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albaitross · 7 months ago

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the beginning:

Mei Li "May" Circletti was born the youngest of two sisters to her parents, Evan and Fei Min "Philia" Circletti.

Despite her family's human appearance, they are all, for the most part, decidedly not. Her mother is a holy angel as eldritch as the scriptures would describe, while her father was a descendant of the first Nephilim - an existence born from the union of an angel and any other being, or bearing any lineage of such.

Such an inhuman heritage lends to equally inhuman abilities, and May was no exception. Alongside a general intuitive keenness for the unnatural and an aptitude for powers beyond human ken, her primary ability is a form of astral projection - when utilized, her soul can detach from her body and wander the cosmos in either an unseen spiritual or visible physical form, irrespective of the boundaries of time and space.

A very simple ability, and one that May almost loathes with all her being.

Her powers didn't come easily or quietly. When still very young, her father had suddenly and mysterious disappeared - leaving her mother extremely distraught and non-functioning, unkind rumors of infidelity to circulate from nowhere, and her older sister becoming cold and harsh from the fallout of all that. The negativity and stress of their new family situation led to May's abilities as a Nephilim awakening—but due to that stress itself, as well as no one being present to guide her through them, her ability was unchecked and uncontrollable.

As such, her astral projection would immediately manifest at any moment when she mentally or physically lowered her guard - mainly, when tired or sleeping. Of course, this meant she would often be popping up in random places and eras if she so much as took a nap. And at first, as surprising as it was, May thought this was great! She was going to strange, surreal, but occasionally fun and pretty places, and while it would be a 50-50 on whether she could interact with anything at a given time, it was still cool to see all these amazing places!

Until she found herself appearing in the not so amazing places.

Ruined and seedy cities, warring and cruel countries, plague-ridden towns full of suspicion and misery, and more than she'd like, right in the middle of battlefields - as much as May saw the beauty of the universe, she also saw its ugliness. Often, the places she randomly ended up in weren't necessarily kind to unfamiliar outsiders or generally safe for alien lifeforms.

It's during this time that May made a friend. The young princess of another world - and among the first people who could actually perceive May, even when in an intangible form. Despite all the strange and horrible things May saw while making her nightly trips around the universe, having made such a nice friend, she could still be optimistic - even eager - about everything so far.

Soon after, May realised that the people she encountered in other worlds are indeed people with their own lives and histories��and that a princess so young would undoubtedly have politics and enemies to maneuver through.

Her friend was a perfectly kind, sweet, and smart person! But not smart enough to avoid being tortured, killed and burnt alive by a scheming concubine.

All of this occurring in her sleep, as well as being too young and knowing nothing (at first), had initially led to her believing she was being plagued by strange and scary nightmares - and then, by grim experiences that were simply occurring, far, far away from home. Her sister, and very rarely her mother, would try to reassure and soothe away her nightmares (flashbacks), but as she grew older, that became infrequent.

Her sister, in particular, would tell her that her dreams were just that—a bunch of meaningless dreams—and to grow out of this childish habit of seeking attention. It didn't matter how much May screamed and argued that all of her experiences were real rather than imaginary (or worse, delusional) - they were true, they were all genuine, they all actually happened to her!

(Dearest Angelica was far too focused on 'reality', on having to be the responsible adult in place of their occasionally dysfunctional mother. In that sense, it couldn't be helped. But the childhood scar will always run deep and May can say, as much as she cares for her sister, she hates hates hates her—)

Needlessly to say though, May eventually did as she was told. No one's going to believe her anyway.

But that didn't mean she was going to disregard the dreams. Not when they felt so real that they could only ever be real, and thus left her with a messy list of traumatic experiences, anxiety and stress disorders, among other things.

the first interlude:

Sooner or later, May eventually devised a plan for herself. Most of her problems - the bad dreams, the terrible moods and her poor mental well-being, which were all further leading to her physical health to decline as the lackluster sense of rest and stress all pressed down on her - boiled down to her uncontrollable power to seemingly walk through the cosmos in her sleep. If she could get that hammered down into something tolerable at least, if not gone altogether, then things should automatically improve.

This initiated her interest in the occult and niche, into rumors and conspiracies and the hidden, dark mysteries of the universe. Hoping to find an answer to a problem that is decidedly not a common facet of the human experience, May dug through the esoteric, and despite being very apprehensive of every night that she has to go to sleep, she sought out any scrap of knowledge she could get while dreaming.

This is how she learned many things, including the following:

She isn't dream-walking but astral projecting - a power tied to her soul itself, and affected to some extent by her mental state.

Everything untrue and impossible is very capable of being true and possible.

She's a descendant of the Nephilim, so not as human as she thought.

Her mother killed her father.

With her ability to traverse the universe while ignoring time and space - and especially with it being highly uncontrollable at this time - perhaps, it was inevitable that she would eventually travel back in time to the night of her father's disappearance.

As it turns out, her father's lineage traces not too far back - to the first fallen angel, "Lilith" or Helel, who fell in love with a human and beget the first Nephilim, Eve, who in turn fell for another and had her father, Abel, the true first murderer of the biblical Cain. As a descendant of the Nephilim, his unique power was resurrective immortality, and as the Nephilim are often not suffered to live, an angel was ordered to forever chase and execute him for millennia. This angel, of course, was her mother, the judge and executioner Puriel.

Over time though, they too fell in love - and hoping to have a happy life, fled as much as they could from the eyes of heaven. But it didn't last forever. And ultimately, a mandate was made: their children's lives can be spared for the price of one immortal man, as well as the return of their fallen executioner back into their ranks.

One might ask: how can immortal man die, especially if he will eventually resurrect from even a single cell? Simple enough. Evan and Philia were taken to a barren, desert planet, with a bottomless canyon full of toxic, eroding winds. All he needs to do is be chained down there for all eternity, until his immortality itself is eroded into nothingness.

Philia simply has to do that to him. Push him down there, impaled by her burning sword. Just has to ignore her daughter, who should be a few years younger than she currently looks, screaming and crying.

(In hindsight, this explains her mother's sudden, awkward distance. May figured it was the shock and loss of his unexplained disappearance, but it turns out, she knew all along that her youngest would find out the truth.

And hate her for it. Gods, she hates this entire family so fucking much—she never asked to be "saved" like this—

She didn't even ask to be born. To be the chip of such a crude bargain.)

the second interlude:

That said, with all of this knowledge and truth in hand, May finally has the answers for her great problem.

(What did it cost? Innocence and the bliss of it. Such happiness is tempting... but if the alternative is to smile at her mother, at the cause of their misfortune, then it's not very tempting at all. It becomes a cheap, poor prize not even worth second place.

No, as much as all this knowledge weighs like a heavy burden, it is better that than to be so stupidly, blindly ignorant to everything else.)

Certainly, she could now ask her mother to assist her with her ability... but knowing the truth of things, May would leave that as the last of last resorts, never to be used. The other option is that, if the berserk nature of her power is influenced by her poor mentality - then, if her mental state improves, then her power should get less berserk, right?

Which is to say - if she can find herself more at peace than she's ever been so far in her pitiful life, then her ability should calm down to a manageable level, after which, she can properly learn to control and utilize it.

Some of the hidden truths she's since learnt have contributed a bit to that by now... but, at the end of the day, they're all secrets that will never see the light of human day. Every day, May will have to wake up, walk through the streets, go to school and think of college and careers, so unknowing of how vast the universe truly is. She has to pretend that this is how things are and no one—bar the equally touched or the distant denizens of magical worlds—will have the same understanding of the greater cosmos.

Be as wholly human as any other. Just like how her foolish sister has been.

...Ah, now there's an idea, isn't there?

That's how May's next major plan unfolds. With a teeny-tiny bit of manipulation, happy and extremely not-happy surprises, though it most ends up with her taking random opportunities as they come - her sister gets dunked into another world, comes to the startling fact that Earth isn't the only world out there with sentient civilizations, learns that magic and fae and gods are real and sister dearest, do you think I'm lying and making shit up now, hmm?

Needless to say, a few screaming sessions and apologies later, as well as her sister managing to find a way back home and not instantly assuming it was all just a really weird dream - May is a lot more satisfied with her life than before. And true to her assumptions, her unpredictable power gradually and finally stops being so unpredictable; May dedicates the years after to better learning how it works now that it's actually functioning as it should, and of course, learning to keep it under a tight leash so that this never, ever, happens again.

Of course, slip-ups do still happen every now and then, especially through the learning process - it's inevitable, with the influence of her mental state that will never truly recover to peachy-perfect condition - but all in all, her biggest goals in life have been practically satisfied by now.

(Wow, she can actually think about career goals that aren't "turning into a rock and never think again" or "fly straight into the sun because I won't suck like Icarus" and be serious about it! Wow!!!)

the present:

With her heritage learned and her power tamed, May has happily taken to learning what a fulfilled life should look like, now that she has the time and space to properly do so.

With her fingers having been in multiple niche areas, she decided to pursue a career in the media industry - becoming a journalist, though with a side avenue as a freelancer for publishing-related gigs such as ghost writing, editing, beta reading, etc., and a more infrequent side avenue of playing the local wise witch of the neighborhood for the more supernaturally-inclined.

Her tamed power has come into great use for information gathering for her job, as well as to keep in touch with the paranormal side and other places.

This time and peace has also given her a little more distance and clarity regarding her family's situation - and while May still hasn't reconciled with her mother, and probably never will out of sheer stubborn refusal to do so, she has nonetheless come to understand how difficult the circumstances were. Understanding, but not sympathetic. The whole thing was shit, and both the heavens and her parents were all idiots for it regardless.

On the other hand, her relationship with her sister has finally improved from the (admittedly rather one-sided) disdain and frustration that May originally harbored. There's still a few kinks to work out, especially now that May has finally dropped the act of a semi-obedient, cheerfully quirky sister to show more of the bitter, cunning person she is in actuality - a personality that clashes terribly with her sister's more straitlaced attitude - but May feels more amicable than annoyed with her sister for once, so that's definitely a good sign.

#ooc ;#(aka extra info for her fandomless/default verse + an explanator for why its also for crossovers in a sense)#(aka aka ''flower read the bible and said 'screw that' and rewrote it to be batshit nonsense'')

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b294 · 2 years ago

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This is why Filipinos are being hired in any industry and what they are expected to do

The Philippines is home to people with humor and positivity. We are flexible enough to adapt to new environments- just like moving to different countries. Learning a language, culture, and tradition are easy for us. Filipinos are known to be hospitable with an industrious attitude. These are a few of the reasons why international employers like hiring Filipinos in whatever industry that is.

In the fields of Education, Financing, Agriculture, Insurance, Real Estate, Marketing, and many more. Though education is important, Filipinos don't need a diploma as a passport to these jobs compared to the skills and services we can provide. Although we are adaptable, training is still a huge advantage if we have them.

Because of the lack of opportunity and not being compensated well in the Philippines, we prefer working with international clients. With that, our skills will be paid with higher potential. In return, Filipinos, even under minimal supervision, will work hard to contribute to the growth of their client's businesses.

With great knowledge of Filipinos, employers expect them to: 1) Be present and show up on time. 2) Evident hard work even under pressure. 3) Maintaining a friendly and light environment in the workplace. 4) Respect boundaries 5) Be flexible and adaptive

BE PRESENT AND SHOW UP ON TIME

Filipinos are infamous for the 'Filipino Time' mentality. Where, we set a specific time and place for a meeting for them to arrive an hour or two later. Funny it may sound, but we say 'we are on our way to the meeting place', while we are still taking our showers and preparing to go out. With that example, employers would still prefer working with people who have good time management and a sense of time.

EVIDENT HARD WORK EVEN UNDER PRESSURE

While everyone works to finish tasks according to how the boss wants it, Filipinos like extending their time just to finish a specific task at its best form. We ask for feedback so we know what areas need improvement. Evident hard work even under pressure. We do our best to be kept. We are family people, hence some of us still work for our families, household chores, outside activities, and more but still make sure these agendas are out of our basket on working hours.

MAINTAINING A FRIENDLY AND LIGHT ENVIRONMENT IN THE WORKPLACE

As people who can easily adapt, we also trust people easily. It makes us befriend everyone without exception. We have a sense of equality as we give the same treatments and respect to all.

Filipinos are known to be funny people so we make sure that stressful time won't be as stressful if you have us. We make fun of everything but with restrictions, leading us to the next one.

RESPECT BOUNDARIES

You show us kindness or not, we would still be decent to you. Although we are friendly enough, we still make sure that we keep professional on working hours. Colleagues are colleagues and bosses are bosses. We can drink and have fun outside work but boundaries presented once we are in the workplace.

BE FLEXIBLE AND ADAPTIVE Bring us to any country and give us two months, or so, to learn and understand a language, tradition, and culture. We like learning and being adaptive to our environment is easy for us. Learning is normal for us and there's always a space for a new skill. We do advance research and we prepare to set our expectation. 'We don't go to a war without bringing an armor' as they say.

These are only a few things an employer would expect from a Filipino worker, not limited only to Virtual Assistants. Work with Filipinos and we'll help you on your way to the top!

#virtual assistant #virtual assistance services #filipino #boss expectation #employers #Virtual Assistants in the Philippines #Filipino VAs

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smallblip · 4 years ago

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Imagine being loved by me

Levihan | rated for mild mentions of sex + spoiler warning for that one forest scene levihans y’all know what’s up | [I hope you find this xoxo 🤍,🐇]

More notes on Ao3! https://archiveofourown.org/works/31001030

“You’re shit at kissing...” Levi coughs. Everything hurts, and him hacking up his lungs is testing the integrity of Hanji’s stitches. The loud humming of the forest fades to a whisper when she breathes life back into his ribs.

The shock and desperation fades from her face and she’s laughing now, “but Levi...” she drawls, “we’ve had so much practice...”

Not enough... He breathes. In a world full of people he chose her, and he has built a home in her. Now he just needs a little more time. And Hanji understands. But this world has been kind. Thirty four revolutions around the sun and she’s here in the forest with him. Everything has gone according to plan. At least in all the ways that matter. There’s still time. The world is suspended in a sunbeam, dancing like dust glinting when it catches the light.

There’s still time... We can pretend we’re the only two people left in the world...

—

To build a home in another person, all you need is a little wonder. But in this time and space, Levi is young and whatever skills he exhibits in the battlefield, he makes up for with lack of imagination.

Because imagine that- Levi having anything to do with Hanji Zoë.

“You’ll love me Levi, just you wait!” Hanji had teased, three days after first introducing herself to him with a smile and enough sunshine to last Levi a lifetime, “we’ll be best friends in no time”. To which Levi responded with a glower and a seething “not even if we’re the last two fucking people on earth.” And Levi hates himself for saying that. How fucking childish. But the need to be eloquent with Hanji is always lost under the temptation to bicker like children. They all tease him about it. Tell him that Hanji is just- well- an inevitability. And she’s never wrong. But Levi doesn’t think much of it. Her prophecy is mostly forgotten beneath the humdrum of routine death and destruction.

Until now.

Except it really isn’t a prophecy, because prophecies are mostly right aren’t they? And Levi is sure whatever they’re doing is testing the boundaries of friendship. Maybe people do kiss their best friends around here. After all what would a street rat from the underground know. But Levi’s pretty sure it’s just Hanji.

“What are you thinking of?” Hanji asks, breaking the silence that comes with being the only two people awake in the dead of night.

Levi pulls himself out of his thoughts, the lines on his forehead relax, Hanji’s words looping monotonously in the back of his mind like a mantra. “Nothing,” he says, because he’s not quite ready to give Hanji the satisfaction of being right. But it’s mostly an inevitability anyway.

“Well... Just imagine I’m a girl you like... Or a boy... Both are fine,” Hanji says, “I don’t really care,” she winks at Levi.

And Levi still thinks this is a ridiculous idea. Then again they’re young and the experiences they have in this life are limited by the affordances of what comes with the job- or the people that come with the job.

Except they’re not young. Hanji has made it twenty two rounds around the sun without dying, without so much as a scar on her arm from that one time she had failed to check her blind spot. And that means something in their line of work.

And Levi has always been susceptible to persuasion. “Join the Survey Corps.” Erwin had said, sure it took near drowning with his head dunked in a drain and a plan he has since abandoned, but he’s here now. He’s here now in Hanji’s room in the dead middle of the night and maybe it means something because he’s here even though his head is still above water and nobody is commanding him to do anything.

But there’s still this feeling in his chest, like everything is wet and he’s drowning.

He clears his throat, “why are we doing this again?” Because he’s lost the plot somewhere between genuine annoyance and realising his annoyance is a farce.

“I don’t know... Pretend we’re the last two people on earth or something?” A shrug, then “got a good image in mind?”

Everything is so simple with her and Levi struggles to come up with an image to make it easier to breathe.

But Hanji is so close to him now that they’re bumping noses. And even in the dark she’s more vivid than any image Levi can think of.

He figures he doesn’t want to imagine.

He tucks a stray strand of hair that had escaped his braiding behind her ear. His fingers skim her cheek. And at this point, Hanji thinks maybe it’s pointless to pretend that she’s imagining that boy who tends to their horses back home, or the girl from the Garrison she couldn’t quite keep her mind off- until now.

But this is just practice, a little experiment, an experience bounded by its own set of rules- this is all just pretend, it doesn’t mean anything.

So Levi thinks fuck it, because Hanji might be right, they might die tomorrow, might as well live a little.

He doesn’t tell her he’s imagining daylight- the sun streaming through the day curtains, warming the sheets. He’s imagining that sliver of light on her face, catching fire in her eyes. The place within this ray of light is one of safety. Nobody can touch them there. And Levi wonders how long it will last them.

Hanji is surprised when he leans in first and kisses her. Tentatively at first, like he’s waiting to see if she will change her mind. But Hanji is resolute in all the ways he is, and she kisses him back with fervour. She imagines they’re younger. Imagines meeting under different circumstances. Imagines they don’t have a war to fight, and they’re sitting on the edge of the wall, shovel by their sides, peering far past the fields and she’s telling Levi all the ways the earth moves to form hills and valleys. And she thinks maybe they’ve always been friends.

But the image fades a little when she brings a hand to his face, cupping his cheek, and he sighs into the kiss. Besides, she’s already told him countless times how the earth breathes.

They pull apart to breathe because breathing is somehow necessary, Levi thinks maybe he’s getting used to drowning. His eyes are glazed over.

But he snaps out of it fast enough when Hanji breaks into laughter that sounds like the morning. He scowls and pulls her close by her ponytail, pressing his forehead against hers.

“You’re shit at kissing...” he murmurs.

“Really?” Hanji drops a peck on the tip of his nose, completely unconvinced, “I guess I just need more practice...”

—

But the clumsiness of youth doesn’t quite abate with practice.

They’re on an expedition and it's storming outside the tents and Levi makes himself at home in her tent. He’s so close to her now that she can hear him breathing. And she feels like a stupid teenager with a stupid crush. But that's exactly what she is.

When she's done pretending she's asleep, she opens her eyes only to find him staring at her in the dark. She holds her breath, but she doesn't look away. Because that's how they get you right? You lose some sort of secret competition and then everything goes down hill from there and you'll have to deal with the humiliation of it all. So she forces herself to look at him, thanking the gods for her bad eyesight.

A shock of lightning illuminates the inside of the tent like a paper lantern and finds the greys of his eyes. Hanji thinks she sees her reflection swimming in his irises. Swimming or drowning- well, there's a fine line isn't there? He shifts closer to her, scowling like he's moving against his will, and Hanji holds her breath. He wraps an arm lazily around her, pressing his face into her shoulder.

"Wha-" Hanji starts, clearing her throat before continuing, "what's this?"

"Whatever you want it to be..." Levi doesn't look up, but even so, Hanji knows he's frowning, "I'm cold..."

"Alright then..." Hanji chuckles, fingers scratching at the short hairs on his neck, "we're the last two people on earth waiting for the storm to pass..."

Levi thinks about thunderstorms, and sure enough, there’s a steady patter of rain he had tuned out earlier in favour of the thrum of Hanji’s heartbeat beneath his finger tips. He hates wet weather. It’s inconvenient to say the least. Earth becomes mud and everyone tracks said mud into the mess hall. He still remembers the way Isabelle looked when she died- the rain washed away the blood, she looked peaceful almost. Maybe it’s apt. The girl who loved storms spent her last moments on earth listening to the sound of thunder.

His breath evens out against her blouse, "and?" Levi wants her to continue, to fill the gaps of thunder with her voice, because that’s all he’s been thinking about lately and he thinks he knows why.

“And we hate each other’s guts...” Hanji grins.

“Why?” Levi asks, thinking Hanji is missing the point here.

“Everyone loves a good enemies to lovers story...” Hanji laughs.

“That’s dumb...” Levi says, but Hanji is so warm that it pulls him in.

“You’re dumb.”

He scoffs. “Fine.” He says, because Hanji is an inevitability, “and then what?”

She hums, thoughtful, “we hate one another until a storm rolls by...”

—

But it's not always storming, and in fair weather, it’s hard to say what you mean. And Hanji finally realises what she feels, it’s somewhat of a breakthrough. Yet, the first thought that flashes across her mind is how inconvenient this whole situation is. She had just been teasing. She just wanted to get a rise out of Levi. And now they’re spilling over the edges of “more than just friends”.

But there’s little time to think of the details. They get into trouble and Hanji blames it on the potent mix of youth and reckless abandon. Levi blames it on Hanji.

They crash a party for the high society snobs within the inner wall only because Erwin told them they couldn't come along. Hanji’s in a borrowed dress and Levi wonders why he lets himself get dragged into these situations. But there’s more alcohol and food than they’re used to, and they learn champagne goes straight to their heads.

“What now?” He asks, when they’ve stuffed themselves full of roast and potatoes and Hanji almost feels sick.

“Wanna dance?” She replies, pupils blown wide so he knows she’s not all there.

They’re too drunk to actually call it dancing, but Hanji remembers the basics. So she leads. And Levi thinks if he looks into Hanji’s eyes now his heart will explode and he’ll be a dead man. So he opts for staring at her clavicle and mumbling the first thought that comes to his mind.

“What?” Hanji grins down at him.

“What’s this?” Levi says again, because his heart is beating out of his chest and he feels like he's going insane.

Hanji looks down at their feet, still keeping rhythm in her head- they're doing a simple box step so they can't fuck up, no matter how drunk.

"A waltz?" She says, confused, because it should be obvious enough.

"Idiot..." Levi mutters, and Hanji thinks it could be the alcohol because his cheeks are red and he's leaning too much into her. So much that she trips.

They fuck up their rhythm.

The streets are cold. That's the only reason they're holding onto each other for dear life.

That and the copious amounts of champagne in their bloodstream. Bold, brash, bubbling. They had bolted the moment Erwin had spotted them, finger raised accusatorily in their direction, mouth agape with shock. And they had done such a good job avoiding him the entire night too, only to have their cover blown when they tumble to the ground in the middle of the ballroom, with Hanji falling atop of Levi, a shared gaze between them like a cliche.

Hanji is laughing so hard she has to crouch down in the middle of the streets, arms wrapped around her belly to stop the shaking. Her dress is stained at the hem and she'll have to wash it out before returning it to Lynne. But Levi has abandoned all notions of hygiene and neatness and he's now sitting on the ground with Hanji, watching her laugh. There's a smile tugging at the corners of his lips. And he thinks to himself yeah, this is inevitable.

"You know what one of the old snobs told me when you were busy chugging champagne?” Levi says, because the moon is out and it's so full that it's almost bursting at the seams. Nothing matters. The streets are cold, but Levi feels a fire coursing through his veins.

Hanji looks up at him, wiping the tears from her eyes, "what?"

“He told me ‘your wife’s a real handful’” Levi doesn’t know why he’s quite so breathless. But it doesn’t spare him the fact that he is.

“And what did you say?” She chuckles.

Levi makes the mistake of looking up into her eyes. Her eyes with their own gravitational pull, and Levi gets dragged into orbit. “yeah she is...”

“Ah...” Hanji replies, thinking maybe she needs more alcohol. Maybe they could stop at the pub on the way back. But the churning in her gut tells her otherwise. Besides, there's enough of this to go around- this thing she calls youth and reckless abandon. In a few years she'll call him an old man, the cadets will call him a relic. But that's the distant, distant future. For now they're young and the only thing that matters is the way she's smiling at him.

The rest of the walk is quiet, and Levi makes a passing comment about being the last two fucking people on earth with how empty the streets are (“did everyone just die?”). She chortles and he doesn't quite let go of her hand. Somewhere between the party and her room, Levi drapes his jacket over her shoulders. Well, technically her jacket that he borrows all the time. It smells like him now and Hanji holds it close to her with her other hand. And when they’re back at the barracks, he walks her to her door like any boy on a date would. So Hanji tells him just that- that he's behaving exactly like a boy with a hopeless crush-

A lover boy.

And she's not at all embarrassed at the words slipping past her lips. Then again, she has never been one to be particularly careful. She’s been told she’s not exactly good at holding her tongue.

They stand there in the silence, the partial darkness of the corridor. Levi only realises he’s staring at Hanji’s lips when he glances up momentarily and catches a glimpse of her eyes widening in realisation. Realisation like she has found something about him that only she knows. Levi feels vulnerable. But all he can think of is how the blush on the bridge of her nose is beautiful. Hanji looks like she’s about to say something, there’s something amusing about this situation and it’s bubbling between them- bold and brash. In another universe, she would have the opportunity to say it. Probably something along the lines of told you Levi! Enemies to lovers! and this is the part of the story where you kiss me...

But Levi decides he doesn’t want to hear anything she has to say, so he grabs the lapels of her jacket and pulls her close. The kiss that follows, a far too gentle succession to the feeling of crumpled fabric in his fists, a press of lips against the bridge of her nose, and another one- a chaser- on the tip of her nose.

She chuckles and he frowns at the offending noise. “What’s so funny?”

“You missed...” Hanji says before pulling him close by his belt loops and kissing him on the lips.

And there's a hunger that's ignited.

His jacket hits the floor first- the one he had draped around her shoulders. Then his shirt- the only fancy thing he owns. Then her dress-

Like a waltz for two- fingers reaching, exploring, lips crashing. But they're too drunk to call it dancing, sober enough not to call it a mistake. So when they're both naked, breathless forms in the dark, Levi reaches out to press their palms together.

“I don’t know how to be anyone’s lover...” he says just before they fall asleep, and Hanji's vision has adjusted to the dark. There are stars in his eyes, brilliant enough to pull Hanji into their orbit. This is the part of the story where she falls in love with her best friend, and he falls for his, and they know one another a little too much to use the word “love”. She can’t help the smile that spreads across her face-

“Neither do I...”

—

In uncharted waters, Levi can only hope for fair weather again. And maybe it comes in the form of Hanji knocking on his door the night he becomes captain.

“I like you Levi... Does that scare you?” She says from his bed. She’s never had the best timing. But this moment is as good as any other. One terrible mission, too many deaths, and the burden of greater responsibility later, and here they are. One too many revolutions around the sun. Enough for him to be seen as some sort of god, and her, an enigma.

“How much?” He answers. The bed dips where he joins her.

“What?”

“How much do you like me?”

There’s silence. Levi can hear his own heartbeat in his ears when he lies beside her.

“Like a sunbeam...”

He scoffs, “you’re not making sense four eyes...”

She chuckles, a kiss to his forehead, where lines have gathered- hold your horses Captain...

“Imagine you’re lying in bed and it’s been raining so it’s a little cold. It’s not uncomfortable, but you notice the chill and it wakes you a little. But then the sun filters through that gap in the curtains, soft and warm and it kisses your face,” she turns to him to press a kiss to his lips for clarity’s sake, “and there’s nothing in particular you have to do, so you go back to sleep, cradled by that sunbeam, like a cat... Nice huh?”

“Yeah...” Levi says, breathless. The atmosphere is thinning and if Hanji doesn’t let up, he’ll be gasping for air soon.

“That’s how much I like you...” she grins, matter of fact, like she’s talking about the weather, about how the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.

When he goes to sleep lulled by her soft snoring he’ll dream of Hanji. In his dream he tells her he’ll steal a cat for her. Because that makes sense somehow. He needs her to know how much he loves her too. It ends with her naming the cat Albert. Levi absolutely hates it. Or at least he pretends to.

But it’s the present and they’ve sunk back into comfortable silence.

This is the part of the story where you kiss me you idiot... he hears it in her voice, warm and playful.

So he does just that. And Levi figures maybe some part of him is a sucker for romantics.

—

“Help me capture a titan, Levi!”

Levi would glower at her, tell her no before she’s allowed to finish her sentence. But they head back to camp, titan in tow, captured alive. And perhaps this is as far as romance goes in this world.

And it becomes a ritual of sorts- if we make it back, dinner’s on the sucker with fewer kills.

Except this time the date is them tearing at each other’s clothes.

Hanji never understood why anyone would put this world at the centre of the universe. There’s just too much pride in that assumption. There’s nothing particularly special about this world, yet she will live, love, and die here. A cursed rock, a beautiful rock, orbiting the sun. This is the world in which the death greets them with the hospitality of an old friend. Of an old god that whispers in their ears-

Welcome home, my children.

But at twenty five revolutions around the sun, she can’t imagine being dead. She knows she doesn’t want to die, not really, not when there’s still so much beauty to behold. There’s so much beauty in the way his heartbeat feels against her temple, in the way her toes are peeking out of the duvet, in the way he’s holding her like she is his.

“You won this time Levi... You captured a fucking titan!” She says, meaninglessly. It doesn’t matter in the larger scheme of things. Hanji would get drunk mid-way through dinner and Levi would pay. That’s just how things work around here.

“You nearly died...” Levi says, “you nearly fucking died...” he’s calm now, all the anger, all the frustration he had, has now been wrung dry from his system. Now his face is pressed against her chest, and the marks he left are just starting to surface, more brilliant than her bruises from battle are.

“Yeah... Scary huh...”

So she thinks now is as good a time as ever. This moment is precious enough. She presses a kiss to his forehead.

“What do you want to do when this ends?” She asks, because a little wonder never hurt anyone:

“If you died, all that wouldn’t even matter...” Levi says accusatorially, a petty way to be in their line of work. But it’s only because it scares him that nothing has come close to scaring him this much. If she dies, she takes everything that’s left of him with her. Levi doesn’t make the rules. That’s just how it works.

Hanji chuckles. “I’m sure you can easily find someone else... A nice little wife, an apartment in the city, a brood of kids?” She quirks a brow at him, completely missing the whole irony of lying in bed naked with a man she’s selling her little fantasy to. But she hears the others talk about it all the time- about settling down, having children. Besides this sliver of light will not last them.

“Is that what you want?” He asks.

Hanji ponders this for a moment, she thinks maybe not. It’s best not to drag someone into this life of hers, where nothing is guaranteed, where death lives on her doorstep and she knows it on a first name basis.

“No...” she answers simply. “I just want to sleep. Take a long nap... Wake up and realise it’s mid-day, then fall back asleep again.”

That sounds nice. That has always sounded nice. He thinks of sunbeams, of dust, of a stupid cat named Albert.

To build a house in another person all it takes is wonder and reckless abandon. And being around Hanji has granted Levi both.

“Maybe we could build a cottage in the forest...” he says like he’s dreaming and he has nothing to lose.

Levi doesn’t miss the crack in her voice, “didn’t peg you for a forest kinda guy...”

Levi shrugs, “figured you’d like the forest... Enough dirt for you to play in...”

Hanji chuckles breathlessly, turning to face Levi. She locks eyes with him, and she sees the boy she kissed in the dark “just to see what it feels like”.

“I don’t know how to be anyone’s lover, Levi...” her voice is a whisper, “I don’t clean, I hardly wash... I don’t know how to make bread...” After all, all things weird and abnormal come with their warning labels.

There’s a smile pulling Levi’s face.

“I do,” he says, “I’ll make the bread... Just promise me you’ll take a bath before dinner...”

Levi pictures that- a cottage in the middle of god forsaken nowhere, the last two people on earth- he glowers at her first, then they become friends, an inevitability. And now they will fall in love over a loaf of warm bread. Maybe there’s a storm outside. Maybe not. Doesn’t matter. They’re waiting on that sunbeam that always comes through their curtain in the mornings.

“Yeah...” she answers, it’s hard to breathe in vacuum. It’s hard to breathe when Levi has taken her breath away, “yeah okay...”

—

Welcome home, my children.

But Levi isn’t dead yet- not yet.

“You nearly fucking died...” Hanji had said, accusatorially. And even though she has fought it for years, she thinks maybe she has allowed herself to take him for granted. The invincible Captain Levi, now dredged up to shores like old treasure. And Hanji nurses him back to a soft glow. “What the fuck... You nearly died...” she says again, as if it isn’t already obvious by the state he’s in.

He looks at her, because moments like these are rare as of recent. He feels the ghost of her lips against his lingering under his bandages. From when she had breathed life back into his lungs. There’s still blood on her face- his blood. And even so, god, even so-

There’s sunlight percolating through the clouds, a sunbeam that reaches down to caress her face. She’s here now, this lover of yours, it says. And Levi almost confuses this moment for his dreams. But life on this unspectacular little rock has been kind, and this is reality. Slightly grimmer than he’d hope, but Hanji is still here. And he sees the years that have gone by in the way responsibility has weighed her down.

No matter. She’s here now. Waking up next to him in a beam of sunlight, dust rising and dancing like bubbles underwater. He’ll get up, warm the bread, and she’ll set two cups in front of them. And Levi would stare at his cup.

“It’s tea, idiot...” Hanji would say, but she has no business defending the cup of something that looks far too dark, too murky to be tea. So she laughs and adds a- “you know I’m really shit at making tea...”

He knows. And that’s a problem for later. For now, Levi imagines they’re the only two people left on earth.

“Maybe we could live here together... Right Levi?”

The thing about the sun. It will always be alluring to the little creatures that dwell in the leaf litter. But too much of a good thing would blind them. This little cursed rock will turn on itself, like a little ball of dirt being rolled off to some pre-determined spot. Completely meaningless in the larger scheme of things. But god, does Levi want to fly into the sun.

Instead he replies, best he can, “I don’t know how to thatch a roof...” And that’s unacceptable. It has to be. How are they going to survive in the forest without a roof. What are they going to do when the storm comes. And his reply reads with familiarity- I don’t know how to be a lover... Now a meaningless phrase exchanged between the two of them like a habit. As a warning to themselves to not get too comfortable in this world.

He hears his own heart shatter. This is the moment he realises there might not be a happy ending to their story. This is the moment he realises he had been hoping for one.

Hanji understands. She understands because she’s the same. So she breaks a smile at him.

“Neither do I...” she says. She can’t even make a decent cup of tea to save her life, and now she wants Levi to run away with her. What will they do. But god, she knows she can brave any storm with him.

“But when this is over... We can figure out how...” Levi says, laboriously, and he links his pinky with hers. He’s humanity’s strongest, surely he can learn to thatch a roof.

“Yeah...” Hanji says, breathless. She’s smart. She’ll figure it out. And she thinks she never wants to die. “Yeah okay...”

She takes this as her cue to lie beside him, head leaning against his good shoulder, hand over his heart. Hanji was right all along. Levi kisses her forehead and tells her he wants her.

“What’s this?” She whispers, eyelids getting heavy, like she’s going to drift off to a long sleep. By morning, the sun will caress her cheek, and if this life permits, she will fall back asleep again in Levi’s arms.

“Whatever you want it to be...” he replies.

“Okay...” she says-

We’re the last two people on earth, waiting for the storm to pass.

#hope you like it💖#levihaneggschange2021 #levihan #Levi x hange zoe #Levi Ackerman #hange zoe #mine #my fic #shingeki no kyojin #i hope there are no mistakes I rewrote this a few times!#Levi x hange #Levi x Hanji

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onecanonlife · 3 years ago

Text

In which Tommy travels back in time and tries to prevent a nightmare from happening to everyone he knows. Everyone else, meanwhile, is highly concerned.

(fic masterpost w/ ao3 links)

(first part) (previous part) (next part)

(word count: 4,598)

--------------------

Part Three: Wilbur

Wilbur oversleeps.

He doesn’t mean to. He never means to. But he does, and when he wakes up and finds the sun halfway to its peak, definitely mid-morning rather than the predawn he was hoping to find, it serves as a shock to his system, and all he can think is, shit. Because sure, he’s been pretty fucking exhausted lately, but that’s no excuse. He’s supposed to be the leader here, and leaders can’t lead when they’re sleeping.

And gods above know what Tommy’s managed to get into this morning, or what Dream’s done, because Dream’s been suspiciously quiet over the past few days and there could be an attack at any moment now, and shit, shit, shit.

He fumbles his way through dressing, tries to neaten his hair, fails utterly, and gives up and pulls his beanie on over it. Not very professional, but it’s fine. This is fine. He can’t hear any screams, so nobody’s dying. Probably.

He steps outside of the hastily-constructed house he claimed for his own, and it’s less of a house, really, than a single room with walls and a roof liable to cave in at any second, but it serves for now, and he never claimed to possess his father’s building prowess. There will be time for infrastructure development after independence is secured. But he steps outside, squinting against the sunlight, and finds—everything in order. Everything looks fine. Nothing is on fire, except for the ever-burning camarvan. The walls still stand.

That should be his next step. The walls.

He climbs his way up, surveying the area. The surrounding lands appear just as they were left last night. No ominous structures set up. No fucking TNT cannons. All is calm, peaceful, and he has learned not to trust peace, these past few weeks, but if everything is alright for now, he’ll accept it gladly. Even if it doesn’t last.

He sighs, bracing his hands against the battlements. All too often, these days, he’s found his mind wandering down paths they never would have before. He can’t help but wonder what Phil would think if he knew the full extent of what he’s up to. His father tried so hard, when he was younger, to shield him from war, from the legacy that he and his best friend laid out behind them. And Wilbur cannot blame him for that protectiveness; his first experience of war has only been a few weeks long, and he’s finding he doesn’t care for it, even if he’s discovered a knack for tactics.

The thing is, though, he’s always wanted a legacy of his own.

Phil always said that it would be through his music. He never told him that he had his doubts about that, that he loves his songs but that something in him always calls for more, something just out of reach, just beyond the crest of the next hill. He’s not sure his father knows how ambitious he really is, in the end.

He should probably write him. He’ll do it after the war is over. After he has a country to invite him to see. After he’s built something that his dad will be proud of. And if he leaves out the struggle it took to get it, nobody has to know but him, because it’s certainly better that Phil doesn’t.

“Hello, Wilbur,” Dream says, right by his ear, and he jerks, pulling his sword from his inventory in an instinctive motion. How he missed the bastard’s approach, he has no idea, but Dream is standing right there, right on the walls next to him, covered head to toe in netherite armor, smiling mask firmly affixed to his face. He holds no weapons yet, but Wilbur knows all too well how quickly that can change.

“You’re trespassing on L’Manberg property,” he snaps, trying to disguise the frantic racing of his heart. His feet shift into a ready stance, a movement that’s old hat by now, both from this war and from Technoblade’s training when he was a kid, even though the sword will never be his weapon of choice. “With armor on, too. You’re not allowed to wear armor within our borders.”

He doesn’t know why he bothers to try. Dream won’t obey. He never does. That’s why they’re at war in the first place.

But then, to his shock, Dream chuckles, inclining his head. And then, piece by piece, the armor disappears, accompanied by the familiar clink of metal landing in an inventory slot.

“Right, right,” Dream says, as if he hasn’t just blown all of Wilbur’s expectations out of the water. “Of course. I guess I really should be trying to get off on the right foot with you, here. Congratulations, by the way. I’m sure you were happy to hear the news.”

What is he—?

What is this? Is he trying psychological warfare now? Is that what this is? Because Wilbur has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about. Is he supposed to know what he’s talking about? Dream’s acting like he should know what he’s talking about, and he doesn’t particularly want to give him the upper hand by revealing that he does not, in fact, have any idea what he’s talking about.

“Thank you,” he manages, a beat too late, but Dream doesn’t seem to notice, just continues on blithely.

“I just figured we should set up an official meeting of some kind,” he says. “One country leader to another. Get some peace treaties drawn up, write some trade agreements, draw some official boundaries, all of that stuff. I’ll admit, I’ve never done any of that before, but it can’t be too hard, right?”

“Right, I’m sure,” Wilbur replies, nodding along. Because, what?

“It doesn’t have to be right away,” Dream continues, and he just keeps talking. “I can give you a day or two to settle in, get stuff in order. There’s no real rush, but we should get it done soon. I don’t want to leave anything up in the air. That’s not the kind of thing that promotes stability.”

“Of course,” he says.

Dream goes to say something else, and then stops, tilting his head again. This time, it’s less mocking, more curious. “You do know what I’m talking about, right?” he says, and the game is up. Wilbur feels caught, but he breathes deeply, fights off his rising blush, gathers up all his composure.

“I’ll be entirely honest,” he says. “I’ve got no idea what the shit you’re on about right now.”

He’s not expecting that to make Dream laugh. But he does, tossing his head back and carrying on, loud and long, and then it devolves into a tea kettle wheeze. Genuine amusement, then, though at what, Wilbur isn’t sure. He doesn’t appreciate being laughed at, but he can’t help but feel like there’s something going on here that’s going straight over his head. He doesn’t appreciate that very much, either.

“Oh my god,” Dream manages, as soon as he’s capable of speech, mirth still dancing in his voice, “he didn’t tell you? Still?”

Something icy gets its claws around his heart.

“Who didn’t tell me?” he demands. “Who didn’t tell me what?”

“Tommy,” Dream answers, and those claws squeeze. His heart skips several beats, and suddenly, he’s casting back in his mind to the last time he saw Tommy. It was last night, wasn’t it? Just last night? He sent him to bed, because Tommy often tries to take late watches, claims himself capable, but he’s not even quite sixteen yet. Wilbur may have pulled him into a war, but he’s still a teenager, and Wilbur’s going to do his damnedest to make sure he comes out of this as intact as possible. And that means getting enough sleep.

He looked fine, last night. He was fine. He has to be fine.

He’s moving before he realizes it, his hand fisting in the front of Dream’s hoodie.

“If you’ve done something to Tommy, I’m tossing you off this wall right here and now,” he snarls. “Don’t test me, Dream.”

A year ago, a month ago, he never would have pictured himself making a threat like that. Never would have imagined himself capable of following through. But he is different, now, from the way he started, different already, and there is a part of him, a part of him that whispers to him in crows’ voices, that is scared of what he will be by the time the war is done.

“I haven’t done anything to Tommy!” Dream protests, raising both hands, though he sounds unconcerned. “I swear, I haven’t. He gave us a really good chance to, last night, but we didn’t take it. You should thank us for that. It was pretty stupid, what he did.”

“Explain,” he demands. “Explain right now.”

Tommy’s a resourceful kid. He can picture him getting himself in and out of an altercation easily. But the way Dream says it, it’s like he put himself in the situation in the first place, like he sought it out, and what the hell was Tommy even doing, outside of the walls so late at night? The walls are there for a reason. The walls are there for protection. The walls are there to keep his people safe, because maybe he didn’t exactly set out to start a country, in the very beginning, but he’s going to see it through. By all the gods, he’s going to see it through.

If, that is, this kid doesn’t give him a heart attack first.

Dream shoves at his hand, and he lets him go without an argument. Dream takes a step back, putting a bit more space between them, and then leans against the wall.

“Tommy came to us last night,” he says, “and traded his discs for L’Manberg’s independence.”

It’s a simple sentence. A very simple sentence. But somehow, the words don’t make any sense.

“Congratulations, President Soot,” Dream says, and he knows, he knows the bastard is smiling under that mask. “I look forward to establishing relations between our countries,” and he isn’t, Wilbur knows that he isn’t, but he’s enjoying this because he’s just dropped a bomb on him and he knows it, because—

“Leave,” he rasps. “Get out.”

Dream does a little salute, short and mocking, and then hops over the side of the wall. Wilbur hopes he takes damage, hopes he breaks his fucking legs. The sound of water hitting the ground tells him that he doesn’t. He can’t even be upset about it, because his heart has jumped into his throat, pounding in his ears, and all of the words were fine individually, but all together, they’re too much to process.

Tommy gave up his discs. And now L’Manberg is free. Just like that, the war is over. And Tommy gave up his discs. Tommy walked straight into enemy territory without telling him and handed over his most prized possessions, all for the sake of L’Manberg’s independence. And he succeeded. He got it. He sacrificed something dear to him, something that Wilbur never would have asked him to give up, and he did it for them. For L’Manberg.

Giddiness is the first emotion that fills him, and next is pride. Because this—this is above and beyond. He never would have asked Tommy to trade away something so important to him, but somehow, he found it within himself to do it, and he got what he wanted from it. He got what they all wanted. Somehow, Tommy managed to end their struggles in one fell swoop, and they’re not related, neither by blood nor by adoption or anything like that, but Wilbur thinks that this must be the sort of pride an older brother feels when watching the younger grow up, watching the younger go on and accomplish great things.

They are free, and it is because of Tommy. He feels like he’s on cloud nine. He feels like he could fly.

And then reality crashes back in.

Tommy didn’t tell him that he was planning this. Tommy didn’t tell him, might not have told anyone at all, and that means he strolled straight into the arms of their bitter enemies, people who might have killed him without a second thought. No one has died yet, and he always intended to keep it that way, but the thought of Tommy alone, at night, creeping his way into the belly of the beast, sends a chill down his spine.

Tommy could have died. Tommy could have died, and he wouldn’t have known until he woke up this morning, woke up late, and saw the message on his comm. TommyInnit was slain by Dream.

And then, another thought occurs to him: Tommy hasn’t come to him. Hasn’t come to brag, hasn’t even come to just tell him, to tell him that he’s just single-handedly won their independence. And that is not a Tommy-like thing to do, to let something like that go unremarked upon.

Something is wrong. Dream might have lied. He could have hurt Tommy. Tommy could be injured right now. He doesn’t even know for sure that he made it back.

Tommy gave up his discs for L’Manberg.

It still barely makes any sense to him. But there’s no time to make sense of it. He rushes back down the wall as quickly as he can manage, and then it’s off through their settlement, eyes darting around, hoping for a glimpse of him. He checks Tommy’s house, first, the ramshackle, makeshift thing he’s been sharing with Tubbo until they can get better buildings erected, and he’s not there, and Tubbo isn’t either. The camarvan turns up nothing. He’s considering leaving L’Manberg entirely, going to check by Tommy’s other house, the one built into the hill, when Tubbo comes up beside him.

“Morning, Wilbur,” he says, and then frowns. “You alright, man? You’re kind of pale.”

“Tubbo,” he says, and grabs him by the shoulders. Maybe a bit too emphatically, because he suddenly looks a bit alarmed, but he’ll be concerned with that later. “Tubbo, have you seen Tommy today?”

Tubbo’s frown deepens. “I was coming to see if you knew where he was,” he says. “He was being a bit off last night. Think he had a nightmare or something. But he’s not with you?”

“No, he’s not.” With every word out of Tubbo’s mouth, he feels his own panic grow. It is one thing for Tommy to hatch some sort of plot and not tell him. That is—well, it’s not fine, but Tommy doesn’t tell him everything. But to keep Tubbo out of the loop? To, presumably, visit him before leaving and yet still not tell Tubbo what was going on? It’s unlike him. Very unlike him.

“Okay, well, he’s got to be around here somewhere,” Tubbo reasons, his brows creased. “L’Manberg’s only so big. Should we go look for him together, then?”

“Right,” he says. He breathes, in and out. Tubbo’s a good kid. Very sensible. Very down to earth. And he’s right, of course. Tommy has to be around here somewhere. Any other possibility is out of the question. “Right, of course, let’s go look.”

So they do. They take a systematic approach, first checking all the most likely places and then combing every inch of their land in a grid formation. Tubbo’s suggestion, again. But that turns up nothing, either, and he can feel the panic creeping back in, because what if he actually didn’t make it home? What if he was out there in the dead of night, distraught and alone, and something took advantage of that? What if some mob looked at him and recognized him for an easy kill?

He’s not dead. He can’t be dead. There would have been a notification. But he could be injured somewhere, incapacitated, in pain and all alone, and he can’t let that happen, can’t let Tommy be hurt like that on his watch—

“Oh, wait,” Tubbo says, and pulls on his sleeve. “There he is.”

Wilbur jerks, and stares in the direction he’s pointing. And sure enough, Tommy’s there, right in front of the camarvan, and Eret too, it looks like. He doesn’t think he’s ever felt relief as pure as in this moment.

“Gods,” he breathes, and starts toward them, calling out, “Tommy!” And as he approaches, he gets the sense that something is off.

The first thing he notices is Eret’s expression. Pure, unbridled confusion, mixed with what perhaps might be something like anxiety. And the reason for that is clear enough: Tommy is holding their face very firmly in his hands. Which is bizarre, and Wilbur blinks a few times to make sure he’s seeing this right, because Tommy doesn’t—he doesn’t just do that. That is a gesture reserved only for people he is very, very close to. Tubbo gets that treatment. He’s been on the receiving end a couple of times himself, but not often. And he knows that Tommy and Eret get along just fine, are friends, just like all of them are, but he really didn’t think that the two of them were close enough for this. And judging by the look on Eret’s face, they didn’t think so either.

And Tommy is just standing there. Not speaking, not doing anything else. Just staring Eret in the eyes—or the glasses, rather—with a startling intensity.

“Tommy?” he asks, as soon as he’s close enough that he doesn’t have to shout. “Is everything alright?”

And Tommy startles. Withdraws his hands from Eret’s face as though he’s been burned. Turns to look at him, and Wilbur freezes in place, because just for a second—

There is fear on Tommy’s face.

He doesn’t understand what could have caused it. But it is undoubtedly there, only for a moment before it is smoothed away into something more neutral, if strained. And he hates it, hates it viscerally. He never wants Tommy to look at him with that expression on his face. It makes him feel sick to his stomach.

“Ayup,” Tommy says, and his voice sounds—rough. Like he hasn’t slept at all. “Morning Wil, Tubso.”

It’s casual. Far too casual for what Wilbur has just learned, for the panic he’s felt for the past half hour or so, unable to find this kid, this kid who is basically his brother, for all he pretends to protest against the moniker. Tommy is his family. Tommy is his family, and he risked everything last night, gave up everything for the sake of Wilbur’s everything, his grand ideals, his great vision, and now he’s standing there like nothing at all has changed.

“Ayup, Tommy,” Tubbo says. “You feeling any better this morning?”

At Tommy’s side, Eret shifts uneasily. Their expression is still one of concern, and Wilbur wonders exactly how long Tommy had been standing there like that, or what their interaction even was to get them to that point in the first place. It’s confusing. He’s confused.

“I’m great,” Tommy says, and—no, no, they’re not going to do this.

“Tommy,” he breaks in, and Tommy stiffens. “Tommy, last night, why did you—you just—why wouldn’t you tell me?”

It’s not quite what he should be asking, but it’s what comes out. And his voice is annoyingly desperate, and he hates showing off so many emotions like this, especially in a public space, but he can’t stop himself.

“What about last night?” Tubbo asks.

“Last night?” Eret echoes, and looks to Tommy, who blinks, his gaze darting between the three of them but landing on Wilbur most of all, and it’s like he’s nervous, almost, anxious about how he’s going to react, and—does he think he’s going to be angry about this? Perhaps he is, but only in the sense that he’s angry that Tommy took such a stupid risk. Below that anger, that anger born of fear, his pride burns bright. Surely, Tommy must know that?

“I—look, I knew you’d say no, alright?” he says. “But I knew that I could do it, so I did it. Simple as that.”

Simple as that, he says. As if he didn’t give up his greatest possessions. As if he didn’t win them the war, win them their freedom, win for them the reality of the values that this country was founded upon.

“What’s going on?” Eret asks.

“Yeah, does this have something to do with what you were saying to me the other night?” Tubbo says, and then looks at him. “Wilbur, what are you talking about? What happened last night?”

Tommy sighs, and says nothing. Wilbur swallows, and maintains eye contact with him as he speaks, searching for some kind of reaction.

“Dream came to me this morning,” he says, and does not miss Tommy’s flinch at the name, “not even an hour ago. He said—he said that we were free. That the war was over, that L’Manberg was its own nation, that he wanted to set up a meeting for diplomatic ties and whatnot. He called me the president. And, um, he said that you won it for us, Tommy.” He pauses, just for a moment, trying to get his emotions under control. He mostly fails. “He said that you came to him, last night, and you traded your discs to him for L’Manberg’s freedom.”

“You did what?”

Tubbo’s voice is dismayed and disbelieving all at once. And Tommy flinches, draws into himself a little, and that’s not the reaction Wilbur would have expected, but literally none of this is what he would have expected.

“Yeah,” he says, sounding quiet, a bit defeated. “Yeah, I—I did. I knew he’d take the deal. And I just wanted—I wanted the war to be over, yeah? Before anybody got hurt. And I knew this would work, so I just went and did it.”

“You couldn’t have, though,” he finds himself saying, before he even know what he’s going to say next. “Maybe you could’ve guessed that he’d go for it, but—Tommy, what if they’d killed you? Taken what they wanted and killed you right then and there? I just—” He breaks off running a hand through his hair, remembering too late that he’s got his beanie on. His fingers dislodge it, and he readjusts it with more fervor than is necessary. “I just can’t believe you did that without telling someone. Without telling—” Me, he wants to say, but holds himself back. No matter his feelings regarding Tommy, the deep respect and even deeper love that has grown in him over the course of their friendship, he doesn’t have a monopoly on Tommy’s attention. Perhaps he would have preferred for Tommy to tell him, but he’d have settled for Tommy telling anyone.

“What, are you worried?” Tommy says, and Wilbur only spares a second to wonder why he sounds so disbelieving, because—

“Yes,” he bursts out. “Gods, Tommy! Dream came to me with this and my first thought was that you’d died! Or that you hadn’t made it back, that you were out there somewhere, alone and needing help, and I didn’t—Tommy. Tommy, please tell me you thought of this. Please tell me, tell me that you were prepared, at least. Tell me that you—” He cuts himself off again, shaking his head hard, and under any other circumstance, he would be kicking himself for the display, for the outburst of emotion, for the lack of eloquence, but he thinks he can be excused for the moment.

Tommy’s mouth works for a second.

“Oh,” he finally says, weakly. “Um, right. Sorry, Wilbur. No, I had it handled, trust me. Sorry, I didn’t, um. Didn’t mean to scare you like that. Sort of just—did it, y’know?”

“It’s okay,” he says, even though it kind of isn’t, because Tommy’s continued to shrink into himself, and he doesn’t want that. “It’s okay, Tommy, I’m just glad you’re okay. And, gods above, what you did—” He steps forward, then, unable to help himself, and takes Tommy by the shoulders. Tommy stares at him with wide eyes. “I never would have asked that of you. I couldn’t believe it when Dream told me. And Tommy, I—I’m so, so sorry. But I am so damn proud of you. You hear me? So damn proud. I know what that must have taken, for you to do that. And I’m so fucking proud of you.” He smiles, then, wide and a bit watery. He’s not going to cry, he’s not, but emotion is rising up in his throat, thick and overpowering. “You did it, Tommy. You won us L’Manberg.”

Tommy returns the smile, if a bit tentatively. “Yeah,” he says, “I guess I did, didn’t I?” And then, the smile widens, and he puffs out his chest, putting his hands on his hips. “I hear that makes me the leader now. You’re speaking to Mister High President King Lord Innit, so show me the respect you owe me, eh?”

“Absolutely the fuck not,” he replies, but he’s laughing. “No, no, enough out of you, go, take Tubbo and go get yourself whatever you want out of our rations, you’ve fucking earned it, Toms.”

Tommy offers him one last grin, and then he ducks out of his grip, grabbing Tubbo’s hand and dragging him in the direction of their storage. He can hear Tubbo’s voice already, high and offended at the fact that Tommy went and did this without telling him, and perhaps all is right with the world after all. Some things do not change, even when everything else does.

He went to sleep last night a rebel, a general. He woke up a president. How about that?

“Do you think he’s alright?�� Eret asks, and he starts, almost having forgotten they were there.

“Probably not,” he admits. “Not entirely. Those discs meant a lot to him. But we’ve got time to figure it out.” He turns to them, then, makes eye contact with himself in the reflection of their sunglasses. “What was he doing with you, before we walked up?”

“I’m not entirely sure,” they reply. “He came up to me, sort of yelling a bit? Punched me in the shoulder a few times. Couldn’t figure out what that was about. Then he thanked me for something, and then he hugged me, which was a bit odd, and then he did the, uh, thing, with the holding my face? And then you and Tubbo arrived. I honestly don’t know what any of that was about at all.”

He hums, and looks out after the boys, at their retreating backs. As he watches, Tommy slings an arm around Tubbo’s shoulders, his other hand gesticulating wildly.

“I’m sure it’s fine,” he says softly. “It’s Tommy. He makes it his job to be unpredictable.”

“You’re right about that,” Eret says. “I suppose congratulations are in order, President Soot?”

President Soot. It’s got a nice ring to it. He is the leader of a free country now, and it is thanks to the kid he sees as a younger brother, whether he’ll admit as much out loud or not. He is the leader of a free country, and that means there is much work to be done.

But he gives himself a moment longer, and smiles at the way the midday sun shines in Tommy’s hair.

It’s all for them, after all. Land is just land; as long as he can give his loved ones the freedom they deserve, that’s enough for him.

#mcyt #dsmp #dream smp #dsmp fic #wilbur soot #tommyinnit #dreamwastaken #tubbo #eret #/rp #cw swearing #cw death mention #cw injury mention #both of those are hypothetical #cat writes fic #long post #time travel au #surprise!! bet you weren't expecting a new chapter of this today!!!#:DDD

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mercurysowntwenty-two · 4 years ago

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tell me more about lancer!! (I’ve heard of it but never played)

“It is 5016u, and the galaxy is home to trillions. At the core of humanity’s territory there is a golden age, but outside of this newly won utopia the revolutionary project continues... Your character in the world of Lancer is a mechanized cavalry pilot of particular note – a lancer. Whatever the mission, whatever the terrain, whatever the enemy, your character is the one who is called in to break the siege or hold the line. When the drop klaxons sound, it’s up to them to save the day. “ - Introduction, Lancer core rules (pp 10-11)

Lancer is a very good role-playing game about piloting giant robots and using them to make Utopia happen. I’m going to organize this into mechanical things that are Very Good about Lancer and lore things that are Very Good. Here are 12 things I like Very Much about Lancer.

MECHANICAL

1. COMPCON

2. In addition to a primary system of regular old weapons n attacks n hitpoints, there is an entire other system of technological attacks and “heat” hitpoints to represent hacking enemy robots to increasingly bizarre effect. Making regular physical attacks is tied to physical weapon “mounts” on your mech, and these mounts may be destroyed over the course of a fight, so the technology attack system gives players who might otherwise be neutralized something to do the whole time.

3. So much player choice: There are 29 mechs in the core rulebook, another 5 in the first rules supplement, another 3 freely available on the publisher itch.io, then various others in the nooks and crannies of the Lancer discord. Do not be daunted, however! i. In a source like COMPCON above, all the mechs are organized by manufacturer and role. Each in-universe manufacturer matches one of the 4 fundamental mech stats so if you know you’re aiming for a mech that especially interacts with a particular part of the mechanics you’ve already selected out 75% of the choices. a. The matches go like this: Harrison Armory matches to the “Engineering” stat and so their mechs deal with the Heat mechanics in interesting ways, HORUS matches to the “Systems” stat and so they specialize in hacking other mechs and other technological attacks, Interplanetary Shipping-Northstar matches to “Hull” and so builds tanks and tough guys, and Smith-Shimano matches to “Agility” and so builds the sexy ones the ones that have interesting ways of avoiding getting hit. b. Roles are relatively straightforward too! Striker mechs are the close-quarters fighters, artillery are... artillery- long range fighters, controllers do big Areas of Effect or impose conditions or alter character movement, defenders have big shields or are mobile bunkers or are just so darn big they protect those behind them, and support is... support- they share bonuses like repairs with their allies. ii. Take this all together and finding the mech that best suits you is actually real easy despite the long long lists. And if you ever get locked into a build you grow to dislike? At every level up, you can completely replace and overhaul the mech licenses (which represent your ability to use the relevant equipment and frame associated with a given robot) you have so you can try other robots.

4. The NPC system: There are 33 NPC statblocks, organized by the kind of role they have in a potential fight. In addition, there are 12 templates you could potentially apply to an NPC. Both statblocks and templates are defined by “systems”- just little traits and qualities and there are often many optional systems you can slap on for an extra level of customization. Therefore, you can tailor hundreds if not thousands of NPCs out of a seemingly-limited stock. i. The template system means any potential moveset or archetype can be made into a miniboss or boss ii. The template system means you can flavorfully telegraph how an encounter can go- telling the players they are fighting a group of pirates prepares them for coreworm rockets and grapple leashes (hallmarks of the pirate template) regardless of the actual statblock in use. iii. Each statblock is effectively 3 statblocks in one, set to different tiers to match and scale to the level of the players throughout the game (so oops I guess there are 99 NPCs by default) iv. Monstrosity- it’s for Kaiju! it’s also one of the most modular statblocks for all the little tweaks you need for Big Monster v. Squad- for footsoldiers!

5. There is no class system (mechanically speaking, in the lore Union is working on it). Character creation functions through selecting Skill Triggers for situations outside your mech and Talents for situations inside your mech, and mech licenses themselves. Even Backgrounds are mostly just lists of questions in order to prompt character introspection.

6. I put this last down here because it’s kind of at the intersection of the mechanics and the lore, but Lancer has some good random tables for generating things like planets, space stations, people on space stations, Pirate crews, and big Enterprise companies. It’s just good clean fun.

LORE

I also created this google doc for totally unrelated reasons

1. The naming convention of the rings of Union and the Blinkgates- Blinkgates are Lancer’s mechanism of faster-than-light travel. They are Big installations and passing through one can take you to any other instantly. They’re organized into “rings” of the stations that are physically closest to one another, emanating out from Earth. Each ring is named after a mountain range on Earth (now called Cradle because of course) and each gate is named after a peak in that range. This is a real small detail in the grand scheme of things but I adore it because this naming convention is a clear reflection of the priorities and values of the people who did the naming. Every gate by definition is situated in places that humans have already settled, but they’re not named according to local convention. Just so, every gate is situated somewhere in Cradle’s night sky, but they’re not named for things like constellations. Each blinkgate is named after a feature on Cradle because the blinkgates were named by the Second Committee of Union, who had a driving philosophy of Anthrochauvinism (a manifest destiny attitude towards humanity on the galactic stage, with a heavy bias towards humanity as it is on Cradle) and so of course blinkgates are named as a projection of life on Earth onto space without regard for the actual space they occupy.

2. On a related note, according to the starship-battle spinoff Battlegroup, Union names its largest starships- its battleships- after environmentalists. That just warmed my little Environmental Scientist heart, and also is a clear reflection of the Third Committee’s values and priorities (Union rose from the ashes of an environmental disaster on Earth, and the Union Navy under the Third Committee has a general mandate of acting protectively and defensively, so Union has effectively named one set of their people’s protectors after another set of protectors).

3. The fact that every faction is simultaneously in a state of escalating tension. "The Good War" is this inevitable conflict that everyone constantly expects, but it is constantly not here, which just increases the tension further. This makes for good adventure fodder. i. KTB and HA are about to have the Second Interest War in the Dawnline Shore, ii. Union and the Aun are about to have the Second Distal War in Boundary Garden, and SSC is gonna wade into it because geneticists gotta get their samples I guess, iii. IPS-N is about to fall apart from infighting, iv. In the Long Rim HORUS is closing in on Horizon, finding the Fourth Metavault is around the corner

4. Utopia is a verb. Corollary: Union are the enemy you want. Or: Life is good, but it can be better. All this to say, Union is presented as an unambiguous force for good, but the game and the creators make no bones about how Union can be made better (and thus directly put improving the world in the players’ court!).

5. Many Factions are defined by a fundamental expectation-subverting "What If?" i. Union- what if the big bad hegemony that rules over everything was (at least trying to be) the good guys? ii. The Aun- what if the mysterious and mystical theocracy explicitly and literally had the support of a god and thus could back up their claims of manifest destiny? iii. The Corpros- what if all of these awful organizations actually did materially improve people’s lives, instead of that just being a propaganda line they throw out to justify themselves?

6. NHPs- Explaining what’s up with NHPs in full would be a whole Thing, so for now I’ll just share my favorite thing about them: they’re like droids in Star Wars, except the creators actually acknowledge the immorality of the situation and thus generate and encourage discussion about it in the playerbase, rather than just let it be taken for granted (and thus directly put improving the world in the players’ court!).

#Lancer #Lancer rpg

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dsmproleplayaccount · 4 years ago

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welcome to the dream smp interactive roleplay game!

happy to have you here! here’s some info about this new concept i’m trying out for fun.

disclaimer; i will not be writing any reader x character romance or overstepping cc’s boundaries; the pfp of my blog is not made by me, but was labelled free to use.

how does this work?

it’s rather simple! after you submit your initial post (it’s explained how to do that below), i reblog it with a reply writing the response by the dsmp cast and world as a whole. it’s a training experience for me to learn to write the dream smp characters as well as get better at writing and dialogue in general! i’ll attempt to keep them in character as much as i can, however keep in mind i believe every single character on the dream smp to be morally grey, not inherently good or evil, so i will write them accordingly.

you can go into this knowing literally nothing about the dream smp! if you have a friend who is clueless about the story, they can submit a post here and become part of the dream smp, learning more about the characters in an interactive way- either way, if you would like yourself / a persona of yours to join the story, that’s exactly what this whole thing is about- i will write you into the story, while you yourself control your own decisions. it’s like a game which takes you down different paths depending on what choices you make, however this has literally endless possibilities!

sounds like a pretty fun concept to me! that’s why i thought it would be cool to try this out, seeing as interactive stories are for me the most entertaining kind.

it might take a bit for me to reply, and in case (though i don’t think that would happen) that this blog happens to get flooded by submissions, i’ll most likely not reply to all of them; including ones that i don’t feel comfortable doing for whatever reason. don’t be shy to submit though, i am looking forwards to playing this w/ you guys!

and don’t feel bad for this being reader-insert! i myself don’t and will not ever read those because of personal preference; you can think of this as more of an open-world text-based fangame.

how do i enter?

to enter, you must be moderately capable at writing your own character- anything extra triggering crossing the line of what usually happens on the smp shouldn’t be included in your character’s backstory or actions, as to not endanger the mental well-being of me or possible readers.

the story itself starts when your character, someday somewhere, finds a portal. they jump into it, and spawn in the dream smp.

in the “start the game” (or submit post) section, you’ll fill out this short form:

- name, age & gender of the character - are they accompanied by any pets? - brief appearance, clothing and height - starting point (time-wise) - starting point (space-wise) - starting post (thoughts and feelings upon arrival, maybe them wandering around or interacting with objects/buildings)

as for the starting points; any time during the canon storyline is fair game, e. g. you can start your story at the beginning of the l’manberg war, during the pogtopian revolution, or during the prison arc that is currently ongoing. feel free to pinpoint very specific times to me as well; shortly after techno’s execution, right after tommy gets let out of the prison, etc.

any place should also be fine, however don’t have your character spawn for example in the middle of a battlefield or inside buildings; you’re most likely to spawn in a large and open area, for example outside l’manberg, in the village by techno’s house, or the initial spawn area.

if you have specific questions and don’t know whether something would work or not, don’t be afraid to simply send me an ask! you’re never a bother.

you can choose to have your character have forgotten everything (except their own beliefs and personality) because of jumping through the portal, or they can have a backstory; please keep those in line with the minecraft universe, i. e. things like growing up in minecraft player villages, hybrid settlements, a nether colony, or public servers like hypixel.

please no mary-sues, overpowered characters, nsfw characters or anything that seems off-limits! your character can be a furry or a mob hybrid if you want! as long as it’s not painful to write about it’s all good.

this rules section will expand depending on my experiences with this! it’s still in alpha, let’s say; don’t be afraid to ask me to specify or add something.

can i play with someone else?

since this game is basically in its demo, i’ve never done this before and have no idea how it will go, multiplayer is not available just yet! if there is enough demand, you’ll be able to play with your friends in the future, but for now it’s limited to one character.

if you have any other questions, please use the question section!

so, are you going to join the anarchist syndicate or become part of snowchester and an adoptive sibling of the underscore family?

can’t wait to see what you come up with!

either way, have a wonderful rest of your day :]

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mitigatedchaos · 4 years ago

Text

Review: SAC_2045

(~3,700 words, 15 minutes)

This post will contain some minor spoilers for SAC_2045.

Summary: You may have thought SAC_2045 was a poor entry in the Ghost in the Shell franchise - actually, it's just intended for younger audiences.

Previously: Standalone Complex 202045:1-4 (superseded)

-☆☆☆-

And what did you think of the remaining episodes of GitS:SAC_2045?

[ @irradiate-space ]

Standalone Complex

There's a certain indescribable feeling associated with Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex as a work, an artistic touch related to the director associated with it, independent of other considerations. SAC_2045 has it, which isn't too surprising since Kenji Kamiyama is back.

SAC_2045 is Standalone Complex. For a brief moment, while watching it, I inhabited my pre-2016 personality and outlook. I can't tell you how much that means to me. Since the arrival of streaming I've tended to bingewatch series, but on the first run-through I decided not to bingewatch this one.

If you approach this show as season 4 of Standalone Complex (Solid State Society being season 3), it's underwhelming. Now, viewing it again, it's become obvious that a conventional season 4 of Standalone Complex was never the intent of SAC_2045 to begin with.

For those of you who have delayed until now, the English dub has been uploaded - it released without one due to the pandemic. They bring back a number of the voice actors from the excellent Standalone Complex dub, though having already watched it with subtitles, I didn't feel the need to confirm the dub's quality.

Sustainable War

To properly describe a new theory of war is the same thing as to invent it. While the idea of war as a for-profit industry has been kicked around for some time, it's generally assumed that this is a kind of parasitic relationship on the part of the war-making industry.

As time goes on, warfare becomes more abstract (partly because warfare happens where it can happen), much like society itself is becoming more abstract as information moves more quickly and humanity gains access to more energy.[1] In SAC_2045, "Sustainable War" is part of the context of the world and its current issues, but we aren't really told how it works - if it's similar to contemporary information warfare and a blurring of the lines between state and non-state actors, it's bound to be quite confusing.

I believe my earlier assessment of "Sustainable War" is correct. The key feature of sustainable war, the reason they say it's safe if you leave it to the experts, is likely that it involves AIs constantly forecasting against each other and moving units around with few direct confrontations. The goal would be to lock in a victory without having to fire a shot, except for small skirmishes that don't escalate to major incidents (due to the AI forecasting).

The presence of armed separatist movements even in Japan may also indicate that the ruling institutional bodies are engaged in a kind of Post-International Politics,[2] which treats all international relations as fundamentally existing between subnational entities - however, I believe that later information suggests this wasn't their original intent.

What makes it "sustainable"? Since if done correctly, very little is actually physically destroyed, the cost is less than conventional warfare, and thus the war can continue indefinitely. Why does it threaten humanity with destruction? Because there's an awful lot of military hardware waiting for someone to actually pull the trigger.

Season 1: Ep. 2

So what is the intent of the series' creators? I think they may be telling us through this dialogue between Togusa and Section Chief Daisuke Aramaki in episode 2.

Aramaki: Seems time has toughened you up. Togusa: Is that supposed to be a compliment? Aramaki: It is if you want it to be. Togusa: Then thanks for the kind words. “I made the right decision by choosing this line of work over my marriage.” That’s what you’re saying? Aramaki: Perhaps. [...] Togusa: They're bringing back Section 9? [...] Aramaki: But my takeaway from the proposal is this: The PM's reason for the urgent reforming of Section 9 takes priority over his personal motives. I believe his true objective is meeting the Americans' demands for the dispatch of special resources. Togusa: So it's as the Liberals feared? An American-born Prime Minister would be no more than an American puppet? Aramaki: I've yet to meet him in person, so I can't really say. But this is an opportunity to have the Major and the rest of you undertake a major operation for me once more. Togusa: What sort of op? Aramaki: Over the past few years, I have searched for an answer on how to deal with a society in turmoil. I'd like you people to lay the groundwork that will help the next generation find that answer. Togusa: I don't know what a man in my position can contribute, but I'll humbly offer whatever assistance I can.

Those of us who cried, Kamiyama, tell us the future once more! based on Standalone Complex's prophetic analysis of a memetic crime wave were bound to be disappointed. SAC_2045 is less rooted in the near future than in the now - cyberbullying, endless war amidst historic prosperity, employment suppressed by automation, savings eaten up by the complex machinations of finance, and a breakdown of national borders? That's today.

Those of us who hoped for a Ghost in the Shell: Unicorn, a psychically overpowering work that synthesizes the full body of Ghost in the Shell into a single coherent form to elevate us to a higher level of understanding, should have tempered our expectations. To reach each new philosophical level is more difficult than the last - to achieve that with Ghost in the Shell of all things would have required a multidisciplinary genius near the limits of current understanding.

Kenji Kamiyama is just an anime director. And anyhow, Gundam Unicorn was a book before it was an animated series. And who among us even knew we'd have to write a book before 2015? Ghost in the Shell was well-understood enough, so I instead wrote 25,000 words worth of hypothetical country and became a blogger, like the infamous Scott Alexander.[3]

If we approach SAC_2045 from the lens that it's a humbler work designed for younger audiences, however, some of the creative decisions make more sense.

Purin

Just how old is Purin, the MIT grad who joins the team later on? If I had to guess, that's '23歳' on that profile she provides, and Ishikawa notes that she 'skipped a few grades' on her way to a PhD. But she acts like someone a lot younger. She's enthusiastic and we're assured she's intelligent, but seems to be lacking social training. For example, she makes the mistake of assembling an era-accurate music player for Batou combined with a playlist after consulting the Tachikomas to find out what he listens to. There are two ways to take this.

The first is that she's intended as a relateable character for someone who would make this class of mistake. It's the sort of mistake I might have made at age 13-14, meaning that the show would probably be aimed at someone that age or lower. Overly enthusiastic, doesn't understand romantic relationships, impulsive, poor reading of boundaries / poor modelling of others outside of certain domains, impulsive in a way that causes social screw-ups? Yeah that could certainly apply to an ADHD kid of about that age.

And all of a sudden the tone of the first five episodes with the gun-fighting, the literal Agent Smith, the decision to place the focus in America, and even the mystery of the series being much simpler than Standalone Complex 2nd Gig's plot regarding Asian refugees in Japan make a lot more sense. This is Ghost in the Shell for kids!

Wow, I didn't think that could be done!

...is what I should say, except that around the time I acquired the ability to futurist shitpost, and I used that ability to predict that it would.

Purin II

The second reading is that the youth of the future are fucked up. She probably has some tricked out modifications, both cybernetic and genetic. Now usually you would tell someone to try to become a well-rounded human being. But...

The global economy has crashed. Batou mistakes her for a robot - creatures that look like pretty young women are a dime a dozen. In the dating market, she would be competing with full sensory immersion VR pornography on the one hand, and at the upper end of society where cybernetics are more widely available, likely women with a similar appearance but decades more experience and professional standing.

Note that in the original Standalone Complex, the team take down an 80-year-old Russian spy with the full prosthetic body of a 20-year-old. Full cyborgs aren't common then, nor are they in SAC_2045 (though cyberbrains are ubiquitous), but if the economy recovers that may change, and the sector she's trying to get in to (full-time salaried government rather than marginal private employment it would seem) is going to be very tough to enter either way.

So Purin may have to be over-optimized even to just appear on the screen. In fact, she says,

"Just so I could work at Section 9, I moved most of my sentimental memories to external storage."

Youch! It's no wonder she's socially maladjusted. Just how much of her social learning (in particular key events necessary to rebuild logical inferences on the boundaries of behavior on the fly) has she locked away?

Purin III

But you know who Purin looks like? Notorious internet personality, Gamer Girl Bath Water seller, and IRL video game character Belle Delphine.[4]

Or rather, it's the other way around - 2D animation compresses real detail into suggestive abstraction, letting your mind fill in the rest. Going from those impossible 2D shapes to 3 dimensions creates strange results, like training your machine learning algorithm on the salient features of a cat's face, applying it to human shape, and putting pink hair on the result. Belle Delphine adopts that otherworldly kind of appearance as part of her act.

Technically, this a stylistic choice. Within the framework of SAC_2045, this is what "a 23-year-old female" looks like.

Purin is in fact so non-threatening that her big red coat obscures her figure. I'm gonna go with younger audience. Now if only I could remember what pronoun she uses.[5/☆]

Motoko

With a full prosthetic body, outward signs of human-like aging are almost an artistic expression, much like in a world with cheap tissue engineering, visible scars are a choice.

When she was first introduced in the original Ghost in the Shell manga, we don't know how old Motoko Kusanagi is. It was once said that her name is analogous to "Jane Excalibur," which in English would be an obvious alias. In the first movie (from 1995), she's cool, almost cold and robotic.

In the original Standalone Complex, Motoko has a more mature personality than in the manga, but she has a clearly adult look by the standards of anime. Seriously, check out this fantastic character design (combat suit), although admittedly the better-known "leather jacket and bathing suit" design is more ridiculous, fashion-wise.[6] (Fortunately, she gets pants in her much more stylish second season outfit.)

ARISE starts off with a young Motoko Kusanagi in a chaotic post-war period before the Section 9 we know was assembled. This shows in her character design, but it really shows in her personality. This was actually why I had joked about an even earlier Ghost in the Shell.

There is a sense in which the 2017 live-action movie's Motoko is even younger. Scarlett Johansson is a killer cyborg with amnesia. She doesn't even have one day of formal combat training.

Motoko 2045

Ilya Kuvshinov designed SAC_2045's Motoko Kusanagi.

Yes, that Ilya Kuvshinov. You could be forgiven for thinking this is a teenager that hardboiled assassins Saitou and Ishikawa in the background have been hired to bodyguard.

Despite this, Atsuko Tanaka has resumed her role as Motoko's voice actress. Standalone Complex's Motoko looked 25 and felt mid-30s. SAC_2045's Motoko looks 16 and has the voice and attitude of 40.

This may make more sense than you might think.

Through Whose Eyes?

Throughout much of Ghost in the Shell as a franchise, Togusa, the only non-cyborg on the team, who is pulled from a police department instead of a military background, tends to be character used to help the people of our time relate to the future. He's the guy that doesn't know the things we also don't know, so in explaining concepts to Togusa they're explained to the audience.

In SAC_2045, most of the team are off doing cool cyborg things in America. Aramaki (whose in-world function is to create the bureaucratic environment within which Section 9 operates) tasks Togusa with finding them. The original Standalone Complex first aired in 2003. It's been 17 years since it was created - a similar situation to finding someone that reached adulthood who was born after 9/11. And during this time, Togusa's life has changed - the family man is now separated from his wife. And the world has changed - Togusa is now working for a private security firm. Togusa's role in the first five episodes isn't to guide the new viewers.

His purpose is to guide or stand-in for the old viewers.

The New Viewers

"Do you still hold a grudge against the Major and the others for leaving you behind?"

For the original viewers, SAC_2045 is your world, too. Togusa is there. Togusa is you.

The new viewers are Purin. Enthusiastic and smart but awkward and not confident in their skills. How could they measure up to these much more talented and experienced characters? (Also consider who is going to watch any sort of Ghost in the Shell - it's probably going to be a moderately bright and introverted kid, who is the kind of person that may be more comfortable socializing with people outside of their age band.)

But Motoko is visually separated from the rest of Section 9. Batou, Saitou, Ishikawa, Boma... they all have a much more adult look in keeping with their appearance in previous versions of Ghost in the Shell. What gives?

Batou is sort of a cool adult male figure - this is actually a pretty natural use of the character and his sense of humor as previously established in other Ghost in the Shell properties. We especially see this come through in 「PIE IN THE SKY - First Bank Robbery」 episode, with the old folks and the 21st century bank robbery.

Motoko's difference in appearance is because she's acting as a bridge between the two. The new viewer (as represented by Purin) is supposed to grow into being like Motoko as they gain confidence and experience. (The characters aren't each limited to a single role, of course.)

But SAC_2045 is still a work that's shared between two groups, similar to how the excellent Into the Spiderverse features both the teenage Miles Morales and an older Peter Parker that has lost his way, with the loss of the vibrant young adult Peter Parker being what starts the plot going.

The Last Quarter

With this framework, the rest of the work should express its nature as targeted at a younger audience itself. Watch the last few episodes through this lens and you'll see how much sense it makes. One takes place at a school. Even the bizarre 3D style that resembles recent video games makes more sense. If we take Togusa's earlier conversation with Aramaki as a discussion of SAC_2045 itself, later on there's even a sort of acknowledgement that Ghost in the Shell is a difficult work for someone of a young age.

So with that context in mind, does it work?

Standalone Complex

If I remember correctly, years ago, when I was perhaps 15 or 16, I was watching a tiny CRT television some time after midnight, and I saw the thirteenth episode of the original Standalone Complex - NOT EQUAL. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. I was immediately taken by it. And, from what I remember, I immediately understood it.

It was as though it were made just for me.[7]

To me, Ghost in the Shell is like a textbook. I thought that as a creator who has reached a place where I am able to be involved in that kind of work, I'm in a position where I have to convey its contents to a younger audience. Well, I knew it would be a lot of work, but I figured it would be my way of giving back to Ghost in the Shell. I thought that I needed to accept the baton and offer Ghost in the Shell to a young audience, to the same degree that Ghost in the Shell raised me to be who I am.

- Tow Ubukata, in a 2015 interview, regarding ARISE

For many people, Ghost in the Shell is a profound influence. I felt that it lifted me to a new level of understanding.

SAC_2045

But what about SAC_2045?

I can't view Ghost in the Shell with new eyes. When I first saw it, I wasn't the kind of person that casually memes futuristic ethical dilemmas as a means of practicing politics.

Compared to the anime I watched back when I was 13, would I have watched SAC_2045? Yes. Is it more philosophically and politically sophisticated? Yes. Would I have found it memorable? I think so.

Would a 13-year these days watch it? That's difficult to assess. I bet someone who does data science for Netflix could tell us, if they wanted. I'm sure Kenji Kamiyama and Shinji Aramaki are considering the same thing.

2017

How does it stack up compared to the rest of the franchise?

For most enthusiasts it's going to be one of the weaker entries, though it certainly does a better job explaining itself than ARISE.

Compare it to 2017's live action movie, however, and I think we'll find it isn't the weakest. The reason is that the writers of Ghost in the Shell (2017) decided to tell a story about bodily consent in which becoming a cyborg is a form of trauma. On some level this may have been a reasonable decision, but they didn't commit to the concept sufficiently fully to execute it well enough to carry the movie - and simultaneously, they dumbed down parts of the regular Ghost in the Shell material for American audiences. As a result the movie flopped both financially and artistically - except for the visuals.

In fact, I wrote a sequence of posts (1, 2, 3, 4) on how to rewrite the live action movie as an actual Ghost in the Shell property. I feel no need to do so for SAC_2045 - and I can't even think of what changes would need to be made.

I look forward to the second season.

-☆☆☆-

[1] It's short, but that's a concept in this post. "Advanced by Left-Wing theorists, Ninth Generation warfare sees all acts as existing on a spectrum of political violence. Most acts of ninth generation warfare consist of extreme pranks."

[2] If we accept the idea of "Fifth-Generation Warfare" as motivated by a desire to prevent the enemy from using their conventional military assets, then a corresponding theory of international politics would involve preventing enemy factions within foreign governments from taking control of those governments' institutions - effectively treating all countries as in continuous level of conflict analogous to a soft civil war.

[3] There is a kind of technique to this, but in my case I substituted ADHD for raw IQ and conscientiousness, which is part of why my posts are so much shorter than, for instance, Moldbug's. In any case, technically, Scott's blog posts on the matter amount to roughly a mere 11,600 words, and the book of the black forest amounts to approximately 26,000 words (which I'm told is entertaining reading), but I'm sure if we go looking we can find an additional 15,000 words worth of worldbuilding from a man known for writing 16,000 word blog posts.

[4] Would it be more of a legal liability to sell regular water with GGBW branding, or actual GGBW that could prove to be a potential health hazard?

[5/☆] There's some future strand lurking beneath the surface here that I can't quite put into words; a culturally divergent moe meltdown where an appearance this ridiculous becomes normalized among some sub-population. To quote the Funko Pop Hatred post,

There are questions about the anatomy of anime people and their internal organs, and particularly about what sort of impact-dampening alien meta-material their softer bits are made out of, but at least homo sapiens gokuensis looks like it’s a branch off a similar starting hominid! Whatever transhuman engineering company was responsible for manufacturing the creatures in the typical harem anime has some weird ideas about human beings, but we’re clearly in their ancient lineage somewhere.

Under Late Safetyism, everyone is a declawed catgirl.

Anyhow, I don't want to alarm you, but I can't guarantee that this won't be the future somewhere. Both Purin and Belle Delphine resemble Xiaoice, "The AI Girlfriend Seducing China's Lonely Men." (2020)

[6] Motoko's ridiculous outfits are a major flex on the non-cyborgs, who aren't indifferent to ambient temperature and whose natural bodies may have unflattering features. Similarly wild fashions can exist in places like Second Life, a 3D digital platform with mostly user-uploaded content. Presumably they're also a flex on every Japanese salaryman who still has to dress like a normal guy.

[7] "It's as though it were made just for me" is also how I feel about the original game Mirror's Edge. Its follow-up, Catalyst, is also a personal favorite of mine.

#miti does media #longpost #flagpost #ghost in the shell #sac_2045 #standalone complex #review

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medranochav · 4 years ago

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my moms been living with us for 4 months now. her stay was initially tolerable but is now triggering and I find myself regressing in a lot of ways. Her grief has evolved into torment and per her m.o. she'd like for her issues to take first priority. Except, my sis and I are grown now, and as a therapised household (literally we've all been in counseling, babies included) though we still lean on each other for support, we ultimately don't function codependently.

And beeecause that's not how we grew up, I think my mother is now having to contend with the reality that she has to do the emotional work of surviving her many traumas (and currently her many dramas) on her own. We support her but we can't fix it for her.

Currently, it's a crisis a day and she's spiraling into mini catastrophic states everytime. Which was sufferable at first because despite my labored support, I still maintained my boundaries and didn't adopt her distress as my own. The problem now is the increasing frequency with which these crying spells are taking place. Not to mention the fact that she's been doing so in front of the kids; something that would normally be acceptable because my sis and I make space for feelings (even our own) in our home. The difference being, we do so responsibly. We listen, we talk, give affection and/or space but always with the fundamental knowledge that our emotions belong to us individually and only we can be accountable for them. A gentle reminder that though part of a unit, they still have agency and accountability.

This interdependency makes way for a more compassionate exchange. Whenever they see us cry or be vunerable, the kids have the wherewithal to approach us without attaching themselves to our emotional circumstance. It's an empathy that perceives our emotional reactions as relatable but still not their responsibility. I've seen our work proven time and time again.

One example is when my sister's [redacted] died and the boys spotted her crying on the couch. Without being prompted, they approached her independently, commiserated, hugged and kissed her and shortly after went back to playing on their electronics. It was such a graceful display of emotional validation that demonstrated their love for her without sacrificing their own desires in doing so. Truly remarkable, that at ages 5-8 they maintained boundaries while still being there for their mom.

They're also there for one another but it's seldom a sinking ship. And when emotional support is rejected they respect that as well, without taking it personally [tbh that has more to do with concepts of mandatory consent that we impart on them, but as is evident, it applies. #intersectionality] It's an ongoing practice that I'm proud to be a part of, considering the kids have codependent figureheads in both their maternal and paternal families. WE'RE TRYING TO BREAK CYCLES HERE.

Yes, our home is a safe space for emotional processing but always leveraged with the emotional balance of self reliance, awareness and resiliency. The kids have proven to have the capacity for this and through teaching them, so do we.

It's human to have outbursts, but my mother's pattern is proving to be less intrinsic and more deliberate. She needs an audience in order to experience catharsis. A potentially reasonable behavior except for it's her only one. So it's imbalanced and seeks refuge in the reliance of our total empathy.

Furthermore she's disingenuous in her emotional performances. When approached out of concern, she responds with the proverbial, "I'm ok." Like, its subtle but super manipulative to say that, when we can CLEARLY see she's not. The kids see and hear her, the least she could do is not gaslight them. And I'm not saying her tactics are successful but it exposes the bby's to unnecessary dysfunction and covertly teaches them to assume the responsibility of communicating her emotion for her. She's also non verbal and unpredictable and tho not at her best rn [like, literally who is? this year has wrecked us all] she and we deserve proper communication.

The mind games are soul sucking and triggering for me in a way that is not for my sister. Though we share a mother, the repective versions of her that we experienced as children differ greatly.

My sister's the eldest and spent the first couple years of her life as the only child to a very young mother living alone in America after being displaced by the civil unrest in her native El Salvador. By age 3, with the addition of a new baby sister (my moms 2nd) she was sent to a country fully at war. My sisters would spend the next half decade of their lives in sunny wartorn tropics, watched over and raised by our family of four women. A blissful antithesis to their future with our mom. Upon the return to their forgotten country of origin (USA) and severed from the only family and community they've ever known, the girls were whisked away by a mother they barely remembered and a baby brother they had never met... marking the beginning of my mom's descent into single motherhood.

My mom resented having a brood of kids, namely her 2nd and 3rd, who's father was abusive and absent. Don't know much of the facts outside of what she would ritualistically berate my siblings about during her brutal tantrums -as if it were their fault they simply existed. The second born, my other sister, left home at 12 and has been estranged ever since and the third, my brother, has recently severed bonds abruptly claiming a new life with a woman he's known barely a year yet now calls wife. Proving that despite being raised by the same woman we all had different mothers.

Since my siblings endured a childhood with a volatile, violent woman who managed her emotions thru physical abuse... when she wasn't, she was neglectful of them, turning her attention onto me... the youngest (four years removed from the rest of the pack). I bore witness to said abuse until I was 5, when it was litigiously exposed, forcing her to abandon corporal punishment and rely solely on mental/emotional abuse. That's the version of my mom I got.

I was 10 when my sister left for college. Just my brother and I remained. Similarly to each other we both lived in service to our mother. Whereas his duties were more physically laborious, mine consisted of full on emotional labor. I spent most of my childhood navigating a homelife that was so saturated and occupied by my mother's opera of a life, that there was no room for my feelings, thoughts, desires or identity. I was her plaything, a person sans agency. My age and vulnerability proved advantagous when grooming me. I learned to behave in ways satisfactory to her needs. I was made to react to (and collect) her emotional distress, endorse her judgements of others, perform well in school as a testament to her rearing, and accept her violations of me as normal. I was a shackled spectator, whose own emotions were mere reflections of her dramatizations. I was tailored to be the MOST convenient. So I kept secrets and coped alone. I knew just enough abt myself to remain human but lacked the vision to actualize it. And because emotional abuse is so insidious in its indoctrination, I was really none the wiser until I too moved away years later.

I'm almost 30 now and I'm a mess. I can't establish enduring relationships, I'm fat, I'm broke, I'm debilitatingly avoidant, socially inept, codependent, confused and lack significant self worth. I spent the past decade delving deep into undoing all the work done to me to keep me a reliable supply for my mother and coming to terms with all the time lost in doing so. I've had glimpses and proof of another life but this year sent me back to old coping mechanisms and devastatingly familiar relationships. I read that by its very nature, all pandemics have to end and I thought I was strong enough to share a definite time&space with my abuser for the foreseeable future.... but with no end in sight, I kind of really wish I had established a clearer version of myself and where I stand in this family, to her.

Similar predicaments flung us both to the south and having her here is like a screen forging images of the same dysfunction I exhibited upon my arrival 7 years ago. There's so much I wish I could tell my former self, namely, "it's not your fault. you're not alone. you don't have to try so hard and tomorrow is another day" And perhapz it's this layered vision of myself as seen thru her that compels me to want to save her, but doing so requires me to get too close to a flame I've yet to extinguish. Im not foundationally sound enough to go up in flames and rebuild afterwards, I need a few more rounds of therapy for all that. I'm a stitch away from coming apart at the seams. Weak construction, but I'm still standing. I have more life to live and can't risk the breeze of my mother's chaotic whims to topple what's taken years to forge. I love her, because she's the only mom I got and because she's the kids' only access to our motherland. How can I reconcile this version of me with this version of her?

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secret-engima · 5 years ago

Note

I am horribly sick and just want to stab everyone that tries to make me use my incredibly sick throat. May I get a ramble on fangs and feathers? Or even Prompto-Cloud thingy bit thing. (Uuughgi. Sickness makes my memory WORSE. I can't remember its name and honestly F&F was a hit or a miss but it LOOKS RIGHT SO.)

I’m so sorry to hear that!! Ummm let’s go with the Prompto-Cloud thing (Clouds and Moonlit Skies verse btw). Actually *grins* let’s go with a nutty xover.

-Zack and Cloud are ten years old in this. They trip into another dimension and at first don’t realize it. They were busy exploring an old part of the Citadel, Seph is with them, having abandoned his paperwork on Zack’s puppy eyes and Cloud’s teasing. They have fun for a while, poking around dusty old rooms and discovering a new, spacious training ground to trash later.

-Then they get hungry and troop their way for the kitchens to grab a snack.

-They enter the populated part of the Citadel and come face to face with a Crownsguard.

-The Crownsguard isn’t human.

-Well, the upper half of him is, but his lower half is some kind of fluffy tabby house cat, like a centaur, but a cat.

-Both sides stare at each other in astonishment for several very long seconds before the guard shouts in shock and rears back, tail puffing out to stupidly huge proportions as he reaches for his com to ... alert someone.

-Seph acts on pure instinct, lunging for the guard and tackling him to the ground. He knocks the guard out, but not before getting a nasty claw-made gash on one arm and the guard screaming into his link something about “Drautos is here!” Which really shouldn’t be cause for alarm because he works here- except he doesn’t, because he’s half sitting on an unconscious, man-sized half HOUSE CAT person.

-A frantic game of keep-away-what-is-going-on starts up with Noctis, Prompto, and Titus all ducking into rooms and through camera blindspots to avoid the Crownsguard who are ALL centaur cat people (Zack: Cataurs? Cloud: Not the time Zack) eventually though, they get caught, because of course they do, the Citadel is different and the cameras are too many. They get cornered in a very large, grand hallway with lots of very potentially breakable art, surrounded by wild-eyed and tense Crownsguard who range from cat people to deer people to ... is that a ferret over there? Cloud is pretty sure that’s a ferret person.

-Also Cor Leonis is there, tail swishing madly as he clutches at his sword and eyes them, fur bristling slowly as their hunters all seem to finally realize that the “Drautos and unknown intruders” they’ve been chasing are NOT half animal of some kind.

-Zack is the one to break the silence by stage whispering to Cloud, “I thought he’d be a lion. You know, with the name and all.” Seph, uncaring of leaving himself open to attack, takes a moment to facepalm with a heavy sigh while someone in the Crownsguard gives a nervous, semi-hysterical laugh.

-Tension now thoroughly ruined, the three allow themselves to be herded by a stiff-legged, bristling Cor to the Throne Room where the Regis and Clarus of this dimension are. Zack smothers (badly) a giddy laugh at seeing his dad with lion hindquarters (so cliche! Lion King!) and ooing softly over Clarus’s tiger stripes.

-Seph notices something subtly relax in the king despite his bristling tail and the way everyone keeps staring at them like they’re cryptids. That is CONVENIENTLY when Gentiana shows up (as an actual centaur???) and explains that the three of them accidentally slipped through the boundaries between worlds from a nearby world, and that it should wear off within three days time.

-She disappears and the awkward conversations start. It quickly becomes apparent that the ... Taurs are a little bit in awe at the sight of their two-legged status (apparently, as the king explains, all taurs used to be humans but were turned into taurs at the FALL OF SOLHEIM. Cloud wonders if this was how Aerith felt when people gushed over her being an Ancient). It also becomes evident that none of them trust Seph. At all. They keep their eyes on him far more than Zack and Cloud (though Regis does stare at Zack a bit, no doubt it’s weird looking at his son with human legs). Cor looks two steps away from murder at all times while glaring at Seph even as Clarus and Regis argue over where to house them for the three days that will be secure and how to keep this from getting all over the media.

-Finally Cloud snaps at Cor that if he has a problem, come out and say it. Everyone stares at him in astonishment for reasons he can’t fathom (yet) and finally Clarus explains that the Titus Drautos in their universe was a traitor who tried to assassinate Regis and conquer Insomnia. Seph blinks very slowly at that because wat. Why would he work for the people who experimented on him AGAIN. Then he realizes that without his past life memories he probably would have been brainwashed into it yeah. “I can see that,” Seph muses aloud while Zack sputters and Cloud spaces out dangerously at the distance. At the sudden tensing he waves a hand and drawls, “Niflheim and I do not get along.” He pauses, then adds just in case it come up somehow, “I cannot speak for your Titus, but I was forcibly captured out of the Crownsguard, experimented upon, and implanted with an armor unit codenamed Glauca. It did nothing to endear them to me.”

-Zack flings his arms around Seph’s and yells loudly before anyone else can say a word, “He’s mine! You gotta problem with them then fight me!” Zack pauses then adds, “Actually, you gotta problem with him then I’ll sic Prom on you.”

-“I don’t think that’s a very intimidating threat unless you know our Prompto,” Seph points out dryly but Zack loudly shushes him.

-They end up in a guest suite meant for visiting royals, with a few Crownsguard outside to make sure they don’t leave and aren’t disturbed. Of course, because their luck is their luck, the rumors have spread far enough that Regis, Cor, and Clarus are unable to run damage control before the Chocobros of this world hear about it.

-A day into their stay, Regis reluctantly takes the children to visit with Clarus, Cor, and Aulea all as backup. They enter to find all the furniture pushed to the far sides of the room, Titus on one end of the room, all three having what appears to be a mini war complete with battle lines. All three pause in their war, Noctis-Zack calmly dangling from Titus’s fist by his ankle while Prompto-Cloud lies sprawled near the door, feet up by his own head, arms splayed like he’s just been kicked in mid-air and didn’t have time to land right.

-“Are we interrupting something?” Cor asks stiffly. Noctis-Zack just laughs and Cloud attracts more than a few stares as he flips himself upright in a smooth movement utterly impossible for a Taur. Seph casually drops Zack without warning and the boy easily twists to land on his feet. Regis ... reluctantly asks if they would mind meeting their child counterparts plus a few friends, which Zack is all for and the other two fold to his whim. So Regis reluctantly lets the children enter. Noctis thunders up to Zack with bright eyes and gapes at his two-legged status while Cloud finds himself suddenly face to face with 10,000 Rays of Sunshine wearing his face and wagging a tail like a mad thing. Gladio trots up to Noctis while Ignis just kinda watches from next to the adults as the Nocti exchange greetings and then Zack hastily goes to extract Cloud from Prompto, because Cloud looks two inches away from a panic attack and stabbing is not recommended right now (Cor sees the sheer difference between his son and this human version and something in him growls. Why is the human Prompto so quiet, so alert and wary, watching everything, even himself, like it might attack?)

-Prompto deflates a bit at his counterpart’s silence and wariness, not understanding why and Seph breaks the tension by humming, “You know, Zack,” (who is Zack? The Taur adults wonder until human Noctis perks up), “I find myself a bit surprised. I would have been certain that your counterpart wouldn’t be a lion.”

-“Why’s that?” Noctis asks with a head tilt.

-Seph smirks, cool and smug and positively catlike, “Because he’s nothing but a big Puppy.”

-“Oi!” Zack yells but he’s laughing, “I make a great lion!”

-Cloud’s lips twitch against his will and he adds, “Well, this is another dimension. Some differences in temperament are to be expected.”

-Zack puts his hands over his heart with a gasp, blue eyes big and watery, “Cloud- Cloudy- My Cloudy Prompto Cloudy Spiky Buddy! How could you betray me like this??”

-Cloud just raises an eyebrow very slowly.

-Their banter is interrupted by a laugh from Prompto, “You guys are weird,” he says with a tail wag.

-Zack grins back and despite having known his son as a lion cub all his life, Regis can almost see the matching wagging tail on the boy, “You don’t know the half of it! Wanna play something?”

-The kids end up playing a strange mix of tag and the floor is lava (which Ignis RULES at because Ibex and Cloud rules over right behind him because Stubborn Mountain Boi) while Seph watches with fond eyes and finds himself slowly dragged into a conversation with Aulea.

-Some questions are exchanged and answers given, Cor snarls under his breath at the news of Prompto being given up to a neglectful home until finally being adopted by Cor where he belonged, and Regis and Aulea clutch hands when Seph slowly admits that Zack (they’re going by Zack, Cloud, and Seph to differentiate counterparts, claiming it’s an “in joke” and “nicknames”) hasn’t noticed her because he doesn’t recognize her. Queen Aulea died when Zack was a year old.

-But it’s not all sad things with the adults, Seph tells them little anecdotes of his world, and Regis notes how much more ... mellow this Titus is. Cunning yes, and somewhat cold, but not pushy and angry. Much more patient, and there is clear devotion in his eyes as this Titus watches his Noctis and Prompto play.

-Cor ends up sparring with this Titus, because Seph isn’t going to turn down the chance to Throw Hands with a cheetah man anymore than Cor will a human.

-It’s a tie that ends with both of them wheezing and tired on the floor.

-Cloud ends up falling asleep at one point and Prompto flops down next to him and soon they are both out and cuddling. All the Pictures are taken.

-Regis and Aulea are bemused and horrified by just how much of an Energizer Bunny Zack is. Like- HOW. Where do you store it all child and they thought Prompto was bad in his puppy stage.

-The three days end and the three disappear as swiftly as they came, and Zack is gleeful to have all the photo evidence Seph thoughtfully took to prove that YES they went to a world with Taur people and LOOK DAD YOU MAKE AN AWESOME LION. SO DOES MOM. SO DO I. AND HAH IGGY IS A GOAT (Ibex, Cloud corrects with a sigh and is ignored by Zack).

Tagging @robininthelabyrinth because I’m pretty sure Nocturne is your fic? Hope you don’t mind this little silly xover. I just loved the story too much to resist.

#SE asks #oliverslewty asks #Secret Engima Rambles #Clouds and Moonlit Skies verse #nocturne #long post

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iwriteficsandmore · 5 years ago

Text

Mindful Education

Finally. Sorry it took so long but here’s that fluff I promised. Hope you like it, anon :D But anyway this is also to commemorate Hawks’ Birthday! Yay! It’s different from my birthday piece last year but I still liked how it turned out :)

|Alright. Meet me tomorrow at 9am at the station.|

Hawks reread the text on his phone for the tenth time as he patiently waited at said location for ten minutes now. It wasn't yet time for your meeting with him but he had wanted to get there early to mentally prepare himself. You two had been dating for the better part of six months. Much longer than he expected any relationship with anybody to last. But he knew there was something different about you. It was why he had been so adamant despite your obvious disinterest at first. Sure, he might've come off as a tad bit overbearing but it was only because he was interested about what he saw in you that he couldn't quite describe.

You weren't big on dates. Neither was he for that matter since there was no such thing as privacy in his life. But he knew you enjoyed spending time together no matter where that might be. So after months of trying to convince you, you finally accepted with one condition: you chose where you would go, no questions asked. He complied if only for the opportunity. Needless to say, he was somewhat anxious about what you had in store for the day.

I just hope it's not where people will bother us too much.

"Big Bird!"

The sound of your voice calling out to him made Hawks spin on his heels to meet your gaze as you caught up to him. He stared for a good minute as you caught your breath. Seldom did you two see each other outside of work and seeing you now in normal clothes took him aback.

You looked adorable in that summer dress. Even more so with how cute you looked with that little scowl while calling him that name—whoops.

"My bad," he chuckled, "I wasn't paying attention."

"Obviously." You don't regard that as anything unusual. He always seemed to daydream in front of you. It made getting him to do his work all that much harder but at least he wasn't an awful boss and boyfriend aside from that. Losing the edge from an awful morning, you give him a small smile before pointing towards the station. "Come on, our train is leaving soon."

The two of you boarded the train. Hawks noted the stations it would hit and wondered which one would be your stop as you took a seat beside each other in a mostly empty car. You said little of where you were headed even now. All you told him was that it was a place you frequented and that you enjoyed being at very much. That was enough for him for the duration of the train ride. It got him to wonder just what kind of place it was that made you wear such a loving smile.

Of everything that he had come up with, this was certainly not even on the list. "Y/n-sensei!"

"Hello, everybody!"

All the preschoolers rushed your way the moment you entered the door, the faster ones clinging to your skirts and legs and the rest clamoring around you for attention. Hawks stared with mouth agape as all of them—he counted at least...30!?—bombarded you with questions that you patiently answered. Hawks couldn't help but stand stiffly when one of them, a little blonde girl with huge green eyes, spotted him. They stared at each other, one curiously and the other quite awkwardly for what seemed the longest time.

Finally, she grinned and pointed enthusiastically at him. "Birdy!"

Almost like a war cry, the rest of the children turned together and burst into shouts and laughter as they rushed to Hawks. Some appeared to recognize him while others simply were interested in the new face that had 'pretty wings.' Looking up, he couldn't help feeling used when you simply chuckle mischievously before sauntering off to meet with who he assumed was the actual person in charge of the bunch of children. She was an older lady. One that seemed to readily recognize you when you came to her.

"Ah, darling. It's so nice to see you again."

"Glad to be back, Yui-san."

"And you brought your friend—everybody! How do we introduce ourselves to a new friend?" With a clap of her hands, the children dispersed like well trained animals to give themselves space as they bowed a little and chorused a 'it's very nice to meet you!'. Pleasantries over with, she readily instructed the children to go prepare for morning activities. They did so after a grand chorused 'awe' and scattered out into the adjacent room where another, younger, teacher waited for them. Turning to Hawks, Yui smiled tenderly.

"Welcome to our little school. I'm Yui, the director."

"N-Nice to meet you. I'm—" The small laughter from the old woman made Hawks stop midsentence.

"I know who you are, young man. It's not everyday that a hero comes to visit us, much less the No.2 hero in Japan. But that’s alright, y/n told us beforehand you would come."

Hawks eyed you briefly before the other teacher called out to the director. The moment you two were left by yourselves, his amber eyes gave you a sidelong glance and a raised eyebrow that you replied to with a sweet smile.

"This is your idea of a date?"

"It's my idea of a good time. And at least the ones who'll bother us here won't do so with ill intentions."

Touché. Setting that aside for the time being, you took him around on a tour of the small building that made up the school. For once, Hawks listened intently to what you said. You liked coming here and helping around once a week when time permitted it. You knew both the director and the rest of the staff personally and you came often to give music appreciation classes. You chuckled at the thought of that. "I call them classes but it's really nothing more than me playing and singing in front of the kids and them singing along with me."

"Sounds amazing to me," he replied sincerely.

"It really is," you said. "You'll get to see it this afternoon. But until then!"

To say that he wasn't confused and taken aback by all the stuff that you got him to do would be an understatement. While you were a natural with the children that you saw on a weekly basis, Hawks couldn't say that he had that kind of expertise. For all that he did outside with the citizens and media, he was somewhat puzzled as to how to act with children that expected nothing of him except for him to play with them. They were as ecstatic about his presence as he was baffled by theirs. You lasted a half an hour laughing on the sidelines while watching him struggle until you came to help with the tough crowd he'd gathered.

When one of the kids tugged at your skirts—the same one that had been bugging him about getting airplined around for the fifteenth time—you bent to his height before lifting him up in yours arms. The boy giggled before he placed a sweet kiss on your cheek. Once he was done, you placed him down. Unlike how he acted with Hawks, the boy trotted off to play elsewhere, satisfied with the pick up.

"How do you do this?" he asked tiredly, his wings drooping dejectedly.

"It took some getting used to," you assured him as you helped a few girls tie together flower crowns before leaving them to run around the playground. "First thing I learned about was boundaries." "Boundaries?"

You nod and step back behind him. Hawks barely had time to follow you with his gaze when he felt the prick that came from your plucking one of his smaller feathers from one of his wings. With a teasing smile, you brushed it against your lips with a giggle from his reaction. Bending down to help one of the boys, you place it on the band he wore around his head to help with his costume as they played heroes. They thanked you before dashing past the two of you without a bother.

"They have their needs, mentally and physically, and I help them meet them. But I can't give them all the answers. If all I do is give them what they want, they'll grow spoiled without understanding what it means to grow and learn. I listen to them, work with them, and keep my distance when I have to." Rolling your eyes, you glance at Hawks as he stands beside you, "It's a little like how heroes work with interns to teach them the ropes."

"Well, maybe that's the problem," he pointed out. "I don't take interns in my office."

"Well, maybe you should give it a try."

There wasn't much time for Hawks to rest. You made him help out during the daily activities and lessons which though not hard were draining in a whole different sense.

Children made him feel awkward. You could tell at least that much from the way he dejectedly sat outside on the grass once naptime for the kids came around. You watched him from afar as he spread his wings behind him, letting them rest from all the tugging and plucking that the kids had undoubtedly and unconsciously done. His back had become a familiar scene nowadays. But gazing at him from behind always gave you the worst kind of feeling. Like he was in such faraway place that you couldn't reach him. No one could. It was why you brought him here. You wanted for him to let go of his responsibilities and burdens of a hero and see the world outside that.

A world where he needn't be Hawks, the hero Japan had created.

A world where he could just be Keigo Takami, the man you loved.

You made your way out there with the small bento you'd prepared and sat beside him soundlessly. Not even when you felt his feathers bristle beside your leg did he say a thing. He merely watched you with an intense gaze—one you often felt watching over you during work—as you unpacked the lunch you'd pack for the both of you. Hawks thanked you under his breath when you passed him a rice ball and ate it without a word, simply gazing skyward. You did the same watching the clouds as they floated by in the soft breeze that blew by.

"You know..." he spoke softly, not taking his gaze away from the sky. "Even when it's so loud and cramped in there, it gives off the feeling of being peaceful somehow."

"It's strange, huh?" you say, agreeing implicitly.

"Very." He looks down long enough to grab another rice ball before turning to you and smiling warmly your way. "I can see why you like being here with them. Compared to everything we see everyday, this is heaven."

"It's a very pleasant way to unwind." You admit this as you finish your second rice ball. Deciding that was enough for you, you gently push the rest his way. He thanks you for the meal before taking what was left. "It reminds me why we do what we do. Why we're out there fighting, even when there are times when we question ourselves and the society we live in. When those thoughts come into my head, I think of these kids and all the others out there who have so much to live for. So much to see and experience. And then I think about how we're the ones keeping that future taut. We keep their dreams alive by giving them a future to look forward to."

"It's a hard thing to think of," he confessed. "Especially for someone like me who was robbed of a choice at all."

Your gaze fell, saddened by the strain in his voice. You were well aware of what he meant. Hawks had told you before how it was that he became a hero. Unlike you, it hadn't been by choice. Destiny had given him one of the best Quirks out there and by doing so, forced his hand in this society. He needed to become a hero...because if he didn't, what else could he possibly be without people out there comparing what could be with what was.

"And that's why we have to work hard," you retorted calmly. "To make that dream of yours a reality."

"I want a world where we have more free time than we know what to do with."

So that everybody out there has the chance of a choice.

"Y/n! Hawks-san!" Hawks and you look over your shoulders to one of the staff members who waved at you from inside the building. "Nap time is over."

Hawks saw a small smile appear on your lips as you raised to your feet. He followed suit and helped you gather the bento box you brought with you. As you made your way to the classroom, he spoke up, "Is it time for the live concert?"

"It is."

A few minutes later, he found himself standing at the back of the room before a crowd of 30 more or less awake children along with the teacher in charge and the director as you took your place before a small upright piano that stood against the opposite wall. Sitting with your back perfectly straight, you turned on your bench to half face the children around you. "Now, what should we sing together today?"

Hands shot up so quickly that Hawks let out a chortle at their enthusiasm. He watched immersed and entranced with the scene of you picking a hand and choosing a song before turning back. Claiming you would need help, they all cheered and quieted to mere murmurs as you began to stroke the keys of the piano. You ask the girl that you chose the song from to start the song and for others to follow after.

"We're small but we're strong." The little girl started with a squeaky voice. The one next to her, one who Hawks recognized as the girl's friend who'd been playing together with her stood alongside her friend while grabbing her hand to sing along.

"We're cool but we're kind, and..."

"We deserve to shine!" they sing together, completely out of harmony but completely fine by them.

"We're gritty and tough," one of the boys chimed in.

"We're smooth and refined, and," another girl called out.

"We deserve to shine," they sang along.

"We'll figure it out, there's plenty of time."

The small voices of the teacher and director join in with a few of the children as the song continues.

"For everybody and every mind and every facet to finally find that..."

Your voice gently echoed through the air along with the quiet voices of the children as they sang low to hear you better, joining you only when you got to the chorus again.

"We deserve to shine.We deserve to shine."

A smile came to Hawks as he listened to you and the children chorus along to different songs. The director, noticing his attention taken by you, took the moment to explain to him why she appreciated what you did for the children.

"Take a moment to think of just Flexibility, love, and trust."

"They are children at a very critical point in their lives," the old woman said just loud enough so that he would hear her without taking the children's attention away from the quiet and soothing song that you sang to them next.

"Take a moment, remind yourself to Take a moment to find yourself Take a moment and ask yourself if This is how we fall apart?"

"They are aware of themselves as individuals and are just learning about others. She teaches them through song how to accept themselves and others as they are. They also learn to love the world they live in, despite it not being perfect. I suppose they love her so much because she doesn't shelter them from reality or sugarcoat it as others do."

"But it's not. It's okay. I've got nothing to fear I'm here."

"She simply tells it to them in a way that they can understand."

"And it was just a thought It's okay We can watch them go by From here."

Curiously watching from the background, Hawks couldn’t help but be taken by your performance. You took your time to explain to the children what they didn’t understand and just like the director said, you didn’t shy away from the bad things either. You found a way to explain it to them in a way that they clearly understood. He recognized that way of thinking immediately. It's what attracted him to you in the first place. Your optimism, it was never from a place of falsehood. It came from a place of learning, earned experiences, and surpassed pain.

And it's the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

The day ended quickly thereafter when the last child was picked up from school. Hawks went and found you in the music room alone sitting on the bench in front of the piano and playing a couple of notes. Cautiously, he took a seat beside you and leaned his head against your shoulder. "Greatest date ever or what," you mumbled.

He chuckled as you stroke away at random keys making a makeshift melody. "I’ll admit that I was a bit skeptical at first. It was quite a surprise in the end, though, I’ll give you that."

"What can I say?" You say as he reached out with his hand and struck one of the keys repeatedly and slowly. Though dissonant, you quickly changed the ones you were playing to harmonize with his missed stroke. "I'm full of surprises."

"That you are." Carefully taking back his hand, he lifted his head to look directly at you. You, however, don't take your eyes away from the alabaster keys as your fingers graze them without making a sound now. " I’ll say...you're definitely the better hero out of the two of us."

This time you chortled at his joke. "Doubtful. You actually save lives."

"I'm not the only one," he assured you. "I may save them from danger, but you're saving them in a way I could never."

"Saving them from what, pray tell?"

"The society that will eventually try to crush them into neat little molds for their own purpose."

A brief sidelong glance was all he got from you before you retracted your hand and smiled tenderly. "They're treasures, those kids. I want them to live the lives they want to live. Differently from us. Freely."

"And we can make that happen," Hawks said confidently. You felt how one of his wings moved to cradle you closer to him. Feeling this, you reached back with one hand to run your fingers against the soft feathers that graze your skin. "The two of us, in our way."

Finally smiling that smile he fell in love with, you leaned against his shoulder this time, bringing the tail end of his wing over you.

"I like the sound of that."

"Yeah." Hawks smiled, his chest swelling with the love he had for you as he let his head fall on top of yours. "So do I."

#happy birthday hawks #bnha hawks #hawks #hawks x reader #bnha imagines #hawks imagines #keigo takami #bnha keigo takami #keigo takami x reader

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lannister-slings-and-arrows · 5 years ago

Note

“I feel like an idiot—I stuck up for you against everyone!” w javi 🥺

Javi x Steve because apparently I’m incapable of anything else. Sorry lol

Steve had felt like he was treading water in the middle of the ocean since… since Horacio had died. Some days he managed to almost forget what had happened, they would all get so busy chasing leads, chasing Pablo, that he would barely remember anyone else besides Escobar, Javi, and himself even existed. Then they would join up with Search Bloc and go on the hunt and there would be someone new, someone different, sitting in the front seat- his seat. And he would remember it and it would hurt all over again. A new wave would smack him in the face and try to drown him and he would have to fight through it to get to the other side and have a moment of calm floating again. If just for a few seconds. He could do that. Live through the bad moments for those fleeting periods of rest. He could. This would get better. Eventually it had to get better.

No, it was Javi he was really concerned with. The waves seemed to wash over him harder and more frequently and he didn’t think he was as strong of a swimmer as Steve was.

It was hard watching Javi go through this. One second he was more irascible than usual and Steve would need to keep at least six feet back and as far out of sight as possible if he didn’t want to get hit with the stray bullets of his rage and grief. He was apt to lash out at anyone or anything that got in his way or looked at him a half second too long and he could be vicious. The broken chair and smashed lamp in his apartment were a testament to that. Steve had borne the brunt of his unique form of mourning on more than one occasion when he wasn’t observant enough or fast enough to get out of the way and he tried not to resent that.

Because he didn’t have those precious moments of just floating calmly and gently between the waves of pain that Steve did. Between the waves of remembering that caused his outbursts, Javi was just sad. Just broken. And honestly, Steve hated those hours more. He would come home to find his partner sitting in the dark, staring at the floor or the ceiling or something of Horacio’s they had missed when they boxed up all of his things that had somehow migrated to their place. He wouldn’t look up at Steve as he made his way over to him. He wouldn’t flinch or give any acknowledgement that he recognized anyone else was in the apartment when Steve would sit next to him and touch his shoulder or his neck or his waist. He would allow himself to be drawn into Steve’s arms and would continue to just stare.

Occasionally Steve would feel a shuddering breath drawn into Javi’s smoke damaged lungs and the broad shoulders more used to carrying than being carried would shake under his arms. Steve preferred those signs of life to the passive way Javi would allow his body to be moved and manipulated however Steve wanted.

Steve defended Javi’s terrible temper at work to anyone he heard criticize him. He never mentioned the death of Carrillo, not only was he not confident that he could without breaking down himself, but no one else needed to know how close the three of them had been. That was private, that was theirs, he knew Javier would not appreciate his coworkers having that kind of insight into his real life. What the three of them had cobbled together, with each other and for each other, couldn’t really be explained to an outsider anyways. Steve had barely understood it himself. But he was able to snap back that Javier had been down in this shithole country longer than nearly all of them and he was tired. Tired of the corruption preventing him from doing his job. Tired of not knowing who he could trust to keep the secrets necessary to ensure all of the idiots he worked with got back to base safe every night. Tired of the differing agendas between different American government agencies and all of those agencies and the factions within the Colombian leadership. Tired of fucking everything.

“So maybe all you lazy fucks should back off and leave him alone. You don’t like getting barked at? Stop doing things that are gonna make him bark atcha.”

Steve was frustrated and sad and mourning and tired and lonely. He missed Connie and the baby. He missed Horacio with a special kind of ache that he didn’t think would ever go away no matter how many hundreds of miles eventually separated him from the place where he had been shot.

Most of all he missed Javi. The Javi he had fallen in love with who sighed like he was so put upon every time he had to translate for his gringo partner, but who’s mustache twitched up at the side in the way Steve knew meant he was trying not to smile.

He missed not having to fight the rest of his co-workers on his partner’s behalf. He didn’t want to have to keep beating them away from Javi so his partner could sit and wallow by himself, isolate from everything except his thoughts of revenge.

He wasn’t entirely sure what Javier was doing those times that he slipped away from the base or the apartment at odd times by himself. He thought he was being so sneaky but when you sleep wrapped around a man you do tend to notice when that man suddenly isn’t in your arms anymore. Steve defended his absences to the ambassador, to Search Bloc, to himself. It was better that he rode out his waves of irritability and rage by himself where he couldn’t do damage to any of the professional relationships that they needed to catch Escobar and finally put this nightmare behind them. He told himself that over and over as Javier disappeared more frequently and for longer and came back drained and empty and unwilling to look him in the eye.

If Javi was cheating there wasn’t much Steve could do about it. He needed his partner too much to ever come out and ask him. He didn’t really want to know the answer.

So when he found Javier sitting outside smoking and looking pensive he sat down next to him and braced himself for a confession. Javi had that look on his face, the look that said he knew he was about to hurt someone but that that wasn’t going to stop him. Steve took a drag on his cigarette and waited. He was not going to be the one to start this conversation, if Javier wanted to upset the fragile peace they had carved for themselves since Horacio had left a hole in their lives and extra space in their bed Steve was not going to make it any easier on him.

“I need you to prepare yourself for some blowback,” Javier told him, barely meeting his eyes and quickly looking down at his chin again. Steve sighed. Oh this was so much fucking worse than some hookers.

“It goes high up. And these people aren’t going to like it when I try and get myself out of it.” Steve looked away, willing Javier to stop speaking. To not be saying what he thought he was saying. He wouldn’t. He would never. He wouldn’t betray everything he had taught Steve about being down here- wouldn’t betray Horacio’s memory like this. They pushed boundaries, but they did not cross them. That’s why he has been so upset when Carrillo… No. he couldn’t be saying what he thought he was saying.

“If they come after you about what I’ve been doing, you protect yourself first.” Javier ducked his head and met Steve’s eyes directly and deliberately, with his normal intent for the first time in what felt like years. Steve cursed the fact that that direct and forceful gaze still sent his stomach into tailspins.

“You didn’t know anything,” Javier ordered. “Understand?”

Steve sat in silence, smoking and staring at the grass in front of him for what could have been hours or could have been seconds.

“So this is what you’ve been doing? All those times you snuck out? I thought you were seeing hookers again. I wish you had been seeing hookers again!” He saw Javi open his mouth and reach for his shoulder out of the corner of his eye and he dodged his hand.

“No, dont. Don’t fucking touch me right now man.” Javi’s hand immediately snapped back to his side and he just stared at the side of Steve’s head. “Los Pepes? Really Javi? This is what you’ve been doing? How you chose to avenge Hor-“

“Don’t fucking say his name,” Javi ordered, interrupting Steve fiercely. Steve scoffed.

“Why not? He’d be so proud that this is what you’ve become. That this is how you chose to honor his memory.”

“I got him fucking killed, alright?! I have to do something, fucking anything, to make up for that! And the only thing that feels like it might make a dent in the debt I have to pay for what I did is to catch the fucker that killed him and this is how we fucking do it, alright?!” Steve turned to face Javi, incredulous and getting angrier by the second.

“You didn’t kill him, Escobar did! And don’t give me some bullshit about trusting the wrong informant; you fucking know that both he and I would have made the same decision as you did. Fuck, Javi,” he paused, throwing his cigarette to the ground and standing to pace away from his partner. “Fuck, you need to stop man. You need to come back and quit it with this shit, ok, you. You really fucked up man, and you should have fucking told me what you were doing.”

“Why? So you could have stopped me?”

Steve threw his hands up and stalked back to him.

“Yes! So I could have fucking stopped you, Javi do you- This is serious man, people have fucking died!”

“You think I don’t know that?!”

“If you knew that why the fuck did you keep doing it then?!”

Javier dropped his own cigarette between his feet and watched as the grey ash shifted and finally blew away in the wind.

“Because I had to do something. This fucking country and this fucking war had already taken everything from me and so if something needed to be done, I guess I was the person to do it.”

Steve stood, looking at the top of Javi’s bowed head and tried to remember how to breathe.

“Everything, huh?” Javier looked up at him, frowning. A look of startled, contrite realization passed over his face and he held both hands out to his partner, standing and qualifying,

“No, baby, no that’s- no that isn’t what I meant. Not everything-“

Steve backed a step away from him, shaking his head and determined to ignore the hurt in Javi’s eyes.

“No you said everything and you don’t say things you don’t mean, isn’t that right? Well,” he scoffed, running a hand through his already messy hair. “Great to know finally where we stand, I’ve been on tenterhooks since we got the news.” Javier flinched and shook his head, silently pleading for Steve to hear him out. But this. No.

“I feel like an idiot. So what were we doing all those months? Was I just some novelty that the two of you used to distract yourselves with? Or was it just an easy way to keep the gringo in line and compliant?” Javier’s eyes had started to take on that hard glint that Steve knew to watch out for but he did not care. “I suppose I know why you’ve been so fucking distant ever since he died, just going through the motions until you can figure out a way to let me down easy? God, I stuck up for you against everyone!”

“Well maybe you fucking shouldn’t have!”

Javier and Steve stood nearly nose to nose, breathing hard, fists clenched, and furious.

“You’re right, this has all been a fucking joke. We’re done. I’m done. I just. Just stay out of the way when this all fucking blows up alright? I don’t want to have to save your ass again- I’m going to be a little busy saving my own.” Javier took a step back and Steve could see regret and anger and hurt on his face and if he hadn’t been so mad himself he might have reached out, smoothed everything over, apologized and held him like he needed to be held just to stay in one piece.

But Steve was so mad. Mad at Escobar, mad at the Colombian government, mad at his government, mad at Horacio for getting shot, mad at Javier for so many things and he wasn’t going to shove it down and wait for the wave to pass this time.

“Fine,” he growled, glaring at Javi.

“Fine,” Javi said with a nod, and walked past Steve.

And that, apparently, was that.

#writing prompts #fan fic #fanfic #fanfiction #fan fiction #javier peña x steve murphy #mustache bois #javier peña #steve murphy #narcos #pedro pascal fanfic #narcos fanfic #javier peña fanfic #pedro pascal

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beyondthetemples-ooc · 4 years ago

Text

Unforeseen and Unforesaken

Chapter 5 in Dove’s debut story is now live! Anyone like Teen Titans OCs with social anxiety, connections to Azarath, magic, and a secret? (Story takes place in a world that blends 80′s New Teen Titans canon with the 2003 cartoon, heavier on the latter.)

And then, voice low, hanging back for a moment of discussion, Robin reminded them: "We still don't know if Dove is who she says she is. This is the perfect opportunity to learn more about her. And the sooner she settles in her own space, the sooner she'll be comfortable enough to talk to us."

An old friend, Dove’s avian companion, arrives on the island, and after their reunion, Raven helps Dove retrieve a box of items forgotten in the forest.

Really? Dove reportedly had a violent premonition of utter devastation, the instantaneous death of a thousand people at the hands of an other-dimensional demon, and in response to such a dire threat, Dove had chosen to rescue that?

Then, arranging Dove’s room turns into a team effort complete with stories of Dove’s family history, while Dove unveils relics of her life in Azarath.

Nobody would deny that affixing wallpaper was much easier when you had two teammates in the air, a geographically calibrated laserpoint that doubles as a leveling beam, an octopus, and a grappling gun.

Fanfic.net and AO3 links here: https://beyondthetemples-ooc.tumblr.com/post/627828457818226689/unforeseen-chapter-5-links

Chapter 5: Home Improvement

"Raven?"

Dove's quiet voice broke the silence of their coached meditation session gently—though when Raven opened her eyes, Dove was scrambling up and looking outside with her face practically pressed against the glass.

"Can we go outside?"

"I thought we agreed on two full hours of meditation," Raven sighed. It had hardly been a half hour—

"I already meditated this morning," Dove answered distantly, obviously distracted.

Raven looked up at her in genuine confusion. If it was such a struggle for her, more practice couldn't hurt. But... "Why didn't you tell me you already finished?"

When Dove looked over her shoulder, her chin was dipped timidly and her voice even more fragile than before. "Because I... like meditating with you...?"

"And why is that?"

"It's easier," Dove shrugged, eyes dropping in embarrassment. "Your calm is so... perfect. So steady. A lot deeper than mine..."

...well, she supposed there could be worse reasons... Still debating on whether she wanted to allow this flexibility in their training schedule, or if that would undermine the concept of discipline, she asked, "Why do you want to go outside?"

"Sieara."

"Sieara," Raven repeated flatly.

"Yes, Sieara! Raven, I think she's out there!" The excitement in her voice was subtle but genuine.

"And you want to check?"

"Yes! I—" Dove bit her lip, practically plastering herself against the window again. "We have a bond. A connection. Like the one I had with my mother, except—" She cut herself off there and shook her head before she could tempt any memories, or emotions. "I'm worried about her, Raven. She... She feels weak, and... I..." There her voice trailed off uncertainly, and she turned to her trainer, deferring to her permission but also with a thinly veiled plea and concern in her eyes.

Something instinctive told Raven it was warranted. "I guess. Just don't make a habit of interrupting training. These sessions are important."

Dove nodded swiftly and practically ran to the door—though she had to pause there because she barely knew how to get to the living room, and she hadn't gone back to the entrance since the moment she set foot in here. She had to wait for Raven to lead.

Luckily Raven seemed to pick up on her urgency and led them to the door with a hurried pace, but the moment they were outside Dove's eyes were wide and alert, and she turned left immediately and shot off, stumbling once on the unfamiliarly rocky slope but she managed to keep her balance. "I think she's this way!"

"Don't get too excited," Raven reminded her, following just quickly enough to keep up.

"But, Raven, she's—!" Dove's expression sank and her heart clenched when they neared the shore—and neared the small spot of white against the deep green and brown of the earth. "She's hurt..."

The bird was laying still on the rock, eyes open, but her chest heaving quickly under disheveled feathers and she seemed to blink her eyes on every other breath.

"How hurt?" Though empathy could have told her enough, Raven was busy focusing on the waves of emotion shifting through Dove's mind. Hesitance and investigating disbelief, quickly overruled by elated relief and frightened worry playing tug of war on a field of affectionate love.

She didn't know it was possible to feel so much for such a small bundle of feathers... but Dove obviously did. Even though she bit her lip and breathed through her nose, still smiling but trying not to feel too frightened or excited.

"Sieara, thank Azar you're alive..." She was afraid to pick her up, but she reached out and stroked her feathers, and the frail bird stirred at her touch before letting out a weak and smooth chirrup.

"...hurt," Dove analyzed, physical contact clarifying the empathy just well enough that she could interpret what her senses told her. "One wing's hurt... and she's so scared. I think something tried to attack her, and she crashed when she tried to land... Raven?"

Dove looked up, and Raven looked up as well. Something about the bird's mind seemed... strangely human, but before she could dwell, she read the hesitant hope in Dove's eyes, and sighed. "I can help," she consented. Animals felt pain and fear as much as any human, Raven knew that—and they could be healed just the same, too.

So she picked up the bird, exhausted and weak, but very much alive, and they attempted to heal her. (Or, Raven healed her while Dove tried, then failed, and thanked her profusely and focused on choking back tears of relief.)

The moment she could stir without her breast bone aching, Sieara blinked up at Raven, as if startled, then she wriggled energetically in the empath's hands, reaching for Dove immediately. Raven let her go; the bird fluttered straight to Dove's shoulder; and Dove's eyes lit with joy and unending relief.

She immediately reached up to stroke her. "I missed you," she crooned softly, letting the bird settle close against her neck. It was so good to feel her claws gripping her shoulders again, so good to have her oldest friend back after being separated and so, so very worried.

Crisis averted, there was time for observations and questions. Like any other Azarathean dove, Sieara was just small enough to fit in Raven's cupped hands, not nearly the size of a Jump City pigeon but still larger than most doves. And her feathers had looked pure white, except for the flash of purple Raven swore she saw when Sieara took flight. That wasn't normal. And something about it reminded her of... magic?

Dove glanced up when she felt the subtle shifts in Raven's guarded mind. "You... can probably tell she's not really a normal bird," she suggested uncertainly.

Raven nodded.

Dove went back to stroking the bird, affection and fondness in her eyes even as they went distant with memory. "She's not. Not anymore. Srentha put a spell on her," she explained. "That was my friend, Srentha... He made it so she could think like a human and understand more of our world... And he changed her tail, just for fun. So now her tail changes color with her emotions. Azar's magic and all... It was amazing what he could teach me in just ten minutes..." Dove sighed at a lighthearted memory of him showing her a simple illusion spell, grinning at the memory of his wild, silvery hair glowing with a green-golden tint and his utter elation at such a simple wonder.

The dove nibbled her hair, tugging her back to Earth. Lovingly.

Dove blinked. "Now she's... more intelligent than most birds. He made it so she'd glow if she was near anything magical. And cast a spell that allows her to sense magic and track it, and so many other things he never had the chance to explain..."

Magically enhanced mind or not, Raven groaned internally at the thought of having yet another pet roaming the Tower. "Just don't expect me to clean up after her."

Since then, the loyal bird never seemed to leave Dove's shoulder—except to sleep of course (and even that was speculation). It was like she was afraid to lose her again.

But for the moment:

An awkward, concerned glance across the river shifted Dove's attention from the bird. "Um, while we're out here... I did leave a box of things in the forest..."

"And you left them all the way in the forest, because?"

"I thought they were safe. And... I, kind of... forgot."

"How, exactly?"

Dove shrugged, too uncomfortable to meet her eyes. "I hadn't slept well. I had a nightmare, and... and I just wanted to get there—Get here. And by the time I remembered, I-I was already an entire day away. I thought I could go back, and, and get them, eventually..." Distant, somehow fragile helplessness came into her as the words trickled to a stop for a beat of withdrawn silence, until her voice murmured forth like a haunted shadow of what her explanation had been.

"Those things didn't seem important, when I thought I was going to die."

Raven's eyes shifted from bored, to... dare she admit it, sympathetic? "If you chose to bring them across the dimensional boundaries, they must be pretty important."

Dove nodded.

"Well? Where are we going?"

Dove blinked up from her introspective trance. "Uhhhm... Across the city..."

Had she already forgotten how far that was? "We'd better start walking."

That signature uneasiness was back yet again. "Oh. Uhhm... Yeah."

Twenty minutes of walking later, when they'd barely stepped off the bridge, Raven knew Dove really wasn't kidding about that whole "not good with people" thing. Hiding behind her, fleeing their gaze, ducking out of sight... and they hadn't even crossed the beach.

"We'll never get there at this rate."

Dove's gaze fell under the weight of embarrassment. "Sorry..."

"You have got to stop saying that."

(She just pulled her cloak and shoulders in tighter.)

"Maybe we should circumvent the city."

Raven used this as an opportunity to help Dove with her levitation problems, but it ended in disaster; Dove couldn't get in the air, couldn't ease her nerves, couldn't even move straight... and then nearly knocked herself out trying to land in the forest between two trees, and only making it into the first.

Poor Sieara had shot from her perch and was fluttering anxiously from branch to branch, curr-cooing worriedly until Dove opened her eyes.

Once they were sure the crash didn't result in a concussion, Raven helped Dove carry the wooden container into the Tower, both girls using telekinesis—well, mostly Raven; Dove spent most of the journey nearly dropping herself to the ground, she couldn't possibly hold up the box too.

But they made it back alive.

Once they were in her room, safely grounded, Raven watched Dove kneel beside the crate, her eyes distant and her hand resting on its lid.

"Aren't you going to unpack it?"

Dove asked, "Where would I put everything?"

"Good point," Raven conceded after scanning the empty room. "Any ideas?"

Dove blinked up at her in confusion. "For what?"

"Shelving. Tables. Places to put your precious... things. Setting up the room, to be your room."

Dove's eyes lit up—she had never been able to change her surroundings, personalize any place she lived... She never even had her own room before! "Um... I think so. Yeah, actually."

But where to begin?

Only another moment's hesitation, and Dove voiced that she might, maybe, need a shelf? "I used to read three new books every week," she told Raven. "I love reading..."

The gaze Raven responded with was uncertain, half understanding, half bewildered.

They seemed more similar every day.

"Until you have books to fill it with..."

They later moved forward at Robin's suggestion: Using a catalog to find and order her decorations. It didn't take long for everyone to notice Dove's choices were based on peace, safety, and security, no physical thing in particular. Dove wanted it to remind her of Azarath. Which made it a lot harder for the others to make suggestions, but Dove seemed quite certain of what "like Azarath" entailed.

Raven seemed to mysteriously disappear before Dove could explain to the others exactly what Azarath was like, and Dove's throat closed around any attempt to talk about it, anyways.

Everyone had downtime when the shipment arrived, and so Robin called it moving day.

"Is the Moving Day yet another one of your Earthly hollering days?"

Robin explained patiently: "It's not a holiday, Starfire. It just means we're going to help Dove move her new things in."

Beast Boy groused, "When did it become moving day?"

And Robin leveled, "When the shipment arrived and proved we need to help Dove assemble everything she ordered."

"But we had a five-hour gaming marathon scheduled for two o'clock!"

"Yeah, and it's almost two o'clock!" Cyborg tapped the digital readout on his wrist.

Their leader checked the other two before elaborating; Raven was thoroughly engaged in lecturing Dove through another attempt at telekinesis with the smallest, lightest box, and Dove was indeed focusing on the task so hard, her steps were stiff with auto-piloting and tension.

Robin ran up to them eagerly. "Hey! It's best to leave the boxes out here. We should personalize the walls before you get the furniture in."

Dove looked almost as exasperated as Raven, and twenty times as breathless. "You mean... I brought—the boxes... up here, and we... We can't use them—?"

"Not now. But don't worry, it wasn't for nothing. It's just going to be a little later than you thought."

Raven said, "We could use the break."

(Dove sighed at her use of "we", wishing such a simple task hadn't been so frustrating.)

Robin quickly took the role of impromptu project manager, and everyone in the tower pitched in.

The first thing they changed when she moved in was the color; Dove preferred it to be soft on the eyes, with a dark blue carpet on the floor and the ceiling dark green with stick-on clouds, accented with a multi-colored galaxy on the wall opposite her window, a custom commission she had fallen in love with especially for its reminiscence of Azarath's skies. The moment her lamp was plugged in, she began to forgo the (recently-repaired) ceiling light entirely, and instead kept it lit by that soft, golden glow.

Dove, largely unable to fly, or move anything useful, or assemble shelving, or generally help in any way, didn't know what to do and mostly stood off to the side awkwardly... until, at Robins' suggestion, she drew up a vague yet surprisingly recognizable draft of the furnished room in the pen and notepad he produced from his belt, with labels to give them an idea of their goal.

Then it was time to assemble the shelves. Beast Boy nearly tripped over the crate while handing Robin a screwdriver and danced around it with the slightest flail of his arms. "Hey, what's in this box?"

Dove pulled it into her lap and sat on the bed. "Well..." She began unpacking its contents—thus revealing the contents of her previous life.

A knee-jerk surge of pragmatic responsibility rose in Raven's mind: We should probably get back to work...

...but a moment later her curiosity and suspicion won out; she couldn't help wanting to learn everything she could about the younger Azarathean.

The first thing Dove took out (and held with the most careful and reverent touch) was a small golden statue of an Azarathean dove. The base curved out like the foot of a wine glass and fit perfectly cupped in Dove's palm. The bird had its wings outspread, and they were so meticulously detailed, the individual feathers shined clearly, with its fanned tail making it seem like the bird would soar right from Dove's hand as she held it on her open palm.

The sincerity strengthening Dove's voice indicated no small significance. "It relaxes me, and helps me remember happier times... It was my mother's favorite, and mine, too. My grandmother added the base for my mother's hands. It was crafted from pure Azarathean gold, and decorated with textures that are just... so breathtakingly realistic; she carved it by hand and magic, Raven. Bringing it to Earth was like saving a piece of Azarath. And my mother. It... keeps me calm."

Raven could only wonder what it was like, to have so much sentiment attached to a family heirloom.

And... Had Dove really said so many words at once, without a single gasp or stutter? Maybe there really was some steadying magic in the little golden bird.

It seemed Dove was blissfully oblivious to her musing. But after another breath, gentle and sighing, she finally put the figure down (just beside her, right up against her leg), and pulled out a larger gold item wrapped in so much familiarly formative, grounding, internalizing magic, Raven's attention snapped raptly alert.

Dove was holding a mirror. A modestly-sized hand mirror, with a golden rim carved to look like outspread wings and the handle turned into an outspread tail. Closer inspection revealed gold-rimmed wood in a very delicate hue, carved with filamental mystic whorls arranged in layers of 3 reaching from the glass to its wing-tips and tail.

Raven's astonishment, and the immediate yelp and recoil Beast Boy and Cyborg performed in unison once they saw it, made Dove giggle a note or two, and she put it on the bedside table. A moment of consideration, and she told them, "My mother made it by hand, but used magic too..." Then she gave Raven a glance, with a sheepish, tiny grin, and a confession. "She heard about yours, how it helps you with meditation, and we both really liked the idea. Since it's... hard for me to meditate on my own..."

Next Dove pulled out a well-worn, hard-bound book with care and set it beside her on the bed. "My mother used to read it to me all the time..."

Two more books sat beneath it, and then Dove took out a gently-used journal, two notebooks both she and her mother filled, a tome she declared came from her grandmother, a few scrolls from the same woman, and a lightly used journal or two, the bound items sometimes small and seemingly insignificant, but always inked with Azarathean calligraphy.

"For poetry, not agenda, or... keeping track of all the bad things that happen," Dove explained quietly. "Nothing special..." She sighed, then took out the rest of the box's contents: another book, a few crumbling leaves with a refreshing scent, and a bag of dried vegetables and grains for Sieara. And then the box was empty.

"These things bring back so many memories... I just wish I wasn't in such a rush to get out of there and had said goodbye to Srentha."

"At least you weren't killed by—"

"I know," Dove cut her off hurriedly, almost CHOKED it, as if the thought stung her. "But it still hurts to know I'll never see him again..."

Raven echoed, "Srentha. Why does that name sound familiar?"

"You lived in the temple, right? He was the high-magistrate's grandson."

"I... didn't even know Coman had a child, let alone a grandchild."

"Me neither, until Srentha showed up. He spent most of his life training in the libraries, locked away from the rest of the world..."

Raven sensed an aching pain, a loneliness so deep it had to have come from shared experience. Her brows contracted with her own empathy, ever so slightly.

"Srentha was like a brother to me... but, now, all I have left of him is my memories."

"Hold them close," Raven advised calmly. "They're as precious now as they were then."

Dove nodded—glanced away...

She was looking for a distraction. Seeing wisdom in that, Raven offered, "We should probably put these away."

Dove nodded and picked up the books before setting them on the single bedside shelf. Then she took the statue and the ingredients in her hands thoughtfully, and put the ingredients on the middle shelf, the statue next to the books.

She continued her impromptu stories as she set them in place. "My grandmother wrote this one. She was very powerful with magic, and she was even an advisor to our leader, but she caused too many arguments among the council, experimented with things we really weren't supposed to do, and she wound up exiled. So she wrote her experiments down here instead. She had kept it hidden away for years, until the Azaratheans banished her, and then, it was almost two decades before she sent it back 'home' in my mother's hands when she sent her back to Azarath. I inherited it the moment I knew, that... my mother was going to die. And... she knew I wasn't."

Nobody complained that she wasn't helping them, because it was keeping them all entertained. Who knew Dove had such a family history?

Dove's gaze was distanced, but a frail smile graced her lips, like she didn't mind recounting such stories one bit. "And this one..." She withdrew a small band in a bright golden yellow, runes inscribed on its outer surface—

Wait, Beast Boy knew that ring! His elephant form perked up just enough to bumble into the smaller shelf Robin was inspecting, they jumped back and it tottered—

"WHOOOA!" Cyborg cried out and braced to steady it. "Watch it, Dumbo!" He shot Beast Boy a disgruntled glare.

Beast Boy whirled back to human form and rubbed his neck. "Heh heh, my bad. So, uhh. Who else is thirsty?"

Robin looked over. "I could definitely use a drink."

Starfire chimed, "A glass of mustard would be MOST refreshing!"

He zoomed right out to prepare.

With a nod of approval at his and Cyborg's handiwork, Robin turned from the shelf to see what had distracted him... and he also recognized that decorated gold band immediately. "So. Another Ring of Azar, huh?"

"How did you get that?"

Dove cringed at Raven's sudden demand. "From Azar. It was treasured by my grandmother... Magena. That's who I told you about—"

"Why did you keep it?"

Dove's voice suddenly went very, very quiet. "It felt important. Like I needed it."

"What do you need with something that powerful?"

"Protection. Calm... Guidance. After my mother's—When she; I-I— I..."

Raven remained sharply withdrawn against the wall, arms crossed, head low. But her quiet voice was sharp and unyielding as steel.

"What do you know of protection?"

Dove's mouth hung open, speechless and helpless in the face of her honesty... until she just dropped her gaze, and surrendered to silence.

"Ooookay." The awkward tension was broken by Cyborg. "Things are gettin' a little heated in here."

"Who wants some nice, cold, fresh-from-the-fridge chilled-out iced tea!"

Beast Boy reentered with a big tray filled with overly sweetened lemonade and extra-cold, extra-iced iced tea.

The others took it readily, but he had to directly offer it to their new roommate. "Tea, right?"

Dove only took it because he offered so exuberantly, and she nodded, so he handed the glass off with an especially excited smile.

"Bet you've never had tea like that."

Which piqued her curiosity and led Dove to taste it once, twice—and then cough at how sweet it was until tea came dribbling out her nose.

Beast Boy promptly erupted in laughter, and Raven rolled her eyes.

Meanwhile, Starfire sipped from her own glass of much thicker liquid, and with the room littered in empty boxes and packaging plastic, their mission for the day seemed to be completed. "Have we completed the improvement of your home to satisfaction?"

Dove nodded.

Cyborg's appraisal led to curiosity. "Now how is she going to fill a shelf that big with those tiny things?"

"Well," Raven offered, "she said she likes to read..."

"Ooh!" Beast Boy volunteered, "I have these awesome animal books I could show you!"

Dove tilted her head. "I liked a couple stories with animals."

Eyes shining, he smugly specified: "These aren't just stories, and they're all about the animals!"

Cyborg, in response to her blank-faced blinking: "What, you've never read a biology book before?"

Dove hesitated a moment, uncertain—then decided she must not have, and shook her head.

"What do you read?"

"I... like poetry, and mythology?"

Starfire leapt into the air, her smile ELATED! "Oh, I too enjoy the logging of myths, and rhyming words! There are so many beautiful and thrilling tales I can share from my home planet."

"I'd... like to read them... If that would be okay?"

Beast Boy nudged her. "Only if you want to spend like fourteen hours listening to the Tale of woober-snitzel or whatever."

Dove's face blanked. "Fourteen hours?"

"No exaggeration."

Robin suggested, "Maybe we'll take a trip downtown, show you the library."

Dove's eyes were then openly delighted, though her voice stayed modest as ever. "I think I'd like that. Can we go now?"

"The library won't be open when it's 11 at night."

Raven added, "And we do have a training session in seven hours."

Only the low-toned flatness in her voice betrayed her dread, but three of her four teammates groaned audibly.

"Guess we better get some sleep."

Robin stalled, "There's just one more thing." Dove watched quizzically as he rushed from the room, quickly becoming aware that she was the only one confused, and she almost started to dread his return.

But when he returned shortly, it was to offer her a pyramidal stack bound in ribbon with a big white bow in the center. "There's one from each of us."

Taking the pile from him revealed the stack to be five books. Dove's eyes were wide, her brow furrowed, and after pulling the ribbon aside, and staring at them in silent wonder, processing the shock and depths of gratitude, her arms wrapped around the small bundle, and she clutched them close to her chest. "Thank you. Thank you so much, I—I don't know what to say."

"Welcome home," Robin smiled.

She nodded, she smiled, and then she set them all on the shelf immediately, already debating which to read first.

As she stepped back to admire them, Cyborg surveyed the space. "Well, it's not exactly magazine material, but it's looking good."

Now that they finally finished setting up the small room, it was sparsely decorated but with plenty of personality. A big wall-sized shelf housed Dove's cherished books both old and new, a hanging censer from a new-age catalog awaited its smoldering incense, the small bedside table bore a drawer, her bed (and new rounded wraparound headboard) was centered on the back wall with a smaller shelf on its other side, and her big, thick black curtain was hung and prepared to cover the window behind it whenever she wanted to lock out the light.

Her shelves had a slight elegant curve to them (which to her felt like an homage to Azarathean architecture), and they were sparsely cluttered with books. Just a dozen now, but to her they meant everything in the world.

There was also her bed frame, of course, outfitted with a flat wooden headboard rising towards the ceiling, outlined with light gold accents, shaped into dual mounds that wrapped around the mattress with a peak between them, like a bird lifting its beak skyward, holdings its wings down and nearly embracing the mattress, calming and protectively. It surrounded a spacious queen-size with about five pillows and three separate blankets—Dove obviously treasured coziness and comfort. The bedside table was small and elegant with light decorations, silver and gold; her mindscape mirror rested on its surface, along with a notebook and pen, and inevitably it would hold a book she wasn't busy reading just then.

The whole place was very tidy, mostly because she didn't have much to clutter it with, and Dove imagined she would only ever use one thing at a time and tenderly set it back to safety at night, anyways.

It was wonderful. And Dove finally felt like, maybe, she could start to feel at HOME here.

"You'll feel just like a member of the team in no time."

Dove just bit her lip and shook her head slowly. She'd never dreamed they'd accept her so openly...

Then again, they didn't know what she had to hide.

#teen titans fanfiction #teen titans fanfic #teen titans oc #teen titans #dc fanfic #unforeseen and unforesaken

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barbariccia · 4 years ago

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Engineer Adams: Hey, Commander. You know that quarian? Tali? She’s been spending all her time down here asking me about our engines.

Shepard: I’ll tell her to leave you alone.

Engineer Adams: What? No! She’s amazing! I wish my guys were half as smart as she is. Give her a month on board and she’ll know more about our engines than I do!

tali’s down in the engine room, geeking out over the normandy, and she explains that her excitement and interest comes in big part from her race alone and the hardships they’ve faced. we already know the quarians were driven from their home planet and live abord a colony of spaceships, and now she explains a little more about what that really means.

the quarian race is entirely self sufficient to the point of growing their food and even mining for resources aboard their own ships. There are seventeen million quarians within the flotilla, and bonds between one another have to be strong to survive. They’ve given up a lot just to be able to live, which stretches all the way to civil liberties that other races take for granted.

she also talks a little about the quarian forms of government: each ship elects a representative to the Conclave, their govt, and give input toward decisions that affect the whole fleet, but within individual ships, captains have the final say. while things run pretty smoothly, they’re still effectively under martial law, and the five top-ranked military officials serve on something known as the Admiralty Board, which can overrule any decision made by the civilian government in times of emergency. this comes with a caveat: they can only do this once, and then all officials resign from their posts, so there’s no temptation of abusing this power, and in the history of the fleet, it’s only happened four times.

as interesting as the quarian government is, we also get the chance to ask tali about the geth.

she doesn’t know anything that will help us in the here and now, but she gives us some backstory into how they were created and why they rebelled against the quarians.

VI standing for virtual intelligence.

once again, we’re brought back to the concept of AI and synthetics. this is the first time we’re really hearing that AI is... illegal across citadel space. VIs differ from AIs in that they run as computers do: they assist users, process data, and can only work within limited boundaries, like the hologram on the citadel that gives you information on the area, but isn’t programmed to be able to answer questions outside of its scope of knowledge. AIs, on the other hand - true synthetic life - are capable of developing thought and consciousness. and the quarians, with repeated modifications to the geth to fine tune them and make them better suited to the dangerous jobs they weren’t willing to perform, pushed them ever further toward being able to make those decisions for themselves.

tali explains that they aren’t a hivemind, and that each individual geth has its own identity, but the more there are clustered together in a single spot, the less of their individual power they have to spend on doing routine minutae, which frees up capacity for original thought. the more geth there are, the more they act like a subconsciousness - but that’s not really necessary for us to be concerned about beyond “more geth = more intelligent”, which isn’t really something wonderful to find out when you know you’re gonna be fighting a metric fucktonne of them in the future.

Tali: A general order went out across all quarian-controlled systems to permanantly deactivate all geth. The geth responded to this order violently.

Shepard: You didn’t really think they’d just let you destroy them without a fight, did you?

Tali: The hope was that most of the geth would still be little more than machines, incapable of organised resistance. But they had progressed much further than anyone anticipated.

Tali: The war was long and bloody. Millions upon millions of quarians died at their hands. In the end, we were forced to flee our own homeworld. We feared the geth would pursue us, but they never came beyond the Veil. Now we drift through space, exiles searching for a way to reclaim what was once ours.

tying back into what i’ve said before about tali- the way she looks, the religions connotations behind the Pilgrimage - the idea that the quarian people are still searching for a way to take back their homeworld reminds me instantly of the Crusades. For the unaware, the sparknotes version: the term applies to a lot of different wars, but the better known ones were a series of religious wars in the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries directed by the Roman Catholic Church with the objective of taking back the Holy Land (Jerusalem) from Islamic rule. they don’t read as entirely analogous, of course - for one, the geth aren’t expanding their territory, they’ve stayed put for centuries, and the quarians don’t exactly have the same kind of power structure that the Latin church once did, but the concept of reclaiming a sacred land reads firm and true to me. hell, the ‘crusade’ in itself has technically already been waged, right at the offset.

this is one of those things that comes up again later in the franchise, so this won’t be the last we hear about the quarians and the geth and their responses to the history that has already played out, but it’s something to think about for the time being. i do think it’s also pretty significant that the quarians state that they were the ones who struck first, as though they have no compunctions with the things they’ve done. that in itself is... cold, to me. ruthless. they might not have meant to create an AI - but they did, and what they immediately jumped to was meant to be effectively genocide of a synthetic race rather than turn to the Council and ask for guidance or think of any other way to fix the problem that they created. and the result was bloody and had repercussions on not just the race that created the geth, but the rest of the galaxy now, too.

having said that: considering the geth haven’t been sighted outside the Veil, they’ve only recently become a problem for the rest of the galaxy, though their threat is known about by the other races. Ships that venture into geth space are annihilated, and geth that are shut down fry their memory cores, meaning that they’ve never been captured for study - with the only known exception being tali’s recording of saren and benezia talking together.

#mol plays mass effect #squad: tali

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emperorsfoot · 5 years ago

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In this chapter, Entrapta and Hordak board the Monstron in preparation for their journey back to Etheria. (With a few stopped added to the itinerary so Hordak can maintain control of his Bother’s Empire.)

And then, Skeletor finally makes an appearance.

Hope you enjoy!

...

The Imperial docking bays were a whirlwind of activity. It seemed like too much was going on, and, at the same time, nothing was happening at all.

Imperial guards, both clone trooper and enlisted blocked off more than half of the ship docks. Anything within half a kilometer of the Princess Entrapta’s shuttle was shut down. Merchants and pilots could not get to their own ships. Ships awaiting clearance could not land. To those on the outside, it seemed like the world was put on pause. On hold, and frozen while their leaders dithered around doing nothing.

Inside the perimeter of guards, it was organized chaos as servants loaded, not only Princess Entrapta’s shuttle, but an Imperial freighter as well. Baggage belonging to the Princess, the Ladies of her party, Imperial Prince Hec-Tor, and his son went into the shuttle. As well as tanks of fresh water, food stuffs, and sanitary supplies. Into the freighter went the Empires first down payment of supplies and materials for Entrapta’s research.

Administrative assistants stood on either side of the loading gangways checking off crates as they were hauled on. Making sure this went on this ship, no that goes on that ship. Where is the Prince’s arm cannon? Has anyone seen the Princess’ back-up tool kit?

While all that was going on at the space docks, back at the Imperial palace, Prince Hec-Tor was meeting with his lieutenants.

The plan was for the Prince and his son to ride with the Princess in her shuttle up to Monstron, Prince Hec-Tor’s flagship, the twin of the Velvet Glove. Entrapta’s shuttle would then dock with Monstron and they would take the Prince’s ship the rest of the way to Etheria.

Except, Hec-Tor was adding a few stops to the agenda.

“We will stop in the Krytis system to address the uprising in the mines.” He said, walking circles around Mantenna and Grizzlor as they took notes on their own personal datapads. Visuals of the flight plan, its detours, troop accompaniments, and so on were displayed on a screen behind him. “If necessary, we will leave a contingent of our own clone troopers there to maintain order. Then we will go to Denebria and take back the base on the Nordor moon.”

Grizzlor’s stylus danced wildly over his datapad, taking notes and making lists. Working out the logistics of not one, but two military strikes during their journey to Etheria.

Mantenna raised a hand. “Your Highness, are you sure this is how you want to spend you honeymoon?”

Hec-Tor frowned at him.

“I just-“ The Rebrunk Nuru faltered under that critical gaze. “You only just got married. Don’t you, I donno… spend time getting to know your new spouse instead of going off to battle.”

“Keeping this Empire together and stable is far more important that my learning what flavor of carbonated beverage Entrapta favors.” The Prince reminded his lieutenants.

Grizzlor held his stylus to his lips, feigning deliberating over the military logistics. His large paw hiding the smile of a silent laugh behind his hand. Prince Hec-Tor might not know his wife’s favorite flavor, but he did at least know that she only drank fizzy drinks, and that was information no one told him. He just noticed it on his own.

…

Things did not finally calm down until the royal couple and all their attendants were aboard Monstron.

Entrapta’s shuttle docking in the main hangar bay, the exterior blast doors sealing shut behind them. The hatch to Entrapta’s shuttle was opened with a hiss of equalizing pressure and the gangplank lowered.

Rows upon rows of clone troopers greeted them. All arranged in disciplined formations, standing at parade rest. They snapped to attention when Prince Hec-Tor and Princess Entrapta exited the shuttle. A satisfying display of military pageantry.

Behind him, Hec-Tor’s pointed ear picked up a snickered remark from Catra, “Cute action figures. They’ve got the full set.”

Admiral Callix was commander of the Monstron when the Prince was not aboard, and he stepped forward to greet Hec-Tor and his new wife, and cede control of the ship to him.

Callix was not a clone. Clones lacked the independent thinking necessary to fill any leadership position higher than a sergeant. Any officer of rank in the Imperial military was an enlisted alien that had proved themselves and risen through the ranks. Callix was a Stoneman from planet Quarry. Very few beings in the military were taller than Hec-Tor and Horde Prime, but Stonemen grew big and Callix towered over Hec-Tor. A mountain next to a tree.

“Your Highness, congratulations on your recent nuptials.” He said. “And to you, Princess, I welcome you to-“

He was cut off when Entrapta rose up on her hair, a tape measure inexplicably appearing from out of nowhere. “Ooh! You’re a Stoneman, right?” She asked excitedly. “I’ve read about you. You don’t usually leave Quarry. I never thought I’d get to meet one of you up close before.”

Moving on her hair, she drifted around the Admiral. Using her tape measure to gauge the circumference of his arm, the width of his shoulders, the length of his chin.

Callix was a military man. He was disciplined. He held his composure. That did not mean he wasn’t confused or uneasy. “Your Highness?” He looked to Hec-Tor for help. Or, at the very least, an explanation.

“Princess Entrapta is keenly curious.” He tried to sooth the Admiral. “About everything.” Then, to Entrapta, “Perhaps we should let the Admiral go for now. I’m sure he has work to do. There will be time to invade his privacy once we are in hyperspace.”

It was the ‘invade his privacy’ remark that made Entrapta stop. It was something she struggled with. Not exactly knowing what was and was not a boundary unless explicitly stated in words. As Entrapta told him very early on, she did not understand body language or subtle social cues. She needed to be told when her attentions were an ‘invasion’.

Entrapta clapped her hair together excitedly. “I’d love to see the engines as you charge up the hyperdrive. How long is the turn around time between powering up the drive and actually making the jump to hyperspace? With all the technology of the Empire, I would imagine very fast, but my research has also told me that it takes longer for larger vessels and this is one of the largest ships in the universe!”

Callix looked concerned again, turning his attention back to the Prince for guidance.

“Entrapta is an Imperial Princess and my wife.” He informed the Admiral. “She is to have free reign of the ship. All decks, all chambers –except private personnel quarters, of course. If her inquiries or explorations raise any concerns, you are to bring them to me directly.”

“Yes, sir.” Callix nodded.

Entrapta twirled on her hair excitedly. She was gonna learn so much about the Empire’s capital ships and technology! Monstron was one of the most advanced ships in the universe, second only to the Velvet Glove. And Hec-Tor had just given her permission to do whatever she wanted! (So long as she didn’t barge into anyone’s bedroom.) He probably didn’t want her taking apart vital systems. But there was still so much a person could learn without taking things apart first.

She wrapped her hair around Hec-Tor in an enthusiastic hug. Just her hair. Not her arms or her body. “This is gonna be so great!”

Behind them a loud squawk issued from the shuttle and Imp flew out. Sailed circles around the hanger –he’d never been inside a war ship before, he’d never left the Imperial Palace- then came to land on his father’s shoulder.

“My son is not to have free reign of the ship.” Hec-Tor informed the Admiral. “He is to be accompanied by an adult at all times, and if you see him unaccompanied, he is to be brought to me immediately.”

Imp crawled down his father’s arm enough that he could be in the older man’s line of sight when he Signed, ‘But, why?’

“A spaceship is not a play place.” He informed the boy. “You cannot carry on here as you carried on at the Palace.”

He did not want his son trying to climb into one of the ship’s ventilation ducts and getting stuck.

Imp gave a forlorn little trill.

Entrapta wrapped a tendril of hair around him. “I’m an adult. I can accompany you if you wanna explore the ship.”

He gave a more optimistic noise, then looked sideways at his father. He did say Imp had to be accompanied by an adult at all times. He didn’t say who that adult could or could not be, or where he could or could not go. Imp really, really liked Dad’s new wife. She was crafty. Exactly his kind of crafty. Entrapta was easily becoming Imp’s new favorite adult.

Hec-Tor cast a disapproving frown at both of them.

“Oh, unclench.” Entrapta smiled at him. “I was already gonna explore the ship anyway, and Imp and I seem to get along okay. It wouldn’t be an inconvenience for me, and I can keep an eye on him –even if I’m looking at something else. I’m good at multi-tasking.”

“No vents.” Hec-Tor declared firmly.

Entrapta smiled at him. “Is that a ‘yes’?”

Hec-Tor made an ambiguous throat noise. He set the terms and the boundaries and Entrpata found a way to work within them. Still giving Imp a variation of ‘free reign’ of the ship without violating any of his stipulations. Imp would always be with an adult, and Entrapta would keep the child out of the ship’s ventilation system. She would adhere to the literal letter of his rules without breaking them and still give Imp what he wanted. She was smart. Smart and crafty.

“Yes.” He groaned. “But remember that Imp must take medications three times a day and they must be taken with food. He is to report to the galley or one of my personal staff to be served. If he misses even one done, you both will lose privileges.”

Imp whined.

Entrapta nodded. “Understood.”

Then they both scampered off together to explore the ship.

Hec-Tor groaned again.

Callix only remained standing still. “I’ve been told children often have a difficult time accepting a step-parent, but Prince Imp seems quite taken with the Princess Entrapta.”

“Imp would be taken with anyone in a position to let him get away with half the things he tries to pull.” Hec-Tor told the other man. Then cleared his throat. These were not the things one confided in a military subordinate. “Take me to the bridge. As soon as the Princess’ shuttle is unloaded and her party is settled, we will make the jump to lightspeed. The Krytis system will be first.”

…

Krytis was a prison colony first and a mining operation second.

That meant it was very difficult to sneak into, and even more difficult to smuggle weapons into. But Evil-Lyn was a master sorceress and clever to boot and she found a way.

After that, it really did not take much to motivate the prisoners of Krytis to rise up and overthrow their wardens. Not every inmate and prisoner of Krytis was a rapist or a murderer. Most were political prisoners, deserters, or defectors. ‘Decent’ people who presented one challenge or another to the Empire or the Imperial family and ‘disappeared’ for it. It really did not take much, after furnishing them with weapons and promising some magical backup, to convince them to revolt.

That was over a week ago by now, and the Empire was yet to retaliate.

“Good work, Lyn.” Her colleague praised over a video screen. His face covered by a hood so that it was hard to make out his features. The only she visitible was a bone-white chin, and the lower pallet of exposed teeth. No lips or flesh to hide them.

“We experienced only a little resistance at first, then when no backup from the empire came, they all just laid down their arms and surrendered.” Evil-Lyn was telling him.

Her hooded partner nodded. “Prince Hec-Tor is the one who really runs the Empire. With him distracted by his wedding, no orders to retaliate would have been sent. But now that that’s over he will retaliate, and with force. You should leave Krytis right away. I am almost done here in Denebria. We’ll rendezvous at Snake Mountain on Eternia.”

“Understood.” Nodded Evil-Lyn. Then hesitated. Then asked anyway. “After we get back to Snake Mountain do you wanna talk? About the Prince, I mean, and the fact that he’s… remarried.”

The one on the other end was silent a beat longer than Lyn felt was necessary.

Then, “We will need to discuss how this marriage will affect the Imperial military and our own plans. Dryl is an industrial arms manufacture and Princess Entrapta is the mind behind it. Our missions might become more complicated in the future because of this.”

“That’s not what I meant and you know it.” Lyn shot back. “I mean, how do you feel?”

“Nothing.” The hooded figure assured her. “I feel nothing. It is absurd to think that Horde Prime would let him remain a widower this long. It was a waste of resources. Hec-Tor would have had to remarry eventually. Horde Prime was just holding out until he could get the best price possible for his brother’s hand. And look, he got the most powerful weapons manufacture in the universe. My opinion does not matter.”

Evil-Lyn smirked. He let something slip. “But you do have an opinion.”

If that bare, bone-white chin and teeth still have flesh and muscle on it, he would have frowned. Instead, the jaw just clenched. “Get off Krytis before Hec-Tor rains fire down on you from space. I’ll see you at Snake Mountain, and I don’t want to be asked about my ‘feelings’ again.”

He ended the transmission.

…

On the other end of the transmission, half a galaxy away, in the Denebria system, Skeletor leaned back on what passed for a throne on the Nordor base. He reached a hand under the collar of his hood and pulled out a chain. A plain, unassuming metal chain, with a plain, unadorned silver ring hanging from it.

Skeletor held the ring in his hand. A plane band. Utilitarian. Silver, because the one who gave it to him felt the gray metal complemented his naturally blue skin better than gold would have. And he was right. The silver had looked very good on his hand, for many years.

But that was a lifetime ago. Skeletor was a different man back then.

He thought about throwing the ring away more than once. It was a hold out from another life. One he left behind and shoulder hold any sway over him anymore. But, each time he tried, something always held him back. Some small voice reminding him, you never know. It might come in handy some time. You never know. Remember: the ring has a twin somewhere out in the universe. On the hand of the second most powerful man in the Empire.

Well, it wouldn’t be on his hand anymore. Prince Hec-Tor would have a new ring now. A new ring to match his new spouse.

Skeletor should throw it away.

He should.

He didn’t need it.

It wasn’t relevant anymore.

He unclipped the chain from around his neck. Holding the ring out in front of him. He could just drop it on the floor and one of the mutants of Nordor would find it and could claim it as their own. It was silver. Who would pass up the chance to claim a precious metal as their own? There might even be a fun fight over it. Or, he could get up and toss it in the garbage compactor. To be squished and compressed in with all the rest of the base’s waste before it was jettisoned into space.

No. Not that. Not the garbage.

Skeletor should throw the ring away. But no method for disposing of the item seemed appropriate to him.

He would just keep it until a solution presented itself.

That was all. That was why he was re-clasping the chain back around his neck and tucking the ring back under his hood. He did not have an appropriate method of disposal. That was it. There was no other reason.

Skeletor stood from the throne.

He needed to get moving too. After Hec-Tor finished with Krytis, Denebria and Nordor would be his next stop. Skeletor had to be gone before then.

He was not ready to meet with Hec-Tor skull to face.

#hordak #entrapta #skeletor #entrapdak #entrapta/hordak #hordak/skeletor #keldor #hec-tor kur #motu #she-ra #he-man #spop #fan ficiotn #ao3 #RenkonNairu

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