

🌠y/n laughing into Severus's shoulder as the high pitched screams echoed from the waxing area of the clinic floor. Severus only rolled his eyes, the other men squirmed uneasily as they waited their turn.

🌠by the following year, he skips teaching class in October. Much to the surprise of Minerva. It was your graduation date. He showed up with huge bouquet of flowers. After your celebration he takes you by the hand and walks you to a different location. "Close your eyes" He says to.

🌠when you are allowed to open them, your eyes are met with a door and a big red bow. Severus had managed to set up a business, your very own salon. Muggle and not were welcomed in your salon. Those that made mean remarks where only allowed to schedule in the evenings on Mondays. Money was money.

🌠spa day didn't stop after your graduation. It was now a bi monthly thing where severus and you spoiled each other. Minerva too, after she experienced, hands from heaven according to Severus.

[theresattrpgforthat]

Hello! I’m wondering if you have any recommendations for Animal-themed TTRPGs? Specifically wild animals if possible (jungle, arctic, desert, etc). I have a lot of recommendations for domestic animals and pets! ☺️

Theme: Wild Animals

Hello friend! You are right, there are quite a lot of recommendations out there for cute pet-like animals, but I think I managed to find a nice variety of wild animals. I also have a few longer games to balance out the 1-page rpgs I found.

One Less Lobster in Maine, by Minte.

You’ve made it! You escaped! Freed from your wooden trap you find yourself on the picturesque coasts of Maine. One lobster alone facing the world, on a journey to make your way back to the sea. 

This game played with a deck of cards, lets you build your own adventure. Play on your own or with friends this is meant to be a fun lighthearted story building game that is easy to pick up and play. All you need are some cards, maybe some friends, your imagination for your very own crustacean crusade.

This game can be played solo or with a group; it’s basically an oracle that presents you with events and obstacles as your lobster makes their way to the sea.

Emu Uprising, by ashleecraft.

You play an emu trying to defeat the government with the help of your friends in this 1-page TTRPG based on The Great Emu War created for the Historically Accurate Game Jam 2023!

This is hilarious re-enactment of a real-life historical event. You roll a series of times using 2d6 to determine what happens in each round of battle. Your goal is to get more Emu points than Human points. Feel free to add your own embellishments to each moment of battle!

Rise of the Apes, by WuDeRPG.

Rise of the Apes takes the premise of the movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes and lets you play as a group of Apes escaping a laboratory on their quest to reach freedom in the woods.

This is the first game using the RISE system, which divides play into 3-act struggles over which your characters will experience evolutionary moments. I think this game has an interesting opportunity as a teaching tool because players have a chance to get familiar with one part of their character sheet before adding on new pieces. I’m interested to see whether each act could be its own game session; breaking out of the lab as the first act could certainly take up to 2 or 3 hours.

Crabpocalypse, by Z Gosck.

Great news, the apocalypse is here!

but not at the hands of zombies, aliens, or unrelenting capitalism, but rather the meaty claws of giant enemy crabs. And even better news, you’re the fucking crabs!

Become crab, as nature intended, in Crabpocalypse! A game that finally puts you in the carapace of a giant enemy crab, bringing unimaginable death and destruction upon a world that sorely deserves it!

An absolutely ridiculous game, Crabpocalypse requires that players play the entire game with their hands shaped like crab claws, lest they lose a point from their highest crabtribute. The whole game is this silly and over-the-top, right to the end - where you will fight a giant, human-allied crab!

Mortal Wombat, by JoshyLongLegs.

Captured in your infancy by some Australian scientists (unburdened by morals or ethics) you have been turned into a sapient cyborg synapsid, hell-bent on escaping the laboratory you've been kept captive in all these years! 

Joined by your own marsupial mob you've got to use your head and your butt to prove yourself the finest Wombatant and make your way to freedom! 

Another simple one-page game, Mortal Wombat embraces the cartoonish style of children’s tv shows and gives your wombats some serious chrome upgrades. There appears to be some callbacks to Honey Heist here, so if you’re familiar with that one-pager, this game will probably be pretty easy to pick up and play.

Moose Trip, by Kira Magrann.

You’re a moose living in the human occupied wilds of Montana. You’ve just eaten some of your favorite psychedelic mushrooms with your friends. The streams are cooling, the willows ripe with delicious leaves, and soft orange moss dots granite rocks amid grassy fields. You’re settling into your favorite lush sanctuary here in the wilds for a mind altering and inspiring psychedelic trip.

This game is more of a conversational experience than something with a definable goal. You take turns rolling mushroom feelings, and then ask the group around you the related question. I think this game could also be used as a mini-game inside a larger campaign, regardless of who your characters are - you don’t even really need to be a moose to play.

The Warren, by Bully Pulpit Games.

The Warren is a tabletop role-playing game about intelligent rabbits trying to make the best of a world filled with hazards, predators and, worst of all, other rabbits. It is a game about survival and community.

There are many creatures, humans included, that are bigger, stronger, meaner, or more numerous than rabbits. The seasons and the elements do not care that rabbits are only little things. Rabbits cannot hope to meet these threats head on. Only through speed, wits, and keeping a cool head can rabbits bypass the dangers of the outside world.

The Warren hails from the PbtA family of games, and pulls greatly on rabbit stories such as Watership Down and Peter Rabbit. It comes highly lauded and is known for its ability to combine the idyllic comfort of being a small creature with the tragic horror of being everyone’s favourite prey. If you want a deep game that isn’t afraid to send you to some dark places, I recommend The Warren.

Games I've Recommended in the Past

Capybara Capers, by momatoes.

Jellyfish Felonies, by Penguin King Games.

My Fish Games Post.

[just-animaxiz]

Sylvia: Here are some of my teachers!

This is Ms. V, she's from my Botany class. Despite my grades there, she's very sweet and understanding.

Mint: Awww! She sounds like a kind person!

Sylvia: Well... I don't think some of the Monstrous Venus Flytrap experimental pets she kept would say the same. Granted, they tried to eat some of the students.. Myself included. Here's her letter!

Sylvia! I'd heard that not only you inherited your uncle's shop, but you won 5 times in Rafta's Potion Competition Tournament! Congratulations, dear! I would love to see it, but some of these naughty critters tried to run away from tax fraud! Ugh! If I have my paycheck soon, I'll plan a vacation trip there! Have fun~!

Sylvia: Oh! And this is Mr. Stines - He's in charge of the Experimentation section, which means he tests if the potions are efficient enough to work depending on their progress.

Xid: That's quite a lot of bling for someone so serious.

Sylvia: He likes to... Experiment with fashion too... Which gives half of the school either headaches or impressions. His favourite is the Old Gothic + Steampunk mix, which really works well, until he got blown up by one of the explosions from the potions.

Hello, Sylvia! How's it like in Rafta? Too expensive? Too cheap? Never been there but there's quite some good styles! Nevermind that though - How's the potions? Are they as good as your college ones? The Masterworks quality is hard to achieve, but it's worth when you do your worth! Anyways, gotta run - I need to try this Disco + Jungle look for next semester! Don't use Quantum Crystals as Fuel - THEY'LL EXPLODE!

Sylvia: ....

Boss Finn: And I thought I got a creepy grin.

Sylvia: Mx. Crow is the ONLY scariest substitute I'd ever encountered, with their long neck and creepy gaze... Not only that, but their cryptic words sink like venom whenever they talk to any of us, stressing us out.

Sylvia. I'd heard of Rafta, conquered by a witch-queen only to be 'defeated' by a scoundrel of heroes. An average story like always, but I wish my happy shivers came back on the part they all died. Well most of them. That blue-eyed Robin character defeating MAEven. Tell him to watch his back, or else something will creep up again~ Just kidding~........... Am I?

Sylvia: Damn it! Something tore apart Professor Calypso's picture! It's a bad luck thing... Whenever his face comes up on every frame, there's always something blocking it or it mysteriously shreds a piece.

Quinn: From a glimpse of him, I can see he's wearing a mask over a wrap?

Sylvia: I don't know much, only heard rumors of why and how. But if it not were for him being my homeroom teacher, then I would've never passed my college... Oh! Here's his letter!

Dear Sylvia,

I am writing this to you from The Gallant Tower, where the stars are now aligned to The Adventurer. It reminds me of you, and I hope you have a wonderful life in Rafta. How was it? Did you make any friends? Any connections?

I'd heard your uncle is actually alive, which is a relief and concern. You might need to detail me more on that.

And you not only succeeded on paying the debt, but you'd won in a tournament five times, making yourself popular in public. I am more than proud at your growth, and must advise you to keep your chin up even at the darkest of times. Things might come soon, and a trusty hand will need your aid for it, so you must use the right cards for the best advantage.

Oh, and Raven wanted to say hi.

HI SYLVIA!

Sylvia: Raven's his daughter... I think she's turning 18 soon!!