#gonna start uploading /ALL/ my art over here

[r0selace]

I like my mmo main a normal amount <3

| If you like it, reblog it please! <3

[shhroomer]

Oh, help me God, this hellboy got me coming back for more

reblogs super appreciated !!! close-ups under the cut !

[placeinthemiddleofnowhere]

How 'bout I stay here and you fight? 

Pairing: König x Reader

Summary: You’re determined to find out why everyone thinks König is so scary, afterall he’s just some guy that’s taller than most people right? He’s probably harmless! Well, he’s a little scary, but you still like him anyway.

(No use of y/n or mention of gender/race)

AN: Let me start off by saying I'm sooo sorry for the time it took me to update this, I know that it's been quite a gap since the last upload. Hopefully the wait was worth it though, because I have written about 30 pages for you here, so there's lots to sink your teeth into! As always, thanks for all your support and interaction and all the questions you have about the series, having everyone's lovely messages and art means a lot 💕 knowing I have this community to come back to while I stress out about life stuff is amazing, so thanks for being there! Enjoy the next update ☺️

Part 8 of A Rocky Start - Full Masterlist Here

-☠️-

“Ghost before you-”

“Before I what, Sneak?” Ghost spat, shaking with the effort it took to contain himself. “Before I tell Price? Before I jump to conclusions? What? You gonna try and tell me those aren’t what I think they are? Are you going to keep lying to me? Well go on then, tell me what you think I want to hear, Sneak. It’s what you’ve been doing this whole time isn’t it! You selfish little lying fuck.”

“No! I never wanted to lie to you Ghost, I just-”

“You never wanted to lie to me? Yet, you let me believe that König had screwed you over that day in the gym. Mustn't have been some cheap lay by the looks of things, that must have been you that clawed up his back like that! And to think all this time, I thought better of you,” he snorted, pounding the wall next to you with his gloved palm. “You made us look like idiots running around after you, trying to make you feel better all this time! You’ve had us all concerned about you while you’ve been fucking that cunt behind our backs!”

You whimpered and shrunk into the cold plaster at your back, distantly feeling like you were lying on a slab at a morgue. Everything in you said that it wasn’t long until you were going to be meeting your end. Ghost was wide eyed and loud as a lion as he tore into you, now slapping both his hands on the wall and sandwiching you firmly between him and it. You gulped and clenched your fists, trying to swallow the burning feeling that crept up your throat like a trail of gasoline. Everything was falling apart and you couldn't even see the pieces through the wreckage to try and save them. 

“I didn’t intend for that to happen…it just happened that way. You assumed that König had slept around - I didn’t say it - I just didn't correct you. I couldn’t correct you!”

“Do you think that helps? Do you think it’s better knowing that you took advantage of my trust - in all of the 141’s trust? Do you know how much it hurts to realise that someone that you thought you could count on could be capable of deceiving you for months? That someone that you treat like family apparently doesn’t give a shit and would throw you away for a bit of Austrian Muscle? He’s barely even a person under all that fight and armour, he’s a fucking monster, Sneak, and yet you’ve left us for him!”

You clenched your teeth and rubbed the tears from your cheeks, furiously shaking even though you tried to resist. Ghost knew he had you overwhelmed. He was taking full advantage of your upset, taking his revenge on you now and tearing you down. After all those months you spent running ahead of him, keeping on top of all your lies, you’d really thought that you might manage to get away with it all. Not anymore. Your feet were knocked from under you now.

“I- It- It wasn’t like that!” You protested, choking on your words.

“How wasn’t it?” Ghost roared.

“Because he’s not a monster! We care for each other, he- he cares for me, Ghost.”

“Oh, clearly! You’d have to, it has to be worth it, doesn’t it? You’ve made your choice haven’t you? You’ve gambled your place in the 141 all these months and now your chickens have come home to roost. You think you broke our trust by going against my order that day on the field? How do you think this elaborate fucking lie is going to look to Price? It’s going to ruin you, Sneak.You’re going to break up the team!”

“You mean- you, and Pr- Price is going to kick me out?”

“Who knows what the fuck he’ll do! All I know for fact is that this is going to shake the trust of everyone here. It sure as shit rocked my faith in you, who knows what the others will think when they hear about this. Doesn’t make sense to keep someone around that’s capable of going behind our backs like this.”

A boulder settled in your stomach then. Ghost’s voice had dropped severely low, his angry snarling dying down to a quiet threat. His eyes were narrowed and staring at you with a deadly precision, betraying the scene that surely played in his head - the one where he strangled you for making such an idiot out of him. 

“Ghost, please,” you whimpered, closing your eyes. “I didn’t want things to be this way. I had every intention of staying away, but it’s just…Well…I couldn’t give up on König, I care about the team and I love you all like brothers, but that doesn’t mean I could just abandon König and all the feelings I had for him. I just… I just thought that I could have both.”

You felt like an idiot saying it out loud. 

In that moment a haunting realisation overtook you, the minute you opened your eyes and saw Ghost’s almost hollow mask sockets staring back at you through the gloom, you knew something. You’d made your choice all those months ago. You’d chosen König. That’s how everyone would see it anyway, they’d never understand how much you wished you could be a part of both worlds. 

You knew Ghost could see exactly what you were thinking. He snorted as all the features in your face drooped, backing away from you. You sniffed and pushed yourself off the wall, barely keeping yourself from stumbling as you chased after him. 

“Ghost, wait!”

He chuckled, his throat emitting a dark and choppy sound, one you hadn’t heard before. You shivered and tried to catch up with him, boots slapping hard and fast against the floor as you attempted to match his furious pace.

“Ghost, please, you can’t tell Price yet!”

“And why’s that, Sneak? You want a little accomplice in this, hm? You want someone else to go against Price just to make you feel better? The 141 isn’t a fuckin’ joke, even if you want to treat it that way.”

“I’m not asking you to lie!” you cried out, finally skidding to a stop in front of Ghost. “I’m asking you to wait.”

“Why would I do that?” he scoffed.

“Because we have a job to do,” you said, steeling yourself as much as you could even while tears still ran hot as acid down your cheeks and over your jaw.

“Oh, so now you care about doing your job, huh?”

“I care about you all, I care about the team, I care about this job more than anyone could ever know. Even though I fucked up…even though what I’ve done says otherwise, I do care. That’s why I’m asking you just to hold onto this until the job’s finished. I know exactly how this will go down Ghost, I know everyone will say the same as you have. Do you think this is what the team needs right before going away?”

You sighed and rubbed a palm over your sweating forehead, running your fingers over the wet strands of your hair. You’d been caught dead centre in your web of lies, the least you could do is untangle it with a sense of grace. Let your ruin come at the end of your last mission, let Price handle it all with a clear head, it was the least you could do. You had to make him see that.

“You can’t afford to lose anyone before you go after, Rousseau,” you continued, “Not the night before we leave. Just let me help you with this and then I’ll go to Price myself after all this is through. Just let me try to make things right and then…and then if- if Price wants to kick me out he can. I accept that…just let me help.”

Ghost halted in his tracks and balled his fists, kinetic energy fizzling away as he seemed to consider swinging them. You winced already, scrunching your eyes as you prepared for him to send you flying, but the hit never came. He opted for rolling his shoulders back instead and he paused on your words. For a moment, you worried he might reconsider and give you that well deserved blow, you weren’t completely relaxing yet. Tension sizzled through you both like a bomb fuse. 

Deep down though, you knew he wouldn’t follow through on any of the dark thoughts swirling in his mind. Simmering in the burn of his gaze was a man that was deeply hurt. Even though you were probably one of the lowest life forms in his eyes at that moment, you were still family and he would never punish you like that. Even if he would willingly watch you go into exile.

“You’re telling me you feel fit to operate right now?” he asked, his words coming out with careful measure. 

“There’s no other choice. I have to be,” you said with a bitter laugh, feeling like if you continued anymore, you might go hysterical. “All I know is that if we bring this to Price now, it puts the whole mission at risk and becomes a distraction. I accept that I fucked up, and that you probably can barely stand the sight of me, I do. For the sake of a mission though…don’t you think that we should get through this and let the team deal with it after? The last thing anyone needs is this. Please Ghost, you know I’m right. Even if this is the mission I go down on, at least let me do it without putting the others at risk because of what I’ve done.”

Ghost grunted and looked away from you, letting his body sag as he weighed your words. You’d gotten through to him, you’d delayed the inevitable. You knew it. You just needed him to say it. 

You wished that he’d just tell you he’d let it go completely. For a hopeful second you wondered if maybe some time would stop him wanting to let Price know at all. Though that was never going to happen - if not for the fact that he was hurt from being lied to, then it would be the complete destruction of his faith in you. 

Why couldn’t you have just listened to Ghost from the start? Why had you hurt him like this? 

It was all getting too much to carry. Your heart thumped slowly and filled with lead and oil, thickening the blood in your veins like tar. Your whole body felt wrong, your lungs were gasping just to get by. Your head was spinning as it tried to process all that had happened, rattling with the drum beat of your pulse. It took every ounce of energy you had left just to stay upright, feeling like you might start swaying as you lingered in Ghost's heavy shadow. 

“Alright,” he said eventually, voice gruff and distant. “Fine.”

You swallowed thickly and risked eye contact with him. That only served to reignite his anger though, the shadows in the hallway seemingly shivering around him as he loomed over you again.

“I won’t tell Price yet, but I’m warning you - you wait a single moment to tell him when we get back from this, then I’ll find that dopey Austrian cunt, and I’ll string him up and make you watch as what little light he has in him leaves his miserable fucking corpse. Do I make myself clear?”

You froze before nodding stiffly, body jerking as he shoved past you. 

“Clear,” you whispered, talking to no one as you were left alone in the empty grey corridor. 

-☠️- 

You confined yourself to the darkness that night. You were alone in your room, curling your hands around your knees in bed with the lights off, heavily breathing like some kind of demented horror movie creature. The Only thing that haunted you though was your mind. 

There was no getting away from it, no sharing the load with anyone else, who was there to tell? It was just you and your horrible thoughts, locked up tight together with no respite from any voices of reason. It wasn’t like you could tell the others. 

König had tried to message you, but you couldn’t face him. You just messaged something quick back, reading only a couple lines of what he’d sent you first. You couldn’t talk to him either. There was no way he could know about what Ghost knew or otherwise you’d be kicking off the fight of the century.  

Even with the complete lack of light in that tiny space, you still continued to see the bright whites of Ghost’s mask in front of your face. His hard blue eyes were burning holes into you like the pits of hell. It had your heart racing. Your skin felt too hot, your lungs burned with effort, feeling like they would burst with your heart ramming into them. Nothing could calm you down.

Knock.

Knock. 

You froze in your place, back stiffening somehow even further against the corner you’d shoved yourself into. You weren’t expecting company. Part of your mind wondered if Ghost had given in and told Price. Though as you thought on it for a few more seconds you knew in your heart of hearts that the moment, if Price knew about your relationship he sure as fuck wouldn’t come quietly knocking on your door. The sound was too soft, like someone that was trying to be discreet. 

Only one person that could be - surely.

You padded over to the door and took a breath, holding the cold handle in your palm for a moment and letting it recenter you. If it was who you suspected it was, you couldn’t let him know that you’d been found out. He couldn’t get mad at Ghost and give you away. He couldn’t have the stress of your relationship reveal running through his mind while you were in an active warzone. If something were to happen to König because of your stupidity, then Price finding out about you both would be the least of your worries. 

Why had you chosen the path that had put everyone you love into such a horrible position? Why had you lied so much to them all? 

You swallowed the lump in your throat and closed your eyes for a second, only just opening the door as a tall figure had begun to retreat in the darkness. You watched as the giant stopped in his tracks and then you smiled softly when he walked back to you. The red tears of his mask were the first things to reveal themselves as he stepped into the flickering light that buzzed by your door. 

“Did I wake you?” König asked, honey thick voice coming in at a low whisper. 

“No,” you sighed, gesturing for him to come in, “couldn’t sleep. How come you’re here? You haven’t messaged.”

“I couldn’t sleep either. I wanted to see you before we left - see you alone,” he answered, stepping into your doorway. “And i did message, you messaged me back - remember? You were a little blunt with me, so I got worried.”

Oh.

You shut the door behind him and watched as he walked confidently past you and over to the lamp by your bed. He’d only been in your room a couple of times, despite your insistence he shouldn't risk showing up. Though even those stolen moments were enough for him to remember the layout as if the room were his own.

He flicked the switch on your lamp that sat on your bedside table and looked back up at you then. He was bathed in warm yellow light like an angel that had been sent to soothe your troubled head. Even his eyes seemed to melt through the edge that had settled over you. 

“You don’t look very good, darling,” he noted, frowning over at you. “What’s wrong? Have you been crying?”

He tilted his head at you and with that, seemed to remember he was still wearing his mask. His eyes had grown wide like pale blue whirlpools. With fumbling hands, König tugged the fabric over his head and got himself out of the draped material, his tired face was revealed. His hair blew around before it settled into a messy nest on top of his head and his dark eyes refocused on you once he’d been freed from the hood. They were baggy with exhaustion. 

You knew that feeling well. Not that you could tell him the real reason why.

“Hm?” he hummed, walking towards you now. “What’s got you so upset?”

You shook your head and tried to smile at him, accepting the hug that he wrapped you into with a sigh of relief. You didn’t have a good answer for him. Instead you pressed your head into his chest and inhaled his scent, taking in hints of gunfire and metal that his mask had left behind and, of course, the faint notes of your berry tea - betraying his thievery. 

“Have you been stealing my tea again, mister?” you asked, trying to distract him.

“Me? Stealing from you? Never,” he chuckled, the sound reverberating through his body and soaking through to yours. 

“More like all the time!” you grinned, finally chancing a look up at him again.

“Well really, you only have yourself to blame,” he said, stroking his thumb across your chin. “You should never have got me hooked on it if you didn’t want me to indulge myself every once in a while.”

“Mmm…Is that so?”

“Yeah, that’s so.”’

You shook your head at him and tapped him on the arm, prompting him to release you. He let you go, but followed immediately behind you when you went to sit on the bed. He took little time in swiftly drawing you back into his hold once again, nestling you both into the wrinkled sheets on your sad little bed, adjusting himself into your extra cushions. 

His presence might have been making you feel uneasy, the pressure to not tell him anything growing with each passing second. However it was undeniable that the weight around your body was helping you, scattering your worries the tighter he held you.

“Are you going to tell me?” König pressed.

“Tell you what?”

“You know what,” he said dryly. 

You huffed out a sigh. He wasn’t going to let it go though, he repositioned you then and made you face him, keeping you pinned and lying on your side. 

“I know that the reason you smell of berries is because you don’t lift your mask all the way when you drink my tea. Then it gets damp and rubs off onto your shirt,” you said softly, smiling to yourself as you thought of him guiltily sneaking cups of it.

He looked down at you pointedly and rolled his eyes. Ok, so he wasn’t going to let it go then. You stared back at him for a moment before you lay back against his chest and proceeded to close your eyes, reaching out into the beyond to try and think of something to say. Anything other than the truth behind your insomnia. 

“I’m worried about this op,” you whispered quietly. “And what comes after.”

“What? Why?” he asked, wrapping his arm around you tighter. “Why on earth would you be worried?”

“There’s a lot riding on it. It’ll be dangerous too, more than any of the other missions we’ve been on,” you shrugged. “Then there’s the unknowns that’ll come after it as well.”

“You know what will come after it,” König said, a smile weaving itself into his voice. “We will go to Austria together and I will take you on many adventures and buy you lots of good food, real food.”

You laughed a little at what he said and relaxed against him. You could feel the steady rhythm of his heart thudding away behind your head, working away, strong as ever. Maybe the world wasn’t going to completely end, you thought distantly to yourself, maybe even if you didn’t have the 141 you could still make the best of things. Hell, maybe you could move to Austria. 

In choosing König, you weren’t going to be alone after you were kicked out. You would still have him. It didn’t lift the burden that was sinking your heart any, but it sought to bring some light back into your mind. The thought of mountain trails and mornings waking up to his gentle kisses and calloused hands trailing their way down your back weren’t so bad, maybe there was something even a little enticing about those thoughts... 

Your life would be in tatters, sure, but it would still be worth living. There would still be some happiness, even if you were down the love of four family members… Even if you never got to speak to them again. 

“I am looking forward to our trip, that’s for sure,” you replied measuredly. “I just…I mean- I guess I don’t know what things will be like after all this is over. We’ve been working together through this mission through our whole relationship and now that it’s coming to an end… I dunno - I guess I’m just intimidated by all the unknowns.”

You felt ok saying that. It wasn’t completely false. In reality you were far more worried about the situations you knew you’d face rather than the ones that were unknown, but ultimately Price being told about your relationship was still a mystery in terms of punishment.

You had no idea what he might decide to do with you once he’d found out about your betrayal. For all you were aware he could’ve been planning to send you off to one of the worst deployments that you’d ever known in your life. What then?

“You always worry so much” König sighed, tracing his hand up your body so that he could stroke the side of your face. “Know that whatever we both do next…no matter what…you will have all of my heart, and I will do anything to make sure that you get to hold it in your arms whenever possible…because I love you.”

You froze in place, eyes going wide as you processed what he said. He had spoken the unspoken, he had finally put into words the feelings that you knew were there, but both of you had been too guarded to let slip. He was telling you that he loved you, giving you a gift while you lied straight to his face.

“I love you and I will do anything to make this work. I’d dig a hole through to the otherside of the world just to be with you, there’s nowhere you can be sent to that I won’t find a way to reach you,” he whispered, pressing a kiss into your cheek. 

You let a little breath of silence hang in the air for a moment and bit your lip, feeling a tear track its way down your face while you battled with your throat to stay silent. You couldn’t let him know what you were actually upset about. 

You loved him too after all. 

And for that reason you couldn't reveal the truth that Ghost had uncovered, it would send him spiralling. Would compromise him and mission. You could put him in danger, more so than you had already by involving Ghost - and soon Price’s - wrath. 

“I love you too, König…” you murmured. “I love you so much.”

He let out a breath at your admission, you felt it whistling past your neck. You shivered, and tried not to think too hard on what would happen when he found out you’d withheld the truth from him that night. 

“I love you so much, in fact, that I’m looking past the fact that you chose the night before a huge operation to tell me that,” you said with a laugh, trying to distract yourself from the demon’s in your head. 

He laughed too. You both relaxed into the vibrations of each other's bodies and then lay quietly for a moment, staring up at the old scuffed ceiling above. 

Though you couldn’t linger there for long. You pushed your way out of his almost iron grip and rolled around, propping your head up so that you could see his face. You were surprised to see the look of consternation that greeted you. It was like looking into a mirror. His eyes were half lidded as he looked down and his lips were pursed, the pink line of his scar stretching taught as he thought deeply on something.

“Well, seeing as you love me too… Would you offer me some assurance?”

You reached over to him and cupped his jaw in your hands, adjusting his face so that he’d meet your gaze. You searched his eyes for a moment and suddenly something clicked in the place as you were finally broken out of your wallowing. 

“Assurance for whatever it was that you couldn’t sleep over?” you guessed. 

He nodded, the scratch of his stubble sharply rubbing against your palm. You smoothed your thumb over his cheek and he leaned into your touch, somehow looking younger and smaller than he usually did. 

“Things will be intense tomorrow…I will be breaching rooms with countless unknown men that will be shooting at us, and I’ll be having to make quick decisions - act on instinct. Whatever you see tomorrow, know that I love you and that I wish you didn’t have to witness any of it. In another life, I’d spare you from ever having to even know about it. I just need to know, that after we come back, no matter what you see, that you won’t run from me. As much as I’ve tried to protect myself, I know that that’s all over now. I know now there’s no way to save myself from the hurt, the same way I couldn’t protect myself from anyone else I’ve ever loved in my life. I just want to know that you’ll give me a chance to explain myself if you see something that you don’t like again… that you won’t leave me.”

Oh König…

You felt the remainder of your tears threaten to spill over and flood your sheets, but you held them back and closed your eyes instead, thinking for a moment.  You hadn’t reacted well the last time you’d heard him at work. How would you react if you were to see him in action now? 

You shuddered at the thought, but let it pass quickly. At the end of the day, you were all going there to reap an unspeakable violence to a group of people that had committed atrocities in return. There were no pure intentions and there were no good players between any of you. There was only putting an end to a group that threatened to kill innocents. If König was going to be at the head of the speartip, then he had to be damn sharp. You couldn’t have him ineffective with worry over what you might think.

Couldn’t put him at risk.

“König, I promise that whatever I see…whatever I think or feel in the moment…I won’t shut you out. We can talk about it all when we get home again. But whatever you do, don’t put yourself in harm's way trying to protect my feelings. We’ll make it through this together, no matter what, ok?”

He smiled at you, a twinkle returning to his sapphire irises. He turned and kissed your hand, you still held his head, and you both closed your eyes for a moment, revelling in the private moment between yourselves. 

“Ok,” he finally replied. “I feel like I can sleep now. Why don’t you try to get some rest as well? See if you can shut off that busy mind of yours.”

You both settled into a silence after that, letting yourselves relax into the calm. At some point you turned back around and a little while later, König switched off your lamp. In the back of your mind you worried that you’d be discovered come morning time, but König assuaged your fears before you could air them and whispered to you, tickling your ear as he told you that he’d set an early alarm. 

“I love you, König,” you whispered, your half smile lost to the night.

It felt like something to giggle over, like a secret between school children. You could barely contain your smile. 

“I love you too,” König replied, pressing a kiss to your temple, “I’ll love you always.”

-☠️- 

König had stayed true to his word and had left while the sky remained dark, shutting off his near silent alarm on the second ring and scurrying out quietly before anyone would be any the wiser. Anyone that didn’t already know anything anyway.

It felt like Ghost had almost sold you out the moment that you’d stepped foot onto the transport. The sound of your boots nervously clanging against the metal ramp drew his attention, and all at once his conversation with the Captain ceased and he fixed his eyes on you with a glare.

It was enough to freeze you into place, forcing you to maintain eye contact with him until he released his mental hold over you. You Clutched furiously onto the handle of your backpack, hoping like hell that it wouldn’t shake too badly.

For a few painful seconds you were stuck still, though just as you thought that Ghost might say something after all, he turned away again and blanked you completely. Price gave him a frown and said something low under his breath, but whatever it was Ghost shook his head and carried on with what they were discussing before.

It was like some kind of twisted game of red light/green light. If that’s the way he’s going to play things this’ll be a hell of a way to go out, you thought to yourself. That is if you even made it out of the mission.

You were supposed to be on Ghost’s team, and at that point you weren’t completely convinced that he would bother too much to look out for you anymore. No, now it was just you and Horangi, and as much as König seemed to get on with him, you and he had never exchanged more than a couple of words to each other. 

Would Soap and Gaz offer swapsies?

You shook your head at the thought of Gaz ever going off plan, especially one that Price had approved. No, instead of hoping for better, you faced reality and took a seat far away from Ghost, throwing your stuff down for what felt like the last time. You sank down on your cracking knees, settling next to your bulging bag and holding it like a plush toy. The squishy material was solid under your grasp and made a great pillow for you to rest your head on. It was enough to lull you into a sense of security, enough to make you close your eyes. 

“Sneak!”

Your head shot up and you lost your breath, staring wide eyed into the direction that you’d heard the voice come from. Was it Ghost? Was he going to reveal everything just to spite you now that you were getting comfortable?

No. Soap looked down at you instead, shooting you a grin as he saw how much you’d shit yourself at his shout. Stupid bastard. You hit out at his leg and huffed when he sat down next to you, feeling like his loud obnoxious voice in your ear was just about the last thing you needed.

And just to sour your mood more, just to make matters all the better, he shoved your shoulder and almost sent you keeling over and tumbling over to Ghost and Price. As if Ghost needed another reason to want to get back at you. 

You threw your hands out and pushed yourself up, attempting to shove him almost twice as hard back. He’d dodged at the last second and had you wheeling forward this time, though at the very least you had your bag to fall onto instead of Ghost this time. 

“What the fuck are you being so childish for?” you grumbled, recovering and rubbing the sore spot where he’d shoved you. 

“Ooft, someone’s grumpy, eh?” Soap tittered, smile never leaving his face. “Did you not get much rest last night?”

You grunted and folded your arms, staring straight ahead like you might melt the plane’s walls. 

“The fuck does it matter to you?”

“I’ll take that as a yes then - as usual.”

Soap raised his brows, challenging you to defend yourself. Normally you’d probably shove him again or throw a verbal barb at him, but that day you were in no mood to play. Especially not when the truth was going to come out sooner rather than later, and you weren’t convinced you were going to be on joking terms anymore. 

No, it wouldn’t be long until he knew about you and König, and your mind was already filled with the sight of his angry frown setting itself upon you. It was better that you didn’t make it all worse by pretending everything was fine, you reasoned, so that being the case you ignored him and planted your head back down on your bag. 

“Crabbit little twat,” Soap snorted. “Better find your sense of humour before you wake up again. And if you’re gonna be in a mood with me, then you can forget sleepin’ and drooling all over me too!”

You grunted in response, and gave him nothing else. You were too sick with worry to respond properly, even despite the ache that developed as you realised that that might be one of your last ‘friendly’ interactions with him. The weight in your heart increased tenfold, feeling as if it were a sand timer growing heavier by the minute. Better not to think about it. Better to shut it all out, to shut down. 

Unsurprisingly your mood wasn’t lifted by the sleep you caught up on. It only served to keep you from agonising about your situation until the plane slammed down onto the dodgy countryside landing strip. That shocked you back to life again. From then on, until you reached the safe house, your mood remained sour and kept the others from bothering you much.

When you got there, of course, you had to buck up and try to act normal. You couldn’t have the others picking anything up, couldn’t let them think you were anything else except tired and grumpy. It wasn’t that far outside the realm of normal, you never slept very well whenever you had to travel away anyway. 

When it came time to go over the briefing, you quietly set yourself as far away from Ghost as you could muster and stood around the projector wall, listening to Price’s briefing intently while you locked your arms into a folded position. The light splashed across his face in brief interludes, his weight was shifting from foot to foot as he walked you all through the plan in his booming voice, he was restless. He was right to be. 

Price knew that the intelligence that had been gathered was of questionable accuracy - he told you all as much and Laswell confirmed it. She didn’t look that much more confident that him. The men who’d spilled their guts to the interrogators had varying degrees of incentive to reveal the true nature and layout of their base and all of you knew that they were highly fantastical to boot. It didn’t matter how many exercises you’d run through, none of you could’ve really known what was in store for when you raided the warehouse. 

You’d looked round the room as he’d talked about that, scoping out the faces of all the men that you were going to fight alongside. Your eyes slowly ran over the 141, König, Horangi, and all those of the other team that Price had assembled to lock down the perimeter. There were hard eyes all around, everyone stayed quiet, listening to the captain until his very last word. Even Laswell had limited interjections, she was just as stone faced as everyone else, letting Price take the lead.

“I want all of you to be at the top of your game. On a mission like this there is zero and I really do mean zero margin for error! You make a mistake on Rousseau’s home turf and you will get yourself or one of your teammates killed. All of you must communicate, I want clear positions and status updates on comms. You will tell me where you are in the warehouse and you will let me know who you come across, is that clear?”

You all responded, an impassioned “yes, sir!” rang throughout the room, ricocheting off of the walls and back into the crowd  like a bullet. 

“Good,” Price said curtly. “Now, enough talking,we move out in thirty minutes. And remember - Zero margin for error! Clear communication! Don’t get yourselves killed.”

“Yes, sir!”

You all sounded off for the last time and set to work scurrying around, gathering gear and preparing the trucks for departure. You’d be driving out until you reached the edge of the forest and from then on you would be trekking out to the compound, a group of old warehouses that had belonged to a logging company before it had gone out of business years before. You were in for a hard day.

Though as Ghost reminded you, when he icily stared at you from the otherside of the room, the hardship wasn’t going to end at capturing Rousseau. Your problems were only going to multiply from that day on.

You were the first to break eye contact that time, nervously shifting away and grabbing your gear, double checking your ammo and your pockets. You stroked your hands up through the curves and rough textures of your armour and bags and went through your mental checklist, trying to fill your mind with something other than all the swirling thoughts that threatened to compromise you. 

“All good, Sneak?”

You snapped your head to your left side, meeting Gaz’s tilted stare. 

“All good, Sergeant,” you answered, repacking a few of your rounds. 

“Sergeant?” he chuckled.

“Did your rank change while I was asleep?”

“No, but you seemed to,” he shrugged.

“I’m stressed, there’s a lot at stake here,” you said, swallowing down another of your silly lies. “But all that matters is that I’m here right?”

Gaz shook his head as you reminded him of the words he’d said to you months before. Ever since he’d lectured you about letting König distract you, you liked to tease him and call him mini Price, reciting his words back to him without fail. I wanna go out there knowing you’re here with us and not turning yourself into a walking target. You’d do your best Price impression whenever you recounted them. 

You didn’t bother this time - not while Price was in the room with you. Gaz rolled his eyes and patted your back, almost turning away to sort his own things before a smile lit his face. 

“Well with a good attitude like that I might just keep you around when I get promoted to Captain,” he laughed, walking away before he could see the smile dropping off your face. 

Gaz might’ve wanted to keep you around - but would Price? 

-☠️- 

It was unsurprising, to say the least, that you were going to discover John Rousseau’s last stand wasn’t going to be easy. No. He was intent on going out with a bang.  

It had been a difficult breach, you’d lost a couple of the men that Price had sent to crack the warehouse open with you. They’d fallen in the fatal funnel that had been created when the enemy worked out your entry point. Despite the high levels of bloodshed though, König remained mostly unharmed.

You’d tried not to let yourself get distracted by him, but even still, had found your eyes magnetised to him at times, had seen him shooting quickly and forcing enemies close when he needed to, basically folding people in half in an effort to break them. Some of the sounds their bones made still echoed in your ears. 

Everything had moved so fast. Your mind had very little bandwidth to process it all. One moment you were on the first floor, desperately trying to locate the stairs and get to Rousseau’s ‘war room’, the next you were deep into the building, continuing to blast through doors with Soap at the head while you, Ghost and Horangi secured the rear. 

Gunshots echoed out throughout the hallways, lights flickered and sparked and rained down electrical orange confetti as they were shot from the ceiling and swung out like some kind of deadly assault course. The floor in front of you flashed white and gold and soon you were drowned in darkness. All the lights in the room crashed down into their final resting places.

Ghost was in the room across from you, Horangi was with him too. You’d decided to separate when you’d seen a lone man run into the little office, you were convinced you’d seen someone hauling a massive gun across his back. It was hard to be sure what it was, maybe some type of PKM, but whatever it could have been would do a lot of damage, you knew that much. Though now, as you were left alone in the shadows, it had felt like your mind had played tricks on you.

Your breathing was shallow, and no matter how thick your earbuds were, your ears were still ringing from all the abuse they’d had to endure. It felt like you’d been crammed under an old church bell and someone was hitting it on all sides. There was a lightning storm in your head and a heatwave through your whole body. 

Part of you was almost begging to be in the debrief with Price already. 

You flicked your night vision down and scoped the room, tracing through the green fog for any signs of enemies. There was nothing obvious. The pulse of your speeding heart thumped away steadily in your ears while the room remained deathly still. Where the fuck are you?

Something flashed out of the corners of your eyes and before you could even turn to see it, you were being overwhelmingly set upon. You stepped backward and leveraged your weight, getting yourself in a good position to strike your assailant and baulked when he stopped you in your tracks and smashed you against the wall. 

Ouch.

The air shot out of your lungs, your goggles had skewed over your eyes, but after a few seconds of shock you were thankfully able to dodge the figure from hitting you and shoved them off to your side. With tears in your eyes, and knees screaming out, you got yourself up. 

It was fight or die. You picked up your gun, scraping the heavy weapon against the floor, and unloaded it into your attacker, just as he tried to rush you again. 

His body collapsed to the floor in a spray of mist and you watched motionlessly as he fell forward and into a lifeless heap at your feet. The gun was like a lead brick in your arms, but still you held it aloft, waiting for anyone else that might try to get the drop on you.

Why’s it so quiet?

“Sneak, what the fuck was that?” Ghost called out. “And where the fuck did you run off to?”

You could hear him distantly through in the other room, but his voice was also straining loud and clear over the busy comms, you knew your reply would be too. All of you had been running around for a lot longer than you would’ve liked. Then again, it was a blessing that you were still up and kicking if anything. There had been so many surprise attacks launched on you, you were lucky to only sport a few bruises for your troubles. 

“In the room across from you LT. Took down an enemy, heading back to you now.”

You took one last look around the ruins of the office, and once satisfied there were no more hidden assailants, you walked toward the doorway. After plastering yourself to the wall, you took a look up and down the hall, pivoting out a little just to be sure no one was going to take a lucky shot. All clear. Well, one end of the hallway anyway, the other was completely blocked off by a stack of fallen units and desks. 

Probably not a good sign.

Were they directing you?

You crossed the threshold fully and bolted into the next room, locking eyes with Ghost as he perched his foot on a fallen desk chair, it was rattling from his weight. Horangi gave you a nod from Ghost’s side and glanced over to the head of the room, keeping watch over Soap as he set up his charges with no small amount of grumbling. That wasn’t a good sign either. 

Your body was getting tired, your back was aching from all the weight you’d been hauling round. The only thing getting lighter was your ammo. You were praying that you were close to the end, hoping that wherever this supposed room was that Rousseau had locked himself into, it was going to reveal itself soon. You didn’t know how much more you could take.

“Stay on that door Sneak, make sure no one else goes looking for hiding spots” Ghost directed. “What’s taking so long, Soap?” 

You turned and followed Ghost’s order, side eyeing König as he stood over your struggling teammates, dwarfing Gaz and Soap under his watchful stance. He was breathing heavily, you could see the dramatic rise and fall of his hood giving away his fatigue. Other than that though, you were relieved to see that he was still unhurt.

Focus!

You snapped your attention to the hallway again and ignored your boyfriend, pulling your thoughts away from him completely. It had been a long time since you’d been on a mission with König and you were unused to the amount of space he took up. He was clouding your thoughts, sending your brain churning out worry like a spitting volcano as he kept charging through doorways and getting up close and personal with men as if he were indestructible.  

You shook your head and cast your eyes through the shadows, watching out for movement. You couldn’t linger over König any longer. 

Soon you realised that there wasn’t any noise. It wasn’t right. Things never went the way you’d trained for almost one hundred percent of the time, but it was strange that there hadn’t been more men around. You’d encountered most of the men on the way in and now that you were further into the heart of the building they were sprouting up in numbers few and far between. That combined with the fact the building felt strategically blocked off in areas was all just one big red flag, waving and buffeting like a sail in the breeze. 

“LT, there’s explosives already set here,” Soap shouted. “I couldn’t be sure before…but they've hidden them in the door casing. Powerful stuff by the looks of it too. If we try to get through this we could end up blasting ourselves to the moon by the looks of it.”

You whipped your head around and back to the group at the door, watching as they all stepped back. All at once everyone's heads snapped to Ghost and he frowned deeply enough that it could be seen through his eyeblack.

“Price, did you get that?” Ghost asked, speaking clearly for the comms. 

“Copy,” Price said, his voice crackling through all of your headsets. “Can you find an alternative route ahead?”

“Not on this floor,” Ghost responded. “This is the only way up.”

“Fuck!”

You winced at Price’s outburst and bit your lip. Should you speak?

Fuck it.

“There haven’t been a lot of men compared to what we expected either,” you noted. “Anyone else get the feeling we’ve been set up?”

Everyone else seemed to have the same thought, Gaz nodded your way, König looked like he wanted to scratch his way out of the walls and take you with him, Ghost narrowed his eyes. Was he annoyed you’d stated the obvious? You frowned over at him, but he moved shortly after that, sidling up to the window and taking a cautious peak outside. His back visibly stiffened as he caught a glimpse of something. 

“Price, there’s a truck heading out the gates to the south side. Do you see it?”

“We’re tracking it now. Ghost, take both of the teams out of the warehouse, whatever’s going on, I don’t like it. Meet us back at the extraction point, copy?”

“Copy, Captain.”

Ghost motioned his head in the direction of the doorway you were still guarding and while the others filed toward you, you stayed in place. You had to ensure no one would surprise them while they stepped out of the room. Ghost passed you and patted your shoulder, his touch like a lightning shock to your system. 

As much of a professional as he was, you hadn't expected him to be at a point where he was making an effort to praise you. A warmth spread over your chest then. 

Nevertheless, you couldn’t let yourself get too carried away. You put it to the back of your mind and followed up the rear of your group, looking around as you passed through the hallways of fallen men. Bodies littered the floors and by then most of the hallways were dark and devoid of any lighting. The green haze of your night vision goggles continued to wave unsettlingly and the crunch of debris was ever present under your boots. 

“We need to move slowly and quietly,” Ghost directed, heading toward the front of your group. “If the bastards have set up bombs there’s no telling what way they were trying to direct us and what happens if another one of them catches us alive. Any one of them could have a detonator, and we know from previous encounters they’re not shy about martyring themselves for the cause.”

Your heart rate picked up, but still you kept marching ahead. The group moved forward like a little troupe of ants, following your masked leader to what you hoped was safety. Each skittering stray piece of furniture under your feet had you jumping, every breath you took was like a gust of wind. Even with your ears ringing it felt like every bit of muffled noise was coming through like the beginnings of a dance anthem.

Knowing that someone with the power to blow the whole building on you might jump out at any second wasn’t great for your weakening composure. That wouldn’t stop you though. Your group powered on down the halls until you reached the lower stairway, and each of you took every step with care, pointing your weapons in different directions just to be sure that every angle was covered. 

With your gun pointed down, you were able to see that there was activity on the bottom floor, you could see people moving down below. You tapped Soap on the shoulder and pointed them out, allowing him to pass on the message until it carried on through the line and down to Ghost. All of you stopped moving then and watched the little group, stuck in silence while they propped open a piece of wood that had been covering a doorway in the stairs.

Ghost extended his arm and gave you all a series of clear hand signals, watching down the line to make sure you all read him clearly. Stay silent. Stay on me. We’re following them.

There was more pressure than ever to make sure that your steps were soundless. Your heartbeat was in your ears and your body was buzzing with how tightly your muscles were wound. Every step took you closer to the bottom and to the hatch, every successful movement gave you hope that you wouldn’t be found out. 

When your group reached the bottom, you were able to see that the men had replaced the sheet of wood and old construction PVC to try and hide the secret exit. Clearly that hadn’t been meant for your eyes. Perhaps it was lucky that you’d come to the stairway at the right time - it was hard to say, maybe they’d meant for exactly that to happen.

Ghost looked to König and together, without having to communicate, they shifted the board and König took position at the front. As always, he was first to breach.

All of you crept into the blown out entryway and were surprised to find a tunnel at your feet, complete with a very haphazard ladder built down into it. Aside from that, the little room you were in was empty. König replaced the piece of wood over the door once everyone was inside and soon you were surrounded in complete shadow, staring around at the others through the green hues. 

“Price, we’ve found a tunnel under the stairway of the building. What do you want us to do?” Ghost enquired, keeping an eye on the tunnel to make sure no one down below indicated that they’d heard him.

The comms were quiet, nothing but the ghostly whisper of static crumbling away at your ears. All of you eyed each other, stares hard enough to the cut the air between you all. The little room was getting hot with all of your bodies filling it, each breath getting harder to take. 

“Price, come in,” Ghost demanded. “Laswell? Anyone?”

Nothing. 

“Fuckin’ hell,” Soap breathed.

You pursed your lips and kept your stare fixed on Ghost. His eyes were jumping between you all like he was deciding on his lunchtime football team. He took a moment to think, trying to bring clarity into the stuffy room, he was probably waiting for Price to come back in too, but nevertheless the line remained dead.

“Right. Here’s what we’re gonna do. More than likely this entire building is rigged to blow, we need to get out, but more than likely this tunnel is a sign that Rousseau must be here. He would never have left all his men behind, he likes to make a show of being on base and ‘protecting’ and taking control of his men. König, you’re gonna lead Horangi and Gaz through the back entrance at the loading bay and head to the extraction point, find out why command isn’t talking to us. I’m taking Sneak and Soap with me and we’re gonna see what’s down there, see if we can’t dig Rousseau out.”

“What?”

All of you turned your heads as König spoke, the sharpness of his voice coming out muffled through his hood. 

“Did you not hear me right?” Ghost asked.

“I heard you clearly, Lieutenant,” König sneered. “But I don’t agree with that course of action. You can’t just go wandering around tunnels with only two people with you, that’s suicide. Price gave his orders before the line went down, he was very clear, therefore we should all be going to the extraction point.”

“This isn’t the time to disagree with me, König.”

“It is if you’re going to get yourself and two of your subordinates killed,” König said, clearly gritting his teeth. “Not to mention you’re abandoning us with god knows how many men waiting outside to stop us from leaving.”

“Nice of you to care about what happens to us,” Ghost remarked, “Then again there’s probably only one person you’re trying to protect here, isn’t there?”

Your stomach dropped to your feet. It was like a small fire had broken out in the room and now you had the urge to go beating down the secret entrance and throwing caution to the wind. Was this really going to happen?

“What’s that supposed to mean?” König asked.

“You know what it means. Now would you like to press the issue or would you like to get back to your job and do what you’re being paid to do, you fucking goon.”

König seemed to shoot you a sideways glance, you couldn’t really tell with his visor down, but before you could think to warn him otherwise he decided that it was indeed time to press the issue. Every fibre of your being wanted to throttle him then. If your choice was crawling into a death tunnel or ending up in an argument between Ghost and König during an operation, then tunnel of death it is!

“Paid personnel or not, at least I’m trying to get us all out safely,” König retorted. 

“All? Trying to make sure we all get out, or just trying to make sure you’ve got a warm hole to crawl back to at the end of this? Which is it really?”

There was an almost tangible silence in the room. It was as if there was a thick bubble coating you all, preventing a single whisper of noise from escaping. You couldn’t even hear the others breathe, not over König anyway. He was panting like a charging bull, breaking through the bubble, he sounded like he was ready to tear Ghost down into a stump.  

“Ghost, what’re you talking about?” Soap said, not able to contain himself. “We shouldn’t be arguing, we should be moving! Let’s just go.”

“You’re not going down into that tunnel, Sergeant!” König warned, making a move to stop Soap.

“Or what?” Ghost asked, rising to his full height and jumping into König’s path.

König stood silently, he didn’t say anything - but he didn't allow Ghost to intimidate him either. He stood perfectly still, besides straightening his back, and eyed his opponent. The two of them looked like windup toys ready to strike. 

“Nothing to say?” Ghost sneered. “Then move.”

“Lieutenant, be reasonable,” König said. 

“I am being incredibly reasonable, König,” Ghost laughed, a dark chuckle rumbling from his throat. “In fact, judging by the way you’re acting, maybe Sneak can tell you just how reasonable I’m being.”

Everyone’s heads turned to you, navigating the thick silence that followed with ease. Their night vision goggles stared you down as if they were being programmed to move in sync. You swallowed a thick lump in your throat and gripped tightly at your gun, holding onto it like it was the only thing tethering you to reality. What were you supposed to say now?

“What’s going on?” Gaz sighed, clearly at the end of his tether. 

“Tell them what’s going on, Sneak,” Ghost ordered. “Tell them exactly why this little song and dance is happening right now. Go on. Let them know why Captain Rags has his face in a twist over you going down into the tunnel. Let’s get it out there for the world to know.”

Every one of his words hit you like a knife in your gut. There were blades sticking out at all angles and it was taking all your strength just to stay up. So this was it? You were truly going out in a blaze, but it was far from glorious. 

“Sneak?” König said, his voice strained with confusion. 

“König, Ghost found the pictures in your wallet when he knocked your stuff off the rack yesterday,” you said quietly. “He knows we’re together.”

“What the fuck!” Soap whispered.

“Sneak, what do you mean you’re together?” Gaz asked. “You can’t be together, Price will fucking kill you…”

Horangi remained silent. 

“Apparently they’re not ones for following orders,” Ghost sneered. “Otherwise we wouldn’t even be having this discussion would we?”

Ghost looked between you both and you growled out at yourself, sinking into disbelief that all of it was really happening. It felt surreal to be standing around arguing in a building that was full of god knows how many explosives. Why was it that König could never just follow orders? Why couldn’t you? The room was so hot it felt like you were all starting to cook, smelt like it too. 

“König, just do as Ghost says and take the others,” you commanded. “At this rate we’re all going to get blown up and this whole argument won’t even matter.”

“Sneak-”

“No, König! Just go, we can all talk about it later.”

“That’s if you even make it back later!”

“Don’t think like that. Just take Horangi and Gaz back to extraction and find out why Price hasn’t answered us. Otherwise none of us are getting out of here!”

König continued to stare for a second more, but finally he’d seen sense. He shook his head and furiously muttered something to himself in German before he walked back to the exit. He gave you one last look and with that, slid back the wooden panel and walked out with Horangi in tow, missing only Gaz as he left you all. 

With the door open and König gone you felt like you could breathe a little easier again, but as soon as you looked back at the others, the feeling went away. Gaz shook his head at you and walked out, mumbling something that was too low to hear and soon it was only you, Ghost and Soap left. 

“Steamin’ Jesus, Sneak. What the fuck were you thinking? Have you really been lying to us all this time?”

You sighed and looked at Soap, watching the way his mouth downturned in disgust. A horrible nauseous feeling permeated in your stomach and in your throat, but you couldn’t pay too much attention to it. You had to keep your head on more important things. 

“Clearly I wasn’t thinking,” you sighed. “Look, I’ll answer whatever questions you want after we’re out of this, but we need to get moving.”

“Agreed,” Ghost said, already heading for the tunnel. “We’ve had enough distraction already.”

Ghost cut Soap off from interrupting, shooting him a hard look before he took a flashbang from one of his holsters and primed it. He threw it down the tunnel and waited for a reaction. Nothing. After being met with silence, he quickly flew down into the darkness, leaving you and Soap up top. Soap surely burned a hole through his night vision and into you. 

You shivered and followed Ghost, cautiously setting your foot on the ladder, not liking the way it wobbled with Ghost’s weight and yours. There wasn’t much to be done about it though. You had to get down there quickly and make sure he had backup.

You scurried down and stuck one foot behind the other, releasing each of the metal rungs like they were on fire. It didn’t take long until you were at the bottom and eventually Soap followed you both and rather nicely decided against booting you in the head on his way down, dropping to your side instead.

“There’s no one here, but they’ll have heard that, no doubt,” Ghost warned. “Stay close and lets find out what these fuckers are hiding down here.”

You nodded your agreement and followed him down the tunnel, watching the rickety support beams with a cautious eye. König had been right to worry.

What’s he thinking right now? Is he hurt?

Not again, stop thinking about him. Focus! 

The tunnel didn’t seem like it had been in operation for very long. Something that had seen more use would surely have been built better, you reasoned, not looking like it could crumble at any second. As you took a few more twists and turns and continued to follow the path it didn’t seem to get much better. The walls looked hastily dug out and like any little disturbance might bury them. Though as you all turned another corner and followed the winding walkway, you were surprised to find yourself in a rather large cavernous room.

It was built solidly and looked far more like a permanent structure, it was supported by thick metal beams from which overhead lights were suspended and hanging down from long wires. It also contained a plethora of scaffolding like shelves, housing a few abandoned looking wooden crates, some of them looked like they’d been raided, others were dusty and dark with disuse. You flipped your goggles up and watched the two men at your sides repeat the action, finally noticing the true extent of all the grime and blood that had covered them both. 

“What is this place?” Soap wondered out loud. 

“Looks like some kind of storage facility. Well, it was one anyway,” you remarked.

You didn’t miss the way Soap narrowed his eyes at you from the side of his vision. He advanced forward through the looming racks while you stayed behind and watched the other men go. You had to give yourself a second for the bile to stop rising in your stomach. To say that being on an op with two men that had it out for you was making you feel uneasy was an understatement. 

However you didn’t have the luxury of lingering on for very long. Once you noticed Ghost heading to the set of shelves that blocked your view of the head of the room, you started to follow after him, ensuring that he’d have some cover. Part of you felt better being around someone that had had longer to digest the news. 

Once you’d flown past the racks and over to Ghost you began to realise that there was a thrumming noise emanating from the far side of the room. It rumbled and growled and grew harder on your ears the closer you got and as soon as you made your way round the racking you saw the source of it. A big set of metal doors.

Soap joined you from the otherside, clearly finding the rest of the room just as empty as you had. Ghost looked over to Soap then and back at the door, motioning for him to get close. 

“Soap, do you have the borescope?”

“Aye, hold on, I’ll sort it.”

Soap reached into his bag and pulled out the long snake of wire and fetched his drill. From there he made a small opening in the door with quick precision and sent the coiled camera through, taking a look at the monitor as he did so. The monitor quickly flashed on and you and Ghost were able to peer round and see a flurry of men running around a mixture of freight and pickup trucks, loading cargo onto them. There were some that were beginning to drive off, halting just as they made it onto the big ramp then ran up the far side of that room. 

How on earth had they managed to hide that? 

You frowned as you watched on, realising that the last trucks were beginning to get closed up and prepared for driving off, you could hear the echoes of the doors being slammed shut. The men were shouting louder now, driving each other to go, go, go. You watched Ghost out of the corner of your eye, waiting for him to make a decision. All until the final man walked into the centre of the room, he was surrounded by a group of heavily covered up muscle men toting machine guns like they were little more than big boys with pretend sticks in the playground. The man walked in the centre of them with a confident strut - he looked just like he did in the videos.

“Holy fuck, is that Rousseau?” Soap whispered.

Ghost nodded tightly.

“Brothers! We have done well today, the enemy safehouse has been destroyed and the rest of the soldiers will still be trapped in the warehouse trying to route us out. Let us leave and go to our new base, onwards and upwards my friends!”

The enemy safehouse has been destroyed? Price? Laswell? Were they ok?

You widened your eyes, but you didn’t get much time to think about Price and the others. 

Rousseau had sped over to one of the trucks and once inside, had set off a cataclysm. The doors to the ramp opened, bathing the basement in startling sunlight and from there the explosions began, a loud series of bangs that shook the room like a hurricane, each one unsettling the walls and floor as they got closer. It felt like a tiger leaping ever closer, ready to land straight onto your belly and tear you open. 

What the fuck!

“We need to get out of here!”Ghost roared. “Head for the trucks, we can try to get into the one at the back. 

He kicked at the door and luckily it burst open, allowing you all to run forward and into the next room. Because the room was so long, you were still covered by shadow and no one seemed to notice your group’s appearance. No one was shooting at you anyway. 

Your throat burned as you ran, your mind was racing, intent on following Ghost as he stuck to the walls, keeping yourselves hidden in the darkness. He was racing out ahead while you and Soap tied with each other, running neck and neck and panting like hounds as you propelled yourselves ahead of the blasts. The room was really shaking now and while the last truck began to pull away and ascend up the ramp, your eyes teared up. 

No, no, no. Not like this!

You pumped your legs a little bit harder and Soap did the same, managing to sprint ahead like you were all in a murmuration, moving fluidly and in sync with one another. With that effort made, you all managed to jump onto the last truck, detaching from the wall at the last minute before attaching yourselves to the back. You all grabbed onto what holds that you could, affixing yourselves to the bolts that kept the doors closed and held on for dear life, watching on with horror as you saw the warehouse burning up in the distance, leaving it in a trail of smoke. 

It was then you were finally able to hear the crackle of comms and a blended mixture of broken up accented shouts, German, Korean and English. The others were trying to contact you. 

Had they made it out ok? 

“Gaz, is that you?” Ghost shouted out, trying to adjust his headset while he gripped onto the bolt. “We’re on Rousseau, we’re out of the warehouse. Did your team make it out?”

If you weren’t busy being terrified for everyone’s lives  you would have rolled your eyes. 

“LT, is that you?” Gaz called out, his voice finally coming through clearly. “Are you all ok?”

Ghost didn’t get a chance to say anything to that, he was quickly cut off.

“Lieutenant, respond!” König snarled, his voice snapping out like an angry wolf. 

“We made it out,” Ghost confirmed. “Did you hear what I said? Where are you? We’re following Rousseau, we’re on one of his trucks. His men must’ve been instructed to set this up for him upon capture. They must’ve had a plan to move when they knew we were coming.”

“We made it out, we started heading for the extraction point, but we got cut off by Rousseau’s forces in the woods. He must’ve left men behind to try and stop us from getting out, we got em’ though. We still haven’t heard any word from Price. What direction are you heading in? Should we follow?”

“We got word that they destroyed the safe house,” Soap said. “Price and Laswell might not’ve made it.”

You finally turned and looked up, blinking back at the rush of air as you changed direction and looked at Soap. He looked like a terrified cat that had got itself stuck up a tree. Both of his hands must’ve been white knuckling the bolt from under his gloves - he was holding onto the same one as you, standing over you while you crouched low and hooked your feet into the groove of the bevelled doors. The extra grip was helping your shaking body. 

Why couldn't Ghost have just let you and König pair off? You’d have taken jungle warfare over hanging off the back of a speeding truck anyday. It would have avoided the whole stupid argument back at the tunnel too. In that moment, while you held on for dear life, you realised that there was a lot of things that you’d have wished that could’ve been done differently. 

“Don’t follow us,” Ghost said, taking back control of the line, “Try to find out if anyone made it to the extraction. You hear that, König? Make sure that we can make it out of this, don’t do anything stupid!”

“Hard to say what’s stupid when your definition seems so different to mine,” König snarked.

“König, don’t be a smartass! Just try and find Price so we can get Rousseau,” you growled. 

Ghost tilted his head at you, clearly surprised that you’d been the one to tell him off for that. As much as you were relieved to know he was ok, and as much as you’d like to comfort him, you knew the mission was much bigger than yourselves. Getting everyone out safely and trying to successfully capture Rousseau was the most important thing and you could only do that if you were apart.

The line remained quiet for a second.

“Ok, we’re heading to the extraction again now,” Gaz confirmed. “We’ll let you know when we reach point.”

“Copy, Sergeant.”

You looked up at Ghost and then at Soap, watching as both men struggled with staying stuck to the truck. This wasn’t going to work long term, you could feel your own arms wanting to give out, it wouldn’t be long till you’d all come tumbling off and crashing onto the dirt road. You had to figure out a way to get to a more secure location. 

“Ghost, do you think you can hold on to the truck and try to support my weight at the same time?” You asked.

“Why?” he barked.

“If you hold onto me, I can try and climb up the truck and get myself on top,” you explained. 

“And then what about us?” Soap growled. “All very well sorting out a nice place for yourself up there.”

“If I move up there, then you can crouch next to Ghost and open the door on the side we’re standing on,” you said, glaring up at him. “That way we can all hold it so it doesn’t swing out and you two can climb in and shut it.”

This wasn’t the time for accusations. You waited for them both to share their thoughts, and jumped when the truck hit a bump. It almost sent you all flying. Soap yelped and hugged into the bolt tighter and Ghost grunted. You fumbled as your feet were displaced and wobbled, your hands slipping off of the bolt and sending you sprawling backwards. 

Ghost reached out and grabbed you in the nick of time, just when you thought you were about to be grated parmesan on the side of the pebbled road. You huffed out a breath and grabbed a hold of the bar, swallowing down your pulse as it tried to climb out of your throat. 

“Right, get on with it,” Ghost said, “I can only hold you for so long.”

You shook your head and had to remind yourself of the plan. That close call rocked you.

Without any more interruption, you grabbed onto the bolt on Ghost’s side with both hands and swung your legs up, planting them against the wall while Ghost kept his hand flat against your back. As you got higher up, his support dwindled, but from there you were able to reach around the top and kick your legs against the doors. With one last grunt you were able to get yourself fully on top of the truck, but kept yourself belly down on it, ensuring that you wouldn’t be seen. 

“Ok, I’m gonna hold onto the door now. Open it when Soap’s in position.”

The other two fumbled around, getting themselves steady. After a few moments of contoroting themselves around one another they were able to open the door, it was heavy and it took everything in you not to go flying out with it even with Ghost holding it from his position too, but you were able to stop it just enough so that Ghost and Soap could climb in as they both took turns to hold the door alongside you.

Once they’d disappeared inside and snapped the door shut, you realised that there was a small fault in your plan when you were left gripping on for dear life. Not to mention how much colder it was on top with all the wind rushing past your face. Then there was also the bugs…

“Nice work, Sneak,” Ghost congratulated, voice coming in quiet over the line. “I’m gonna get soap to drill a hole in the ceiling. Have you got your knife with you?”

“Yeah, why?” you asked, frowning as you slowly worked out where he was going with this.

“That should give you something decent to hold onto.”

“Are you serious? Can’t you guys cut a hole in the ceiling for me?” you huffed.

“Who do you think I am, Qui-Gon fuckin’ Jinn?” Soap retorted, you could hear the drill going in the background. “Must’ve forgotten my lightsaber at home. Beyond blowing the thing off, how am I gonna cut a hole in the roof, sneak?”

“I’m not asking you to melt the whole roof off soap, you must be able to make a small hole with that drill, just make a few drill holes and weaken the metal!” you growled. 

“Negative. We need you up there, Sergeant,” Ghost interrupted. “We need someone who can see ahead and tell us when the trucks are stopping or if we leave the forest. If they reach base or they leave us with no cover we need to get ready to jump off and hide.”

You sighed and watched as the drill bit poked its way out behind you, grating through the metal with a sound like grinding teeth. You would need to turn and slide forward a few inches to be able to reach it, but it looked like that was your best way to keep on top of the truck.

Without anymore stalling, you flipped around and watched as it disappeared and appeared a couple times more, forming a ragged little line. That would be enough for your knife to eat through.

You shakily reached behind you and to your knife holster, gripping the handle like a vice in your hands, whatever you did you couldn’t let it fly from your hold. With that in mind you quickly extended your arm and stabbed it through the hole, gritting your teeth as your hand slammed into the metal. That was surely going to bruise,

“Could’ve done with some warning, Sneak,” Soap huffed. “You almost took my finger off.”

“Poor baby, maybe you’d like to swap places,” you retorted. “See how you like holding onto the top of a truck with nothing but your hands.”

“Watch it, or I’ll send that knife flyin’ out,” he barked back.

“Shut up, Soap,” Ghost growled. “Keep the line clear. Sneak, let us know what you see, copy?”

“Copy that, Ghost.”

You hardened your gaze onto the horizon, watching as the trees came waving by and flew into your periphery, and adjusted your position. With both hands firmly wrapped around your knife, you were deadset on keeping your fingers wrapped around it with a snake like constriction. In that moment you were picturing it as Rousseau’s neck, already seeing red as you thought about Price and König and all the shit that you’d been through since chasing after the bastard.

You were going to get him. You were going to make him pay. 

If König, Gaz and Horangi didn’t get back to you soon with good news, then you were fully prepared to unleash hell on him. It didn’t matter what Price was going to do when he found out about you and König, it didn’t matter about the rising blood and seething vitriol that would surely come with the revelation. Price was the one that helped shape you into the soldier you were, he was the one that had gotten you back alive from countless missions, he was your reason for marching on in some of your toughest fights. He cared about you and he believed in you - it was why he was so protective in the first place.

If Price was gone then it wouldn’t be long until the killer met the same fate…of course only after suffering for their actions in the meantime. 

Next part here

[sir-adamus]

i've got the blu ray for volume 1 playing and i'm watching the behind the scenes video and Monty explicitly spells out how important collaboration with other creatives was in building RWBY, saying how he wanted to work with Kerry and Miles on it in creating the world and how he mostly gave them broad strokes. and it's mentioned how they all put the show bible together - i'm gonna put the whole transcript for the video under the cut (which i'm having to do myself because no one has uploaded this video anywhere as far as i can tell and there's no fucking subtitles)

Monty Oum [Creator and Director]: It’s the stories I’ve always wanted to tell versus the idea I came up with about, a little over a year ago. And we were talking about doing another show, and I just kind of half-asleep came up with the idea of a color rule for a bunch of characters. The red, white, black and yellow color scheme was something that was very prominent even in my previous work, so I started matching names up, matching ideas up. Also thinking about like, some of the ideas I’d stored up over the years. At some point or another the word ‘RWBY’ came to me.

Monty: Starting the show out originally, I designed the original character, Ruby, as well as going into the other characters. So once I had the first trailer done, and thinking about the rest of the characters for the show, I started bringing in other artists who I had watched for years. People I’d always said “someday I’ll work with them, someday I’ll have them design for me.” And when I was certain about having certain characters, I first contacted an artist I admired and found over DeviantArt. Her name was Ein Lee, she’s actually from Taiwan, and I found her art probably well over five years ago, and just loved her art style, and therefore wanted to incorporate it into my characters. So, I would do rough designs for team RWBY as well as designs for team JNPR, and she would flesh that out to be even further. To the point where eventually I didn’t need to design characters anymore, she started designing a bunch of the rest of the characters down the line.

Monty: The second person I brought on to RWBY was Kerry, because we had just been having conversations about the kind of show we could make. I’d been working with Miles on Season 10. He was writing scenes while I was making scenes, and so the three of us would have a lot of meetings and collaborate on the show to the point where I just started coming up with the broad strokes eventually and they had pretty much written the bulk of the show. Collaboration’s a big deal here, and I tried to include as many people as I can.

Kerry Shawcross [Co-writer]: Right after RvB ended, we wanted to just go straight into RWBY, but that was like right when we were going into commercial season. So we would work our normal hours here. Like 10 to 7-ish, then we would go back to one of our apartments and just start writing.

Miles Luna [Co-writer]: Monty really was enthusiastic about having these characters that may appear really one-dimensional for like the first few scenes that you see them, but the longer you get to know them, you realise “Oh, Yang isn’t just a dumb blonde party girl. She’s a very caring and nurturing girl, that has had to essentially be there for Ruby when she was young.”

Kathleen Zuelch [Producer]: When Monty and Miles and Kerry came to me, and really took me through the story. I started becoming a huge believer, because I’m a big fan of old school, traditional fairy tales, I love the Brothers Grimm, I love all the Snow White, and I love Little Red Riding Hood. I grew up with all of those stories, and the way that they were very clever in creating this whole world that’s kind of making homage to all of these amazing stories really inspired me to get more on board with what they wanted to do with this whole anime show.

Taylor McNee (née Pelto) [Art Director]: The world of RWBY, it looks very familiar. We wanted a blend of very classic looking architecture and clothing and cars, but we’re also mixing in this really kind of futuristic feel, like these little touches of some really futuristic stuff like holograms and things that you wouldn’t find in a classic [inaudible]. And that’s how we’re making this world unique. Our assets have to go through this pipeline of concept, modelling, texturing, and then finally being able to be put into the 3D program. So we start out with the concept and we usually bring that image into Maya, which is the main 3D software that we use. We have to make a 3D model that looks exactly like the concept that we were given, and it’s quite a process. Basically, we’re pushing polys and extruding stuff until we make the perfect shape, then afterwards we have to UV unwrap it, and then lay everything out on a texture sheet and then paint it, and that will put the image on the model. After that we’re basically done with the model and texture, and then we have to give it to the animators. So then we will set it up in Poser so the animators can grab it and use it for their characters.

Gray Haddock [Lead Editor]: There’s a lot of people working on this show, and there’s a lot of different elements in the pipeline. Editorial kinda serves as a hub between all the different departments, so we help all the communication and coordination between all the different pieces of the show, depending on what part of development that they’re in. Editorial’s getting involved way early in the process, we work alongside the director and the writers and the storyboard artists, and we use the scripts to help develop the storyboards and the camera angles for all those boards. So editorial is responsible for building up the moments of any given scene in terms of the timing and what you wanna look at, at any given moment. So we take the script and we help develop the camera angles and how long you wanna linger in a particular camera angle, look at one character or another or the scene as a whole, and the rhythm of the scene in terms of how long is it gonna take to spend on a particular line or when you want the music to come in, things like that. So we build up a set of animatics with the storyboards, and the first pass of all the audio. This is what then is handed off to the animators, so they can know exactly what is in what shot and how long do they have to animate it in a given shot. And once they’re done animating and their shot’s been approved, then their shot goes to the render farm, we get the rendered shot back and we drop it into the timeline for our episode and finesse the cut a little bit if we have to. But for the most part, we’ve done our job right and everything should pretty much be locked in for the most part by the time we’re getting animation.

Kerry: What’s kinda interesting as we’re creating the characters is, we kinda knew what kind of character they’d be. We knew Ruby would act a certain way, we knew Weiss would act a certain way, but we didn’t really know much about them. So we would get to the point where we’d be figuring out plotlines or figuring out dialogue and we’d be like “What would Weiss say here? What would Nora say here?” And then it turned into “Oh well now we know.”

Miles: Obviously we put a lot of thought into Ruby, Weiss, Blake and Yang before we started writing the dialogue. I remember sitting upstairs and we made a show bible, and we’re starting- we talked about likes, dislikes, personality traits. One of the first things I remember making was “Weiss drinks coffee. Blake drinks tea.”

Kerry: It’s important. It sounds not important at all, but it’s very important. It says so much about them

Miles: But it’s so important. So much about them, also it says nothing about them. It was just like- that’s just what it is.

Monty: I want the show to have resonance with people who are growing up. Cos everyone’s story is the story of kind of becoming who they are. Especially these days when the path of becoming who you are tends to be marginalised with reality. Having done what I’ve done, where I’ve essentially dropped out of high school, started learning this stuff on my own, and therefore land in a position where I get to take the things I was dreaming about when I was growing up and make it real. I tend to get a lot of response from people who are also not sure what they’re meant to become, a lot of them also have the same bright imaginations and with the way the world is, the hardships of what it means to grow up tends to marginalise who you are, and I would hate that to happen to anyone because the future is in creativity and that’s not something you can just manufacture. I actually would like this show to grow up with the people, so unlike most shows where they tend to be ageless or age very slowly, I’d like our fifteen-year-old fans watching fifteen-year-old Ruby, when they’re twenty-five, to be watching twenty-five-year-old Ruby, and to actually have some resonance with the character. Probably one of my favourite types of feedback is to say “I know this person” or “this person is just like me,” and that’s probably one of the best things about coming up with these characters.

[jet-teeth]

Specifically relating to my latest post, but in general also: I feel like my attention span has gotten so bad these days in terms of actually finishing anything, to the point that the deflection/procrastination-projects get as silly as "builds a whole-ass 3D model instead of finishing the goddamn drawing because that's somehow easier than dealing with the perfectionism demon hovering over my shoulder when I draw these days"

(I think this why I'm trying to chase looser styles/play around with traditional media here and there again, since anything too precise starts to activate the Overthink Demon. I guess what I post is "oops! All sketches" anyway, but a lot of things still get overworked. Probably should start using timers again or something idk) Rarely do I actually "finish" models as well, which is generally why I don't post any (they are almost always studies/character reference models) but let's see if I can get around to making some Printable Little Guys this year, since frankly I find 3D a more comfortable medium to work in than outright painting/doing rendered-out stuff

Ramble post, but I'm always interested in the topic of "process" when it comes to art, and how struggles & limitations might actually help an individual find what their strengths really are too (or, just reveal areas that need more work. I DO want to finish a couple of the paintings in my WIP folder, but I also have accepted that it's not gonna be the natural medium for me ever) (I always try to include art in long text posts like this so they aren't as boring. Have a Banana Cat drawing I never uploaded. Also yes the printer HAS been added to my enclosure and it's great fun :> )

[alithographica]

Re: Redbubble & Alternatives

Redbubble is doing some nonsense and I've deleted my account. I barely bothered with it anyway, was mostly there for people who've asked for specific images as posters.

Anyway in doing that I sacrificed the $4.35 that was still sitting in my earnings. They only let you cash out at $20, so rather than drum up sales and therefore make Redbubble more money, I'm gonna do what I feel is $4.35 in anti-publicity for them. 🥳

tl;dr there are new fees that hurt artist income at all sales levels. Redbubble is either looking to cut costs and raise profits for funsies, or is in serious financial trouble.

About the new fees:

Redbubble offers their services to artists by allowing artists to control their profit margin above a certain baseline manufacturing fee. This was pretty cool! There's now an additional fee that will be charged starting May 1, 2023. It is not an upfront fee that requires you to pay out of pocket, but it does directly cut your profit margin. How badly? Well...

By Redbubble's own example, if in one month you sell $300 in products that you had set at a 25% margin, you'd previously earn $75. Under the new structure, that earnings level means you pay a $28 fee, so you will now be paid $47. That $28 represents a 37% cut off what you were supposed to earn.

There's a full fee table in that link, but other highlights include a $1 fee if you earned $2 (aka 50%!) and big sellers who'd expect to take home $400 will now receive $320 (an $80 fee, 20%).

It also puts you in a weird spot that earning $1 more in a month may bump you to the next tier, causing you to actually take home less money. Make $1 more, end up losing $11. Make it make sense. 🤨

About the new tiers:

Each shop is evaluated and labeled Standard, Premium, or Pro. Premium and Pro shops are not subject to the new fees, but there's no clarity on how to move from one tier to another. Redbubble says it's under your control but it's clearly not. Many artists are reporting that they have accounts with next to no sales that have been labeled Pro, and accounts with thousands of annual sales that are labeled Standard.

Action items:

Look, I'm not gonna tell other artists that they have to close their shops, or tell buyers not to buy from Redbubble if your favorite artists have chosen to stay. What you do with the above info is up to you.

What I will say is that many artists are leaving because the new pay structure sucks. I encourage people who buy from Redbubble to expand their support to other sites.

Attrition is arguably their goal here—they know people will leave over this, and that'll probably lower their costs and lower competition for the remaining accounts. But goodwill is lost easily and they're playing a dangerous game on betting how many stay vs. leave. I'm out.

Feel free to leave your feedback on Redbubble's feedback form here, but it feels slightly like yelling into the void.

Alternatives:

tbh I don't have a good read on things. If you do know of any recommended (or unrecommended) print-on-demand sites, speak up!

I will say that as of now (April 2023), based on my research:

🟢 INPRNT sounds like a winner if your game is art prints and stickers. Does not have any wearable products like t-shirts.

🟡 Etsy + Printify/Printful might be viable? Etsy always had higher profit margins than POD marketplaces, but it's a bit more work and they also do weird things occasionally. Also has a listing fee so if you're the type to upload a ton of designs, pricey.

🔴 Teepublic is owned by Redbubble. Doesn't have the tier/new fee structure as of now but might be imminent. Have also heard their customer service sucks.

🔴 Society6 is going to charge artists shipping costs, and there's going to be a (mandatory?) subscription service launched in the fall, so that's not a winner anymore either.

[katealpha]

Art by @Dizy_Wata_Toons

—-————————————-

Prologue:

Shortly after the year 2026 began, the Earth was suddenly visited by a fleet of massive saucer ships. There was panic at first, with many seeing this as the beginning of an alien invasion. However, contact was made between the two, and over a few months, humanity began to learn more about the Serpent Empire.

Predominantly made up of clones, the serpent species were born to serve their leaders, with the most efficient way of growing new clones being through the natural reproductive system. For eons, the serpents were conquerors, taking resources and women from various planets to serve as revered but captive broodmares for the aliens. By the time the serpents discovered earth, they’d expanded and taken so much control that the breeding program was entirely voluntary. Once diplomatic ties were made, the serpents began to integrate themselves into Earth’s societies. Chiefly, they advertised the breeding program and offered unbelievable amounts of money to volunteers.

This is where Nina Gao came in.

Nina was an actress who had recently started to gain traction in Hollywood. Seeing an opportunity to boost her career and help bridge the gap between Earth and the serpents, she had her agent contact the empire and soon, there was a drop ship hovering in front of her penthouse balcony….

# 1 Week Later….

A a phone camera began to record, standing up on a small tripod. The subject was Nina, who after a week of thinking, decided how she’d record the progress of what was happening to her. In short, she was pregnant. The operation done on her was a success.

Once she saw that she was being recorded live on YouTube, she smiled and stepped back so the camera could capture her from the thighs up. Now that she was in frame, she waved.

“Hey everyone! Nina here. I don’t normally upload to my official YouTube channel, but this is a very special occasion. Some of you might already know what this is about if you follow my Twitter and Instagram, but I’ll explain it again here. So, those serpent empire aliens who’ve been chilling out around our planet? Well, they’ve been basically doing help wanted ads for their breeding program.” The actress sneered slightly. “I know it sounds super weird, but they assured me that it was refined and safe for humanoids like me. Yeah, I kinda called them to volunteer. Why? Because I think having at least one movie star hear them out will make things between our kinds. That, and I’ll admit, I’m making twice as much as I would on a normal gig. If you’re watching at home and struggling with your bills…I’d probably think about it.” She gave a rather awkward chuckle before she changed subjects.

“Anyways, the procedure wasn’t really bad. They did it exactly a week ago, so as I’m recording this, I am pregnant with their kind. Just to make it fully known. In fact I’ve already started showing. They told me that the pregnancy would last about a month.” She sighed. “So yeah, hopefully it’ll all turn out okay. But here, let me show you guys the progress so far.”

Nina zipped down her thin sweatshirt and revealed her bare stomach to the camera. While she was hardly completely toned around her tummy, a turn to the side showed that something was different. Her stomach looked like she’d eaten too much at a restaurant. Like an average food baby one would see on tik tok or even that side of YouTube.

“You can definitely notice a little when I turn to the side. That’s gonna get a lot bigger over the next few weeks, and they already told me that I’m gonna start getting growth spurts and cravings soon. So yeah, can’t wait for that crap to get started. I’m just glad I only have voice roles to worry about for a while. I don’t know if I can go on a set with how nauseous I’ve been feeling all week. They basically plumped this concoction of their DNA and other stuff into my body, which forms into their version of babies over a month. Don’t worry, it was through my belly button and it didn’t even hurt. It felt weird but it wasn’t like getting a syringe poked into you.”

As she finished saying this, her stomach audibly rumbled on camera. She looked down and blinked. “Ugh, I just got super hungry. I’m gonna end this video now. Please keep things respectful in the comments, and it’ll be seeing you in the next update.” Nina reached over and ended the live feed to upload it fully. Afterwards, she went directly to the Door Dash app, all while her stomach moaned and gurgled deeply…

[yumeka-sxf]

Spy x Family Operation Diary - mini-games

As mentioned in my previous post about the Operation Diary game, I'm making a second post discussing the many fun and varied mini-games that you can play!

There's seventeen total mini-games, with the first four being available right from the start, and the rest as you progress. Each mini-game has three courses that increase in difficulty. You start with the Peanuts course, and after you've paid Inspiration Points to play the game in that course three times, you'll unlock the Penguin course, and then finally the Chimera course.

Since I can't embed more than one video per post, I instead uploaded short videos of ten of the seventeen mini-games to YouTube so you can watch them via the links below (as for the remaining seven mini-games, I may upload videos of them to YouTube eventually but I'm not gonna make another post. You can follow the playlist I made here for any new Operation Diary uploads). All the videos are about 30 seconds each since that's all that the Switch allows.

Yor's Cooking

Vegetables fall from the top of the screen and you have to make Yor cut them before they fall below the blue cut line. If you cut them right as the vegetable is centered on the line, you'll get more points! After enough successful cuts, Yor's "serious mode" meter is filled and you're temporarily able to slow time so you can cut more easily. In the later courses, dog food boxes will also fall and you have to avoid cutting those.

Eden Dodgeball

You play as Anya, Becky, and Damian (you can swap between them) in a dodgeball match against Bill and two other kids. You have to hit each of your three opponents enough times to get them out of the game (deplete their health bar) while also avoiding getting hit yourself. You can dodge and jump to avoid being hit and can also catch a ball thrown at you if you press the button at the right time. Bill has the most health out of the three and throws very fast. Becky and Damian can throw super shots when their meter is filled while Anya is able to use her mind-reading to successfully dodge hits up to three times.

Loid's Escape

This is a stealth game where you play as Twilight on a mission to swap paintings in an art museum with fakes within a time limit. You have to make your way around the museum to swap 5 paintings while also avoiding the enemies with flashlights. If you run or walk near them, they'll hear you and may come after you. If they catch up, Twilight will take them out but you'll lose time. However, you also have a crouch walk that you can do which is slower, but the enemies can't hear you. Once you've successfully swapped all the paintings, all the enemies will come after you as you make a dash to the exit before time runs out.

Thorn Princess's Work

You play as Yor/Thorn Princess and have to take down a bunch of bad guys within a time limit before moving onto the next group. You can either do quick stabs with her stillettos or kick them. The former is more efficient, however kicking knocks them down, so that's good to use if you get surrounded. A few of the larger enemies will also attack back, but there will be visual cues so you can dodge them. If you get hit, you'll lose some time. After enough successful attacks, Yor's "big attack" meter will get filled, enabling you to do a really powerful attack that will take out a bunch of enemies at once.

Also, I have to say about the two aforementioned mini-games, I love how Anya's expression changes when you hover your cursor over Loid's game vs Yor's game...

She looks "waku waku" happy for Loid's...

...and terrified about Yor's 😂

Bond GO

Anya has a dream where she's riding on Bond collecting tons of stella! This is a fairly simple platforming game where you make Bond jump around the clouds to collect stella while also avoiding obstacles like the thunder clouds and crayon spikes. Each time you collect enough stella, you'll enter "fever mode" where Bond will grow larger and be temporarily invincible. However, each hit or fall off the screen will reduce your fever meter. You can collect Penguinman and Chimera for additional power-ups.

Anya's Fashion

This is a rhythm game where you have to correctly time your button presses to get the most points for Anya and Becky's fashion show! You also have the ability to dress up both of them before the show, though it has no bearing on your score.

Peanuts Bowling

You can play as either Anya, Yor, or Loid in a simple bowling tournament. On your turn, you first line up your shot, then you have to press the button at the right time to get a good angle and enough power for your throw. Each of the Forgers has a stat they specialize in: Anya has the most Luck, meaning she'll get more gold peanut pins to knock down for a higher score. Yor has the most Power, so her throws will likely knock down more pins on impact. And Loid has the best Curve stat, so any balls he throws at a curve will hit more accurately.

I love how the Forgers' stats in this game are so fitting!

Eden Old Maid

You play as any of the Eden kids against three of the others in a match of Old Maid! You take turns picking cards from each other and making pairs while avoiding picking the Joker. If you play as Anya, you're able to use her mind-reading ability to read your opponent's hand up to three times.

Yuri's Delicious Meal

Yuri has to eat all of the "meatballs" that Yor cooks while avoiding Loid's food. You have to press the button once for each meatball per plate (up to three) then move the L stick to the left once the plate is clean, or move the L stick to the right to pass Loid's cooking to Anya. Later rounds add an additional factor where you have to press another button to first lift the cover off the plate to see what's inside. The game is timed, and any mistake with your button presses results in a time loss. You'll also get a few "bonus" rounds where Yor will present Yuri with a giant meatball and you can spam the eat button as fast as possible for the most points!

Peanuts Tag

This is a Pac-Man type game where have to maneuver Anya through a maze, collecting peanuts while avoiding the bad guys that chase after you. If any of the bad guys touch you, you'll lose one of your three tries and be placed back at the beginning of the maze. However, there are a few macrons amongst the peanuts that, if you collect them, will make Anya grow bigger for a short time and be able to temporarily get rid of any bad guy she stomps on. Penguinman and Chimera also wander around the maze and you can collect them to get more points.

[rinnie-marylin]

Hey guys

So imma start school tomorrow, yes i know, i live on the other side of the world from yall that's why i started school later😔

Anyways, i will still be uploading (at least i'll try to) but at a WAY slower pace. I still have many ideas but in order to execute them perfectly i'm gonna need alot of time, and ofc that won't be possible with school in the way. So as a filler post, i'mma show yall the artworks that i drew just for fun, some of which include info about me :)

Nothing much to say here, just wanted to try a new artstyle

Remember when i said i'd try to draw their designs in the heathers AU? Well i made this as a "sketch". that's why it's not perfect, i just wanted sort of like a blueprint to map out my ideas and metaphors. Ex: tobey's hammer is mechanical, victoria's holds her intrument, and eileen's is a confetti canon.

Nothing much to say here, all in the colors!

I saw this bingo somewhere and wanted to try it out for myself.

I saw a picture of two kittens cuddling 3 months ago and immediately got motivation boost, so i drew tobecky over 'em! Unfortunately, i don't have the original picture, i'll update this post when i find it!

There was this art trend with the song "takin' what's not yours" by tv girl, and i thought it would be perfect to do tobecky with it, i would've recorded it but i dunno how to make videos yet- (definitely not an excuse to not show how ugly this artwork actually is)

Just a fun little silly thing i made a while back because my mind was plagued by yhe tobecky virus.

Tried to draw myself in the wordgirl artstyle. Not perfect but i'm pretty proud of it. I know i'm a teen but i wanted to draw myself aged up because i wanted to be a more mature character.

[small-artist-oc-showdown]

sorry my demons won and i made a new blog (i am aware that this has been done before, im just doing it because the people around my very tiny and obscure corner of the internet probably did not participate in it and also i want more chances for more sillies)

ANYWAY !! GET YOUR REF SHEETS AND TRAGIC BACKSTORIES READY, BECAUSE IT'S TIME FORRRRR ....................

THE SMALL ARTIST OC SHOWDOWN !!!!!!!

(i swear im not gonna be doing two tourneys at once </3 i will start this one after himbothemboswagger has ended)

HERE ARE THE BASIC RULES !!

1. Fandom OCs are allowed, as long as they are not related to any canon characters

2. You can submit OCs in pairs, as long as it's clear that they go together and can't be separated

3. Uploading other people's art of your OC is fine, AS LONG AS YOU CREDIT THEM (Picrews are fine too! It's preferred that you have the link, but if you don't that's okay, just say that it isn't your art)

4. You're allowed to submit multiple OCs through the form, but please note that there will be a maximum of 2 of those OCs put in the actual bracket.

5. If you have gotten more than 150 notes on multiple of your artworks, then your submission will be invalidated!! Very sorry I'm sure your art is baller but this one's for the little guys :[

6. BANGING POTS AND PANS TOGETHER !!!!! REMEMBER THAT THIS IS ALL IN GOOD FUN !!!!! THIS IS TO CELEBRATE CREATION !!!!! NO ONE IS SAYING THAT CERTAIN OCS ARE BETTER THAN OTHERS, OR YOURS EITHER !!!!! IF YOU FEEL THAT YOUR SQUORMP LOSING A SILLY TUMBLR TOURNAMENT WILL DO IRREPARABLE DAMAGE TO YOUR PSYCH, THEN DON'T SUBMIT THEM !!!!!

Extra notes:

if a duo is submitted and they dont seem like they absolutely have to be together, then i will enter the two of them separately or only have one or the other

i might do 64 contestants, but its more likely that its gonna be 32 because even though its summer my ass cannot handle that many HFGJAKFJVGN

completely original ocs will be prioritized over fandom ocs, and fandoms will be limited to 2 ocs per fandom

LET'S HAVE FUN FELLAS !! SUBMISSION IS NOW !!

[palepinkgoat]

tag game Wednesday Thursday!

thank you for tags and mentions @gallawitchxx @thepupperino @wehangout @blue-disco-lights @gardenerian @deedala @energievie and @jrooc !!! I love you all so much.

how did you get into the fandom? Girl, let's get in a Time Machine to 2013.

I had just had a massive injury that left me unable to walk or leave my bed for months. In this time, I was watching YouTube a lot. YouTube knows me well, so one night said "oh, this is gay, you will like it." The clip was the van kiss. Like, the first kiss. It piqued my interest and soon I'm in a YouTube wormhole. Season 3 had finished so there were some newer uploads. I loving the morning scenes with the Gallaghers too, and once I kind of pieced it all together I went on amazon and bought the first 3 season digitally. There I was, obsessed and bed bound. After a little googling I found Tumblr around Christmas, and lurked until season 4 started. Then I started poking my head out a bit and reblogged some stuff. But I wasn't really fully "in" until I started writing fics in 2014. Then I got more active and after writing a series called Four Eight, more people learned who I was (via a post by a super "popular" and now deactivated Tumblr account). Then I was in. sidenote: Eventually I did physical therapy around the time the club kiss aired (being there for that in real time?? Guys, I'm still screaming) and I'd watch that over and over as I iced my weak leg and took half a prescribed Percocet. The club kiss was better than the Percocet.

how long have you been here? So technically I guess I've had Tumblr 10 years. In December it will be 11. HOWEVER I was not active for several years in between like season 7ish until after the series ended, so I guess I should subtract. But that gets too be too much math.

what’s the first fandom channel you found? (Youtube, Reddit, Tumblr, Insta, Twitter, FB, other?) Youtube at first since that's how I found them. I was also really into watch fan video edits and watched them OBSESSIVELY.

what’s your favourite now? For fandom, Tumblr! Nothing quite like it. I'm glad to be back.

which mutual have you known the longest in the fandom? Oh my gosh. @captainjowl, @wehangout and @the-rat-wins are the ones who come to mind but I'm sorry if I'm overlooking some. So many people left!

which tumblerino’s did you have your first fandom crush(es) on and wanted to get to know? I remember really loving @captainjowl and being so glad when we got to be friends. Then because I almost have a Tumblr Season 2 life, I was really impressed by @heymacy and she just JUMPED off the screen. I wanted to be friends so I sent a message about chapell roan and now we talk ALL THE TIME. I've met so many newer to me people and I am so glad I know so many cool people.

first Gallavich fan fic you read (or that blew you away that you remember) I wish I remembered the first fic I read!! Sexual Harassment in the Workplace was posted around the time I started writing fic and of course that's amazing. I know works by anythingbutgrief were some of the first too. Beautiful.

first fan art that blew your mind? @steorie blows my mind every time. That's the first person I remember just losing it over. But there are so many incredible artists!!

fanfic trope that you were sure wasn’t for you but now you low key (or high key) love? a/b/o! But I mostly was like "what the fuck is this about?" And then got on board pretty fast.

What surprised you most about this fandom? the level of talent is absolutely wild.

moment in the show (or YT vids if you’re one of those) that you fell in hyperfixation with Gallavich? the first one was probably s3 "not everybody gets to blurt out how they fucking feel every minute!" because i was like, OHHH OH THIS IS GONNA HURT ME & then it just kept getting worse.... @gallawitchxx just said it best BUT! I have a tattoo that says "sorry I'm late" so I guess you could say I'm into that one too.

Ian or Mickey? Ian is my baby, my friend. my familiar. I adore them both and it's hard to choose, but I loved him right away and never quit.

Which Gallagher or Milkovich are you? I'm honestly a lot like Ian. But maybe if I swung Milkovich I'd be Sandy.

[outcaststars]

I've been streaming on twitch for over 4 years. I've made a great community and a wonderful group of friends but I've also had to deal with a lot of aweful people. Recently I've been feeling particularly upset about it all so I'm going to air all my grievances here. TW this mentions bullying, grooming, self harm and abuse. If anyone mentioned in this post trys to comment im just gonna delete it, i also dont care if your fav streamers is here, this is my authentic experience. Also dont go attacking anyone i mention here, the whole point of this is to be better then them.

Rat_emoji

The first streamer I ever had an issue with was Rat_emoji. It all started when I tuned into one of their DbD streams only to find him streaming another, younger, streamers live content.

He had just died to this kid playing Myers, he had TTV in his name and Rat was so mad about what had happened he streamed this kids twitch live to his viewers, all the while making fun of his appearance and stream quality.

A day later I would go back and screen record this whole interaction so I can share that if you want to see it. It felt so disgusting to watch this happen live, he has 100 viewers in chat and they were all being nasty. The only person who told him to stop was drag streamer Suttonfister (i think, 90% sure) who was in the same game and discord call at he time. the whole scene was aweful to witness, it felt like such an abuse of power. Rat didnt directly say anything mean but they made a lot of mean girl comments and didnt moderate anything cruel their chat said, it was obviously intentional.

After this I blocked Rat, it would have been easy to avoid him if he didn't found the stream team "Aussie pride", he got a lot of attention for that and a lot of praise and all of it made me sick. Funnily enough I heard that Aussie Pride was an aweful team to be in. The creators didn't care about the smaller members, planned no events and then disbanded the team with the release of Hogwarts legacy because they didn't want to take a stance on JK Rowling. Honestly it seems like the whole thing was a vanity project. That's why I don't like Rat_emoji.

Dcypherpup

DCpup was the first streamer I tried to network with. He hired me to make some art for him. He wanted me to work on merch for his channel, I declined, saying that I wasnt comfortable with the idea of someone else selling my art. I counter offered to just make him a profile icon, this way we could see how my style suited him and i could work out how to tackle the idea of eventually doing merch.

When the icon was done I sent him the high res file, he asked for my signature (my artist tag, a very small "outcaststars" in the corner) to be removed. When I asked why, he told me he needed it gone in order to upload it as merch.

Naturally I was upset. I explained that we had already made a deal not to do merch yet and I also explained that I was uncomfortable with the idea of removing my tag. I went on to explain why visibility was so important for artists. At the time I was a much smaller content creator and DCpup platform was much bigger.

He apologized and said he would give me a cut of the sales. I said don't bother and reluctantly let him do what he wanted. At the time I was too scared to make enemies so I fell into people pleasing.

I took more work from DCpup because I needed the money and I hoped it would be good for my channel growth. He would upload my work to his store and wouldn't credit me. I was frustrated.

The tipping point was after the final comm I took from him. An animated ending screen. During this process DCpup would message me everyday asking for updates which was annoying. When I delivered the final product he once again asked for my tiny, half transparent signature to be removed. I was so upset and defeated, I told myself I'd fight it but I didn't. I removed my sign from every layer, reanimated the whole thing and vowed not to take work from him.

After the piece was done he wanted to commission me again. I left him on read, then I found out what he was saying about me to other people. A good friend of mine showed me a message he had sent in his stream, telling him not to bother commission me, because I would be too busy doing work for him. I was furious.

Another week later I got raided by someone and told the new viewers to check out my work, it broke my heart when someone who looked at my insta, told me he had no idea I made all of DCpups stuff. Why would he? Dcypherpup went to ridiculous lengths to hide my credit. He was telling people not to contact me and not tagging any comm work with my name. One day he came into my live stream and I was so mad I banned him on the spot .

I wish I had done more to be assertive, live and learn. Funnily enough I found out he posted a big rant, telling people off for supporting JK Rowling when Hogwarts legacy released. Only to be called out for buying it and playing it on his steam, which he had forgotten to make private. He deleted the tweet. What a cunt.

Undertheredmoon and Greenypika

Redmoon is furry streamer that I use to really like. They were funny, had great energy and I would even go as far to say that they were a friend.

All this came to a grinding hault the day he invited furry artist and accused child groomer Daveoverlord to join us on Monster hunter rise live on stream.

Dave wasn't in voice chat and I wasn't reading Redmoons twitch chat at the time, so although I was aware of who Dave was, I didn't realize it was them. When someone messaged me about it a few days later I was mortified, I assumed Redmoon didn't know and I messaged them immediately.

I asked Red if he knew who Dave was and what he had done and the kind of artists he was friends with (cub artists). Redmoon ghosted me, left me on read for a week. I messaged again asking why he wasn't talking to me. He said he was too stressed to deal with this "drama" and didn't care to get involved. He mentioned that if Dave was guilty cops probably would have gotten involved and said he just wanted to focus on his own work.

When I asked Redmoon where he stood on cub porn, he stopped replying. We haven't spoken since.

The same person who told me about Dave joining stream also pointed out that Greenypika was inviting Dave onto his stream. They dm'd greeny and asked them if they knew and greeny said he had no idea and that he'd look into it. Greeny hadn't responded for a few months so I dm'd him with the same message and got the same copy paste reply. TLDR greeny knew and was just lying about it so I blocked him too.

Daveoverlord

Dudes a fucking groomer and now he streams. Blocked.

Cidermarten

Cider and I got into an argument once, the topic of which is no one's business.

His bf weyland got mad at me for it and vague tweeted about it so I decided to start a group chat with them to sort it out. And we did.

I apologised for what I did and cider took some time away from interacting with me. Everyone in this situation wanted what was best. And weyland is now one of my best friends.

Cider and I aren't as close as we could be but that's my fault. They're honestly a wonderful person and I appreciate their friendship. There inclusion in this list is to prove a point later but they're also the only person here who I think deserves success.

Stripeydragon and Break trail.

This one is complicated because it involves someone who ment a lot to me.

Back when the exclusive stream team Break Trail formed, my good friend Marsh joined the team. Being an artist he did a lot of the teams promo art of all it's members. Marsh had a lot of anxieties about the team because he was one of its smallest members and often told me he felt underappreciated or out of place. This feeling for worse when artist/streamer and fellow team member Stripeydragon decided he was going to do a redraw of all of marsh's promo work.

I didn't see Marsh much at the time but when this began he spent the better part of a week in my mod chat expressing how upset he was about it. It didn't help he was already anxious but he felt stripydragon was replacing him and even mentioned a time when he tried to give feedback on stripys work only for him to disregard it. Marsh was really fucking upset.

After stripeydragon posted the work my moderator, Ibn, who had been listening and consoling marsh for a week, decided to comment on the art publically. He said he didn't think stripyes version of the art was better and criticized him of slimming down the fater characters.

I wanna pause this to say I don't condone what Ibn did. He ment well but it wasn't his fight and he shouldn't have commented a critique on something no one asked him to judge. Don't do this. Anyway...

Stripeydragon fucking hated this. Not only did he respond to every tweet, he went into the break trail discord and rallied everyone to defend him and attack Ibn, a lot of break trail members also rushed to the comments to defend stripey and attack ibn. He also posted ibns comment in his own discord to encourage others to dog pile on. This shit got out of hand super fucking fast. Ibn was crying and marsh was pissed. It was betray of trust on Ibns part, but the way stripey responded was downright scary.

Shit was at its peak by the time I woke up (Australian timezone) and I immediately went into damage control. I gave Ibn a huge lecture, I was mad af and told him to apologize. I dm'd breaktrails stream team manager Mari, and tried my best to defuse the situation so that both parties could stop. Everyone deleted their tweets. Ibn apologised a dozen times and Marsh told everyone that ibn was just an asshole.

So the story everyone believes now is that marsh actually loves stripydragons work and Ibn is just a weird jerk. There where no consequences for stripydragons weaponizing a stream team and their fan base against someone on twitter. They're still a member of break trail but the team has been dead for a long time. I understand that Ibn was in the wrong and marsh should have just talked about his issues with his team. But this is another case of someone with a big platform and bigger ego not hesitating to use that to attack others.

Starkymorph

this one is fucked up.

Starky mods for a bunch of break trail members, so he had an inside look into the whole stripeydragon thing. Keep that in mind.

About a year after the stripey incident, I woke up to a message from starky. I had recently finished a commission for starky but apart from that we didn't know each other well.

He claimed that ibn had harassed him on stream by bringing up controversial topics and that because he was my mod he wasn't going to support me any more. I was pretty angry, Ibn was causing trouble again. I dm'd ibn and told him I didn't want to hear what he had to say and instead I just wanted the timestamp on Starkeys VOD so I could see what he did myself.

I watched the VOD and what I saw didn't line up with anything starky had said. He made the whole thing up.

What really happened was, starky decided to bring up "cancel culture" and went on a rant about how it was inherently bad and that anyone who participates in it only does it for "self-aggrandizing reasons". A lot of the shit he said was very thinly veiled right wing bullshit dog whistles.

Ibn asked him to elaborate and said something to the likes of "what about people who cancel pedos and rapists" and starky banned ibn and ended the convo.

Ibn didn't start the controversial topic and he didn't harass anyone. But starky was mad and wanted to attack him, he knew Ibn had a history of starting shit so he came to me with a bullshit story thinking I'd believe him and Ibn would lose his friends. And it almost worked.

I tried to talk some sense into starky, I pointed out that his original message was dishonest. Starky doubled down and made up more lies. He continued to claim that things happened during the stream that aren't in the VOD. He even bought up weylandshere and claimed he was harassing him too, out of nowhere! which if you watch the VOD is also completely made up. He said some ablist shit about "high functioning autism" aswell, its all really incoherent. Non of this is true and I downloaded the VOD so he couldn't hide the evidence.

Starky tried to use my argument with cider and Ibns argument with stripy as evidence that we were bad people. I found this really sinister, because my initial reaction to Starkys story, was that i believed him, pretty much everyone reacted this way. It upsets me that i was almost convinced to distance myself from my best friend because of a lie.

A ton of people didn't watch the VOD and took Starkeys word. Starky blocked me and started asking all his followers and mutuals to do the same. A whole bunch of people sub tweeted about ibn being an abuser and me being an enabler. It was fucking aweful. It went on for days.

This only stopped when Kyziethewolf stepped in and defended me. Even tho starky was one of his best friends, he had watched the VOD and told everyone he was lying. Starky doesn't talk to kyzie now and it really broke his heart.

A lot of people still believe starky and I lost a bunch of mutual streamers support because of this. It's one of the worst attacks I've suffered on twitter/twitch to date.

I found out a few months later he's added "outcast is racist" to the narrative he tells people and there's nothing I can do about that

This also basically ended my friendship with Marsh. I've known marsh for 7 years and hes a friend of Starkeys too. During this whole ordeal he never spoke up, it was only kyzie. I was really upset about this because i feel that Marsh could have made a significant change to how this played out if he had of just stepped in.

When he dm'd me a few weeks after asking if I'm make some free art for his project I told him no. I told him I was hurt. He said he just didn't want to get involved in drama. i think its really harmful to reduce harassment to just "drama". We've stopped talking.

Jayedskier

I met jayed though my friend weyland. I needed a 3D artists and he needed work.

Jayed had recently lost a lot of friends because during COVID he tweeted that people not social distancing at a furcon where putting disabled, high risk, people's lives in danger. Totally righteous imo.

He however also tweeted that anyone who doesn't where a mask should kill themselves and deservingly got a lot of hate and backlash. Lost a lot of friends. Since then he was pretty unwilling to comment on any political shit. Publically that is.

The first fight I got into with jayed was when Ibn reposted a Tumblr thread about the YouTuber keffals, and some of the problematic things she'd done. Jayed loves keffals so he dm'd Ibn about it and started a huge fight defending his favourite YouTuber. I stepped in to try and resolve the fight but no one was really happy.

This argument made jayed realise that he didn't have the same values as the friend group he was in. He liked keffals, he thought it was ok to say the R slur and he felt people should be allowed to support JK Rowling.

He left my discord and I contacted him trying to smooth things over. We talked for a long time and I settled on agree to dissagree the hopes to change his mind on some of these issues.

That didn't happen. Jayed kept starting fights about woke shit, even though he's a self proclaimed "leftist" and it slowly drove a wedge between us. He stopped talking to everyone in our friend group, unfollowed us all on socials.

Artists/streamer and friend Ixu had drawn a big group shot of all of us together. Weyland (who is in this friend group) was pretty angry about the whole ordeal so he asked Ixu for a version without jayed edited out. When he posted this jayed got super pissed about it.

Jayed tweeted about how unwelcoming my community was. Screen caped some DM's and changed the context. I was so angry, I had spent months continuing to offer my friend ship and trying to change his mind. One of the last fights we got into he said he was mad that "people" expected him to show support for Palestine and thats kind of the end of it.

This one hurt because it felt like a betrayal. Jayed you can get fucked dude.

Socksthewolf

This one is super recent and is basically why I decided to write this.

I can't remember how I met socks. They work in the games industry and they have a LOT of money/connections. He gives away a lot of stuff, Donates to people a lot. He very affectionate and Everyone loves him. I even accepted a bunch of charity/gifts from him and in return drew a bunch of gift art.

Socks success made a few mutuals of mine uncomfortable. He had a lot of money to put into stream so his channel grew insanely fast. I'm also told he made comments to some mutuals, comparing channel growth that made them feel bad. He ran multiple giveaways and got partner almost a year after starting stream.

There was some drama between socks and one of his mods. I tried my hardest not to get involved. Socks employs a lot of parasocial strategies in order to retain an audience so he flirts a lot and also has a persona of "I'm you dad" on stream. Idk if this counts as love bombing, but it feels similar.

I heard that one of his mods developed a crush on him and when rejected, he drank himself into the hospital. He almost died.

I spoke with this ex mod about it. He doesn't blame socks for what happened even tho he feels the rejection was harsh. I still feel that socks takes advantage of people with his gifts and parasocial friendship. This is a result of that going unchecked.

One of our mutuals found out about this and was really upset. They tweeted about it and tried to hold socks accountable. Nothing came of it.

I grew distant from socks when he started hanging out with Redmoon a lot. Because I felt close to them at the time I messaged him a about Redmoon and what happened between us. He never replied.

This story takes a dark turn when jayedskier, friend of socks, decided to make that tweet mentioned in his section. Socks also went in on someone jayed had mentioned.

This is about my good friend Weyland. Weyland had had someone very close to them pass away recently. Socks complied some tweets and chat screen caps, and made up a story of weyland threatening to kill themselves.

Some of the messages were about weylands dead friend. Socks knowingly changed the context and lied to make weyland look bad.

I honestly think this is the worst thing on this post. To use the death of someone and the personal anguish of someone and ammo for you bullshit story about them is fucking horrifying.

I replied to socks tweet about weyland, I told him what he was doing was wrong. He told me that he feels bad I'm surrounded by toxic people and that he hopes they get better.

After seeing the way socks treats his audience and the way he lied about another streamer, I genuinely believe hes some kind of abuser. Idk the vibe is REALLY off with this one. This feels worse then bullying, there's an ego about it. I've blocked socks on everything. Frankly they scare me.

Final notes

Anyway that's been my aweful experience with aweful twitch streamers. The whole thing has left me bitter and sad and I no longer want to interact with anyone. idk where to go from here.

Twitch TOS doesn't care what people say or do on other platforms. And with other streamers/mutuals so unwilling to get involved or show support I just feel alone.

I do feel compelled to speak up when I see or experience something I think isn't right. I think a lot of neurodivegant people, like myself, feel that way. But I think it's been terrible for my career. I hate the feeling that I'd be so much more successful if I'd shut my mouth and looked away. Maybe even be partner by now. I know a lot of this comes across as just "furry drama" but i think its reductive to label it as that. Content creators who engage in these kind of harmful behaviors need to be held accountable if we want to see any positive change. And im not saying that means "CANCEL" them. some (not all) of these content creators can still learn and grow and be better. Negative attitudes and dismissive statements of "its just drama" create a space for bullies to thrive

Finally, please PLEASE do NOT under any circumstances harass anyone involved in this post. This is not an attempt to rally the masses to lynch some people, im just telling my story so that next time you see someone come forward with claims about a content creator you like you'll see the situation differently.

If you made it this far, wow. Thank you. Dunno if I'll post the vids/screencap evidence. I don't know if I care enough.

[babacontainsmultitudes]

So you wanna sell your art on Redbubble but you don't know how?

(Or, I meant to write this months ago but better late than never lol)

OKAY okay. I have a bunch of friends as well as mutuals who have lovely lovely art and have considered selling it online (specifically on Redbubble lol that's what's being covered today anyways) but don't really have any clue how RB works, if it's right for them, or what to expect. SO I'M HERE TO GUIDE Y'ALL THROUGH ALL THE BASICS and hopefully, if I've done my job right, this tutorial will help you set up your RB shop and start selling your art online (or help you decide that RB isn't for you lol).

Table of Contents:

What the heck is RedBubble and should I use it?

How to make your account and set up payment

How to add a new work

Pricing? Markup?

Extra: Checking sales and payment history

Extra: Taxes and copyright, in case that scares you.

Extra: The Partner Program (or how to make "officially licensed" fanart)

What the heck is RedBubble and should I use it?

>> RedBubble is a site that allows you to upload your artwork and sell it on quite a variety of different products.

>> The main benefit of using RedBubble, aside from reach and visibility, is that RB handles *everything* when it comes to the manufacturing and shipment of your product. You are literally not responsible for anything other than making the art, uploading it, and deciding how you want it to look on different products. If there is any kind of problem with material quality or delivery (though in my experience they're pretty good with both of those things), it's not your responsibility to correct!

>> RedBubble does not charge you to sell on their site, but they do set a base price for all products to cover manufacturing and to ensure that they make some level of profit for each sale. We'll look into the specifics of this in a later section when discussing pricing and markup, but it would be considered pretty standard, for example, for an item to cost $20 and you to make $4-$5 upon making a sale.

>> At the end of the day, whether or not RB is right for you largely depends on whether or not you feel their pricing and payment is fair, and whether their available products correspond to what you wish to sell.

Okay, so how do I get started?

Well first you're gonna need an account!

>> Head over to the RedBubble main page and click "Sign Up"

>> Select "Artist Signup"

>> Fill in your email, shop name (this is your username also), and password

>> Click "Sign Up"

>> You will be brought to this dashboard page:

>> We will discuss creating products in the next section. Everything under "Set Up Shop" is optional and I'll let you explore that on your own so we can focus on the essentials. That just leaves... Getting paid!

>> First, check the email you used to confirm your email address. If you didn't receive an email to confirm your email address, don't worry, we can resend the form- keep going with the steps for now.

>> Then, under "Get Paid", click "Add your name & address". Note that all of the options in the "Get Paid" section actually lead to the same form, but selecting this option starts us near the top.

>> Fill out all the fields on this page. If you didn't receive the email to confirm your email address, click on this button:

Then check your email again.

>> Note when choosing your payment method: if you are from Canada, like me, then paypal is your only option. Same for parts of Europe that aren't in the UK. Otherwise, you also have bank transfer options:

>> Once you've finished filling in everything on this page, click "Save Changes" at the bottom and... That's it! Now you can get paid :)

**Note: I believe RB still requires you to make a minimum amount of money before they do a transfer (for me in Canada I believe it's $20 CAD?), so do keep that in mind!

>> Payments are made to your account monthly, generally on the same day every month (assuming you've made profits!).

How to add a new work

So you've made your account, fantastic. Now you're ready to actually add your works to RB and make them available for purchase to the wider public! To demonstrate the process, we're gonna use our pal Nicky here (who was a gift from my lovely friend @llumimoon) and pretend that we want to upload him:

Ain't he a doll? Anyways, let's begin.

>> Hover your mouse over your pfp in the top right corner to make this drop down menu appear:

>> Click on "Add New Work"

**On a new account with nothing uploaded, this will look a bit different. instead choose "Sell Your Art" from this dropdown menu, then "Add New Work" from the top right corner of the same dashboard page from earlier.

>> Click on "Upload New Work" (and note the file type and resolution requirements at the bottom. I always stick with PNGs, but in theory JPEG or GIF works as well.)

>> Select the file of the image you want to upload. In our case, that's Nicky.

>> Now write a title for your work, tags, and a description if you want. The tagging system is how people will actually find your work, it works a lot like Tumblr's! Try to choose things that are relevant to whatever your piece is. If you're uploading fandom-related art and aren't sure what tags are used for your fandom on RB, try looking some up and seeing what generates the most relevant results!

>> You may have noticed the "background color" section right below Nicky. This sets the default background color for your piece on different products. We're gonna keep this as the default white here, and I'll show you how to adjust this for individual products very soon.

>> Scroll down. This is where we decide what products we want this design to be available on and how we want Nicky to look on each thing we've enabled.

For example, if I were actually selling Nicky here (if that wasn't clear obviously I'm not actually selling my friend's art lol don't do that ofc) I would definitely want people to be able to buy him as a little sticker :]

>> In this case, "Stickers & Magnets" have been enabled by default. If you wanted to disable them, you would simply click that little "Enabled" button. Similarly, if we want to enable a product type that is disabled, just click that same button (which will be grey rather than green and say "disabled").

>> If a product is disabled and you are being prevented from enabling it, that's because the dimensions of your image are too small for the product in question! You'll wanna resize your image (preferably in a manner that retains its resolution of course) and come back.

>> Hm. Let's use the hats here as an example of how we might make edits to the layout of a specific product.

He's kind of cut off, as you can see actually that's pretty in-character, and I think I want this hat to be pink rather than this default beige-looking color.

>> Click on "Edit"

So, the first thing I'm gonna do here is use that "Scale Image" slider to scale him down a bit. I'm also gonna click the image and drag him up a bit to re-center him.

Next, I'm gonna pick from one of the default colors and choose the pink one.

>> Notice the two arrows beside the words "Bucket Hat"? This lets me go through the different types of hats available and change the background/base color for each of those, like the dad hat:

>> Before we apply our changes, click that little gear icon right under the pencil icon

>> This lets us adjust the markup price for each individual hat. It is 20% by default. Changing the markup percentage affects how much you will make off of a sale, as well as how much your product will cost. More on that in the next section!

>> Click "Apply Changes"

The "dad hat" was the last hat I had selected (when setting its color), so the display has changed to show that one in the preview. Here's our bucket hat from before:

Nice!

>> The specifics of how you can adjust your design will vary depending on the product. With pillows & totes, for example, the editing menu looks like this:

Using the "Choose pattern" option, I can make the Nicky image repeat as a pattern like so:

(note that I also scaled the image down a bit here too).

>> One last thing. See that "Replace Image" button near the top?

You can use this when you want to use a different version of your image altogether for a specific product.

>> That's the gist! Play around with the settings for each item as you see fit. You can always edit them again later.

>> Scroll down. Select up to 2 relevant media types.

I'm pretty sure this affects search results when users choose specific filters, but tbh otherwise I don't think it's all too important.

>> Let's look at what remains.

>> I have the "Who can view this work?" section set to "Only You"- THIS IS SO I CAN FINISH THE STEPS HERE AND SAVE THE WORK WITHOUT ACTUALLY MAKING IT AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC. In practice, you'd only use this option if you wanted to buy your own work on something but didn't want other people to be able to see or buy it. Otherwise, you're always gonna choose "Anybody (public)".

>> Collections can be created to organize the pieces in your shop (for example, by fandom), but we won't cover the specifics of how to do that here.

>> Set whether or not your work contains "mature content".

>> If you want, you can set which product shows up in the preview for your work when people view your shop. If you think your piece looks especially nice on a mug, for example, you can make sure that's what people see first.

>> Finally, agree to RedBubble's User Agreement (read that little blurble, since that's basically all you generally need to care about when it comes to what you can and can't sell on RB, but more on that later).

>> Click "Save Work" and voila! Your piece is now available in your shop, and can be found in the search results of whatever tags you left on it (this may take a few minutes to take effect).

>> If you want to check out your design in your shop, navigate to your pfp and click "View shop"

>> Don't fret if the design doesn't appear in your shop right away! Again, this can take several minutes.

>> To edit your design again (and to view/purchase privately uploaded designs like Nicky here), click the "Manage Portfolio" option instead:

>> Here is Nicky as he appears in my portfolio (again, your portfolio and your shop are different things- Nicky will not appear in my shop at all because he is set to "private")

>> You can click that little gear icon to do a variety of things, like return to the editing menu from earlier. The three icons below Nicky refer to the amount of comments, sales, and likes your design has received in total.

>> Click on your design either from your shop page or your portfolio page. Wow! Your cool art is now available on all the products you enabled. Be sure to look through them and make sure that everything is to your liking!

Pricing? Markup? What's that about?

Well good tumblr user, RB handles everything regarding the production (and shipping) of your product, which means that they set a base (minimum) price for every kind of product to account for materials and production, and of course make some amount of profit themselves. The *markup* is a percentage that you the artist set (see the previous section on how to do so), and will determine how much you actually make off of a sale. Note that increasing the markup price means that your product will increase in price as well!

>> An Example (using hypothetical but more or less realistic numbers):

Let's say that the base price (0% markup, i.e. no profit for you) of a phone case on RB is $15. You set the markup to 30%. 30% of 15 is 4.5, so the public price is increased to $19.5, and if anyone purchases this phone case with your design on it, you will make $4.5.

And that's really the gist! Ultimately the markup price is up to you and what you feel is reasonable, though RB sets it to 20% by default.

Extra: Checking sales and payment history

Eheh, unfortunately I've reached the image limit for this post but:

To check your sales:

>> Click on your pfp

>> Click "Account Settings"

>> Under "Artist Tools" (on the left side), click "Sales History"

To check your payment history:

>> From the same "Artist Tools" menu (see above), click "Payment History"

Extra: Taxes and copyright, in case that scares you.

>> Do I need to report the income I make on RB when I do my taxes?

Yup! But dw, it isn't anything special. I mean, I'm not here to do your taxes for you, but money you make on Redbubble counts as "Self-Employment Income", same as if you sold your art just about anywhere else really!

>> So what am I actually allowed to sell on Redbubble? Is fanart okay?

Generally speaking... Yes! Obviously work should be your own, and it should not contain any company logos or names that you don't have the right to, nor photos of actual people unless you have their explicit permission.

>> Hm, okay, but what if I *do* accidentally sell something that isn't allowed?

In most cases, it'll just get taken down 👍. And no, you won't be asked to pay back any profits you made off the work in the meantime.

**A more extreme case: Story time. So, years ago a friend of mine uploaded some official Rick and Morty art that he forgot to set to "private". Overnight he made... Let's just say he made quite a bit of money. RB responded by taking down the work and banning his IP address, effectively preventing him from ever selling on the site again. But they still let him keep the money he made, and he didn't get into any actual trouble outside of that. What I'm saying is, even if you really fuck up, it'll be alright. And again, this was a pretty extreme scenario.

***Note: if your work falls under one of the brands in Redbubble's "Partner Program" (see the next section), it will be temporarily removed from the search results and your shop while it undergoes review. So don't panic if you see your fanart suddenly disappear from your shop!

Extra: The Partner Program (or how to make "officially licensed" fanart)

Very briefly, Redbubble has their partner program, which I won't explain in full detail here, but basically it means that if you upload a work and tag it as one of these brands, it will be inspected for review and, upon passing that brand's guidelines, will be considered "officially licensed" merch for that brand. Just felt worth mentioning!

So that's really the gist folks! There's certainly much more to play around with when it comes to RB, but that's all you need to know to get started! Hopefully this was useful? Hopefully lol. In any case, good luck out there!

[thunderxleafart]

Back to basics as we kick off 2024 with some good ol' Fronnie fluff!~ x'3 Just something simple and sweet to try and kickstart my art motivation again, and hey, you can never go wrong with a sassy bunny and his teddy bear! xD

Honestly, though, I've been struggling with a lot of anxiety over my art as of late. But now that we're full steam ahead into the new year, I'm setting a new goal for myself. I need to stop being such a perfectionist and worrying about what people want/expect of me, and just do my own thing again LOL

After all, I've always loved art because it's a way of expressing myself and my ideas, but I've always just been way too hard on myself over making things look nice/posting what I think other people will prolly like. So it's high time that I say screw you anxiety and just start having fun with it again! :D

So I'm gonna try my darndest to stop being so hard on myself this year and just enjoy drawing my silly lil blorbos again! ^^ Whether that be Fnaf, Thomas or whatever else I inevitably end up getting hyperfixated on for a month or two LMAO

But yeah! Here's to just having fun with my art again! :D

Thank you all for sticking with me despite my slower uploads, and here's to a much more productive 2024! ^^

And as always, thanks for looking everybody!~ ^w^ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Toy Freddy & Toy Bonnie (c) Scott Cawthon [FNAF] Art (c) Me!~ <3

[shadowthestoryteller]

Health Hiatus Announcement

This is gonna be a long post, but a necessary one that has quite a bit of important info relating to the future of my creative works concerning the Adventures!AU series. First, look at this lovely new cover art for Off to a Great Start I had done by my bud Arven92 on DA. The title has changed to The Adventure Begins, but the main story within is the same. 

The light reveals their true Alphian form (symbolic only, not a lore aspect) while their shadow shows their ultimate fate as a member of Clone Force 99/Bad Batch. The bookshelves are a key location (library), but the merge into woods represents how they're entering into a very real adventure that isn't just a fantasy they write into books. Really happy how it turned out ^^

Onto the main post! 

TLDR: Adventures!AU is being drastically shortened for my sanity and physical health into two arcs (six books each) but most likely will cease full chapter uploads after arc one as I am tired af, I don’t want to be doing this series into my 50s, and I want to turn my focus back to my originals eventually. Next year will see postings of the series prologue, Anachronism, as well as hopefully the Remaster of Off to a Great Start/The Adventure Begins. I will still be very active on my discord, where some chapters of next year's stories have already been posted. But for my other story posting sites (aka Wattpad) all new Star Wars content is on hiatus until 2026.

Been wanting to make a big post for a while for the people who aren’t a part of the discord, especially since I’ve more or less dropped off the face of tumblr after it became unhealthy due to comparison eating me alive. If you like my work, you’re welcome to join the server which is dedicated to my works. I’m active in there a few times a week, and even post bi-weekly updates as to what I’ve been working on. And I’ve posted six chapters of remastered Off to a Great Start/The Adventure Begins complete with new scenes, new povs, and even more snark! Just message me for the link, I'm still wary of a stalker finding me again.

Now, for the meat of this update. 

Y’all. I am just… dog dead tired. And stressed beyond belief. Some of it isn’t related to the Adventures!AU itself (job hunt, burnout from completing my Masters in May, ect), but a lot of it admittedly is. Considering I’ve written almost 500k words in just under 5 years, it’s no surprise. Some people don’t write that in a lifetime, and I’m out here doing that on top of college. Proud of myself for that. 

What I’m not proud of, however, is ignoring my body’s warning signals and pushing myself past my limits not once, but twice. Once in 2022, and now again in 2024. Nothing major or genuinely life-altering, but when I say my health anxiety went off the rails. Been a rough few weeks lol. 

But that leads me to now. 

Adventures!AU. My series following the adventures of my self-insert as they become a member of Clone Force 99 back when it was just four members, with the added twist of it being in an alternate universe where the Star Wars universe has crossed over with my original stories. It’s not as big as non-self insert series, but Over the River and Through the Woods (which sits at a whopping 66 chapters and 200k+ words) once got #19 out of 60k in the ocs tag. The series has been going since April 2020, seeing four completed stories of various lengths and one WIP that sits at 21 chapters and 93k words. 

Aside from the recently completed Fallen Not Forgotten, it’s been on hiatus since Dec of 2023. At least as far as chapter uploads go. It’s certainly not been collecting dust. To say it underwent some intense restructuring in July is an understatement. A big understatement. 

I originally had seventeen books planned for the series as of three months ago, sectioned into four arcs with Anachronism kinda being a “prologue” to the main Adventures!AU series. Before this timeline is banished to the dream graveyard, I’m sharing it so y’all can at least see where it was gonna go. The four arcs would have had four books each, and were structured thus:

Bonds Forged Through Fire and Storm

Off to a Great Start (25 chapters)

Over the River and Through the Woods (66 chapters)

To the Far Reaches (66 chapters)

Welcome to War Games (25 chapters)

Into the Light Through Acts in the Dark

Commander, Meet the Cat (Remastered, 20 chapters)

Fallen Not Forgotten (Remastered, 20 chapters)

Risk vs Reward (20 chapters)

Bane of My Existence (20 chapters)

Wars of the Realms

Call of the Wild (20 chapters)

Convergence Hijinks (20 chapters)

Let’s See What You’re Really Made Of (20 chapters)

Anachronistic Adventures (20 chapters)

Decaying Dreams and Deadly Dances

Shadow in the Dark (40 chapters)

Murder Uncle Mayhem (40 chapters)

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished (40 chapters)

A Legacy in Question(40 chapters)

The plans I had for this series were intricate, deep, and would push many characters to their limits. 

But turns out, it wasn’t just the characters pushed to their breaking point. 

I got sick. A rather severe case of acid reflux that landed me in the docs office for the second time in two years. That started in mid-July, and I’m still dealing with it. Will probably be dealing with the sickness afterward for another month at least. But leading up to all that, I’ve been reflecting on the series as a whole and where exactly I want it to go, how I want it to end, and all that jazz. 

Then I did a scheduling test in Excel using the above chapter load plus the 30 I had planned for Anachronism. Assuming two chapters a month with minimal breaks here and there, this series would finally end in 2050. That is by no means sustainable, and while I have had a lot of fun with this series and daydreaming about the different plotlines is a comfort activity, I can’t see myself writing these books for that long. I really want to publish my original stories some day, but I also won’t pretend that I’m not a bit tired of the series. At least, tired of pushing myself to work on stories that just don’t give the same rush of dopamine they used to. It’s almost a chore now to work on them, at least in the case of FNF. 

Full disclosure, that story has been a problem child since day one. Actually, I’m pretty sure the stress of that story is what pushed me over the edge and caused the health issues in 2022 that sent me to the doc with acid reflux the first time. Messing with canon and trying to keep the timeline continuous (with timetravel in the mix too) was nothing short of infuriating. The trajectory changed so many times as I wrote it, which I sadly feel is evident in the story. It really seems like a disjointed mess. I’m just so disappointed how it turned out, but I was determined to at least finish it and not leave everyone on a cliffhanger. And I’m proud of myself for at least finishing it, even if I cut out at least four threads from the ending. It just wasn’t healthy to keep going. 

Nor was it going to be healthy if I kept the series structured like I had it. 

So, I took the steps to fix that. 

Seventeen stories became twelve, four arcs became two. Some storylines were combined into one book (ex: Risk vs Reward and Bane of My Existence) while others (ex: Adventures!AU Batch meeting canon batch in Convergence Hijinks) were cut completely. I hated to lose some, but I’ve always been one to appreciate quality over quantity. Combining books and plotlines will help streamline things and make it more manageable. Some books also get new titles.

Arc one keeps its name, and will cover six books; Four main books then a prologue and epilogue of sorts. Anachronism, The Adventure Begins, Over the River and Through the Woods, To the Far Reaches, Welcome to War Games, and Moving Back to Look Forward. This arc covers Shadow’s initial fandom jump into the Tintin 2011 movie, their first mission with the Bad Batch, and them meeting the sailors again this time with the Batchers. Arc two will also keep its name and cover the entirety of the group’s interference of Star Wars the Clone Wars canon (rescuing Domino to taking down Palps), with a similar set up to arc one. Fallen Not Forgotten, Risk vs Reward, Level Up, Shadow in the Dark, No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, and A Legacy in Question. 

But I know that even the shortening isn’t drastic enough. I feel only dread thinking about the series now, and that won’t do. So, though it kills me, Arc One will probably be the only arc that gets an official posting. Once Moving Back to Look Forward ends in 2030 (barring any major complications), that will be it for official full length postings of Adventures!AU. I’ll still post snippets and segments from arc two on Discord (like I do now occasionally), but MBtLF will end in a way that wraps everything up nicely. I’ll be sure to craft it so it can remain open ended to their adventures, but the current trajectory will see the “main” storyline with Shadow and the Batch, plus the Tintin sailors, close in arc one. 

That’s the long term goal. So what’s short term? 

Next year I plan to at least partially post Anachronism. That story has remained in the drafts for long enough. Yes, that means To the Far Reaches is backed up another year for posting (2026). That story has a lot of emotional moments, a lot of dealing with past trauma and relationship issues, and I just don’t have the spoons for that right now. For those intense moments, I have to crack myself open a bit and let my heart bleed onto the page. I’m not in a position to do that right now. Anachronism lacked that depth, being a bit more surface level than the stories with the Batchers. It’s got its own emotional moments, but it’s not nearly as taxing. Additionally, I’m going back through what was Off to a Great Start (now The Adventure Begins) and bringing it up to the standards I try to hold OtRaTtW and TtFR to. But I learned my lesson posting stories out of order so I’m going to get Anachronism finished so there’s no continuity issues. 

That brings me to my next point; Adventures!AU canon. 

I’ve already announced that the posted C,MtC and FNF are both non-canon and should not be taken as fact. You can still enjoy them (best you can with the crack-writing) but any continuity issues should be ignored as they are from an earlier draft of the Adventures!AU. Well, that decanonization treatment is extending beyond those two. The Adventure Begins, Over the River and Through the Woods, and To the Far Reaches aren’t non-canon per se, but rather some elements of the remastered versions may contradict the original postings. Going forward, the “truest” version will be those depicted in the works posted to Adventures!AU Remastered on Wattpad. The first story (The Adventure Begins) won’t drop there until at least November 2025 but you’re free to watch it in the meantime. It’ll sit dormant for quite a bit longer though. Nothing major will change in the stories, but I plan to add some extra scenes and tweak some minor details (the Batchers time in the galaxy is one big thing I’m looking at tweaking). 

Let’s see. checks notes Yep, I think that covers everything! At least for now lol. I always have stuff to say, but this will probably be the last long update post for quite some time. 

Thanks for hanging around, and for reading this long post lol.

[smurfylegofan2005]

So, remember when I said that I ship Shelley Marsh with Kevin McCormick (they are both on "South Park") because I (often) see them as "counterparts" due to the similarities between the two?

Well, one of those similarities is that Shelley is Stan's older sister, which is similar to how Kevin is Kenny's older brother.

But, there is one issue about that: Kenny has a younger sister named Karen, but Stan doesn't have a younger brother that can be considered a "counterpart" of Karen.

But, will that stop me from shipping Shelley with Kevin? Well, of course not! In fact, Shevin (that's the ship name for Shelley × Kevin) doesn't really have much to do with this situation!

Anyways, there is actually a way I can fix that problem: I can just create an OC that will serve as Stan's "younger brother" and (of course) some sort of "counterpart" of Karen!

Let's start off with his name: I'm thinking his name should be "Samuel Marsh", or "Sam Marsh" for short. This would be similar to how Stan's name is actually "Stanley Marsh", but he's often called "Stan Marsh" for short. So, let's go with "Samuel Marsh", or "Sam Marsh" for short.

Let's move on to his personality: Considering that Samuel "Sam" Marsh will be considered the male counterpart of Karen McCormick (Kenny's younger sister), and given that Karen McCormick is shy, yet much more nice/gentle than Kevin McCormick (Kenny's older brother), he will share that same personality with her.

And what about his design? Well, I'm not 100% sure at this time; but, I will reveal it on my DeviantArt account... eventually!

I mean, I don't really upload a lot of art on DeviantArt anymore. In fact, most of the things I upload over there isn't even actual art but rather fill-in memes.

Don't get me wrong: I still love fill-in memes; but even I can agree that they're taking over a website that wasn't even meant for such things like that to begin with!

As for the rest of the story, I'm gonna have to reveal that in a later post. I hope that I can reveal his design in that same post, though. I know that I said I'd reveal his design on my DA account, but I'll show it to you all over here too.

Oh, and, by the way, this will be the first time that I'll be creating an OC.