#do ask me things

[beaningeneraldenial]

Clown is angry.

He has every right to be; for about a week now, he's been trying to track down the guy who shot him in the head with little to no success. A few rumors here, a few rumors there. People around have been calling him 'Hot Guy', because apparently that's his only catchphrase.

Oh, yeah. The man is trying to play hero. In Lifesteal, there are no heroes. You're either a villain or a peasant trying to stay alive a day longer and now that stranger is trying to cause issues for everyone.

'Everyone' being the people in the heart trading business. That includes Clown as well but he only wants revenge -though a free target for hearts would be nice too.

"There is this avian who has been spotted with him", Branzy comments off-handedly from the bed, where he is tinkering with some cogs and wires and some other bits that Clown couldn't hope to name. "He's called 'Cute Guy', god knows why. They're a hero duo now"

Clown lets his forehead bang against the desk, right next to Branzy's elaborate redstone blueprints and his own neat row of knives.

Some shuffling comes from the bed, followed by footsteps and the badly hidden chuckles of his partner in crime. Leave it to Branzy to console someone through their sulking.

"There, there, Clown" -he pats his back- "You're the deadliest assassin in all of Lifesteal. Even if they're stab-proof, they aren't trap-proof"

---------

The following week is a whole lot of diggin'. Well, it's more like Clown watching Branzy run around the old funhouse design in the bottom of his casino, connecting and disconnecting wires and repairing the damages Vitalasy and Cube caused the last time they were down there. This lucrative endeavor of an establishment has been closed for that period of time, so that the new 'content' won't be leaked.

All he does is wriggle his fingers together as he sees the plan slowly but surely take shap and sharpen his scythe until the blade can slice the thinnest, most see-through slice of a tomato.

"How- It's that sharp?", Branzy is bewildered at the sight of the perfectly skinned tomato on the bar counter. Clown grins. "You know what, I won't even ask how you managed to do that"

"It was a lot of hard work, sweat and tears of the innocent"

"Tears of the innocent"

"I had to test the sharpness somehow"

Branzy stares for a second, then shakes his head, gives him a pointed look, silently communicating 'The less I know, the less I can confess in court' and walks back to the pit.

----------

Hot Guy and Cute Guy are a lot easier to lure than anticipated. Upon opening night, Clown spots the two bantering with some guests near the blackjack tables from the overhead, 'Staff Only' balcony. He gently nudges Branzy's side and watches as the man walks down the stairs to go collect them.

As he does that, Clown grabs his scythe and descends to the bottom of the funhouse pit.

The swirling red, purple and black colours are familiar and comforting. He stands right in the middle of the floor, listening intently on the laughter and joyful screaming coming from the funhouse rooms that are meters above.

Soon, the first target is falling through the ceiling. It's Hot Guy, the wingless of the duo and the sickening crunch that follows his fall is music to Clown's ears. He doesn't pounce yet, wanting to kill two birds with one stone.

Cute Guy is close to the other's timing. Though winged, the avian can't do much more than flap his parrot wings fruitlessly and collide with the wall and then slide to the ground in cartoon fashion.

"Welcome to the Funhouse!", Clown calls out, dashing to Hot Guy and swinging his scythe. The man yells and shouts apologies at him to stop but the blade has already been set into motion.

The other hero has managed to stand on shaky legs by the time he's done with the now-corpse that is already sizzling away, one heart down and Clown one heart up. Back to twenty.

"Hey, we can talk about this, fella!"

Clown doesn't think that they can talk about this. Silent as always, he stalks towards his pray. Branzy whistles above, probably looking at the bloody mess that is the pit he worked so hard on.

And Cute Guy pulls a gun out of nowhere. A pink gun with a heart on either side to match his equally pink outfit. The warning shot misses Clown's ear by a hair. It's a power play, he undesrtands that but now that he has an audience to appease, he has to play into the theatrics as well.

"Next time, I won't miss!", his voice dances. There is a light tremble to it; barely there but Clown's senses are enhanced and he picks up on it without issue.

Then he slices clean through the muzzle of the gun with his scythe. The hero is absolutely shell-shocked, shrieking and Clown laughs as he mocks him.

"Next time, I won't miss!", he follows through with his words. The guy's heart doesn't add to his count but it instead floats right above the hero's corpse. It's a deep purple with a swirling darkness inside it; Clown has never seen anything like it.

At the end of it, all that's left is the blood, the adrenaline and the slow, impressed clapping coming from Branzy.

Revenge had been served.

[puppyeared]

filipina miku!! my mom helped me with her outfit ^_^

[thelaurenshippen]

watching bridgerton and obviously there were a lot of things wrong with the way socializing has worked in the past, but honestly the idea of a "calling hour" is so appealing. office hours for friendship. you can show up unannounced at my home between 1 and 3pm. you must leave by 3pm. I may give you a pastry. lets bring that back

[beebfreeb]

[druid-for-hire]

[image id: a four-page comic. it is titled "immortality” after the poem by clare harner (more popularly known as “do not stand at my grave and weep”). the first page shows paleontologists digging up fossils at a dig. it reads, “do not stand at my grave and weep. i am not there. i do not sleep.” page two features several prehistoric creatures living in the wild. not featured but notable, each have modern descendants: horses, cetaceans, horsetail plants, and crocodilians. it reads, “i am a thousand winds that blow. i am the diamond glints on snow. i am the sunlight on ripened grain. i am the gentle autumn rain.” the third page shows archaeopteryx in the treetops and the skies, then a modern museum-goer reading the placard on a fossil display. it reads, “when you awaken in the morning’s hush, i am the swift uplifting rush, of quiet birds in circled flight. i am the soft stars that shine at night. do not stand at my grave and cry.” the fourth page shows a chicken in a field. it reads, “i am not there. i did not die” / end id]

a comic i made in about 15 hours for my school’s comic anthology. the theme was “evolution”

[phantomrose96]

I think we should have a turn of phrase for "I'm not in the right, but I AM annoyed with this situation, so I just need to go bitch to a friend about this before I suck it up and go do the right thing" because more and more I'm finding this is a critical element of functional adulthood.

[inkskinned]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[krysmcscience]

I have some questions about karaoke night, Alex Hirsch. Very Important Questions. Which I will happily scream at a poor hapless baby triangle who can have no answers for me, and possibly also does not have object permanence yet.

Follow-up that is I guess suggestive, but let's be real here, Bill's a fucking triangle:

Dude slipped right into his birthday suit, lmao

this is so stupid :D

Anyway, I don't care what anyone says, this brilliant individual knows what's up - Bill is absolutely way more of a monsterfucker than Ford could or ever will be, full stop.

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

i would say that, mentally speaking, i'm in a good place right now! physically of course, the crows continue their chanting,

[assiraphales]

a five year old had my phone & this is what he searched

[unholyhymns]

still one of my favorite bits i ever got to commit was pretending not to know who jesus is when a street preacher was evangelizing to me. he was like "do you know who jesus is?" and i had so much time before my next bus and i wanted to know what would happen so i said no. and you know what. he had clearly never been told no to that question before because if i hadn't actually known who jesus was, his baffled and fumbling attempt sure wouldn't have told me. literally reversed the roles. now you get to stand here feeling very uncomfortable and wishing you could be somewhere else because guess what buddy, this is my bus stop, im early (and can catch like five other buses from this exact stop), and im now thoroughly invested in hearing about this mysterious jesus figure. you're locked in here with me. im eating the key as we speak. i will kill us both before i let you out of here.

very highly recommend this bit if you can pull it off and if you have time to kill

[beaningeneraldenial]

The Admins (Part 2-electric boogaloobooboo)

Parrot sighs in relief once he gets to the front door of his apartment. Another day, another deal with shady people made, another dozen of pants sold in the definitely-not-illegal market in the city sewers. Profit was made both for himself and for the No Pants People Party; the very famous pants-selling organization.

To be fair, the fact that all the pants were worn by famous people is a lie. No one has to know that, though. Parrot just roughs up each pair (more like throws them around his living room) and tosses it in the cheapest clothes detergent he can find before handing it over to the first guillible person that passes by the stall.

The moment he steps inside his house (and closes the door behind him), he thinks he's hearing things. He didn't leave his computer running, did he? No, he can recall turning it off as he does most electrical things (electricity bills have been harder to pay these days).

That leaves only one scenario: there is a burglar in his house. His blood runs cold. What if it's that psycho that killed Jester –fucking Jester– who is rummaging around his closet?

As a safety precaution, he grabs the sword that is hidden under the couch cushions (no, no one has been stabbed in the butt yet) and proceeds to investigate.

Silent as a bat, he makes his way down the hall, wings folded neatly against his back as he casts a net on all of his emotions. The door to his room is half-open but dark. No lights have been turned on -he didn't even turn the one in the living room on; this was a sudden development afterall. He can't see the reflection of a light, meaning that this burglar has nightvision or something of the like.

Eh, it isn't the first time Parrot has had to deal with that.

The idiot trips right as he opens the door and Parrot doesn't hesitate to stab first and ask questions later. He doesn't remove the sword from the guy's neck right away -he isn't in the mood to clean up more blood than necessary- so he flips on the light switch and kneels down to get a closer look at the criminal before they dissipate into thin air.

Unusual armor, unusual gas-type mask, a tank it is connected to on the guy's hip. Parrot doesn't know what to make of it. It isn't any sort of oxygen mask that he's accustomed tooo- oooh no. It's a damn voidwalker. Crap.

Voidwalkers are notorious for being aggressive and vengeful and they can teleport. Or as their name suggests: they walk through the void, or void-travel.

He is so screwed. How is he going to get out of this one? Nevermind the extra heart; he's about to lose all three of them (voidwalker heart included)!

"Hello?"

His blood runs cold. Turning, he sees the guy come out of his storage room, only now he's wearing pink body armor and his mask has fins coming out of it. Frilly fins. It is… weirdly reminiscent of an axolotl.

"Ah! Excuse me!", Parrot, over his panic spiking on red, doesn't hear what the guy has to say. He screams and slams the door shut.

Then a second later, he thinks that this is a stupid move. The guy can teleport into his room if he so liked. Or he could grab him from the shadows like Spoke had that one time-

"I'm sorry for scaring you! Please, could we talk?"

"No!"

"I- I just spawned in here. I don't know where I am!"

"Fuck off!"

A pause.

"Please?"

"Get out of my house!"

"I'm looking for my friends! Another avian like you and a happy-go-lucky man with a bow"

Oh, this is far worse than Parrot first thought. Not only is a voidwalker trying to bait him out of his room (not using his powers for whatever reason) but he is also friends with a psycopath. Oh, this is just amazing. nOt.

But! But he could turn things around… maybe. If the guy isn't interested in killing him, then maybe he could get out of this position.

"If I open the door, do you promise not to kill me?"

"Why would I- Sure, I promise on the Void"

That's as good a promise as he'll get, probably. Reluctantly, Parrot opens the door, sword still held in his hand and wings pressed against his back.

It's going to be fiiiiine.

Part 1

Part 2 (You are here!)

[hinamie]

surprise it's yuri!!!in 2024

[sergeant-angels-trashcan]

Yall remember how Texas had that "report an abortion" form that they had to take down after a week?

Well, Missouri has one, only it's for reporting transgender concerns.

Comrades. Friends. Romans. Countrymen. You know what to do.

[gatoburr0]

I HATE how this turned out WITH A PASSION.

[just-an-enby-lemon]

The thing about jonmartin is that Martin wants to be a romantic, he loves poetry and probably watches romance but for him it is a fantasy, a silly game he plays. Martin is at his core very cynical. Things don't work out for him so he doesn't really belive in romance, it is a pretty dream but that's it. He is pratical and realist. Dating Jon he has to remind himself it is real and he actually struggles with romantic gestures, it is something he has to remind himself to do, to remind himself he can do even and honestly who even has the energy and what if Jon doesn't even like it?

Jon on the other hand wants to be cynical. His first coping mechanism was pretend the things he was afraid of weren't real and goddam if he isn't afraid of love. It didn't really work to him so far so it's easy to pretend he doesn't care. But he is a romantic at heart. He saw love and he read about it and he has enough evidence that it is undeniable. And to be honest Jon was always to much a bunch of mushy feelings hidden in a grumpy (and bitter and afraid) trench coat. Dating Martin he has to hold himself so he isn't too much. He plays the grumpy unromantic guy at first. But he just can't stop giving flowers and planing dates (this is the guy that saw a theme park on a fear domain and considered how he wanted to take Martin to a romantic ferris whell date [until he discovered Martin was afraid of them]) and making all the silly things one does when in love.

TR: Martin is deep down very cynical about love but wants to/pretends to be a romantic and Jon is deep down very romantic but wants to/pretends to be cynical about love.