#he says that the guardians would rather put their destiny in the hands of children

[stormingfrost]

Kinda obsessed with the historical context of Rise of the Guardians. Pitch wanting the Dark Ages to come back, which historically was the decline of culture and records. The Guardians rose at the same time as the Renaissance with the rise of culture, knowledge, and science. (Tooth in particular mentions that she hasn’t been out in the field for 440 years, give or take, which would put that smack dab in the middle of the Renaissance) 

The way Pitch doesn’t want the world to change, the way the Guardians change in tune with the world. The way Jack, who lived in has a human in the 17th or 18th century, who lived in the time after the Renaissance and lived witnessing the world all the way to the modern era, is there to show the Guardians how much they missed and how they can further change and improve for the more modern world. These characters are immortal beings who have so much power over the world, it makes so much sense that when they fall and rise in power it impacts the world that they want to influence, for better or for worse. 

[bokettochild]

I Am My Master's Sword

So... I ended up having feelings about Fi. Mostly because of a a post that was shared before my Tumblr break about her. Like, we talk about how Fi might have felt when Wind pulled her, and I know- I know! I talk about him a lot but-

Legend.

Legend was a kid, maybe even younger than Time was, when he pulled the sword. And unlike in the other timelines where Fi's decision hurt the hero, in this one, he died!

Fi is dedicated to, and assigned, one task; to help her master protect the world. So how would it effect her to fail in that task and let her master die? Only to be given another one, just as young and small and weak, to try and guide?

Anyways, I caught Fi feels and wrote her a little thing. It is TTTB compliant, but you don't have to read that 30+ Chapter mess to read this.

Hope y'all enjoy!

Perhaps it was not the goddess’s will, but Fi had favorites.

Logically, a sword should not have any attachment to her many masters, she should have been cold and loyal to all of them, granting them her power and aid until they returned her to her rest, and then waited for the next one to come and draw her blade.

But even so, there were a few of her masters that she had an especial fondness, for, even despite her attempts to remove her own feelings from the equation.

Master. Matdas. Link. The Hero of the Surface and the Sky. Chosen Hero of Hylia herself, her dearest and closest friend, easily stood at the top of her list of favorite heroes. He was the one to forge her to her fullest power and stand by her side. Certainly, he was an eternally exhausted and somewhat easily distracted young man, but in her lengthy experience, it seemed that was simply Her Grace’s preference for heroes. The point was that her first Master was her favorite, and dearest of friends, and despite his flaws; his tardiness and inability to focus for long periods, his utter cluelessness when conversing with other individuals, and his (honestly endearing) love of danger; she adored him.

They could not remain together forever though. She may be her Master’s sword, but a knight only requires the use of his blade as long as he is in battle, and with Demise defeated, there was no need for her power to be continuously used. It was with great sadness that Master had laid her to rest, and had Fi ad a heart, she had little doubt that she would have shed many a tear at their parting.

She lay at rest for many years.

The hero after her Master had no need of her power, forging his own blade like his ancestor before him and defeating evil without her aid.

It was the hero that followed after that that weighed heavy on her mind.

The young Hero of Time was both her greatest regret and her greatest sorrow. A mere child, one too young for her voice to be of any aid to him, her calculations and estimates nothing in comparison to the orb of blue light -a fairy she had determined- that filled the air with chatter and guided the boy along. Had she had her way here, he too would have gone on without having to wield her power. Such a choice was not in her metaphorical hands however, and when small fingers had clasped her hilt the possibilities of the future had overwhelmed her.

In another world, the sleep she sent him into saved him. In another world, her strength was enough. In another time, the hero survived and moved on with his life. In another world he grew up and was married and was happy. The echoes of that world resounded within her, but they were not the life that she saw in this time. No. In this time, her blade clattered to the ground amid the churned-up dirt and seeping blood as a boy too young had released his last breaths in an agonizing scream.

The princess defeated the monster that was Ganon, sealing him away. The princess took her blade in her hands and carried it far away from the castle, hiding it in a grove with a bitter curse on her lips for the blade's failure to protect its master.

Still stained in blood and dirt, Fi took the admonition of Her Grace’s incarnate, fully aware of her own failure in the gristly matter.

She sat alone in that grove for centuries.

Trees rose and fell and hand after hand tugged at her blade, curious but unworthy to remove her. Children had played at her base, uninjured by her dull blade as stories were shared about where the youngsters thought the broken and neglected blade had come from.

“A princess put it there.” A pink haired child had told his playmates. “I saw her in a dream once.”

“A princess?”

“Sure, Link, an’ my Gran’s a duchess!”

The other children had laughed and teased, eventually tiring of their play and wending back to where their parent’s and families gathered on the edge of the grove, half-way through a journey, no doubt to a festival or event in castle town.

Fi had watched with a stiff little smile. They were precious beings, Her Grace’s children, she could understand why Master and the Spirit Maiden had been so dedicated to protecting these people if such small beings were possible. She enjoyed watching them, as much as a sword spirit could, perched, invisible to the mortal gaze, on the hilt of her blade, watching games of tag and hide and go seek with dull eyes.

None of them should have been able to see her.

Purple eyes met hers regardless, shining and curious, and so painfully innocent.

Had the spirit had a heart, it would have sunk in her chest at the smile and shy wave cast her way.

“By Miss Blue Lady.” The boy had whispered, darting off with his playmates back to their caravan.

And just like that, she’d known that evil would again rise soon.

None but a Hero of Hylia ought to have been able to see her.

She dreaded the day that the hands of the pink haired boy would wrap around her blade. Would he be a child still, like the last one? Would he have aged at least as much as her beloved Master? Still young, but old enough to at least bare the weight of her blade without stumbling? Would Her Grace be able to hold strong long enough that her Chosen Ones would be allowed to age enough to bare their heavy burden?

Her soul wavered when the blade was pulled at last, and had she been capable, she would have cried tears of sorrow when she saw her new Master.

He was still so small...

She was far too big for him, just as the hero before him, but the very thought of sending him off, putting him to sleep like she had the last one..... The Hero of Time’s soul would have stirred and roamed free to find and shatter her should she do so, she had little doubt. And she would wish it. Never again, never again would she trap a mind in a body too old, nor would she so illy prepare her master as she had her last.

In another time, another world, a place covered with waves as far as the eyes could see, her choice was the same, and when a small boy, only twelve or so years of age had come, she had breathed her blessing on him even as a soul foreign to the Hero’s Destiny had pulled her free. In that world, her Master had not fallen, but the world had been corrupted in the wake of their victory, and it was left without a guardian to save it from the evils of the world.

But in this world, she had held herself aloof from the young one in her care, careful to not impress on him the destiny he neither chose not embraced. Duty pushed this child, orders of one above him and the glimmer of hope that whatever sorrow burdened his young heart might be relieved. There was little she could say or do to him regardless, after all, she was not meant to be locked into stone, away from Her Grace’s power and touch, where her blade could not regain its power and where she grew weak and damaged.

There was little she could do to aid the little hero, her Young Master, but Hylia’s wisdom touched the young one’s mind and he, rather than forsaking her for a better blade, took especial care to clean and care for her blade, gathering supplies and taking her to a smithy who strengthened and brightened her blade, and who’s hands guided her Young Master to mend her ailments and restore her to power.

Again, under caring fingers and a soulful gaze, she was restored to her true strength, and when little fingers had set to work, etching away a name in her steel, she’d never done a thing to stop them. He had never seen, but she had smiled at the little one as he looked down at his work with a firm nod.

His smile was so much like Master’s own, it made her spirit sing.

Her new master, her little master, the youngest she had known yet (in this time and in this world) was a good one. He tended her blade with all the care due by a young smithy, and even after he had replaced her to her resting place, his enemy defeated and his world saved, he’d taken care to visit and tend to her blade.

While he worked, he’d sing.

Sometimes the Ballad of the Goddess that he hummed, sometimes an old song she didn’t know. Sometimes he’d chatter, telling her about his day and how the world was. About the apple orchard beside his house and how it prospered, about the princess that was his sister, and about the things they’d seen on their journey.

Unlike before, violet eyes did not rest on her when she perched on the sword’s hilt, attentive and silent, but that did not stop her from watching him as he attended to her blade and the stone it was set in, as he cared for the ground and the area around it with all the worry and knowledge of a budding gardener.

But then he had stopped coming, and only the princess had come to her once and again, until Farore’s Oracle herself came, taking her blade in hand and whisking them away to a faraway country where her little hero, a bit older and a bit more experienced, waiting to take her on another adventure.

He had had help this time, there were friends and a mentor at his back as he fought the corrupted Golden Goddess that had been Nayru, but now acted only as a puppet to the evil Veran. There was no small amount of pride in the spirit’s soul as she watched him lead an army to destroy Ganon once more, to defeat Koume and Kotake and destroy the Tower of Evil that Veran had caused to be built.

Adventure after adventure, she had watched her little hero grow in skill and body. But with each task, each fateful quest, she had seen light leave violet eyes until they were hard and cold as stone. Eyes that lacked the purity and innocence to see her when at last her strength had fully returned. He no longer spoke to her, even as his hands worked dutifully over her blade. Only a set jaw and harsh stare met her gaze when she tried to catch his eye again, and again the spirit’s lack of a heart to break was felt as she watched bitterness and anger take over the boy as he cast aside any faith he may have once held for the Oracles and Her Grace Hylia.

Like a mother whose child has gone astray, she mourned, watching as task after task had consumed the innocent child and fueled the anger of the troubled teenager.

Sword spirits were not meant to have feelings, or to love and grow fond, and perhaps this was why. Because any Hero who must wield his blade for too long will change and grow callus and bitter towards those he loves, and she would have to watch the life fade from them as anger took hold. Hylia had attempted to grant her peace, to save her from the curse that was feeling, but she had pushed just enough to taste it, and now it was hers and a curse that weighed heavily on her as she was carried to and fro on quest after quest after quest.

Fi should not have known all of this, should not have known the heroes that she would meet in the future. Her memories should not have swum to her as nine heroes gathered, each baring his own blade as once more her Master had drawn her from her place to join with his fellow heroes to fight an evil that danced through time with no regard for its sacred pattern and the delicate lines cast between worlds. By all calculations, she ought not be able to know each in all of their individual splendor and lack thereof. She should not have known that the last of their number was once the youngest to wield her blade, or that in his time her strength was nothing to the world it was needed to save.

She shouldn’t have known that the boy’s father was a knight who’s power had been corrupted with her strength, a man brought near to ruin in her desperate attempt to right the wrongs she had done to those before him. Her strength was returned in his time, and it had nearly saddled her with the weight of another hero’s death.

She shouldn’t have known the beast that tamed himself with her power, the wolf that stirred inside the heart of a Hylian who had drawn her strength to himself in a time of shadows and twisted evils that spread far beyond the corrupted worlds and into Her Grace’s blessed land itself.

And there was her Master, and the child hero who she had killed and saved and ruined and lost all at once, alive from the time he had moved on from when he had left her yet returned her, his life tangled in the web of time and leaving holes and breaks across its surface. There too was her young master, angry and bitter and harsh, and two heroes whose fingers had never borne her strength; a hero whose power had forged his own blade and another who’d yet to find her in his desolate world.

Could a sword spirit sing in more than battle, she would have cried her thanks to the goddesses for a chance to see all of her masters, both claimed and not, gathered. Something stirred in her, although what it was was anyone’s guess, and no calculations and algorithms could determine its source, but Fi would smile as she danced in battle on her Master’s fingertips, protecting those that she had failed and who had been called too young, with the aid of one who she had grown and learned with.

It was her honor to aid them, to travel at their backs and to protect them from the darkness that followed and attacked them. To cleanse evil from their forms and return them too how they ought to have been. But her joy came when at last she could see her heroes connect.

A battle gone wrong, a misstep from one of the heroes and Master had been gravely injured, left unable to carry her and leaving her to be held and wielded by another until he was healed. There was arguing for who had a right, for who had a cause and who would wield her best, but at last she was landing in familiar hands, ones that fingered the etching on her hilt with a knowing and bitter look, but who treated her kindly as he pulled her baldric and sheath over his thin shoulders and followed along behind.

She should have kept silent, she ought to have. She had not spoken to any but the first and the last of her many masters, but she was unable to prevent it when she heard the thoughts of her Young Master.

It’s not like Sky’s actually just my Great-grandfather or something like that, he’s just... I just... I don’t want him to scold me is all. The royal family doesn’t last that long, Hyrule is wrong.

Since watching Master re-unite with the Spirit Maiden, she had not known such curiosity and -maybe it was joy- at hearing the thoughts of one of the heroes that had wielded her.

“So, you are Master’s offspring?”

Despite how the young hero -one of her favorites and the dearest to her soul, beside his ancestor in what might pass as her heart- might complain, she knew he found comfort in hearing her voice. It brought something to stir within her as well.

After centuries of silence, yet from master’s time no time at all, she was freed from silence and able, again, to converse with one of those to which she had been bound for eternity, and through him, Master.

Sword Spirit’s weren’t supposed to have favorites. But the pink-haired child that bore the Gift of Hearing and Understanding, be it animal, plant or spirit voices that he spoke to, was the connection to herself and her Master, a Link, if she might dare jest, to both her past and future, and to the heroes who she had been promised to protect. He stood beside the Chosen Hero in her memory, a favorite. And she too must have been dear to him, why else would he take such care to keep his mark on her hilt, a poorly scrawled name, only four letters, but ones that meant everything.

L-I-N-K.

The mark of ownership. A claim. A promise, and one that she would also keep and honor in kind.

She was her Master’s Sword, but she was also the blade of his descendent, and if pride could be felt by the Goddess’s blade, then Fi would have been bursting with it.

[aspoonofsugar]

What is your opinion about the Maidens in RWBY and their importance?

Hello anon!

I like the Maidens and especially how they explore two main ideas:

1) The concept of cycles and generations.

2) The trope of the chosen one.

THE CYCLE OF SEASONS

I think it is clear Ozpin created the Maidens partly because he wanted guardians and partly as a way to grieve his four daughters. He has symbolically dragged them into the cycle with him and Salem.

In a sense, the story keeps repeating. Salem kills Ozpin, he is reborn and his daughters are victims of the conflict between them.

Because of this, the four Maidens have become one of the many symbols of this endless cycle, which is clealry breaking its protagonists more and more.

This is well conveyed by the Maidens having a season theme. Seasons are in fact linked to the repetition of time aka one of Ozpin’s motifs:

At the same time, the idea of an older woman passing the torch to a younger one can be easily read as a metaphor for a mother-daughter dynamic. This is not always the case, but so far this interpretation is important for two of our four Maidens:

Penny receiving the Maiden’s powers from Fria is important on multiple levels and it plays on Penny alluding to Pinocchio. Fria (The Blue Fairy) recognizes Penny as a real girl, something she has been struggling with since the beginning:

Penny: Ruby... I'm not a real girl.

And is still struggling with:

Cinder: I don’t serve anyone. And you wouldn’t either, if you were built that way.

That said, Penny is not only struggling with enemies that consider her a robot, but also with the (understandable) overprotectiveness of people who love her:

Pietro: I lost you before. Are you asking me to go through that again? No. No. I want the chance to watch you live your life.

Penny: But dad… I am trying to.

She is not only a robot, who wants to prove she is a real girl, but also a daughter, who wants to grow into her own person.

This idea is made even stronger by Penny having been “created” through Pietro’s aura. She is a part of Pietro becoming someone completely different and independent from him. Still, isn’t it what all children are?

Raven is instead Penny’s opposite since she is not a daughter, but a mother. Not only that, but she is a mother, who fails three times.

She fails her biological daughter Yang by abandoning her and putting her in danger.

She fails Vernal, who dies for her.

She fails the previous Spring Maiden, who clearly looked up to her and was betrayed:

Cinder: Vernal was a decoy the whole time. The last Spring Maiden must've trusted you a great deal before she died. I bet that was a mistake...

This is well conveyed by Raven’s case being the opposite of what should ideally happen. Normally an older Maiden should pass her power to a younger girl, so that the cycle keeps going and that a new generation can keep fighting for good. However, Raven steals the powers of the Maiden for herself, just like she uses her shape-shifting ability for selfish objectives:

Ozpin: Everyone has a choice. The Branwens chose to accept their powers and the responsibilities that came with them. And later, one of them chose to abandon her duties in favor of her own self-interest.

She presents herself as a mentor for young women, but in the end she is a failure because she is too self-centered.

In conclusion, Rwby is both a coming of age story and a story that deals with cycles. Let’s think about the many abusive cycles in the story or the damaging cycles present in society, for example. All these cycles need to be broken and I would not be surprised if this will be the case for the cycle of the Maidens as well.

THE CHOSEN ONES

Up until now, the person who should be a Maiden never becomes one.

a) Pyrrha was destined to be the Fall Maiden, but Cinder stole the power.

b) Vernal is foreshadowed to be the Spring Maiden, but Raven turns out to be the real one.

c) Winter has been preparing herself to inherit the Winter’s Maiden’s role, but Penny is the one chosen by Fria.

Why is that so?

The story is clearly playing with the idea of the “chosen one” and asking some questions.

Are people chosen by destiny:

Cinder: It’s unfortunate you were promised a power that was never truly yours.

Or do they choose it?

Red-Haired Woman: She understood that she had a responsibility… to try. I don’t think she would regret her choice, because a Huntress would understand that there really wasn’t a choice to make. And a Huntress is what she always wanted to be.

What if the chosen person is the wrong one?

Lionheart: She was determined, at first, when she inherited her powers, but the weight of responsibility proved to be too much for the child. She... ran. Abandoned her training, everyone. That was over a decade ago. There's no telling where she could be now.

Finally, is it even right to choose a person?

Weiss: Doesn't it bother you? He practically groomed your entire military career.

Winter: It did at first, when the General first proposed it to me. But the more I thought about it, the more I saw it as a privilege, a chance to do some real good for Atlas. For Remnant.

Weiss: But your destiny was chosen for you, without your input.

So far each Maiden has explored this concept in a different way. Moreover, the story has highlighted many problems with the method used by Ozpin and his allies to select their guardians.

First of all there is the machine used to transmit aura:

Ironwood: We've made... significant strides. And we believe we've found a way to capture it.

Qrow: Capture it and cram it into something else. (gestures to Pyrrha as she takes a second to realize what that means) Or in your case ...

Pyrrha: (to Ironwood) That's...

Ironwood: Classified.

Pyrrha: ... wrong!

This method has been presented in-universe as sketchy and unethical both for the person who is having her aura taken and for the person receiving it.

It is also interesting that this machine is basically the technological equivalent of the Grimm used by Salem and Cinder to steal the powers in the first place:

One is the product of destruction (The Brother’s Grimms), while the other is the result of creation (in-universe technology is linked to creation). However, they both do essentially the same thing. They steal another person’s aura and change the one absorbing it:

Raven: You turned yourself into a monster just for power.

Secondly, there is the fact that so far several Maidens have died or have been targeted in horrible ways.

Some of them were specifically attacked because young and less experienced than others, like Amber. Some others made their choice without truly understanding it, like the Spring Maiden. And some of them. like Pyrrha, were not even given all the elements to make an informed choice.

In short:

Hazel: You send children to their deaths for a cause that you know has no victory, no end!

It is true that Hazel is a hypocrite that feels anger for Ozpin sending students to their deaths only to be the one killing them. It is also true that he does not respect his sister’s choice:

Oscar: Did she know the risk of being a Huntress?

Hazel: She was only a child! She wasn't ready!!

Oscar: She made a choice! A choice to put others before herself! So do I.

However, the narrative harshly criticizes Ozpin for not giving people all the information, “the knowledge”, they need to make that choice:

Yang: There was so much you hadn't told us! How could you think that was okay?!

Finally, we arrive at the current volumes where we see how Ironwood has tried to control Penny, Winter and Fria aka all the three people involved in the passage of the Maidens powers...only to fail miserably.

And in this failure probably lies the true mistake which has been made over and over again. The whole point is that probably the whole cycle (thematically) can’t and should not be controlled to this extent:

Goodwitch: At first, the only thing that was certain was that the powers were specifically passed on to young women. But as time went on, it was discovered that the selection process was much more... intimate.

Pyrrha: ... Intimate?

Goodwitch: As we understand it now, when a Maiden dies, the one who is in her final thoughts is the first candidate to inherit her power.

The powers are passed from a person to another through emotions. It is not by chance that the last person in a Maiden’s mind is the one who gets the power. It is because the power is linked to emotions and to ties and you should not try to weaponize them.

MAIDENS AND RELICS

Finally each Maiden is clearly linked to the theme represented by her respective relic.

Pyrrha and Cinder are both linked to the idea of destiny and choosing. I have shared some thoughts on them here.

I would say that Cinder wants to be chosen. She wants to be special and to be given value. This is probably why she is serving Salem. It is because Salem has chosen her for an important role:

Salem: When I chose you as my vessel for the Maidens, I put my trust in you.

This is not positive. It is dehumanizing:

Salem: This game is not yours to win, Cinder, it’s mine. Just because you’re more valuable to me than a pawn, does not make you a player.

But Cinder sees this as a chance.

Pyrrha is instead a person, who chooses her own destiny:

Pyrrha: When I think of destiny, I don’t think of a predetermined fate you can’t escape. But rather… some sort of final goal, something you work towards your entire life.

In other words, Pyrrha has an active role in her own destiny, while Cinder so far has accepted it passively.

This might seem ironic because all in all Cinder has been a pretty active character. She was born as nothing and fought to free herself and to become more powerful. However, she is still leaving her own life in the hands of another person, who is specifically coded as an abusive mother-figure. It is probable that her arc will be about taking back the agency Salem is clearly stealing from her.

This might very well be why she is the Maiden of choice. It is because in the end she’ll make an active choice to get her own freedom back.

At the same time, Pyrrha being active in her choices still leads to her demise. This is because she represents a choice without knowledge, as I have stated in the meta linked above:

She had been explained only a fragment of the truth, while the whole point is that one should learn, meet creation and destruction and then make a choice. This is why we have yet to meet the relic of choice.

As a matter of fact it is clear that knowledge and choice are complementary, just like destruction and creation.

This is highlighted also by their respective relics. On one hand the Lamp offers knowledge of the past. On the other hand the Crown gives its user a vision of a future choice.

This is because one has to know the past to change the future:

Bartholomew Oobleck : History is important, gentlemen! If you can't learn from it... you're destined to repeat it.

In a sense, knowledge is the passive condition of choice, while choice is the active goal of knowledge.

This is why one needs both to contribute to the world in the most effective way possible. If one acts without knowledge they might make the wrong choice. At the same time, knowledge without choice is just passiveness, as shown in The Indecisive King fairy tale.

Too much knowledge might lead to indeciveness or even cynism. This is why Raven is the Spring Maiden. It is because she is Pyrrha’s opposite aka knowledge without choice:

Yang: Which is it, mom? Are you merciful, or are you a survivor? Did you let me walk into that trap because you knew I could handle it, or because it meant you could get what you wanted?!

Raven keeps making decisions only to run away from them immediately after. Knowledge did not make her braver, but just a coward.

Finally we arrive to Penny and the idea of creation.

I have mentioned Penny in the meta linked above:

Penny is an artificial human, a creation who was given life because her father loved her so much that he sacrificed a part of his aura for her… twice. She is at the centre of the theme of creation and it represents the good sides of it. She is a creation with a soul, a child, the fruit of parental love. It is because of the love she received that she is willing to protect creation.

Penny is at the centre of the theme of creation in two ways.

a) She is a child, who wants independence.

b) She is a good declination of technology.

On one hand children are new lives that join the world. They are the embodyment of creation.

On the other hand technology is an expression of human creation and a way humans have to change and influence reality.

Penny is both. She is Pietro’s girl and a robot with a soul:

Pietro: When the General first challenged us to find the next breakthrough in defense technology, most of my colleagues pursued more obvious choices. I was one of the few who believed in looking inward for inspiration.

Ruby: You wanted a protector with a soul.

Pietro: I did. And when General Ironwood saw her, he did too. Much to my surprise, the Penny Project was chosen over all the other proposals.

Ironwood choosing Pietro’s project over others is very interesting and ambiguous. Did he choose this project because at the time he understood the importance of “a protector with a soul”?

Probably consciously yes, but the way he has treated Penny since volume 2 suggests also something different. It suggests a desire of domination. The idea that putting a soul into a metallic body would make it easier to control it.

After all:

Ironwood: For the past few years, Atlas has been studying Aura from a more scientific standpoint; how it works, what's it made of, how it can be used. We've made... significant strides. And we believe we've found a way to capture it.

Each one of humanity’s gift has another side of itself. Knowledge can lead to fear and choice is linked to passivity/agency. When it comes to creation, this gift brings with itself the temptation of control.

Why shouldn’t a creator “own” theis creation? Why shouldn’t they be entitled to it? Why should they share it with the rest of the world?

If one looks at Ironwood, at Atlas and at the other protagonists of this volume this way, a lot of things resonate.

Atlas is the most technological advanced kingdom, but instead of sharing its resources it closes off. Ironwood’s embargo is just another declination of this same idea of losing control.

Similarly the Ace Ops and Winter are all repressing their emotions. They want perfect control over themselves. They are taught they should be like drones.

Technology itself is often misused by the characters. Technolofy should be like Penny. It should have humanity and a soul, but Ironwood likes it because he sees it as something logical that can be controlled (and of course he keeps losing control over it). Ironwood wants to become like he thinks Penny is aka a controllable soul. He fails to understand that Penny is special because she has her own free will.

Finally, this same desire of control is present also in familial relationship. It is not by chance that the Schnee Family is in Atlas. Weiss’s story has always been about exploring this specific idea of a family. A family, which is cold and controlling, just like ice. Weiss’s arc is about melting this ice, in herself first and now in others as well.

Technological control and the control of people. In short, the control over two aspects of creation. This is the the idea Atlas represents and this is why it is currently falling.

In short, the creation must be free and it is not by chance the world is in its current predicament because the Gods tried to control their creations with disastrous results.

CONCLUSION

These are my main thoughts on the Maidens so far. That said, they might chance since the story is far from over as the arcs of all the maidens we have met so far.

As a final note, I find interesting that so far none of our four protagonists is a Maiden. It is an interesting choice and I think that it lets the series make a good use of its ensemble cast.

That said, I wonder if our four protagonists will end up calling back the original Four Maidens instead.

The fairy tale is interesting on multiple levels.

In-universe, it is interesting because it tells us something about how Ozpin was probably inspired by the original Four Maidens to try to save the world again. Ozpin is inspired by four normal people, who are just trying their best to help others.

This is a recurring idea in Rwby and this might be why none of the four protagonists has been selected to be a Maiden yet.

If read as a stand-alone, the story is an interesting tale on how to overcome depression.

The story starts with the old man closed in his house and it shows how he progressively opens up until he himself is able to help others.

Winter is the one who teaches him how to work on his own interiority even when the world is cold.

Springs prepares the terrain for him to come out. It makes the garden more welcoming. It is like when a person has to find the right environment to open herself up.

Summer is the one who finally drags the man out and gives him energy.

Finally Fall is the one who makes the man realize he can now share his new found energy with others.

Theirs is a virtuous cycle and I would say it is very different of the tragic cycle that sees the current Maidens as protagonists. Who knows? Maybe it is about going back to that virtuosity.

Thank you for the ask!

[sassyduckqueen]

Miraculous: Rise of Anatis 67

Firstly, I am sorry this took so long to do but it's finished now and hopefully it is a good read. Anyway, this was really fun and hard to write but I enjoyed it. I tried to make it quite light hearted compared to the others I've wrote recently and this officially marks the Lukanette part of the story. Like i know these two blueberries have been dancing around each other for a while but now they are finally on the same page on each other's feelings. However, Anatis won't be telling Lady Noir about it and vice versa. The reason is because they could work out each other's identities. Anatis thinks if he tells her, she realize he's is Luka from it as he wouldn't want to be with anyone else then Marinette and Lady Noir is still Marinette so she figures that if she tells him, he realize that both her and Marinette had the same thing happen to them at the same time and from that, he realize they are the same person. So I will be working on the Halloween Special for the Specials section and Crescendo next so I'm pretty excited about them XD

Also I changed Heureux Fin's powers a bit. He has a dust that turns people into fairytale characters that makes them not worry as a side effect. It can also change objects and places into fairytale scenery. Fairytale can shape-shift into fairytale creatures aka a fairy, a shadow and a wolf. It can also produce a dust in it's fairy form that turns Adrien's friends into the lost kids, making them think they were always lost kids while forgetting who they really are. Their canon hero names are inspiration for their lost kid names. For example, Kim is just monkey as a lost boy. Another reason why I decided to give it that power is because Neverland has that effected on the characters in the book.

Oh and for the fairytale characters that the characters became check the end notes :)

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Chapter Sixty-Seven:  Heureux Fin

~Agreste Manor~

 "Thank you all for coming," Gabriel stated as he looked to his guests. Audrey and her husband were sat close to him on the right side of the tablet while Tomoe was sat next to him on the left. She was still gripping her cane. XY had come in place of his father and Amelie Graham de Vanily was sat opposite him. The only person who hadn't turned up was Alim Kubdel but this did not surprise him as Alim had walked away after the birth of his son. "As we all saw the temple of the miraculous has returned,"

 "Is that why you called us here, Gabriel?" Audrey asked, making him look at her as she glanced at her nails. "I already did my part for the order,"

 "Yes and your daughter was a wonderful contribution but now we must focus our efforts on the true goal of our organization," He stated, making almost all of them look at him. "Finding the mage's latest form,"

 "We have been looking for years," Tomoe replied. "We even hoped our own children would be him reborn and when it wasn't the case, we gave up or did you forget that?"

 "Of course, I remember that but I have reason to believe he must be here in Paris,"

 "Why on earth would the mage come here?" Amelie asked with disgust. "This rat hole is not worthy of his presence,"

 "Because of Hawkmoth," Gabriel stated, causing everyone to look at him. "Hawkmoth is currently misusing a miraculous and trying to steal more. It would make sense that this would draw the mage to Paris. In fact, I believe he might even be the one responsible for giving Anatis and Lady Noir their powers,"

 "So you're saying the mage has already been reborn?!" Amelie gasped, standing up. Gabriel nodded in reply. "Well, that simply won't do! How are we suppose to control him now?! He could be older then all of us,"

 "Relax, my dear. I have reason to be believe that he isn't that old," Gabriel replied, making her frown. "As for controlling him, there is plenty of ways to indoctrinate him into our way of thinking... as I'm sure Audrey will testify with her daughter,"

 "Yes, Zoe is doing wonderfully at her current school. By the time she is 18, she'll be a perfect fit to take over my position as both the Style Queen and Queen of the underworld," She smirked, looking at her nails. "Shame that Chloe is such a broken child though... however, I'm surprised none of you decided to put your child into the program,"

 "The Tsurugi family never let anyone dictate how they see the world," Tomoe declared, making Audrey frown deeply. "We are as elusive as the wind, as powerful as the flood, and as swift as lightning. We never let anyone rule our hearts or control us,"

 "Yet you're one of the most controlling parents here," Audrey pointed out, making Tomoe frown. "So much for not letting anyone control you,"

 "At least, my family understands honor," Tomoe retorted back. "Yours only understands money,"

 "You say that like it's a bad thing," Audrey laughed. "Money is power. We all know that,"

 Gabriel clapped his hands, getting everyone's attention.

 "As much as I would love to see this continue, let's focus on the subject at hand," Gabriel stated, making everyone look at him. It took a lot of mental strength for him not go to his secret garden and akumatize the room but having said that, they would make great akumas. He would even akumatize Amelie despite the fact that she was technically family. He cleared his mind of those thoughts as they began to talk about how to track down the mage's latest form and how they would take control of him. Of course, Gabriel had no intention of letting the others have him. No, he would take the mage for himself and akumatize him. He would be the perfect akuma to finally take down Anatis and Lady Noir. They wouldn't know what hit them.

~Feng's Hut~

 "Su Han used the wish?!" Luka gasped, pushing his fingers through his hair. "Why? Why did he do that? Why did he kill Toutai?"

 "Because he wanted the title," Feng replied, making Luka frown. "Su Han believed it was his destiny to become the Celestial guardian as soon as he found out about my existence but when Toutai was revealed to be my most recent incarnation, Su Han became jealous. That jealousy was left to fester and grew, turning into resentment as the years passed. It did not help that both were in love with the same woman,"

 "Mulan," Luka muttered, causing Feng to nod. 

 "When she chose Toutai, it added salt to an already infected wound and the resentment that Su Han had for Toutai turned into a cold, deep hatred," He stated, making Luka frown. "From that, things just got worst. Thanks to his hatred, Su Han fell victim to the dark spirit I mentioned. This dark spirit influenced him with promises of power and his 'rightful' destiny. He tried to get Su Han to murder Toutai but when he wouldn't, he suggested using the wish to claim what he called Su Han's destiny but as you know, the wish requires a price in return for what you wish. Su Han wished to be the celestial guardian and so Toutai lost the title but even with the title, it didn't change that Toutai was the rightful guardian. Su Han only wished to be have the title. He should have wished to have been born as my reincarnation but he did not. He thought just having the title was enough. He thought that he would become the best celestial guardian there was and that Mulan would rush to his side as his bride. Of course, she didn't rush to his side and stuck with Toutai. The two of them intended to leave and rebuild else where but the dark spirit whispered in Su Han's ear, making him believe they intended to usurp him. He made a special dagger and confronted them but he did not expect Toutai to challenge him for his betrayal. They got into a fight and as a result, Toutai was murdered and the dark spirit was freed,"

 "That's when he possessed Su Han," Luka stated, making Feng nod. "Tell me more about the dark spirit,"

 "His name is Simme. He was born of humanity's cruelty and feeds off negative emotions. Feelings such as anger, jealousy and resentment are what he is drawn t. He is also drawn to those who's hearts are darker then others. Just been around him will bring these negative emotions to the surface but it goes much far then that," Feng replied, making Luka frown. "Simme is what the kwamis call Móguǐ or Devil in your tongue. He inspired the stories of Lucifer, Satan and most devil figures in mythology and religion. He is a trickster and a deal maker but those deals never go the way people want them to. They only work in his favor,"

 "How did he get trapped?"

 "Another spirit fought him and trapped him in Jīngshén, an area in the spirit realm," He replied, making Luka nod before he frowned. "Luka?"

 "Wait... if he escaped from there and possessed Su Han at the temple..." Luka muttered as the color drained out of his face. "I restored the temple! That means he's back!!"

 "Yes and no," Feng replied, making Luka frown. "Simme is a spirit, meaning it is rather difficult for him to interact with the physical world so while he is technically back, he can only do so much right now, especially with the fact that his host is weak... but should there be an event that creates enough negative emotion or if he was able to find a dark soul and use it as a host, it could be enough to allow him to break through the spiritual barriers and manifest a form in the physical world,"

 "Great... wait what's a dark soul?" Luka asked, frowning.

 "It's a form of a pure soul but one that is born pure evil," Feng replied. "It is rare but what's even rarer is a light soul, which is one born pure good. You see most souls are a mix of good and bad. It's very rare for someone to be born pure evil or pure good,"

 "And I brought this thing back?!" Luka gasped, running his fingers through his hair. "I've made a huge mistake! I should have given up been Anatis and then-"

 "Simme would have returned regardless of your choice. Whoever defeated Feast and cast the miraculous cure would have brought him back," Feng replied, making Luka at him. "But regardless, this is what was meant to happen and your choice has been made. You are Anatis and Simme is free but that doesn't mean you are helpless against him. As my reincarnation, you can use a spell to trap him back in Jīngshén,"

 "Wait... I can?" Luka asked, making Feng nod. "How? I don't know magic... or at least not that type. Obviously, I know how to project my emotions... but casting spells... isn't that evil?"

 "No, a spell is neither good nor bad. It is the intention of the caster that makes it either," Feng replied, making Luka nod. "As for learning, I can teach you. Of course, you won't be able to cast that spell yet. It is a very powerful spell and you must first learn to channel magic, which is why we have the tests,"

 "Tests?" Luka asked, confused.

 "Yes, tests," Feng replied, making Luka raise an eyebrow. "These tests are required to prove you are worthy of magic as well as the title of Celestial guardian,"

 "Whoa, whoa... Celestial guardian?!" Luka gasped, making Feng chuckle. "I'm not celestial guardian material! I'm barely guardian material, Feng!"

 "Becoming a celestial guardian is your destiny, Luka," He explained, making Luka frown. "Think of it as you are my heir and I beg to differ. You have already ticked a number of the boxes to becoming a celestial guardian and passed one of the tests,"

 "I... have?" Luka asked, surprised.

 "Yes," Feng nodded. "You lead a team of heroes, you have the trust of a civilization, you restored hope, the kwamis you have met love and respect you and you are willing to fight for the right. As for the test, you passed the test of determination... my test... when you continued to fight, despite having a chance to walk away. Whether you see it or not, you're on the path of becoming the next celestial guardian,"

 "What do you mean your test?"

 "Each test comes from our different lives," Feng replied, making Luka frown a little. "Me and Khnurn came up with them after he showed determination in saving Egypt despite having a strong dislike towards most humans,"

 "...Why does he hate people?" Luka asked, making Feng sigh.

 "It is not really my place to save but let's just say for now that Khnurn has seen how cruel humans can be," Feng replied, causing Luka to frown. "He'll tell you in his own time but for now, let me explain more about the tests,"

 "Ok," Luka nodded. "Why is your test determination?"

 "It is what I represent," Feng replied, making Luka give him a confused look. "Hmm... how to explain this? Well, I guess you could say we're the closest thing to a spirit a human can be,"

 "Wait... that does mean we're not human?!" Luka gasped, concerned. Feng chuckled a little and shook his head.

 "No, we're still human... we're just part spirit too," He replied, making Luka frown. "Well, you know Kwamis are born from concepts and Renlings are born from values. Well, spirits are born from traits,"

 "Traits?" Luka echoed, making Feng nod. "I'm not sure I fully understand,"

 "Ok," Feng replied, making a thinking face. "Well, a good example is Simme and his opposite,"

 "His opposite?"

 "All things have an opposite, Luka. Where there is light, there is always shadow and where there is evil, there is also good. The world is of balance and Simme is no different," Feng replied, making Luka blink as he stopped talking and took a drag from a pipe. He rose an eyebrow as he was certain that Feng didn't have it a moment ago. However, he blew smoke out of his mouth and to Luka's surprise, it formed shapes that resembled men. He frowned as he watched them hurt and kill each other as a new form shaped. It resembled a snake with a grin. "Simme was born from the cruelty in the hearts of man and as a result, he can influence it,"

 Luka frowned as he watched the smoke snake whisper to the men, causing them to be cruel and evil but the smoke changed and showed a smoke person offering another food.

 "But where there is cruelty, there is also kindness," Feng replied as Luka watched. "Not all humans are evil or cruel. There are kind and it was from this kindness, Simme's opposite was born,"

 From the smoke people, a new shape formed but this one resembled a bird.

 "Finni, the spirit of kindness.... you met him during the mob boss situation. It was him who guided you to safety," He replied, making Luka blink. He did remember seeing a bird but he had no idea it was a spirit. "And it is him that we owe our long lives and immortality to. He is why we are part spirit,"

 The scene changed, showing a boy in a temple surrounded by others but what made them stand out was they didn't look solid. Instead, they appeared to transparent but the boy in the scene looked solid. Luka realized the boy was Feng.

 "I was born with the gift of foresight and I have always been able to see spirits..." He replied as the smoke changed. It now showed the boy but he was alone in the temple while others whispered to each other. Luka knew they were whispering about him. "Other humans believed I was mad. Even my parents. I never fitted in and the other children thought I was weird,"

 The scene changed to the boy, walking through a forest before he stumbled on the kwamis.

 "Then one day, I met Tikki and the other kwamis. I invited them to live with me, finding that I had more in common with them then other humans," Feng replied as the scene showed him laughing and playing with them. However, the scene changed to him trying to tell his mother something during a thunderstorm. "But then I had a vision of death and war,"

 The smoke changed to Feng talking to a girl in a village before it showed him running from her.

 "I tried to warn my family but they did not believe me so I ran away," He replied as the smoke showed him going deep into a forest and crying to himself. As he did, the grinning snake approached him. "That's where I met Simme. He tried to tempt me into using my gifts for evil but I refused him and found Finni,"

 The smoke showed an injured bird and Feng trying to heal him.

 "I tried to help and my kindness saved his life but he was still weak. I took him home with me and for a small amount of time, I was happy again but my vision haunted me and one day, it came to be," The smoke changed into a scene of carnage as a village been attacked by men on horses. Luka covered his mouth in shock as he watched Feng been cut down then attacked by Simme. Before he could kill him, Finni flew in and attacked Simme to protect his friend. He used his magic to banish him, sending the snake away and tried to heal the boy's wounds with his tears. When that wasn't enough, he possessed a nearby body and lifted Feng into his arms. The smoke changed and showed Finni's host taking a dying Feng back to their temple and to the other spirits who surrounded the dying boy. The other kwamis and Finni discussed something and then the scene showed them surrounding him and singing as Finni turned into a ball of light before it covered the area. When it disappeared, the smoke showed Feng sit up, alive. Finni had sacrificed himself to heal him.

 "That war drained Finni's power a lot and he used the last of it to merge his soul with mine and save my life," Feng explained, making Luka blink as the smoke showed Feng placing his hand where his heart was. "That was the moment I became the spirit of Determination. Up until the very end, I tried to warn my family of the attack and when Finni merged his soul with mine, it made me into a spirit... well, the closest thing to a spirit a human could be. That is why my test is the test of determination and each time I have been reborn, I became a new spirit with a new trait but the same soul. Each of my tests is based on those traits,"

 "What is my trait?" Luka asked, looking at Feng. "Did you know straight away?"

 "No... and I don't know what yours is either," Feng replied, making Luka frown. "But you will find out,"

 "Can I know what the other tests will be?" Luka asked, making Feng nod.

 "You will be tested on honesty, loyalty, courage and compassion," Feng replied, making Luka nod. "But I can not tell you when you'll be tested or how. Only that you will be and what their traits are,"

 "Four tests? That's it?" Luka asked, a little surprised. "What happens if I pass them? I mean I don't feel any different from passing yours..."

 "Oh, you are different since you passed mine. You're stronger and I know you felt it," Feng smiled, making Luka remember how he felt when he transformed after reclaiming his miraculous back. He had felt stronger. "As for rewards for passing, I can teach you how to farther your magic and how to channel mine. You also unlocked one of the locks,"

 "Locks?" Luka asked as Feng gestured towards the door of the hut, the one that never opens. "There's locks on it?"

 "Yes, five all together," Feng replied, making Luka blink. "One for each trait and once you have passed all of them, it will open the door, allowing you to join me and the others in Shangi-La both spiritual and physically,"

 "Ok... cool..." Luka muttered, not entirely sure how to feel. "I am here physically?"

 "No but this is still real," Feng replied, making Luka nod. "Anyway, do you understand spirits, our lives and the tests a bit better?"

 "A little... yeah..." Luka admitted. It kind of did make sense. He had to admit he was interested in learning how to channel magic. "So you can teach me to channel your magic? Does that mean I can have visions? And will that help with learning to cast spells? Also what spells can we do? Is it like Harry Potter? Do I need a wand?"

 "Luka, calm yourself," Feng stated, making him blink and grin in a sheepish manner. He did get a bit excited. "No, you don't need a wand. It isn't like Harry Potter. We can cast any spells but certain ones need certain things and power level so you'll be learning basic spells and yes, it will help with casting and you will be able to have visions but learning your own magic will help too and most things can be a spell. We just need to work out how you cast,"

 "Ok!" Luka grinned, making Feng smile. While part of him was kind of weary of it, a bigger part of him was excited. After all, he just got told he could do actual magic and it wasn't like Issac was in his life anymore. He didn't need to be afraid of been a witch plus Feng had explained that it was his intention that determined what the magic actually was so as long as his intention was good, his magic would be too and this was a chance to learn more about his empathy. "When can we begin?"

 "Now if you want," 

 "Yes!!"

 ~A Few Days Later~

 "Urg, I can't believe we're back at school," Alix groaned as a number of students walked back to the school grounds. Summer holidays were over now, meaning it was back to the humdrum routine of studying and akuma attacks but the children were back, heading to the school. Felix had returned from London and was talking to Aurora and Mireille while they waited for Jean to turn up. Nino and Alya were similar in the sense they were waiting for Adrien and Marinette. Nathaniel was already at the school and in the art room, discussing the new ideas for the comic that he and Marc came up with during the holidays. Marc was also there. Alix would have joined them but she wanted to wait for Kim and Max. Mylene and Ivan were stood with the others, waiting for Juleka, Rose and Luka. "Why couldn't the summer holidays last longer?!"

 "We had two months off, Alix," Max stated as he walked up to her, making her groan before she grinned. "How was your holiday... other then... you know?" 

 "History Keepers," Alix replied, rolling her eyes. "It's been fairly good. Dad's still embarrassing and Jalil is still a history geek. When's Kim gonna be here?"

 "Oh, he is currently stuck in traffic," Max replied, pushing up his glasses. "Mr Pigeon has been trying to get rid of cars. I'm surprised Alya isn't on the scene,"

 "Eh," Alya shrugged, making Nino snigger. "It's Mr Pigeon's 60th time as an akuma and it will be over soon anyway. No one wants to watch that,"

 As if on que, the miracle cure rushed throughout the city, fixing any issues the akuma had caused. The students grinned as they saw it before beginning to chat about the recent akumas and how Anatis and Lady Noir saved them. A few of them had been akumatized before going back to school. Nino had been one of them. He had been re-akumatized into the Bubbler as he wanted Summer to never end so he tried to get rid of the adults again to allow the summer holiday to continued. Fortunately, Anatis and Lady Noir had dealt with him pretty quickly. A few minutes after the cure had been cast, Juleka and Rose walked over, followed by Luka. At the same time, Marinette had rushed out of the bakery, holding a croissant in her mouth. She had ran over and hadn't seen Luka, who had been jogging to catch up with Rose and Juleka. The two of them knocked into each other and fell on the ground with Marinette landing on Luka. She jumped up and helped him up as he laughed it off.

 "I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have looked where I was going!" She gushed, making him chuckle.

 "It's ok, Marinette," He replied, smiling before he pulled a face as a limo pulled up. "I was rushing too so I should have been more careful as well,"

 "Did I miss something?" Adrien asked as he climbed out, followed by Kagami. He smiled at her as he held her hand, making her smile back as she linked their fingers together. Instantly, Marinette cooed at their action, making both Adrien and Kagami blush a little. Alix laughed and moved her arm around Marinette.

 "Just Marinette and Luka falling for each other," She grinned, making both of them blush a little bit too. However, the mood soured as they heard the screech of none other then Lila Rossi. They all looked over as she waved at them before she walked up to them, instantly making a number of them feel uncomfortable.

 "Hi everyone!" She grinned before turning to Luka. "Hi, Luka! I'm so glad you decided to take the restraining order off me! I hope we can be friends,"

 "I didn't take it off. It was granted on a temporary basis and I'll be in court tomorrow afternoon to get it reinstated," He replied in a calm but cold voice. "So no, we won't be friends. Just because it is currently inactive doesn't mean you can come near me so I suggest you back off, Rossi,"

 Lila gave him a look before huffing and walking over to Alya.

 "Can you believe his attitude?" She asked, rather loudly. It was obviously to make Luka hear. He took a small breathe and ignored her, turning back to Marinette. "I just want to fix where we went wrong and he won't even give me a chance,"

 "Lila, you didn't exactly treat him nicely," Alya muttered, making Luka roll his eyes. It was more then that. "I mean you kissed him without his permission,"

 "I misread the situation!" Lila gasped.

 "Still..." Alya stated as Nino started to berate her, saying it wasn't cool to kiss people even if she thought it was but Marinette took Luka's hand and led him inside the school, making him smile a little as they walked over to the benches. They took a seat as he let out a sigh.

 "You ok?" She asked, making him nod. "How come the restraining order ran out?"

 "The court granted it on a temporary basis," He sighed, making her frown. "If the problem still occurs, we can get a fresh one which we'll be doing tomorrow. I asked if we could get it renewed before but apparently it needs to run out first and they review the case before granting a fresh one which can take up to two weeks to grant depending how bad the case is. There is a chance they won't grant a second one against her,"

 "They should," Marinette stated, taking his hand in hers as he looked at her. She gently moved his hair, causing him to close his eyes. "Are you sleeping ok? You look tired,"

 "Hmm... my nightmares aren't as bad," He muttered before a yawn escaped him. "But I'm not getting a lot of restful sleep. Music's been on my mind,"

 "Oh, you writing some new songs?" She asked, making him smile before he shook his head. "Oh?"

 "I've been practicing for that violin contest," He admitted, making her grin.

 "You're entering it?!" She gasped, clearly excited. "Wait but weren't auditions for it a couple of days ago?"

 "Yeah... I'm just waiting to find out if I got through to the next stage," He muttered, rubbing the back of his neck. He hadn't even told his ma or Juleka that he had entered yet. He didn't want to disappoint them if he didn't get through. There had been a lot of entries for it and a lot of talent. Luka wasn't sure if he could get through to the next stage so he decided to keep quiet about it until he knew for certain. "I don't know if I'll get through and I don't want to disappoint anyone if I didn't so I figured I'd tell Ma, Juleka and you if I got through but I guess you know now... sorry for not mentioning it,"

 "Hey, it's ok," She smiled, making him smile back. "I get why but you're gonna get through to the next stage and blow those judges away!"

 "Thanks, Melody," He smiled as the first bell rang. "We better go to classes,"

 The two of them got up and walked over to the locker room as the other kids headed inside. Luka completely ignored Lila, who shoot a glare at him when she thought no one was watching before he put his stuff in his locker and grabbed what he needed for his class. Once that was done, he locked his locker and headed over to Marinette's locker as she put her things in and grabbed what she needed. The two of them left the locker room with their friends and headed upstairs to their classes.

 "See you at Lunch?" She asked, causing him to nod before she gently kissed his cheek, making him blush. He smiled dreamily at her as she waved to him before heading into her classroom. He turned and walked over to Mrs Mendeleiev's class as Aurora hooked her arm with his and grinned.

 "So you and Mari are an item?!" She grinned, clearly excited. He blushed a little. "Oh you are, aren't you?!"

 "W-We're taking it slow," He muttered, rubbing the back of his neck. "Like we're not exclusively dating... just enjoying each other's company,"

 "Oh my gosh! You're courting her!" Aurora grinned, making him blush as she giggled before she leaded against him as they joined the rest of their class. "I'm so proud! Our Lu is a true gentleman!!"

 "Have you told her that you love her yet?" Mireille asked as Aurora let go of his arm and took her seat next to him. Luka rubbed his neck again. "You haven't, have you?"

 "I mean we're taking it slow..." He mused, looking to the side. "And I know she likes me but I'm still unsure if it's just because I'm her friend or more... I'm probably just a friend to her..."

 "More... it's definitely more," Marc stated, making everyone look at him. He was scribbling in his notebook but he looked up to address everyone. "She flutters to you like a bee to a flower... I would use a butterfly as an example but... akumas..."

 "It's not their fault," Luka pointed out, making everyone look at him. "Hawkmoth uses the butterflies, just like he uses people,"

 "Hmm... that is a good point," Marc smiled, writing something down. "Anyway, Marinette definitely likes you. She moves her hair, blushes and she also shows you her wrists and 'vulnerabilities'... which means she trusts you,"

 "Trust and liking someone isn't the same thing," Luka pointed out but he couldn't help the smile on his face. He liked that she trusts him. "Still... it's nice that she trusts me,"

 "She's also open with you, has a genuine look in her eye when she looks at you, she mirrors you a little bit and when you two talk, she leans towards you and acts like it is only the two of you in the world," Marc pointed out, making Luka blush. "All signs that at the very least, she has a crush on you,"

 "How do you know this?" Luka asked, making Marc blush a little as he begin to fidget. "Not that it's a bad thing... I'm just curious,"

 "I wanted to show that Lady Noir has feelings for Anatis in the comic so I researched body language for it plus it helps Nathaniel with expressions when he's drawing," Marc replied, playing with his hands. "I'm sorry if I crossed a line. I just think you should know that Marinette likes you a lot and definitely as more as a friend,"

 "No, it's cool," Luka smiled before looking down. "I just guess... I like that she might like me but I'm just Luka so I guess I don't really see why..."

 "Stop second guessing yourself, Couffaine," Felix stated, making everyone look at him. He was so quiet they had actually forgotten he was there. "Dupain-Cheng likes you. You like her so just date already,"

 "Felix! Be nice!" Aurora gasped, causing him to give her a cheeky grin before she turned to Luka. "But he's right. Oh, you should ask her out on an actual date and make sure she knows it's a date date!"

 "I don't know, Aurora..."

 ~Meanwhile in Miss Bustier's Class~

 "You look happy," Alya grinned, making Marinette jump a little as she had been day-dreaming about watching Luka playing violin. Alya grinned, making Marinette look at her. "So you finally asked Luka out on a real date?"

 "W-What?! No!" She blushed, covering her face with her hand. She wanted to but they were taking it slow. However, when she thought about it, she did want to been more then just what they were at the moment. She liked the idea of been his girlfriend. She liked the idea a lot. She really enjoyed going on their little dates and she had thought about kissing him a few times but hadn't done so because she wasn't sure if he wanted to. It seemed like he did but she didn't want to assume. She loved and respected him too much to do that. She looked up from her hands as Alya grinned at her. "I... I want to... but I'm not sure if he likes me like that. Like I know he likes me but I'm not sure if he likes me enough to want me to be his girlfriend,"

 "But you want to be his girlfriend?" Alya asked as Rose gushed, leaning against Juleka who gave Marinette a small but happy smile. Everyone knew she shipped what they had dubbed 'Lukanette'. Marinette slowly nodded. "Girl, you need to ask him out,"

 "I bet he would say yes!" Rose gushed, making Marinette blush even more.

 "Luka definitely likes you," Mylene agreed as Alix rolled her eyes.

 "I don't get the whole dating thing but you like him and he likes you then you should go for it," She added in, making Marinette smile. Even Chloe encouraged her in her own way. However, Lila kept to herself, digging her nails into her hands as she listened. She wanted to destroy Marinette and take everything from her but taking Luka from her will be really hard since he knows what she is like. Somehow, that freak had seen through her facade extremely quickly. Even Marinette hadn't seen through it straight away. It was only after Lila slipped up that Marinette had realized that she was lying and tried to expose her. As annoying as it was, Lila was partially glad because she couldn't stand the baker girl but she had to pretend to. Sure, she still had to pretend but before she couldn't do anything about it. Now, she could mess with her and that's exactly what she did. In fact, that's what she'll do. She might not be able to turn Luka onto her side but she could at the very least make Marinette asking him out impossible. Hell, Marinette or Luka might even get akumatized out of it. She could then claim that they hated her and it would be especially funny if Luka got akumatized. If it succeed, he would have to fight his friend for Hawkmoth and if it didn't... well, he'd be sick for a few days and out of her hair. She held back a smirk to herself as she pretended to listen to Miss Bustier. The day moved on and soon enough, it was lunch time. Marinette was getting her food and Lila was watching her, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. Seeing Marinette walking towards the lunch table, she tried to trip her up but much to her annoyance that failed so she moved onto the next plan. She tried to get Marinette to call her out by saying something clearly false. Instead, Alya told her she didn't need to lie again and Marinette ignored her. She didn't even notice Nino rolling his eyes. After a few more attempts, she saw Luka walking in with his friends and annoyingly enough, his expression lit up when he saw Marinette. It was so obvious he had feelings for her that it sickened her. However, she also noticed a number of students looking at him. A few girls were looking at him with a dreamy expression but a couple of guys were glaring at him. Lila smirked as she saw one of the boys who she knew had a crush on Marinette, not that she understood why. She didn't know his name either and it didn't matter but luckily enough, he looked like Adrien and most of the school knew Marinette had a crush on a boy with blonde hair and green eyes. She could use that to ruin Marinette's chances with Luka by getting this boy involved. She excused herself from the table, not that Nino or Alya noticed and walked over to the boy. He looked up at her with mild surprise.

 "Hi, I have a message from Marinette for you," She smiled, making him frown.

 "Um... what is it?" He asked, a little confused.

 "She asked me to tell you that she has a crush on you but is just too shy to ask you out," She stated, making him blink.

 "Uh... isn't she with Couffaine?" He asked, making Lila mentally smirk. She knew they weren't together.

 "Oh, no they're not actually dating," She stated, making him raise an eyebrow. "She sees him as a brother and really likes you,"

 "Right... but aren't you that liar?" He asked, making her frown. "Doesn't Marinette hate you?"

 "Look, I have an illness that makes me lie sometimes but I'm currently in therapy for it and it's helping so much," She replied, making him nod. "Besides, I don't lie about crushes and I want to make up for my behavior towards Marinette so I figured getting her with the guy she likes. Anyway, you should totally ask her out. I'm sure she'll say yes,"

 "Well... I do like her..." He admitted, making Lila smirk. Though she morphed it into a friendly grin. He got up and walked over to Marinette, who was chatting to Luka. Lila returned back to her seat, just as Alya looked up and the guy talked to Marinette. He frowned as she gently let him down and asked her why she got her friend to tell him otherwise. Marinette looked at him confused as he pointed out Lila. She frowned and apologized to him before she walked over.

 "Why did you tell that boy I like him?" She asked, crossing her arms. Lila gave her an innocent look.

 "Oh, I thought you did," She gasped, making Marinette grit her teeth. "I'm so sorry. I thought that's who you were talking about in class today when you were saying about having a crush on a boy called Luke was it? Or was it Luka?"

 Marinette's face went red as Lila gasped.

 "Oh, no! I must have got the names mixed up," She gasped in fake regret. "I hope I didn't embarrass you! I was just trying to help you out... I mean you suffered so badly with your crush on Adrien that I didn't want you to suffer in the same way with your new crush but I should have known it was Luka you were crushing on. I just hope you're not stalking him like you-"

 To everyone's surprise, Marinette slapped Lila across the face before storming out of the room. Lila held back a smirk but instantly started to cry. However, no one jumped to her defense. Instead, Luka rushed outside to check on Marinette and Alya leaned over to her as the rest of the room glared at her.

 "Lila, girl, I know you were trying to help but you shouldn't have done that," She gasped, making Lila frown. "Everyone knows that Marinette has a thing for Luka and moved on from her crush on Adrien. You didn't need to lie to get her to ask Luka out. We don't do those sort of plans anymore,"

 "O-oh, I thought it would be ok since you and the other girls have come up with plans like that before," Lila gasped, tears rolling down her face. "I didn't mean to embarrass her. I guess I deserved that slap..."

 "Damn right!" Alix growled as the class glared daggers at her.

 "I get it, Lila but Marinette was getting there," Alya replied, causing her to grip her fist. "It's not nice to reveal a crush like that and that poor guy... I get you were trying to encourage her but you shouldn't have told that other guy she liked him? What if he hadn't take no for answer?"

 "Oh, no! I didn't think of that,"

 "Yeah right," Nino muttered, making both Alya and Lila look at him in surprise. "It's clear you did all of that on purpose,"

 "W-what? No!" Lila gasped as Alya looked shocked. "Why would I?"

 "Because you hate Marinette and probably want Luka yourself," He pointed out, making her blink. She would have to be careful with Nino. "I mean all you do is lie. You lied to me about having a crush on Adrien, you framed Marinette and you lied about been friends with heroes,"

 "Babe, that's enough," Alya gasped, making him look at her. "I get she lied but she's trying to be better and she did it to help Marinette, right Lila?"

 "Of course," She lied, making Nino glare at her before he suddenly got up and walked off. Alya sighed and went to follow but Adrien stopped her.

 "I'll go talk to him," He stated before walking away. Alya nodded and sat down as Lila mentally frowned. Her plan didn't go the way she wanted but at least, she embarrassed Marinette enough to make it awkward with Luka.

 ~The Art Room~

 "Hey!" Adrien called out as Nino stormed in, slamming the door. He ran up to him and gently grabbed his arm. "Nino, calm down,"

 "How can I?" He asked before sitting down and taking off his cap as he ran his hand over his head. "I had to say something, dude. I wasn't there for Marinette when Lila caused her to become Princess Justice. I actually believed her until Anatis exposed her and then this whole thing Alya still believing in her. It nearly drove us apart and I keep telling her that Lila isn't a nice person and is lying to hurt people but Alya still wants to see the best in her and I love that because it's sweet but it's wasted on someone like Lila. She doesn't want to be nice! She didn't do that to make amends with Marinette. She did that to hurt her and Alya can't or doesn't want to see that. I love her but she is acting dumb around Lila!"

 "Whoa, it's ok, Nino," Adrien gasped, kneeling down as Nino tried to calm down. "I get it. You just want to look out for your friend and your girl. And someone like Lila is nasty but Alya has to realize that herself. You just need to be there for her when she does,"

 "... you're right, dude," Nino replied, nodding. "I'm sorry... I just... I just don't want Lila to destroy her faith in people but I also know she needs to realize Lila isn't the person she thinks she is,"

 "I know," Adrien stated, sitting next to him. "I wish I had realized sooner myself but if you want, I can try and talk to Alya bout Lila,"

 "That be cool," Nino sighed. "I wish I had known before Anatis exposed her. I can't believe it took that for me to see the truth,"

 "I know the feeling," Adrien sighed, looking down. "I never realized how damaging her lies could be before Anatis called her out... I really thought she was like a tabloid and that she was just doing it for attention but after he pointed out that she was hurting myself as well as others, I realized how damaging lies can be,"

 "Yeah," Nino replied before he suddenly looked up. "Wait... Anatis called her out in front of you?"

 "Y-Yeah, like a few hours before he exposed her online," Adrien replied. He was sure he had told Nino about that. "She had tried to claim she was a descendant of a superheroine and that Marinette had threatened her into blaming Chloe,"

 "Y-You knew before the rest of us?" Nino asked, making Adrien frown. "Did you know before Anatis called her out? She use to claim that she knew Aspik and Ryuko and you always seemed to ignore that..."

 "Well, I thought at first she was telling the truth but then she said something that I knew was a lie..." Adrien admitted, making Nino start at him. "I asked Nathalie about it and she just said to ignore her like a tabloid and that she would expose herself..."

 "You knew and you didn't think to warn us? Me?!" Nino gasped, surprising Adrien. "Did you not think that we wouldn't realize?!"

 "I honestly thought she would expose herself and I didn't think she would go so far," Adrien gasped as Nino looked at him with hurt, making him realize how wrong he had been. He should have exposed her straight away and he would if he could go back in time. "I'm sorry, Nino. I wish I had told you and the rest of the class. I could have saved everyone so much pain but I really thought she would expose herself and disappear like a tabloid paper,"

 "Well, she didn't!" Nino gasped, pinching his nose. "God, Adrien! This isn't a fairytale! Things don't just randomly fix themselves! You should have told us! I... I don't know how I can trust you anymore..."

 "Nino!" Adrien gasped, surprised but Nino walked out of the art room, causing Adrien to follow. "Nino, wait!"

 Nino ignored him and kept walking, failing to notice the akuma and amok heading towards him but Adrien did. He gasped and suddenly pushed him out of the way, causing Nino to turn around in anger.

 "What the- Adrien?" Nino gasped, feeling his anger melting away as he noticed Adrien gripping his head and stepping backwards towards the wall. A purple butterfly mask appeared around his eyes as he tried to fight off Hawkmoth's control. Nino gasped and reached out his hand as he realized that Adrien had taken an akuma meant for him. He gripped his shoulders as Adrien tried to fight off Hawkmoth's influence. "Adrien, dude! Fight him!"

 "I'm not going to listen to you!" He gasped before groaning. "I won't be one of your puppets, Hawkmoth!"

 "That's right, dude!" Nino gasped, trying to encourage him. "Think only positive thoughts! You've got this, Bro!"

 "I won't do evil for you!" Adrien gasped but his eyes widen as Hawkmoth spoke to him. Nino slowly let go as he remembered what it was like giving into him. Hawkmoth had a way with words that made it seem like the greatest idea of all time. No one could resist for long, even Adrien and both of them knew it as Adrien's arms fell limp to his side. A single tear slid down his cheek as he gave one last look of desperation towards his friend. "N-Nino... run..."

 "Adrien!" Nino gasped as the purple smog engulfed him and a small blue smog appeared next to him before it disappeared, revealing his akuma form. He actually didn't look much different or scary at all. His outfit had changed into a green tunic with leaves on his sleeves and he had matching green pants. Material shoes were on his feet and he had a dagger attached to his hip, along with a pan-flute. His hair was still blonde but it was messier in style and he had a green mask across his eyes. The only thing that he could see right now that was unusual was his ears that were now pointed. In fact, Adrien actually reminded Nino of Peter Pan. Nino stepped forward, unsure what to do but maybe he could find the akumatized item before Adrien did anything. He went to reach for him but Adrien snapped open his eyes, revealing that his scleras were now green and his irises  "A-Adrien?"

 "Not anymore," He replied, smiling as Nino stepped back in fear. Adrien took out a small bag and reached in it before taking his hand out and blowing the dust in Nino's face. His eyes rolled up into his head as he fell down onto the ground. A golden glow surrounded him as Adrien grinned. "Don't worry, Nino! You'll be seeing me soon... but first, I have a game to play! Come on, Fee!"

 He flew up into the air and laughed happily before he flew off with his sentimonster following him. 

 ~In the Courtyard~

 "Marinette!" Luka gasped as he rushed out of the canteen after her. He frowned as he looked around but he couldn't see so he took a small breathe and closed his eyes, listening for the familiar song. He picked up on it and luckily it was close by so he followed it, coming to one of the staircases. He stopped and looked underneath. Hugging her knees while sitting underneath it was Marinette. He crawled next to her and sat down, making her look up from her knees. Her eyes were bloodshot and her tears were tear-stained. Luka gave her a soft look before he opened his arms. Instantly, she crawled into them and wrapped her arms around his torso as he hugged her. "Are you ok?"

 "E-Embarrassed," She mumbled, looking up at him. "N-Not of my feelings for you but just how it came out... I don't make you uncomfortable, do I?"

 "No, you don't," He replied, moving part of her hair out of her face. "If you did, I would have told you already but I like been with you. Lila was just been a bitch because she is a black hearted coward,"

 "But... now you know I like you.." She mumbled, looking down as she pulled away. 

 "Well, I hope so... we have been going on dates with each other..."

 "Yeah but only like small dates. They're practically friend dates," She mumbled, pressing her fingers together as she still felt embarrassed. She really liked Luka but she hoped he liked her but they were probably just really close friends... even though she wanted to be more. She would love to be his girlfriend but there's no way he would like her that much, especially after Lila's stun. "Lila meant that I like you... like really like you... and I'm sure you don't like me. I mean I'm sure you like me enough to go on a few small time dates but I don't think you like me as more then that. We're just friends... right?" 

 "Marinette... I-"

 "Marinette! Luka!" Adrien's voice stated, causing Marinette to gasp and bring her hands to her face. Luka looked behind him as Adrien walked over. Before he could reach, Adrien suddenly blew a golden dust in his face, causing Luka to fall to the ground as he heard Marinette shout before he heard a thumb as well. He tried to look over and saw Marinette laying on the ground as Adrien grinned to him before he looked over at Luka. "Don't resist it, Luka! This is your happy ending!"

 Luka felt himself getting heavily before he fell into darkness...

 ~Hawkmoth's Lair~

 "Dusuu, fall my feathers," Mayura declared, turning back into Nathalie. As soon as she did, she felt dizzy and began to cough. Hawkmoth went to see if she was ok but to his surprise, she pushed him away. He gave her a puzzling look as he turned back into Gabriel. "I'm fine, sir... but why didn't you recall the akuma? Adrien-"

 "It would have been too suspicious," He replied, making her frown. "That friend of his is the boyfriend of the lady blogger. If he tells her then she'll publish it and it will end up in Anatis' hand which could lead him to find out that I am Hawkmoth. I have managed to keep his investigations at bay but that would only fuel his belief that he is correct,"

 "I see, Sir," Nathalie replied as they made their way back to the lift. It took them a few minutes but once they were back in his office, she took a glass of water and sat down. Gabriel frowned to himself as he began to work on designs while keeping an eye on the news. As soon as Anatis and Lady Noir were on the scene, he would transform back into Hawkmoth but right now, Heureux Fin was wreaking havoc across Paris so he might as well do some designs while observing the situation. It also gave Nathalie time to rest. He glanced over to the news as Heureux Fin burst into the news reporter. He transformed Alec into one of the ugly step-sisters and turned Nadja into a version of the boy who cried Wolf before he addressed the camera.

 "People of Paris! I am Heureux Fin, bringer of happiness! I invite all of your to the grandest ball in the whole of Paris, brought you to by me and to be hosted at Agreste Manor!!" He declared, making both Nathalie and Gabriel to stare at the screen before he grinned and flew out. 

 "Wait what?!" Nathalie gasped before the doors suddenly burst opened and Heureux Fin flew in landing on the table.

 "Father!" He declared, grinning as Gabriel stared at him. "We're having a grand ball and I've invited everyone in Paris!"

 "Absolutely not," Gabriel declared but he regretted it. As soon as the words left his mouth, Heureux Fin's expression turned dark and his sentimonster, Fairytale, transformed into his shadow before it wrapped around Gabriel, trapping him in place. Nathalie jumped up in shock as Heureux Fin walked across the table towards his father. "Adrien, stop- hmm!"

 The shadow covered his mouth.

 "I'm not Adrien anymore! I'm Heureux Fin!" He declared, taking out his bag of dust. "We're having a grand ball and all of Paris is going to come whenever you like it or not!"

 "Hmm!" He declared as Heureux Fin took a handful of dust and blew it in his face, causing his shadow to let go him as he fell to the floor and began to glow gold as well. Nathalie rushed over to the door but the shadow got there beforehand, causing her to back up from it. She felt a tap on her shoulder before she turned around. Heureux Fin was hovering right next to her.

 "Adr-" She started but he grinned and blew the dust in her face, causing her to collapse to the floor as well. Heureux Fin turned to his shadow and grinned. "Go and bring our Princess Charming. She can help us set up the ball with her skill!! Oh and why you're at it, spread this all over Paris,"

 The shadow grinned and nodded, turning back into it's fairy form before it took the pouch that Heureux Fin handed to it. He had already transformed those who he needed to. Now he just had to set up the ball. He was even willing to let the cat and the beetle come to the ball. Though he will take their miraculous from them before the clock strikes Midnight.

 ~Back to the School Yard~

 "Luka!" A voice echoed as he slowly came around. He slowly blinked and opened his eyes, causing him to notice that he was laid on the ground. He slowly sat up and looked around as he recognized his surroundings as the school yard. Tikki flew in front of him and let out a sigh of relief. "You're ok,"

 "What happened?" He asked as he looked around. He remembered been in the courtyard with Marinette. He was making sure she was ok after Lila pulled one of her tricks and was about to fully confess to her but then they got interrupted by Adrien, only he didn't look like himself. In fact, he looked like he had been akumatized. Luka's eyes widen as he looked around and saw Marinette was gone. "Where's Marinette?!"

 "She was taken by something that looked like a shadow," Tikki stated, making Luka look at her. "I think your friend was akumatized.."

 "We have to transform," He declared, standing up. "Tikki, sp-"

 "Luka!" Juleka's voice echoed, making him stop and turn to Tikki. He went to open his hoodie, only to find that his clothes had changed. His new outfit resembled the waiter outfit Marinette had made him but it was more ragged and wore out. He blinked before pointing to his hair which was messier then usual. Tikki got the idea and hid in his hair as Juleka rushed over to him. Like himself, she was wearing a different outfit too. She was wearing a white dress with a blood red overcoat, matching red shoes and a ruby and gold circlet. Her hair was her natural color, which like himself was raven brown, almost black and her lips were blood red. As soon as he saw her, he realized she was suppose to be Snow White. Following her was Rose, who was wearing a pink dress in a style similar to Juleka's. "Are you ok?!"

 "I'm alright," Luka admitted. "Just confused about the new outfit,"

 "Oh, Luka must be Cinderella!" Rose gasped before yawning. Of course, she would be sleeping beauty. "Sorry!"

 "What's that?" Juleka asked, making him frown and look down. She was pointing to a golden envelope on the floor, causing Luka to pick it up and opened it. "Well?"

 "It's an invite to a ball at Agreste Castle," He stated, making him frown before he read it out. "Citizens of Paris, I, Heureux Fin, am throwing the finest ball in all of Paris! Everyone from all walks off lives are invited so they find their happy ending and forever after! Even the beetle and his cat are invited as long as they promise not to cause a fuss and hand over their miraculous! The ball starts at 7pm tonight at Agreste Manor..."

 "That's in half an hour!" Rose gasped, making him blink as she yawned. "Sorry! I'm just really tired,"

 "No worries, Rose," He replied before continuing to read. "The Dresscode is Fairytale theme. Though that shouldn't be a problem for anyone in Paris..."

 Luka's eyes widen, along with Juleka's and before anyone could say anything else, the two of them had ran out of the school. They came to a stop as they looked around. There were a number of giant beanstalks, thorn bushes and trees, making them realize that Heureux Fin had transformed the city into something out of a fairytale. The Grand Paris hotel was now a huge castle, there was a number of smaller castles and huts around. To Luka's surprise, the bakery had been transformed into a tower. Luka rushed over and made his way inside, finding Tom and Sabine had been transformed into a king and queen. He wasn't sure what fairytale they were from but he was more concerned about Marinette. They looked up at him and rose an eyebrow at his outfit.

 "I see you got hit as well," Sabine sighed, making him nod. "Are you ok? You look pale, dear,"

 "Is Marinette here?" He asked, making the two shake their heads as they looked at him with worry. "She was with me at school but the akuma ambushed us and when I woke up, I was dressed like this and Marinette was gone,"

 "We can help you look for her," Sabine stated, lifting her dress a little and following him outside with Tom. Luka nodded and led them to where Juleka was. He frowned as he noticed she was staring. He followed her look, causing him to stare at the floating ship. For a second, he thought it was Guard-O-War again until he realized it resembled the Liberty. A rope was thrown down and Anarka swung down, making them look at her. She was wearing a red captain's coat, black pants and boots but the most interesting thing was her right hand was replaced with a hook. She grinned at them. 

 "Ahoy, Me Hearties!" She grinned as a crocodile jumped down and landed next to her. Weirdly enough, they could hear ticking coming from it. "I see that scallywag hit ye all with his cursed magic,"

 "I'm afraid so," Sabine answered as a puff of glitter appeared next to Anarka before it reformed into Penny. She was wearing a silvery suit, had fairy wings and was holding a wand. "Oh, Miss Penny, you look lovely,"

 "Thank you," Penny smiled before turning to the kids. "Everyone ok?"

 "Well, no one's hurt but we've all been turned into something out of a fairytale," Juleka muttered, gesturing towards the school where a giant version of Ivan stood. Luka rose an eyebrow as he smiled and waved at him. He waved back before turning to the others. "At least, Anatis will be able to fix this,"

 "Have you seen Marinette, Penny?" He asked, making her frown as she made a thoughtful face.

 "No but I have an idea where she might end up," She stated, making Luka raise an eyebrow. "At the ball. Everyone in Paris is invited and Marinette is friends with Adrien,"

 "She's also the class representative," Rose gasped before yawning again.

 "And she's the best at making parties and organizing things," Juleka pointed out, making Luka frown before his eyes widen.

 "You don't think Adrien has taken her to help set up the ball, do you?" He asked, making everyone look at him.

 "It makes sense," Penny stated, making him frown. "We should attend the party then,"

 "Aye!" Anarka grinned as Penny cast a critical eye towards Luka, making him blink. 

 "Something wrong?" He asked, making her look in his eyes.

 "Marinette would never forgive me if I let you go to a ball dressed in rags," She pointed, making him blink. "And since I've been turned into what is clearly the fairy godmother... it makes sense that I have the ability to do this,"

 She waved her wand at Luka, causing a silver mist to move around him, causing him to shield his face as it changed his outfit. Once it disappeared, he lowered them and looked at his new outfit. He was now wearing a light blue vest with dark blue detail and silver buttons with matching light blue pants. There was a blue ruffle tie around his neck and he had a light blue gloves on his hands that only covered part of his hands and middle fingers. His boots were a dark crystal blue and sparkled like they were made from glass. Over his shirt, he had a silver tailcoat with a small amount of frills on it. It felt like it was made from the finest silk there was and his hair had been tidied up but remained in his normal style.

"Ok, now you can definitely go to the ball," Penny grinned, clearly enjoying herself. Luka would have to find a way to sneak away from them at some point during the ball so he could transform into Anatis but at least this way he could get in there without been spotted. Now just to get there. Maybe he could get close enough to Adrien to find out where the akumatized item is.

 ~Agreste Castle~

 "Are you coming to the ball as well?" Luka asked as the ship came to a stop outside the castle. Penny looked over and shook her head as Anarka walked over and handed her a bottle of rum. "I'll take that as a no,"

 "Well, I am a pirate, Lad," Anarka grinned. "We'll just wait here until Anatis fixes everything. Now go have fun at the ball!"

 "Right," He smiled before Penny lowered a plank for them to walk. Juleka and Rose went first before Luka followed. He felt nervous as he walked through the gates with a number of other people that looked like something out of a fairytale. Once he had located Marinette and made sure she was fine, he would find a way to transform. While his mother was flying them to the castle, he took a moment to check on Tikki. Luckily, she hadn't been affected by the change of clothes but gushed over his outfit. She was now resting inside his jacket, waiting for him to find the perfect moment to transform. He hadn't seen anything on Lady Noir yet so he guessed she was in a similar situation to himself. He took a deep breathe and followed Juleka and Rose in. The ball room was the grandest room he had ever seen. It was clearly based on an enchanted forest and hundreds of people there including a number of his classmates. Luka rested his hands on the edge of the banister and kept himself hidden a little as he looked around and observed the room in his luck vision, noticing the amount of exits in the place before he turned his attention to the guests. Rose and Juleka had joined the others and started to dance but Luka was observing everyone. In the back of the room was two golden thrones. A woman dressed as a queen but with a pig's nose was sat one. Judging by the color of her hair, it was Gabriel's assistant Nathalie. He noticed a frog king sat next to her that looked a little bit moody and he suspected it had seen better days. Judging by the smirk on Nathalie's face when she looked at the frog, it was Gabriel. There were other fairytale themed characters to. A lot of the guests were transformed into one might reference to as stock characters such as royalty and witches but it seemed that Adrien's friends were themed around main characters from fairytales. There was a wooden puppet next to his maker, making Luka realize it was Max and Marvok as. Alya and Nino had been transformed into Beauty and the Beast only Alya was the beast. Kim resembled a mermaid and seemed to be holding something in his hand while he sat in a bathtub. That made Luka assume he was the Little Mermaid. Near him was Alix who was talking to Aurora. Both appeared to be characters from Alice in Wonderland. Alix was clearly the white rabbit and Aurora herself was Alice. They were also talking to Nathaniel, who was Red Riding Hood, Marc who looked like a warrior, Mireille... she was the blue fairy and Jean who was dressed as Aladdin. It took Luka a second but he realized Marc was Atreyu from the Neverending Story. He took a deep breathe as he looked over the remainder of the guests, hoping to find Marinette. The Bourgeois family were there. Audrey was the Queen of Hearts and Andre was the cowardly lion but Chloe was dressed in a beautiful dress that resembled a Swan. Clara Nightingale was nearby. She was dressed as Clara from the nutcracker by the looks of her dress and she was talking with Felix who resembled a pixie. In the far corner of the room was an old witch, which he realized was Lila. Luka wasn't surprised that she had been turned into that. He moved his eyes from her and scanned the rest of the room until his eyes landed on Marinette. She was dressed in a pink tail coat with a golden waist coat and matching pants. Her boots were dark brown and her hair was tied into a loose ponytail. She had a ruffle tie around her neck and a pink rose pinned into her hair. It was simple outfit but she looked very beautiful. However, she seemed to be look around. Her eyes moved over to where he was and a look of relief came onto her face as she saw him. A blush crept over his cheek as that look turned from relief to awe. She must have spotted his outfit. Alya was next to her and said something to her but she shook her head as Luka took a deep breathe and walked over to the staircase. He descended down them as Marinette pushed through the crowd, causing people to look at her as she moved over. 

 "Hi..." She smiled shyly as she met him at the bottom of the stairs. "You look amazing,"

 "T-thanks..." He blushed, rubbing the back of his neck as well. "You look beautiful,"

 "Really?" She asked, making him nod before she moved closer as if to inspect him. "I'm glad you're ok. I was really worried when I woke up and you weren't around. I thought Adrien had hurt you. He assured me that he didn't and that he needed my help to set up this. I was gonna post on the akuma alert app but Adrien seems harmless and the heroes haven't turned up yet,"

 "I know," Luka replied, nodding. "I think they might be stuck in their civilian forms and haven't had the chance to escape yet,"

 "That makes sense," Marinette replied, nodding before shrugging. "Oh, well,"

 Luka nodded in reply and looked around as the music changed. It was the same song they danced to at Chloe's party and in the moonlight. He had a feeling Adrien was behind the song choice. Marinette smiled as she looked around too before Luka cleared his throat nervously.He knew he should make some excuse to get away so he can transform but it would just seem odd to just sneak off. Besides, Adrien seemed harmless as an akuma and he could fix everything later. He should be able to enjoy himself, especially since he was with Marinette. 

 "W-Would you like to dance? It's our song... You know... never mind it's stu-"

 "Yes," She stated, making him look at her. "I would love to dance with you,"

 Luka broke into a smile as she grabbed his hand and lead him to the dance floor. The two of them moved together, ignoring everyone else as they just danced and zoned out into their own little world. Luka couldn't help but smile when Marinette leaned against him as they swayed. The more they danced, the more a fog seem to cloud their mind, making them forget as they continued to enjoy each other's company. Around them, the same thing seemed to be happening to everyone else. Nino, who wanted to talk to Adrien and apologize to him, decided he could just do it later. After all, he was having a good time and it was thanks to Adrien. The other guests were the same. Aurdey didn't care what people thought about her, Chloe was complimenting Sabrina and others and Marc wasn't hiding behind his hair. He was laughing and happy. Lila was talking happily to people as if she wasn't a malicious witch. Her lies and fake personality forgotten by both herself and everyone else. Even Gabriel had forgotten that he was Hawkmoth and that he was after the miraculous to bring back his wife. Instead, he was sat in Nathalie's hand as they danced, all of their worries forgotten. Luka smiled as he swayed with Marinette. His own worries lifting away and been forgotten as they danced. 

 "I love you..." He whispered, making her suddenly look up at him with surprise in her eyes. A blush crept over his face as she searched his features. A smile broke through as she looked at him as well.

 "I love you too," She stated, making him stare at her before he grinned like a love struck fool. She smiled back and gently leaned on her head against his shoulder again as they swayed. Luka smiled and pulled her a little closer to him as he rested his chin on top of her head before closing his eyes as they swayed on the spot with their friends grinning and whispering as they finally confessed their feelings for each other. However, their peace was short-lived as Heureux Fin flew in and landed on the stairs case, crowing as he did. 

 "Hello, Paris!!" He shouted, grinning before a fairy like creature flew over, trailing dust over everyone. "Let's get this party started!!"

 He laughed and flew up into the air as everyone cheered before the party kicked into a swing. Everyone laughed and danced without a single care as the castle shifted into a real forest. A huge roaring fire was created in the middle, causing everyone to dance wildly around it including Heureux Fin. It was like something out of a fairytale with wild fae and characters dancing around. Sure, it would be a mess in the morning but Luka couldn't bring himself to care. Just like everyone else, he knew Lady Noir and Anatis would fix it, even if the heroes hadn't turned up yet but that didn't matter. Now was the time to have fun. The music changed into a fast paced song, causing everyone to clap and dance faster as the evening went on. Song after song, played and Viper laughed as he spun around arm in arm with Ladybug but he suddenly stopped when he saw someone standing in the crowd, watching. He let go out of Marinette's arm as he stared towards the figure but Carapace knocked into him, making him look over.

 "Everyone ok, dude?" He asked as Viper blinked.

 "Oh, I thought I saw someone over there," He replied, looking over again but the person was gone. "Huh... guess they went away,"

 "Ah don't worry too much!" Carapace laughed, joining the party again as he howled and danced around the fire with Rena and the others. Frowning to himself, Viper glanced over to where the person had been. He felt like he knew that person and something had changed but he couldn't place his mind on it. He shrugged and turned around to dance again but something inside his mind niggled at him. Something felt wrong. Very wrong but he didn't know what it was. It just felt like he had forgotten something. He groaned a little as he felt his head ache and very slowly, the fog began to lift. It still wasn't clear what he had forgotten but it was definitely something. He moved to the side and sat down as he held his head. Ladybug moved over and leaned down in front of him. He looked up at her and frowned. Was she always dressed similar to Rena? For some reason, he was sure she was dressed as a princess before.

 "Hey, you ok?" She asked, making him look over. "You look pale,"

 "My head hurts," He replied, frowning. She frowned back and sat next to him, gently rubbing his back. "I feel like I've forgotten something important,"

 "Really?" She asked. "What do you think it is?"

 "I don't know," He replied, looking down. He frowned as he noticed his outfit had changed as well. Like Rena, Carapace and Ladybug, he was dressed in what he could only described as ragged clothing. He was in a teal green tunic with dark teal breeches and material shoes but he was certain he hadn't been wearing it before hand. He was sure he had been wearing something similar to Cinderella. That's what his fairy godmother put him in. Wait... not his fairy godmother but Penny! His eyes widen as he remembered her and his family. She had been transformed into the fairy godmother and his mother had been transformed into Captain Hook by an akuma. His eyes widen even more as he remembered Juleka and Rose. They were Snow White and Sleeping Beauty respectively and Marinette... Marinette had been Princess Charming. He glanced over and saw Rose and Juleka dancing by the fire. They were dancing as if there was no care in the world. He turned to look to Marinette, who was looked at him with worry and fear. He stood up as she watched him. "There's an akuma.. we have to get out of here,"

 "What's an akuma?" She asked, confused before gasping. "It is to do with that nasty pirate-"

 "Marinette, listen to me," He gasped, cupping her face. "Do you remember who your parents are?"

 "I don't have any, silly and my name is Ladybug," She giggled, making him frown. "We're the lost kids, remember? Part of Fin's crew. We never grow up and we get to play all the time. You know that, Viper,"

 "Viper?" He asked, frowning.

 "It's your name," She giggled, tapping the side of his head. "You came here with Tigress and Pigella,"

 "Tigress and Pigella?" He asked, causing her to point to Juleka and Rose. He frowned and shook his head before gently grabbing her shoulders. "Listen to me. None of this is real. It's the effect of the akuma,"

 "Viper, you're scar-"

 "My name isn't Viper, it's Luka," He gasped, making her frown. "And your name is Marinette Dupain-Cheng. Your parents are Tom Dupain and Sabine Cheng. You're 15 years old and a fashion designer..."

 "This game isn't funny, Viper,"

 "It's not a game," He gasped before he took a deep breathe. Something told him he needed to wake her up as well. "Remember what I said to you just before Kitty Section played live. You are an extraordinary girl, Marinette. Clear as a music note, sincere as a melody. You have been the song I hear in my head since we first met..."

 Recognition flowed into Marinette's eyes as the fog began to lift for her. She gasped and looked around, panicked.

 "Luka?" She gasped, making him let out a sigh of relief. "What happened? My mind feels foggy and confused,"

 "There's an akuma but I can't remember everything. I just know we need to get out now," He gasped, grabbing her hand and leading her away from the fire. Everyone else was having too much fun to notice. The farther they got away from the fire and the others, the clearer their minds got until they fully remembered everything including that they are heroes and that they needed a chance to escape and transform. Luka turned to Marinette, making her look at him. "I'm going to see if I can find Anatis. He might have been affected by the spell as well,"

 "Right," She nodded. "I should find Lady Noir as well,"

 He nodded before they were their separate ways. He slipped into the garden and hid behind a rose bush before letting Tikki out. He found her in his pocket asleep. He poked her and woke her up, making her yawn.

 "Luka?" She asked, making him slight in relief. "What happened?"

 "You feel asleep and I fell under the akuma's spell but now it's time to rewrite this story," He stated, making her nod before he swiped his earrings and transformed into Anatis. The rest of the fog completely cleared. He took out his yoyo and made his way back into the forest to fight Heureux Fin. He spun his yoyo when he came to the fire as all of the 'lost kids' looked at him with annoyed expressions. Heureux Fin got up from his throne and flew over, landing in front of him.

 "So you finally turned up, Bugboy," He declared, glaring at him as the lost kids sneered and shouted. "You know I'm just trying to let people have fun and helped everyone get their happy endings,"

 "By forcing them to forget who they are?" Anatis replied back, shaking his head. "That isn't how to help people... Adrien,"

 "My name is Heureux Fin!" He shouted back, taking to the air. "Besides, you can't catch me! Unlike me, you can't fly,"

 "He might not be able to fly but he isn't alone!" A voice shouted, causing Heureux Fin to look behind him as Lady Noir jumped on him. He managed to throw her off, causing her to land next to Anatis. "Got a plan?"

 "Not yet," He replied as Heureux Fin laughed and taunted them. "We need to ground him so we can find the akuma,"

 "Ok,"

 "You can't catch me!" Heureux Fin shouted before whistling. The fairy like creature flew over to him. "Fairytale, deal with this losers!"

 Fairytale turned into a giant wolf and landed on the ground, making Anatis and Lady Noir stare at it.

 "Great, he has a sentimonster," Lady Noir gasped as the wolf changed at her. She hit it with her baton as Anatis threw up his yoyo and summoned his lucky charm, which was a shoe and a sock. Anatis rose an eyebrow at it with confusion but before he could work it out, Heureux Fin tried to grab it off him. He jumped out of the way and stepped back, dropping the sock in the process. However, he was grabbed by the lost kids as Lady Noir was knocked back by the sentimonster. Anatis struggled against the lost kids as Heureux Fin flew over.

 "Now we can finally finding out who's behind that mask," He stated, reaching for his earrings. Anatis' luck vision kicked in, highlighting Heureux Fin himself, the shoe and the trees as a plan formed in his head.

 "None of this is real!" Anatis suddenly shouted, making Heureux Fin stop reaching for his earrings. "It's all a lie created by your powers. You're not Heureux Fin, you're Adrien Agreste! And this isn't a forest!"

 "You're lying!" Heureux Fin shouted but he lowered closer to the ground again, causing the lost kids to look at him with a little confusion. Seeing his chance, Anatis yanked him self free and threw the shoe, causing everyone to gasp it flew towards tree tops. Heureux Fin gasped and went to fly after it but Anatis stopped him, using his yoyo. The shoe hit the top, shattering one of the skylights before it fell down with shattered glass. The lost kids gasped and realization appeared in their eyes, causing Heureux Fin to realize. He fell down to the ground, allowing Anatis to recall his yoyo. Heureux Fin yelled out and charged at him but before he could hit, Lady Noir got the upper hand on the Sentimonster and threw it into him, causing it to fall on top of him before Anatis threw his yoyo, tying Heureux Fin and the Sentimonster to one of the trees with his yoyo. "Let me go!! Fairytale, atta- hmm!"

 To everyone's surprise, Nino shoved the lucky charm sock into Heureux Fin's mouth, cutting him off and causing Heureux Fin to look at him in surprise and slight betrayal.

 "I'm sorry, Adrien," He stated, taking the ring off and turning to Anatis, holding it out to him. "The akuma and the amok are in there. He took them to stop me from been the victim,"

 "Thank you, Nino," Anatis replied, taking the ring. "Kitten, would you mind?"

 "Cataclysm!" She called as he flipped the ring, tossing it towards her. She caught it and it rushed in her grip, causing the akuma and the amok to escape. Anatis recalled his yoyo, causing Heureux Fin to fall to his knees as Fairytale disappeared in blue smog before he threw out his yoyo and captured the akuma and the amok in it before releasing them. Lady Noir picked the shoe and handed it to him, causing him to smile as he took it. "Should I get the sock as well?"

 "The shoe will work fine," He replied before tossing it up in the air again. "Miraculous Ladybugs!!"

 The shoe burst into the cure and spreaded throughout the forest, getting rid of the trees and fire as it turned back into Agreste Manor. It washed over the party guests, turning them back to normal and restoring them to where they had been originally before bursting through the windows and spreading across Paris, turning it back into the city they loved. Heureux Fin turned back into Adrien and looked up confused as the heroes fist-bumped each other. Gabriel and Nathalie also looked around confused.

 "How did I get here?" He asked, confused before he noticed them. His eyes widen in realization and dread. "Oh, no! I was akumatized, wasn't I?"

 "Yes but I know you took it to stop Nino from been the akuma," Anatis stated, helping him to his feet as Adrien stammered an apology, "No need for an apology, Adrien,"

 "But I hurt people!" He gasped, making the heroes look at each other. "I did hurt people, didn't I?"

 "Adrien, you threw a massive party and turned people into fairytale characters," Lady Noir explained. "The most trouble you caused was causing them to forget their troubles. You didn't hurt anyone,"

 "But Nino... he must hate me," Adrien groaned, covering his face. Anatis frowned. "I... I should have never trusted Lila! All she does is hurt people and she upset my friend Marinette and Nino got upset with Alya because even though she told Lila off, she thought Lila was trying to help and fit in, just like I did. I offered to talk to her, to help her see the error of her ways like I did but in the process, Nino discovered I knew about Lila before anyone else and got upset that I didn't tell him like I should have!! I upset him and I saw an akuma coming for him! I couldn't let him down or fail to protect him again so I pushed him out of the way but the akuma and amok got in my ring and I tried to resist I swear. I-"

 "Adrien, calm down," Anatis stated, making him look at him. "Yes, you made a mistake with the whole Lila thing but that doesn't make you a bad friend. Talk to Nino and get him to help you with understanding social situations. None of this would have happened if you were taught how to interact with people your age and allowed to interact with them,"

 He shoot a look toward Gabriel, who looked at him with shock.

 "How dare you suggest that I'm the cause for this?!" Gabriel gasped. Anatis was ready to chew him out but to everyone's surprise, Nathalie stepped forward.

 "Anatis is actually correct, sir," She stated, making Gabriel look at her. "While his grades are excellent, he does lack in understanding normal social situations due to his isolated upbringing,"

 She turned to look at Anatis.

 "Which is we will work on," She stated, making him nod before she lead Adrien out, promising to get him some ice cream and to clear his schedule for a couple of days. Both Gabriel and Anatis stared in surprise as she lead him out before Gabriel turned to Anatis and held out his hand.

 "A thank you is in order," He stated as Anatis looked at it with distrust. "Is something wrong?"

 "I'm sure you saw how I call out a number of people for their behavior," He stated, making Gabriel retract his hand. "Well, you're heading to the top of the list, Mr Agreste. Adrien isn't some puppet or property. He is your son and if you keep going down this path you have chosen, you're gonna end up losing him forever,"

 "Is that a threat, Anatis?" Gabriel asked. He was certain the young hero didn't know he was Hawkmoth but he suspected the boy still suspected him. "Or a promise?"

 "Neither, Mr Agreste," He replied, making him raise an eyebrow. "It's a warning and if I were you, sir, I would heed it. Let's go, Kitten,"

 The two heroes walked out of the door, making Mr Agreste frown in a dark manner.

 "Soon enough, Anatis, I will crush you like the insect you are,"

 ~A Couple of Days Later~

 "So Adrien's schedule is been relaxed a little bit and he's asked me to help him to understand social ques," Nino explained as he and Marinette walked up to the school. "Though he won't be back in school for a couple of more days. Apparently, Nathalie is letting him have sweets and watch whatever he wants,"

 "That's good," Marinette replied before seeing Luka sat on one of the benches, listening to music. "Hey, would you mind going ahead? I need to do something,"

 "Sure thing, dudette," Nino smiled as he saw her looking at Luka. He grinned. "Go get him, tiger,"

 "Nino!" She gasped, blushing as he laughed and walked off. Licking her lips, she began to walk over. Since been restored, she hadn't had a chance to talk to Luka. She had tried to text him but he barely answered and she had a feeling is because of the party. She wasn't sure if it was the affect of Heureux Fin but Luka had said he loved her and she told him she loved him back. She did but she wasn't sure if he knew if she was been sincere. She had a feeling that he thought it was because of the effects of the akuma and in a way, she thought that might be the case as well. She stopped in front of him, making him jump a little and take out his headphones. "Hi..."

 "Hey," He stated, looking down at his hands. "Um... how is everything..."

 "G-Good," She mumbled, feeling her face heat up as he looked up at her. "How are you?"

 "I'm... good..." He muttered, though he didn't seem ok. In fact, he seemed surprised. Marinette rose an eyebrow. "I... I got through to the next stage for the music contest..."

 "Oh my gosh! That's great!" She gasped, going to hug him but she stopped and rubbed her neck, making him frown. "Sorry,"

 "It's fine," He replied, making her smile. "But are you ok?"

 "Um... actually, I wanted to talk to you about... the party and what you said..."

 "Oh god," He muttered, making her frown as he looked down in embarrassment. "Marinette, I am so sorry... I don't know what came over me with that. I know you don't like me in that way at all. I mean if you did, you probably would said already and you're out of my league anyway. I mean why on earth would a beautiful symphony like you want to be with a sour note like myself? You deserve better then me..."

 Marinette frowned as he looked down before a wave of clarity came over her. Luka didn't think she meant it but not because he didn't love her. He did but because he thought he wasn't good enough for her. 

 "Luka," She stated, making him look at him. "You're an idiot,"

 "That's mean, Melody," He stated, making her giggle "Why am I an idiot?"

 "Because I like you," She stated, making him blink at her in surprise. "I meant what I said during the party. You're amazing, funny, brave and creative. You mean everything to me and I'm so sorry it took me a while to realize it. I was so blinded by my crush on Adrien that I didn't even consider that someone else could be the one I want to be with but with you... there isn't any of that. Everything is so easy and simple with you. I don't feel like I have to be something I'm not. When I'm with you, I'm happy. Luka, I know I'm not perfect. I'm clumsy, stupid and I'm sure there's tons of girls that are way better then me but... I like you, Luka as more then a friend. I really like you and I..."

 She took a deep breathe.

 "I want to be your girlfriend," Luka's mind went completely blank as her words sank in. Marinette... liked him. Like actually liked him in the same way he liked her and she wanted to be his girlfriend. Marinette, the most beautiful girl in the world, wanted to be his girlfriend. He must be dreaming. There's no way this could be real but when he looked up at her, she was still there and he hadn't answered yet. He needed to say something before she thought he didn't like her. He opened his mouth as she looked down. taking his silence for rejection but before she could get up and leave, Luka gently took her hand, making her look at him. The way he was looking at her made her cheeks heat up.

 "I don't think you're clumsy or stupid. I actually think you're brilliant, beautiful and gifted," He stated, making her cheek heat up even more. "And there might be tons of other girls but they don't hold a candle to you. Marinette, I meant what I said when I said you were the song in my head. I still mean it and I always will. I... I love you..."

 "Luka..." She gasped, blushing. "I-Is that a yes to been my boyfriend then?"

 "Yes, it is," He smiled before blushing as well. "I-If you'll have me that is. I mean I'm not perfect and I'm certain gonna mess up but I love you and if you'll have me, I want to be your boyfriend..."

 "Yes, absolutely!" She gasped, making him blush. "Sorry, too much?"

 "N-No... I like your enthusiasm," He replied, causing her to squeak and throw her arms around him in a hug, making him chuckle and hug back as the bell rang. "We should go to class,"

 "Ok but meet me at lunch! I want to spend it with my boyfriend and hear about the contest! Ah, I can't believe I can say that!!" She grinned, making Luka smile back. Her song was louder then it had ever been. The second bell rang and she jumped. "Right! Gotta go!! See you at lunch!!"

 She blew a kiss at him before running off to her class, making him smile dreamily before he headed to his own lesson. He couldn't wait for lunch.

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Miss Bustier’s Class:

Marinette- Princess Charming/Ladybug Nino- Belle/Carapace Alya- The Beast/Rena Nathaniel- Little Red Riding Hood/Red Rose- Sleeping Beauty/Pigella Juleka- Snow White/Tigress Ivan- The BFG Mylene- Little Princess Max- Geppetto/Pegasus Marvok- Pinocchio Kim- The Little Mermaid/Monkey Alix- The White Rabbit/Bunny Sabrina- Rapunzel Chloe- The Ugly Ducking/Swan Princess/Bee Lila- The Evil Queen/Hag Miss Bustier- Mrs Darling

Mrs Mendeleiev's Class

Felix- Rumpstileskin/Chat Luka- Cinderella/Viper Kagami- Puss in Boots/Dragon Marc- Atreu (Neverending story)/Horns Aurora- Alice Liddle Mireille- Blue Fairy Jean- Aladdin Ondine- Thumbelina Mrs Mendeleiev- Unaffected

Other Characters:

Audrey Bourgeois- Queen of Hearts Andre Bourgeois- The Cowardly Lion Nathalie- The Pig-faced Princess Gabriel Agreste- The Frog King Anarka- Captain Hook (didn’t attend the party) Jagged- Tick-Tock  (didn’t attend the party) Clara Nightingale- Clara from Nutcracker Penny Rolling- Fairy Godmother (didn’t attend the party) Jean (Butler)- Knave of Hearts Mr Damocles- the Piped Piper Nadja Chamack-  The Woman who cried Wolf Gorilla-  The Hunchback of Notre-Dame Officer Roger- The Huntsman (didn’t attend the party) Master Fu- Wizard Of Oz (didn’t attend the party) Master Mila- Snow Queen  (didn’t attend the party) Tomoe- Mother Gothel (didn’t attend the party) Emile- The White Queen (didn’t attend the party)

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Next Chapter: Coming Soon

[miraculouscontent]

A full summary of “Furious Fu” for my followers who can’t find subs or who would rather look at a summary first to figure out if the episode is okay for them to watch:

- The kwami are arguing with Marinette because they want to go see Fu. Marinette argues against this by saying that his memory was erased. They ask why Tikki can go and Tikki explains that Marinette might need to transform. They offer to hide, still wanting to see him because he took care of them for 100+ years, but Marinette says that they need to let him restart his life with his soulmate, so it's her turn to take care of them.

- Wayzz points out that he understands, but Fu was his friend and he misses him. Marinette relents and allows Wayzz to go, which makes the other kwami upset. Marinette tries to get out of the situation by saying that someone needs to protect the box, and Trixx responds, "Well then only one of us needs to stay, right??"

- Sass suggests letting "destiny" decide (I have no idea what that means), then Mullo suggests Kwami-Kwa-Who, which seems like Eeny Meeny Minny Moe. Mullo lands on Marinette and says that Marinette will have to stay. The kwami go to fly away and Marinette blocks them off, stating that it was cheating and she's the guardian, so she decides what happens.

- The kwami give her puppy dog eyes and Marinette relents, asking which kwami will stay. Barkk calls Marinette "little one" and agrees to stay behind to watch for villains because they have a bad feeling (also being in the middle of watching a knight movie on Marinette's monitor).

- At the train station, the kwami start making noises. Marinette panics and claims it was her phone to any onlookers and that she'll "throw it in the trash" if it keeps talking. An old man is watching her from a garbage can in the distance.

- Fu and Marianne arrive and Marinette greets Marianne with a hug. Marianne asks Fu if he remembers Marinette, stating that "she found you after your boat accident; the one that erased your memory."

- Marinette hugs Mast--she catches herself and calls him "Mister/Sir Fu," and he thanks her for reuniting him with his beloved Marianne.

- Cut to the Seine where Marinette, Fu, and Marianne are sitting on a park bench and having snacks together. Fu explains that he's found that he has a passion for painting and pulls out a piece of art to show Marinette (it looks like splotches of paint in red, black, white, pink, and blue). Fu continues talking and Marinette notices that Wayzz has gotten out of the bag and is slowly crawling his way across the ground to make his way to see Master Fu (Wayzz keeps having eyelashes in some shots and it's really distracting). Marinette tries to be subtle in grabbing Wayzz, but Fu notices and picks him up, asking Marinette if it's one of her toys. She insists that it is and puts Wayzz back in her bag, leading to Wayzz squealing happily, "He touched me! He touched me!" Marinette panics and tries to claim that the toy talks, pulling him back out and trying to talk like a ventriloquist to make it seem like he talked.

- The old man from before is hiding in a box on a bicycle and spying on them.

- Fu wants to paint and goes to get set up, telling Marinette and Marianne to act like he's not there. The scene cuts to a painting Fu did of the two of them.

- Marinette comes home to find that an old man is suddenly in her room. Barkk re-states that they had a bad feeling and the man notes that Marinette had the Miracle Box (which is now in his possession). Marinette glances over to her hiding spot for it, seeing that it's indeed been opened, then asks who the man is. Tikki confirms that this is the previous owner of the Miracle Box before Fu, Su-Han.

- Marinette is skeptical and asks how he found her. He explains that his Guardian staff leads him directly to her Miracle Box. Marinette asks why she doesn't have one and he explains that she's not a real guardian. Marinette argues that Fu handed it to her, leading Su-Han to go off, calling Fu "chicken legs" and mocking the fact that Fu couldn't even do the fasting and that didn't meet the expectations he had for him.

- Marinette, annoyed, says that Fu has protected the box all this time and sacrificed himself to save Paris, and he even became a great painter. Su-Han starts to argue, then looks around and notices that there are missing kwami. Marinette explains that Fu had lost the butterfly and peacock, which leads Su-han to ask where Plagg is and Marinette answers that he's which Chat Noir, who she doesn't know the identity of because their identities are meant to stay secret. Su-Han notices her earrings (somehow? I guess guardians can sense miraculouses?) and starts to go on about how "OH I GUESS THIS IS THE MODERN WORLD" and continues on about how Plagg is "flying free" (he's not but go off I guess) which led to the end of dinosaurs and dragons and such, and that guardians aren't meant to hold miraculouses.

- Su-Han pulls out the Miracle Box and demands that the kwami return to it. The kwami sigh and pout, but ultimately go back into the box. Su-Han then takes a book out and starts reading off all the rules Marinette broke: Kwami aren't allowed out of the box, guardians mustn't hold miraculouses, and you mustn't lose a miraculous (Marinette technically lost the Bee but he'd have no way of knowing that; either the writers didn't realize this or Su-Han is blaming Marinette for Fu's mistake). Marinette argues that Fu used a miraculous and he explains that this is the exact problem; they keep making their own rules and children shouldn't be allowed miraculouses anyway.

- While he's talking, the knight movie Barkk was watching is still playing, and Su-Han thinks the knight is a person trapped in Marinette's monitor, nearly attacking it (presumably, no knowledge of technology since the order has been away for 150+ years). Marinette explains that it's a movie and Su-Han clearly doesn't get it, but cuts to the chase and asks her to lead him to Chat Noir so they can hand over their miraculouses. Marinette asks Tikki if it's a good idea and Tikki is unsure but states that he is the celestial guardian and whatnot, so maybe she should listen to him. Marinette sighs and transforms. They leave together.

- Su-Han and Ladybug meet up with Chat Noir. Su-Han demands that they hand over their miraculouses, to which Chat says that it's not a funny joke and he’d know because "he knows them all." Ladybug questions how he plans to defeat Shadow Moth and Su-Han explains that he'll hand the miraculouses over to adult holders who are fit for the job.

- Chat Noir is skeptical of Su-Han at first, but Ladybug insists that the kwami confirmed him as a previous guardian, even suggesting that this might be the right thing to do because maybe this is why they haven't been able to defeat Shadow Moth yet. Chat Noir tells Ladybug to trust herself like he trusts her, and agrees to hand over his miraculous, but only if she says so because she's the real guardian to him.

- Su-Han accepts these terms and demands that Ladybug order him to take off his miraculous (they're on a roof so I don't know how they plan to get down from there afterwards?), then she'll relinquish her guardian status to him. Ladybug asks if this means that she'll get her memory erased like Fu, which prompts Chat to suddenly pause in shock and ask specifically if she'll forget him. Ladybug doesn't answer and Chat Noir suddenly changes his tune, demanding that Su-Han come and get him if he wants his miraculous. Su-Han agrees and Ladybug panics, trying to get Chat Noir to calm down.

- Su-Han readies himself and explains that guardians are specifically trained to fight against miraculous holders, then takes Chat Noir down (Chat Noir makes a side comment about how "Master Fu was nicer"). Just before he swipes Chat Noir's miraculous, Ladybug throws Su-Han with her yoyo and is now on Chat Noir's side, insisting that she's guardian and that neither of them will be giving up their miraculouses. They fight, with Ladybug and Chat Noir managing to get enough of an upper hand (Ladybug puts the knight movie on her phone to distract him) to swipe both the box and staff, getting away.

- Shadow Moth senses Su-Han's negative emotions and sends a butterfly.

- Su-Han leaps after Ladybug and Chat Noir, muttering that this would be a simple task if he had his staff. Coincidentally, he spots Fu (who Marinette had to confirm the identity of, so I imagine that Fu never went to the temple like he said he would in "Feast"; "that old man was Fu/chicken legs?") and Marianne over by a fountain, Fu painting with one hand and his cane in the other.

- Su-Han descends and grabs Fu's cane, starting to tug-of-war with him over it. Marianne comes by and starts whacking him with her cane, telling her to leave her beloved alone. Su-Han then spots the akuma and quickly backs away, performing some sort of technique that causes him to be surrounded by a blue aura, repeating a phrase akin to "my anger is mine but my anger is not me." The butterfly is repelled, but Su-Han goes after Fu's cane again, opening the top to reveal some sort of orb inside, confirming that this is a proper guardian staff.

- Fu asks Marianne if she's okay, then glares at Su-Han and walks after him, demanding that he apologize to her and return his cane. Shadow Moth senses a new negative emotion and the butterfly goes after Fu instead. Su-Han quickly flees as he realizes that Fu is being akumatized(akumokized?).

- Shadow Moth gives ye ol' generic speech (plus a "we meet again" which obviously Fu doesn't get) to Fu about revenge and blah blah blah miraculouses, but Fu is confused and asks Shadow Moth to repeat himself. Shadow Moth sighs and simply asks if Fu wants revenge, which Fu answers affirmatively.

- Marianne sees Furious Fu and approaches, insisting that this isn't worth it. Fu spouts some Chinese saying (there's a LOT of that in this episode from both he and Su-Han), then pulls out some paper and starts writing on it in Chinese with his akumatized object (his ink brush). It says "Find" and Fu shouts as much, throwing the paper away and then leaping after it as it pursues Su-Han.

- Ladybug and Chat Noir are hiding in the football (soccer; sorry, I’m a filthy American :P) stadium, talking about what to do about the situation, when Su-Han shows up and demands their miraculouses. Ladybug notes that the cane he's carrying belongs to Fu and then Furious Fu shows up. Furious Fu writes "Thunder" and sends it into the sky, leading the sky to fill with dark clouds and start blasting everyone.

- They dodge while Su-Han and Ladybug fighting over the Miracle Box, leading them to send it flying a small distance away. Shadow Moth notices this and tells Furious Fu to retrieve the box, so Furious Fu gives chase. Ladybug drops the box and kicks it to Chat Noir as if they're playing soccer, so Chat Noir starts running away and keeping the Miracle Box at his feet. Chat Noir sees Furious Fu and Su-Han at both sides of him and panics, kicking the Miracle Box at the goal. Chat Noir stops to cheer that he achieved a goal, then Ladybug runs past him and he realizes oh, and chases after them.

- Furious Fu writers "Teleport" and attaches it to his head, which teleports him to the box's location. Furious Fu latches the box to himself and readies himself to fight, leaving Ladybug and Chat Noir standing there while Su-Han suddenly cowers and sneaks away. Ladybug and Chat Noir fight Furious Fu, but are clearly outmatched as he blocks their attacks and sends Chat Noir flying. Su-Han makes judgmental comments about their fighting from the sidelines, leading Chat Noir to point out that he's not doing anything. Su-Han explains that guardians are trained to fight holders, not the magic that a holder might make. Ladybug asks if they have to fix his mistake then (calling him out for causing Furious Fu in the first place) and Su-Han is unable to argue. Furious Fu then sends Ladybug and Chat Noir flying away.

- Furious Fu then challenges Su-Han directly and Su-Han has no choice but to fight back. They fight and Furious Fu writes, "Statue," sticking it to Su-Han and freezing him in place.

- Furious Fu retrieves his cane and Shadow Moth reminds him of the miraculouses. Furious Fu doesn't understand and even calls Chat "a bat without wings."

- Meanwhile, Ladybug explains to Chat that it's not important to defeat him, but to make sure he doesn't defeat them. Chat Noir doesn't understand and Ladybug tells him to keep Furious Fu busy while she makes a call. Chat can do that much so he leaves to fight.

- Ladybug uses Lucky Charm, changing her suit to its "upgraded" state and giving her a pair of pliers. She notes Chat Noir's ring, then a bin of soccer balls, then her yoyo, then the pliers. She rushes to enact her plan and Furious Fu notices her. He kicks Chat Noir away, sets his cane down, then writes "Vision" and sticks it on his head, making him see what Ladybug noticed earlier. He says that he sees what she's planning and pursues her, but Chat Noir knocks him down. They fight and Chat Noir calls for Cataclysm, but Ladybug screams for him to stop, running at them both with a soccer ball. Su-Han grabs Chat Noir's wrist, then puts Chat Noir in a hold, Chat held to his chest with one hand on Chat Noir's arm and the other hand on Chat Noir's wrist, trying to get him Cataclysm'd (which is a little strange since he seemed confused about the whole concept of fighting him earlier and doesn’t even know Chat Noir but I digress).

- Ladybug throws her yoyo, which Furious Fu catches in his mouth. Ladybug pulls herself to him, but he grabs her wrist with his hand (the one that wasn't holding Chat Noir's wrist), leaving her dangling. Ladybug smirks, catches the soccer ball with her feet, and shoves it against Chat Noir's elbow, preventing Chat Noir from using Cataclysm on himself as there's now too much space between his hand and chest. Furious Fu comments that neither of them can defeat him in this state, to which Ladybug replies that they're not going to.

- Marianne pops up, taking the brush from Furious Fu (it was tucked behind his ear) and snapping it in half, talking about the call she got from Ladybug. Ladybug smiles and thanks her, assuring that she did perfectly.

- Ladybug opens her yoyo to purify the akuma (as I notice that SHE HAS ACTUAL SOLES NOW IN HER UPGRADED FORM!!!), then uses Miraculous Ladybug, which throws her object in the air and her upgraded outfit goes with it, changing her back to normal. Su-han returns to normal and Ladybug, Chat Noir, and Marianne go to "pound it" before Chat Noir realizes that he's still got Cataclysm active. He Cataclysms the soccer ball from earlier and they do a proper fist bump now.

- Ladybug opens her yoyo and pulls out a Fu-colored amulet She gives it to Fu and assures him that it'll protect him. Fu says that he'll use it to remember her by (just a line to rub salt in the wound I guess) and thanks her along with "Mister Bat." Su-Han then shows up and apologizes to Fu for taking his cane, almost calling him "crybaby" before he corrects himself, claiming that he "mistook" Fu for "someone he knew long ago. Fu forgives him and they do the Chinese bowing thing with the fist against the palm.

- Back at the train station, Fu comments on the "adventure" of sorts and Marinette praises Marianne, having "heard that she was the real hero of the day." They both smile at her and the scene cuts away to Marinette in her bedroom with the kwami and Su-Han.

- Su-Han has two things to tell her and begins with the first thing, going on about her relying on a human with no powers, which is a huge no-no, and how she has the gall to invent her own rules... but that they strangely seem to work. That gets Marinette's attention and Su-Han goes on to talk about the second thing: that she has amazing natural instincts which is an essential quality for a guardian, so the "crybaby--er, Master Fu" may not have made such a bad choice after all. He talks about how this Miracle Box is the most powerful and the first, and that he can't imagine what would happen if they fell into the wrong hands.

- Su-Han tells Marinette that she can keep the box, but if she makes one mistake, he'll come back and take it again. She smiles and goes to put the box away, then Su-Han talks about how he'll be staying in Paris for a while; he needs to get used to the modern world as a guardian, after all. Marinette tells him that he'll "need these" for that and offers him a pair of shoes. Su-Han looks down at his current shoes, which are currently torn open at the fronts (they've been like that for the whole episode). They laugh and the episode ends.

[phoenix-downer]

The Princess of Light Chapter 5: A Grieving Prince

~1840 words. Angst, Romance, Fluff, Fairy Tales. For SoKai Week 2021, Day 5.

Summary: Princess Kairi is cursed to be without love when she is a baby. She grows up cold and without a heart to help her understand other people’s feelings, no matter how hard her parents try to help her. One day, however, she meets a mysterious prince from a faraway world, and he just might hold the key to breaking her curse.

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7

Fairies age much more slowly than humans, so when the king and queen met with the Violet Fairy about what was happening, she hardly looked a day older than she had at Princess Kairi’s christening. They were in her little house at the edge of the castle town, which was surrounded by the prettiest violets and forget-me-nots you’d ever seen. Most fairies preferred seclusion, but the Violet Fairy liked living near people and letting children play in her garden. 

Right now, however, the garden was full of royal guards. The Violet Fairy set dainty tea cups containing her famous violet tea out for her royal guests. Nothing helps a difficult conversation like some nice, warm tea, a principle the fairy lived and swore by. Once the king and queen were sipping their tea and the guards also each had a cup, she sat down to discuss why they had come.

“To answer your question, Your Majesties,” she began, “I suspect the light is draining from the pool because the Heart of the World has been injured.”

This news alarmed the king. If the Heart of the World was injured, the very world itself might die, and as its guardian and ruler, he had to do something about it. 

“But how?” the queen asked. “The Heart is buried deep underground and has a series of enchantments protecting it from harm.” 

“That may be,” the Violet Fairy said, “but the very strongest, wickedest types of dark magic might have found a way around those protections. Otherwise the pool wouldn’t be draining.” At this she turned to the king. “Fairies are forbidden from learning such magic because it would corrupt us like it has corrupted your sister, so I cannot say what has happened exactly, but that is my best guess.”

“Maleficent,” the king spat. “Of course. This has to be her doing. She despises Kairi and always has.”

The queen nodded. “We think she’s jealous of Kairi because Kairi will be queen someday. No matter how far we banish Maleficent, she keeps tormenting us.”

“My advice to you would be to find the Heart of the World as soon as possible,” the Violet Fairy said. “See if it is indeed wounded. If so, then you must search for some way to save it, or the very world will die, along with your daughter.”

The king and queen sent a group of soldiers to check on the Heart of the World in its cavern underground. When they reached it, the Violet Fairy’s hunch proved to be true: the Heart of the World was indeed smaller and less vibrant than it had been before, and that only happens if it has been wounded. So the king and queen ordered for every inch of Radiant Garden to be searched for a way to restore it. In the end a group of children found the answer, as it had washed up on the shore of Radiant Garden’s only sea. It was a small lucky charm, and it was made up of five thalassa shells. A curious sight indeed, for thalassa shells were native to Destiny Islands, not Radiant Garden.

On the lucky charm was engraved the following: 

Should the Heart of the World beat slow

And the light of the earth cease to flow

There is only one way to make things right

A young man must pour out his light 

Pour and pour till his heart beats no more

Only then will light flow from river to shore

The words of the lucky charm made the king and queen very sad. They didn’t want to ask anyone to die, but the world was doomed if they did not, and Kairi would surely die as well. The king wanted to offer himself up, but he didn’t fit the description, and neither did the queen. 

So it was with heavy hearts they made the announcement and sent the proclamation throughout Radiant Garden. A day went by, and not a single person volunteered. Two days, and Kairi’s condition took a turn for the worse. On the third day, the king retreated to the woods where the royal family owned a cottage to think about what to do. 

Now, Prince Sora had gone home to speak to his parents about how to help Princess Kairi. He was shocked to return to Radiant Garden to find the entire world in a state of mourning as the light pool shrank to a puddle while the hole in Kairi’s chest grew bigger and bigger and her skin colder and colder. 

He went to the inn where he’d stayed the first time, and on the door he saw the proclamation from the king and queen. With trembling hands he pulled it down and wandered into his room as if in a daze. No matter how many times he read the proclamation, his mind still spun and his heart pounded in his chest.

“I can’t let her die. If she dies, life is hardly worth living. But if I die,” at this Sora’s voice cracked a little, for he saw no way out of it; till his heart beats no more seemed rather clear, “she, along with the rest of the people of this world, will be saved.” His hand curled around the proclamation. “I’ve made up my mind, then. I’ll talk to her parents about being the sacrifice.”

This was how Sora ended up at the king’s cottage in the woods after the sun had set. The autumn breeze made him shiver after experiencing the warmth of his home world, but he steeled his nerves and knocked on the wooden door.

“Who goes there?” the king asked, rather irritably, for anything that wasn’t helping him solve his daughter’s dire state was a nuisance at best. 

When he opened the door, he was quite surprised to see a young man waiting just outside. Sora bowed low, as was proper when greeting a king. In fact he bowed as low as a servant would bow. He lowered himself to his hands and knees and bent his head, for he wanted to show how serious he was about saving Princess Kairi.

“Your Majesty, my name is Sora, and I have an offer to make.” 

At this, Sora fell silent, and a few agonizing moments ticked by till the king groaned. “Stop being cryptic and come out with it,” he said at last, pulling Sora to his feet. “My daughter is dying, the world’s in danger, and I haven’t got all day.” 

“Your dying daughter is why I’m here,” Sora said quietly. “I heard you need someone to restore the Heart of the World.”

“Are you offering?” the king asked, raising an eyebrow.

“On one condition.”

The king nearly lost his temper completely, for he couldn’t understand why Sora wouldn’t just put out all of his terms at once when the circumstances were so dire. “Out with it, boy!”

“I’d like Princess Kairi to keep me company as I give up my light.”

The king’s eyes widened; this was not the sort of request he’d been expecting. Bold of the boy to ask, but his voice was unwavering, and he refused to look away.

“And if it’s not too much to ask,” Sora continued, his voice growing stronger with every word, “I’d like her to tend to me when I’m hungry and thirsty. I want to make sure I… survive long enough to complete the ritual.” 

Restoring the Heart of the World sounded like it would be a very grueling task, because Sora knew the Heart must be much larger than his own. Would his light be enough, or would he fail? There was only one way to find out, and he wanted to make sure he made enough preparations to see this through.

“That can be arranged,” the king said, for he was not about to turn away his one shot at saving his daughter and his kingdom. “We can send food and drink down into the cavern where the Heart of the World is. After you begin the ritual, Kairi will feel better, and she can tend to you as you’ve requested. I doubt she’ll have any objections.” 

“Oh, I think she’d rather be in her light pool,” Sora said with a rueful smile. “But if you ask her to keep me company, I think she’ll say yes. She thinks very highly of you and of her mother the queen.”

Now, you mustn’t fault Sora for despairing a little, as it is a bitter thing indeed to die for someone you know doesn’t love you back. Sora was ready and willing to do so, but a part of him still wished Kairi would return his affection. Could return his affection. He remembered that night he tried to explain to her what love was, how she seemed so curious and eager to understand, how she just couldn’t grasp it.

“I know it’s because of her curse,” Sora said, his voice low and his heart heavy, “but I wish… ah, nevermind. I’d die without her, but she’ll live happily without me. That’s just… how things are.”

The king thought he saw tears shining in Sora’s eyes, though he couldn’t say for sure. He’d been silent up till now because he was beginning to grasp why Sora would be willing to do this when no one else would, and the thought of sending this poor young man to die… 

Then he thought of Kairi’s cold, stiff form as his sister’s curse ate away at her. Thought about leaving her to die to spare this young man. Sora himself had said he’d rather die than let that happen, so the king could hardly stop him. Nor did he want to if it meant Sora’s sacrifice would save his daughter.

“Thank you for doing this for her,” he said to Sora. “For all of us.”

Sora nodded. “I’ll go to the cavern tomorrow morning.”

The king returned to his wife and daughter and explained that someone had volunteered to save Kairi. She perked up for the first time in days when she heard that the light would be returned to her pool. She was so sick that she didn’t register that it would be due to another person giving up his light; all she could think about was feeling better. The king and queen were relieved too, relieved that their daughter would be spared and the world saved.

Sora felt the opposite of relieved and slept very poorly, but he was driven by a quiet determination to see this through. He awoke the next morning and put on his best clothes, clothes befitting a prince, for if he was going to die, he wanted to die like a king.

With that, he set out for the cave where the Heart of the World was located. When he reached it, he took one last look at the world around him. One last look at the sun and clouds and sky. Then he took a deep breath and lowered himself into the cavern.

[loruleanheart]

Desired Fate, Chapter 14

Read on ff.net

Read on AO3

Zelda and the others were transfixed as they looked up at the spirit of Calamity Ganon writhing around the castle. The anguish of all Hyrule hung stagnant in the air along with the ambient gurgling sound of malice.

"It's here…" Impa was the first one who managed to speak. "The Calamity has already begun…" She said, at a loss.

"No, No…." Zelda gasped when she noticed malice enter one of the nearby Guardians and became animate. It made a horrible mechanical sound as it turned its 'eye' towards the princess, a red laser appearing on Zelda's chest. Link immediately sprang into action, deflecting the Guardian's blast back at it in a brilliant flash of light.

"Calamity Ganon is taking control of the Guardians!" Zelda lamented. "It's going to turn them all against us!"

"It can do that?" Said Revali in surprise, realization starting to dawn on the Rito champion, as well as the three others. The Calamity was far more cunning than any of them had imagined.

"There are still more on the castle grounds. It's too dangerous. Everyone, protect the princess as we make our retreat!" Impa called.

"But…"

With that, Link grabbed Zelda's hand, pulling her roughly behind him as he ran down the brick path away from the Castle, which didn't go unnoticed by Astor, feeling an intense wave of sullenness he couldn't shake. They disappeared down the path and the Champions and Sheikah aide followed, no one paying him any mind in the frenzy the Calamity had created.

Astor remained, feeling out of sorts and alone, but determined to fully embrace his new destiny. Hyrule really was on its knees… Especially Zelda, who was being crushed under the weight of her duty. How had he ever been so blinded by Calamity Ganon to want this? To want to harm her? He had almost killed her for the sake of Calamity Ganon… HER! He was barely aware that his fists were clenched, wanting to make her his and spare her all this pain and suffering. The back of his neck was becoming sore as he glared up at the beast he'd once dedicated his life to serving. Calamity Ganon opened its maw to a right angle, and a thunderous roar of rage issued forth as if demanding the prophet make a blood sacrifice of himself to atone for his disloyalty.

Astor smiled up at the beast spitefully.

I wasted so many years of my life on you…. But serving you led me to her… I must thank you… I'm going to live on and create a legacy for myself, and you… You're going to be sealed away… Forever perhaps.

Astor's smile faded as he noticed King Rhoam emerge from the castle's sanctum.

"You're coming with me…" Rhoam said in a stern, matter-of-fact way., The King wielded a huge claymore single-handedly, flanked by three knight attendants.

Astor scowled at the older man, raising his hand to summon his orb, but then thought better of it, giving only a huff of defiance.

"I'm glad I have your cooperation, Astor," Rhoam said, coming close as he brandished his claymore in a vaguely threatening way. The sword was almost as big as he was.

Confident that Astor would not run or fight back, Rhoam nodded to his attendants. "Alright men, retreat!"

"Yes, Sire!" The three knight attendants said in unison. They were looking around wildly, in horror at the destruction the Guardians were bringing and a bit miffed that their king had apparently decided to take a prisoner at the worst time possible.

The five quickly, but carefully made their way down the path, Rhoam staggering a Guardian that blocked their path with a single swing of his sword. Astor could almost feel the brunt of that swing.

"Astor, I'm afraid we're going to get to know each other whether you like it or not. Had the Calamity not happened when it did, you would be in lockup now. However, since my castle is currently overrun with Guardians and all manner of Ganon's monsters, I will be keeping an eye on you myself. Suffice to say, I am not in a good mood."

Astor kept his gaze forward as they moved forward. The king's tone did not bode well for him. It wasn't lost on him that he was in a precarious situation. Still, this could be amusing.

"I know I'd rather not," King Rhoam continued, "but given that I fear you are encroaching on my daughter's divine duties, I must go above and beyond to perform mine as her father and as king." Rhoam noticed Astor's attention was elsewhere. "Look at your king when he's talking to you, you piece of filth!" Rhoam raised his voice, finding the younger man infuriating, despite knowing so little about him. The prophet had already left the worst impression on him, not that he stood a chance in hell of making a good first impression all things considered. Why would Zelda consort with this man, let alone trust him? He was scrawny, deathly pale, and dressed in rags. Everything about Astor was… off-putting. How had he and Zelda even met? Was the young knight he'd appointed to Zelda slacking off?

Astor turned his attention to the older man slowly, giving him a look of intense spite. He then saw the king's eyes widen, looking at something beyond him. Astor turned to come face to face with a Guardian's laser trained on him.

Rhoam and his men stood back, apparently obliging the Guardian to make short work of Astor.

The Guardian's laser rested on Astor for a moment, moving over the malice eye on his circlet before fading and readjusting to focus on the king.

Rhoam wasted no time in raising his claymore and bringing it down on the Guardian, giving a grunt of effort. Bolts and gears flew out of the busted machine, littering the brick pathway.

"Why did the Guardian disregard you?" Rhoam mused aloud. "How disappointing..."

"Thank you for looking out for me, Rhoam. Such a caring king and father, too… You're going to make a fine grandfather someday..." Astor said darkly, facetiously.

"How dare you!" Rhoam bellowed, giving the young man a ruthless slap across the face, causing Astor to stagger and fall. Astor simply returned a perverse smile despite the stinging sensation on his cheek. Astor began to laugh, chuckling at first and then breaking into an intense round of laughter, his yellow eyes going wide in a way that unsettled the old king - as if seeing beyond. "Yes, my children. Go harass King Rhoam and do not disappoint me!"

Rhoam was fuming. Astor was either very insane or intentionally provoking him, perhaps both. Either that or he had injured the prophet's mind when he struck him. Astor's antics were making it very difficult for the king to maintain his composure.

"You're very fortunate I am not a crass man, or I'd tell you what I think you deserve… Now tell me, how well do you know my daughter?"

"Well enough to know she is terribly lonely." Astor replied. "She despises you."

"What nonsense… Everything I've done has been for her! She was supposed to be Hyrule's pride, but it seems that the gossipmongers' words are coming true... Look around you. Hyrule is on fire. What sort of future does she have? 'Heir to a throne of nothing' if she does not awaken that power very soon. I can tell you're a lousy prophet by that alone."

"Bold words from a king who does not carry the blood of the Goddess."

"I may not carry the blood of the goddess, but I am still the rightful king of Hyrule in my late queen's stead. I was born into a noble family and my union with her was arranged by the former king and queen. The only thing I'm going to be arranging for you is an execution. Know your place, Prophet."

"An execution?" Astor almost laughed. He couldn't imagine what Rhoam's reaction might be when he learned he had formerly been trying to bring about Calamity Ganon's revival. "On what grounds?"

"Interfering with the Princess awakening her power to seal Calamity Ganon away for one. Also because it would bring me personal satisfaction. Now, get up, before I change my mind and grind my boot into your head. You're slowing down our escape."

Slowly Astor got up, dusting himself off, raising his chin to the older man in a testing manner.

"Wipe that smirk off your face. Move!" Rhoam said, giving Astor a shove with the side of his claymore.

oOo

Zelda looked back over her shoulder, her hair whipping in the wind as she ran. "Wait… Where are Astor and my father? We can't leave them behind…!"

Nobody seemed to acknowledge her question or nobody heard.

They ran through the chaotic town streets, witnessing horrifying scenes as the Guardians wrought havoc upon Hyrule's capital. Guardians were climbing the walls of houses and shops alike, some not being able to bear the weight of the mechanical wonders and the rooftops beginning to crumble.

They finally reached the main gate, crossing the threshold into Hyrule Field, as the Guardians had completely overtaken the castle and even the surrounding town. They stopped to look back, now a safe distance away. Zelda's eyes widened in horror when she realized more Guardians were appearing, being methodically ejected from the five columns that had suddenly risen out of the ground to surround Hyrule Castle. The same columns she had tried so hard to locate just days ago.

"Where did he go…?" Zelda said out of breath and sick at heart, but trying not to break down again. Hadn't she already cried all the tears she thought she had at the realization of her failure? She knew the Calamity was eventual, but experiencing it was beyond her worst nightmares.

"Little bird… How do you know he wasn't the one to summon the Calamity himself just by being present?" Said Urbosa.

"T-that can't be… " Zelda said, exasperated, not even willing to entertain the idea.

"His Majesty is missing as well… Did he remain behind on purpose?" Impa mused.

"The two are probably still bickering for all we know…" Revali quipped. "Hylian males…"

It would have been a humorous mental image in any other circumstances: Astor and her father too entrenched in their argument to notice as Guardians flooded into the Sanctum, but Zelda was vaguely aware that Astor had at least left the sanctum when the Calamity appeared.

Zelda turned her gaze elsewhere. Watching Castle Town burn was too much to bear. She happened to catch Link's eye, the boy wearing a severe expression.

You're fated to unlock your power because of him.

Zelda looked away from him and then at the back of her hand, giving an inaudible sigh, doubts about so many things clouding her mind.

This didn't go unnoticed by Urbosa, who came to stand behind Zelda, placing her hands on the princess's shoulders. "Don't give up! It's not too late."

"I know… We can't let the Calamity win. No matter what…" Zelda said, sounding downtrodden, but resolute.

"All is not lost. As long as I live I will fight. Just as you must." Impa reassured Zelda.

All the champions agreed one by one.

The group lifted their heads when they sensed others making their escape into Hyrule Field and out of Castle Town. Zelda's breath caught in her throat when she saw Astor standing in the shadow of her father's sword. He was unbound, yet it was clear from their expressions that he wasn't standing there on his own volition. Astor held her briefly in his gaze and then looked away, in shame. His face was more bruised than before.

"Champions, go to your Divine Beasts!" King Rhoam called in an official tone. "Astor will be coming with me, lest he interfere any further. Link… You are the knight to Princess Zelda. I trust you understand your duty." Rhoam said, shooting a disapproving look at Zelda.

There was a flicker in Zelda's eyes as they began to sting. "Where are you taking him?!"

Suddenly their hands held her back before she could rush forward. Zelda cried out for Astor as Rhoam and his attendants turned to leave, giving Astor another shove in the direction they were going.

A million horrible possibilities rushed through her mind. She was under no delusion that her father would deal with Astor kindly, especially if he were to ascertain Astor's former ties to the Calamity.

"What are they going to do to him?! Please, Someone, do something... Don't let them take him away!" Zelda implored pitifully, despairing because she knew none of them were going to defy her Father. Zelda dropped her head. "He's all… He's all I have…"

It was very soft, but everyone heard. Her pleas sounded all too familiar.. Rhoam halted, just for a moment to look back in irritation instead of pity as he had when she was young.

"Dammit, Zelda, show some self-control!" Rhoam said, angrily. "Your whining didn't work back then, what makes you think it will work now?"

Zelda looked hurt by his response, her shoulders shaking. Rhoam wondered if she remembered when he had confiscated the little Guardian she had named Terrako in a bid to get her to focus on her training. A decision that regrettably hadn't borne any fruit. Rhoam had almost cursed the late queen. Damn her for instilling such a love for Sheikah technology and relics in her daughter, which only proved to be a distraction for Zelda in awakening her divine power. That had been the most grievous flaw Rhoam saw in his wife.

Astor knew this was his moment to act. While the king was distracted, Astor phased past Rhoam like a restless spirit, knocking Rhoam off balance for a moment.

Zelda looked up and exhaled in surprise.

Astor came to a stop in front of Zelda, making a show of pulling her close. She clutched tightly to his robes, and for a moment everything else ceased. She was his and he was hers. She would have given much to live in that moment forever, relieved tears cascading down her cheeks.

"Her Highness is mine now. Have fun fighting the Calamity, Rhoam. You don't deserve her."

"Hylia on her throne! Stop him!" Rhoam ordered his knight attendants.

The men hesitated, fearful of the prophet's magical abilities. And in the blink of an eye, Astor raised his orb high, vanishing with Zelda in tow. Those that remained looked on in silent disbelief.

A short distance away, the scene was reflected in the 'eye' of Harbinger Ganon. Ganon knew it was winning, though that did not satisfy the being's intense all-encompassing rage. Its plans had still been disrupted. The weak-minded, disaffected Hylian man it had chosen to do its bidding in this age had somehow seen beyond the illusion of importance and power it had engineered for him. High above, the spirit of Calamity Ganon gave a shattering roar of detest for the goddess it knew was at work. And because of that vile goddess, the foolish bag of flesh was stepping out on him, even after all the power it had bestowed upon him. Ganon would simply take the man's ability to wield malice away. It would make sure the seer suffered tenfold for betraying him and choosing the girl who bore the goddess's blood. That pathetic mortal was supposed to remain loyal until his dying breath at its hand, for Ganon hated all life and showed no partiality even towards those who swore allegiance to it. It had been over ten millennia since Ganon had been mortal, and any memory of its past humanity or semblance of understanding human emotions had long perished. Calamity Ganon's inhuman hatred burned against the Hylian seer, rivaling its hatred for the hero and the young woman who bore the blood of the goddess. And so, the corrupted Guardian began to plot.

[goodfortune-au]

Good Fortune (Soulmate AU) Chapter 13: Gone

Once Angel wakes up and finds him gone, she’s met with such sinking sadness that all she can do is hug her pillow and blink back the stinging tears in her eyes. Suddenly, all of it comes flooding back to her. All she can think about is how he felt last night, pressed up against her for hours; all the sweet things he said, just how at ease she had felt, like all her problems simply didn’t exist so long as she was in his arms. The revelation of who he was is still shocking to her, but she’d be lying if she said no part of her had known that Pennywise was connected to her guardian angel. The dreams were the most damning evidence of that, and Angel, while fairly oblivious most of the time, was by no means stupid. It had been a gut feeling, and she couldn’t just ignore a gut feeling; it was something she’d come to trust over years of bad experiences. Eventually, once she’d started to rely on that feeling in her stomach, the pits or the butterflies brewing within, things had become less painful with time. She simply couldn’t ignore the strength of that instinct, the sweeping warmth that always coursed through her when she found his gifts, and how she’d feel the very same watching him on the TV or finding him within her dreams. How she’d felt such comfort and protection from the both of them, the only meaningful bastions to her in such times of turbulence and unrest. There were the children, and of course she was blessed to be in their company, but they were, in the end, just children. They had lives of their own and she respected that. She wanted something of her own to bring her purpose, and it looked as though she might have finally found it. As she nuzzles sadly in her pillow, she remembers that one word, and the way it had made her feel. Mate. It makes her feel just a little bit better.

There was simply nothing left to do now except continue in her life. Angel couldn’t just wait around for her knight in shining armor or, rather, her knight in silken clownsuit. She had obligations to attend to. She gets ready for work, all the while entertaining thoughts of him, possibly watching over her. While she’s getting dressed, something saucy sweeps over her like a fever and, engrossed in her fantasy, she puts on a show for him, dropping her panties to the ground and dipping over sensually as she plucks a new pair out of her clean laundry hamper. She wiggles her hips as she puts them on and cups her breasts when she clasps her bra closed. She runs her hands down the length of her body seductively and, though she might have just imagined it, she feels something of a light but telling tremor beneath her feet. She puts her hair in a ponytail and tightens it, and then she finishes getting dressed. Mayor Jello is aloof when she fills his bowl with food, and seems to be avoiding her for some reason, hiding behind a chair leg whenever she draws near. She doesn’t think much of it; he could be extremely fickle in mood sometimes. While he was a very affectionate cat, there were sometimes days he didn’t want to be touched at all and she was inclined to respect it. After all, even cats have boundaries.

She bids him goodbye and then she sets out. The world, for some reason, seems a little brighter as she walks her commute, and for some reason, she’s standing just a little bit taller. Her life was still the same as it ever was, and all her problems hadn’t simply disappeared, but right now they didn’t seem to be the fate worse than death that they had been just less than a night ago when she was weeping disconsolately into her pillow and pining so painfully for something she thought she might never be able to indulge. She had spent some time recently living in such fear of the evil within the town, fearing that her guardian angel had abandoned her, fearing that she was now a moving target for whatever had attacked Patrick on that fateful Halloween night. But now that fear had been properly assuaged with her protector’s reappearance, and she no longer needed to stew in such dread and apprehension. Well, not about that, anyway. As she works her shift, her mind wanders on all kinds of things. Most notably, she wonders if what she experienced was really just a dream or if it was actually real. To tell the truth, it could honestly go either way with how offbeat and unusual this town was, especially in regards to what she had experienced personally. Something about Derry was simply not right, and she couldn’t shake that no matter how hard she tried. That’s why she had clung so hard to the notion of a guardian angel, why she had accepted their affections so readily and invested so much love and trust in them. Though she hadn’t really understood at the time why they had picked her to fixate on, she couldn’t spurn the protection of something that clearly had her best interests at heart. She would be simply foolish to do such a thing.

But had it all been a dream? He’d said it wasn’t, had even said he wouldn’t leave her again, but all the same, he’d been gone when she’d woken up in the morning. Was he still here? Was he simply referring to having left her completely in those weeks following up to Valentine’s Day? Why had he even done such a thing? Was he caught up in something else? He seemed enigmatic and otherworldly. Maybe there was simply more to him outside of her and she just didn’t understand what that was. She didn’t know whether or not she could rightly ask him about such things either, or not yet at least. If what he’d been saying was true, she would be seeing a lot more of him in the future, and he might even share intimate details of himself with her as time progressed. After all, they were… They were… Her face flushes scarlet at the thought, and all the implications it made. He’d said she was made for him, was destined for him, and she wondered what all of that might mean. It seemed as though destiny definitely played a role in all of this, she couldn’t rightly deny that at this point. Just who was she? She starts to come of the assumption that perhaps it all really was a dream, simply one more vivid than all the ones of before. It didn’t seem impossible, and was in fact the more realistic of all the various scenarios.

As she assists with checkout, she starts to wonder if the gifts might still play a role in their relationship. Surely there was no reason for the correspondence to continue if it was, in fact, not a dream? Had it all been an attempt to woo her, a way to court her, and now there was simply no reason now that they were properly introduced to each other? It all really was perplexing, and her mind simply cannot grasp the infinite questions she wished she could ask. She truly wished she could see him again, even if only on the Derry Children’s Hour. Maybe she would look for it when she got home. Although… There was the distinct possibility that all of that was over, too, if that was simply another way to reach out to her. There was also the possibility that he would continue in his attentions, simply in an attempt to keep contact with her when he wasn’t able to be there in person. After all, she assumed he must surely have other obligations to attend to outside of her. Perhaps he was busy keeping the evil of the town at bay, a cause worthy enough for her to be understanding of his absence. She couldn’t rightly fault him for having other things to do; she refused to be that person, who was so possessive that she wanted him to be at her every beck and call. It was enough that he was there in the first place. She tried to keep that in mind.

Work passes rather quietly and without much incident. Though she’s antsy and on the lookout for any strange sightings, Angel isn’t plagued by bad thoughts. Rather, she’s still reliving last night through a rose-colored lens, can’t so much as summon a single shred of suspicion or distrust in her guardian angel. After all, what reason would she have to have such feelings now, when he had been nothing but kind and considerate to her, caring and protective and gallant? She couldn’t ignore those feelings inside of her, the sheer safety she’d felt within the strength of his embrace, and some part of her was assured of that safety. Try though she might, she couldn’t shake the idea, the instinct that he meant only the best for her, that she would remain safe under his watchful eye.

“I’ll always protect you, my sweet.”

And she’d gotten the feeling he’d meant it, when she woke up that morning after Halloween. The dreams seemed prophetic in a sense, building up to something in time that was bigger than anything she truly could have imagined. Life in Derry was incredibly simple, and she hadn’t thought in a million years that the unusual would seek her out like this, grab her hand and whisk her off into the unknown. Even as a girl who revelled in the strange and the peculiar, she had to admit that it was all very perplexing, that she quite frankly wasn’t prepared for it, for any of it. But oh, how delightful it was, to share his touch, to hear him speak those words to her; soft, lilting prose that made her insides dance with exhilaration, unbound and unabated and unceasing. How her blood had sung for him, had begged for him, how she was little more than a slave to her physical longing as she felt the silk of his suit in her fingers. And he’d clearly meant something to her if her reaction to his disappearance was any indication. Angel was rather an emotional girl, had tended to wear her heart on her sleeve, quite frankly another trait that should have rightly gotten her killed by now in a town like this, and yet still she made it through her entire adolescence relatively unscathed. Well, unscathed of mortal harm anyway. She was a girl prone to outbursts, a girl prone to crying and weeping and caterwauling over the dumbest things. She was a girl who felt things very strongly, and it very often made her look like a sentimental fool but she couldn’t stop being this way any more than she could stop breathing.

She missed him. It was stupid and yes, sentimental, but it was true all the same. She knew she needed to be patient; it was only a single morning after he’d left, after all, and she’s surely gone longer periods of time without seeing him before. But this… This was different. This was different from all the other times. Even if it had been a dream, it was the most vivid one she’d ever had. It had lasted so long, she had felt things she’d never felt before… He’d felt more real than ever before… She didn’t even want to admit it, but some part of her craved his touch. Was addicted to it in a sense. Once she’d gotten a taste, she’d wanted more. And she knew she would surely get more, but that didn’t change the fact that she wanted him, wanted him now. Her face is still red as she thinks about it, thinks about the way that gloved hand had felt so divine against the screaming heat of her skin, the cooling silk working with his kisses to bring her back from overheating completely and she has to stop herself from shortcircuiting right there at the front counter. She couldn’t keep thinking about this while she was working, it was clear it was too much of a distraction. But she still finds him lingering in the depths of her mind, ever-present and indomitable, demanding her attention like a needy child. And she could do nothing else but oblige, finding his presence in her subconscious comforting in so many ways that she couldn’t stand to ignore. Customers find her spacing out at the front counter and she has to snap out of it before continuing in her duties.

The walk home is easy and she feels reassured, no longer ill at ease about the evils of the town in this moment, no longer so needled by the niggling sense that something was after her that she was fearful and apprehensive of even the sound of rustling leaves. Though she didn’t feel that telltale warmth now, some instinctive part of her knew that he was watching over her, even if he wasn’t physically present. With each passing day she was becoming more in tune with his aura, accepting it readily like the notes of a heady perfume and letting it wash over her like pleasant waves on a sandy shore. In each step she takes she imagines him there with her, accompanying her, escorting her on her walk home and she smiles at the thought. The idea of being in a relationship with something… It was new, it was exhilarating. Her mind is swimming with hypotheticals, hypotheticals of what was to come should he return to her. She delights in the prospect of more cozy, comfort-filled nights, him at her side, lulling her to sleep, holding her until her eyes grow too heavy to keep open. She thinks of him coming to visit her at work, flustering her while she tries to focus on her job, teasing her mercilessly as she sorts through the returns… Cornering her down in the archives where no one could see the two of them, moving in on her where she couldn’t be any more vulnerable... She thinks of him joining her on the couch during TV time, idly passing the hours with her, and she thinks of him telling her more about himself, thinks of herself gradually learning more about him until she understood him just as much as he seemed to understand her.

She comes upon Witcham and starts to make her way down the path toward her neighborhood, casting an indifferent glance at the Grace Baptist Church, Derry Elementary and other such dull landmarks as she passes them. To tell the truth, she really hadn’t known why she had chosen to stick around Derry so long; besides all the rampant crime and grisly happenings it was such a painfully plain place to live, and for someone like her that created very little incentive to stick around. When the day had come however and her parents had announced their plans to move to Haven, she’d felt some kind of a sinking feeling, something downcast and a little bit crestfallen. For all its faults she rather liked living here; she’d grown up in it all, and Derry had a certainly undeniable small town charm to it. And really, were all her bad experiences really so bad, bad enough to justify leaving it all behind? She’d ruminated on it, had thought on it night after night after night, and had eventually come upon the decision in the end to stay while the rest of her family moved on. After all, she surely couldn’t shirk the opportunity to try making it on her own, even if it was hard. She was a grown adult, it was time for her to start acting like one. She’d grown up rather dependent on her parents for just about everything, and while she didn’t mind it growing up it was slightly less free of guilt now when she was fully grown and had so many resources for independence readily available at her fingertips. If she was cut off from them she would have the opportunity to spread her wings and fly, as it were, no longer beholden to the confining security of the nest in which she was raised. Maybe that’s why she’d chosen to stay behind. That was the more rational reasoning. The other was less so, though she couldn’t deny it was growing more and more plausible by the day. The idea of destiny, the idea of something bigger than herself that was keeping her here, that had created the conclusion in her mind not to forsake the place in which she was raised. It was slowly but surely making itself more apparent in her thoughts. It had seemed that destiny was now calling to her in some fashion, if the manifestation of Pennywise in her life was any indication. All the gifts, all the days, the months she spent pining after him on the Derry Children’s Hour, it was all building towards something, and it seemed as though that something had finally arrived, culminating in them finally coming together like two puzzle pieces, separated for the longest time by a force she couldn’t possibly comprehend.

It was so romantic, she thinks, positively enchanted. She’d never had the pleasure of experiencing such bliss. The feeling of him pressed up against her, when just moments before she’d been so shattered and heartbroken that she wanted to scream, was so relieving that it truly defied words. How all her dejection seemed to melt away with a single brush of his hand against her thigh, those gentle words whispered in her ear from behind, how she’d known it was him simply by the sound of his voice alone.

“I’m here now, my darling.”

And how speechless she was. It had taken everything she’d had in that moment to stay composed, and when she’d turned inward towards his chest she truly couldn’t take it anymore, the floodgates had opened and she couldn’t hold back her joy any longer. She was simply so relieved by his presence that she couldn’t possibly think to deny his embrace, not then, not in her most desperate time of need. She had cried into his chest, every heaving breath she had taken bringing her more healing and comfort, feeling herself lifted every time she gasped air into her starving lungs. She’d taken in his scent, so deliciously indulgent, something like caramel apples and cotton candy and funnel cake all coming together to create the sensory image of a carnival in her mind. It was so pleasant that she couldn’t deny its captivation, how hypnotizing and bewitching it all was; nostalgic in a sense, evocative of the past, of happy memories and wistful reverie.

When she comes upon the walkway of her house she’s still ruminating on it, all of it, hadn’t stopped since she’d woken that morning. She was almost in a trance of some kind, and she couldn’t for the life of her break it, couldn’t stop thinking of all the joy of last night, thoughts of sensations so unfamiliar that they were addicting. Angel was and always had been a touchstarved girl, deprived of anything physically affectionate beyond that of which her family offered her on occasion. That was simply the package deal that came with being lonely and unwanted, and over time she had grown to accept it, had remedied it only with mounds of pillows and sentimental, unrealistic thoughts. The fact that he had touched her… The fact that he wanted to, had seemed so happy to, it drove her wild. She’d never been wanted by someone before. She’d even wondered for the longest time if it were even possible for someone to like her that way; she’d had such stunning lack of fortune in that regard that she honestly wondered if she repelled people rather than attracted them, and her track record in the town as she’d grown up could certainly attest to that. That she’d seemed to attract this beautiful thing, this breathtaking force of nature; it was ineffable to her. Simply unfathomable.

She steps inside and puts down her things, still entertaining these thoughts even as she sets her sketchbook down on the dining room table. She kicks off her shoes, making her lunch for the next day. She cuts the crusts off her sandwich before bagging it up and depositing it into the waiting tin, and then drops a small assortment of pre-packaged things in with it. She puts her lunchbox away in the fridge. She sighs and gets undressed as she walks down the hallway to her room, and she briefly thinks about taking a nap, perhaps in a somewhat fruitless effort to see him again. She was rather tired, after all. Even with all the excitement, perhaps in service of it, she had gotten all worn out, and the walk home was a relief to her, the aftermath of a day well spent working for her living wage. When she walks through the doorway of her bedroom, her eyes fall on the bed and her breath catches in her throat.

There is a friendship bracelet worn like a necklace around Pepper’s neck, and a note is waiting at her plush heels. When she opens up the note, she simply smiles and hugs it to her chest. “Miss me?”, it says, and it’s accented with the obligatory heart. The bracelet is in glittery beads of red and black, her favorite colors, and it reads “I ♥ Derry” in whimsical uppercase block letters. The gifts had officially returned. She immediately dons the bracelet and holds her arm out to marvel at the way it sits on her wrist, delighted with the gesture and positively elated that he had started to continue his correspondence. The afternoon only improves when she makes her way over to the couch, and after a few minutes of sifting through the available channels she inevitably comes upon Channel 27. She’s met with a couple minutes of disheartening static but, emboldened by the discovery of the bracelet, she lets it burr like white noise in her ears while she passes the time rendering loose sketches in her notebook. Her face snaps up to regard the TV screen with glee when she can hear the ever-familiar jingle of the Derry Children’s Hour. He wastes no time with preambles, it seems; when the set filters onto the screen the hostess is already speaking, like the episode had already started some time ago. Pennywise is present already, and her heart flutters at the sight of him, just waiting for him to speak, wanting so badly to hear his voice that she can hardly breathe. The hostess goes on about some humdrum topic of the day but Angel hardly pays any attention; she’s simply fixated on him, waiting for him to talk, waiting for him to do anything except listen intently to the words of the hostess. When he remains silent she starts to let her eyes fall back down onto her sketchbook again, and as she passes the time listening to the TV she starts to get lost in the process of what she’s drawing. Her stomach stirs with something unfathomably pleasant as she details the figures in her sketchbook, and she lets a smile creep vacantly across her face as she continues. There, alive on the page, is a lively scene of Pennywise and herself, engaged in romantic dance, staring intently into one another’s eyes as they sweep tastefully about the paper. She starts to see it come alive in her mind, and she can see them both, so completely consumed in each other that the rest of the world simply doesn’t matter to them. Her eyes linger intently on the details of the sketch as she leans back to admire her work and-

“Angel.”

She freezes. She pauses, and slowly turns toward the screen. He’s staring intently into the center now, out of the glass and directly into her eyes, leaving no doubt in her mind that he was most certainly talking to her. The hostess continues on as though he hadn’t interrupted, the entire show continues on unperturbed but he’s there regardless, speaking to her through the screen. She knows, in this moment, that none of it had been a dream after all. Not unless she was hallucinating.

“You’re supposed to be watching, silly girl.” He wags a finger at her patronizingly. “You should be paying attention- shouldn’t spurn your precious guardian angel, pretty thing. After all, he’s here just for you.”

“S-sorry…” She mumbles, almost to herself, but she assumes he can hear her. "I'll, uh…" She clears her throat, setting her sketchbook down. She readjusts herself on the couch and he smiles.

“Good. Good girl. Now… Keep your eyes on me, hmm?”

She flushes red and he looses a fit of impish giggles. He continues on, now taking charge of the conversation on the screen as the kids listen intently to his words. The topic of the day seems to be art, and he goes on and on about how much fun, how fulfilling it is, how you can even make a career out of it if you’re so inclined. He turns toward the screen again, regarding Angel with a knowing grin and a wink.

“And that is a lovely sketch, my sweet. I think it could use some ink though, don’t you?”

She makes a distinctly fragile “eep” noise and he continues on unfazed. “Give it some detail, really bring it to life. Pennywise would really like to see it, you know. Wouldn't you all like to see it, kids?"

The kids all unanimously agree with cheerful laughter.

She looks down at her sketchbook again and they really are dancing right in front of her eyes. She’s breathless as she watches, the way they sway and spin and dip in each other’s arms. The dizzy, lovesick look on her stylized face, and the steady movements of Pennywise as he guides her around the paper are so vivid, the details so crisp and tangible on the page. It’s magical, it’s enchanting. It’s… Real.

“I’ll uh… I’ll do my best.” She manages weakly. She’s starting to grow fainter by the minute and he can see it, can see the way her lip quivers with want for him and the way she clenches her thighs together on the sofa. Can hear her little whimpers as she watches him speak, and the fragile breaths she takes as she rubs her legs together. Despite herself she’s growing… Wet, down there. Her mind starts wandering to lewd places, eventually falling on that neglected toy waiting in her bedside table drawer. He seems knowing, he seems aware of her thoughts, seems to read them as they come into her head. His grin is sly now, sly and mischievous.

“Dirty, dirty girl…” He purrs, his voice almost a growl. “How naughty you are. I can see the thoughts in your head. Can’t even wait until the program is over, can you?”

She’s caught off guard and she gasps.

“I-I-”

“You should wait for me, pretty thing. Wait, and be patient… Good things come to those that wait, don’t they?”

She’s silent.

“...Mmm… Answer me, precious.”

“Yuh-yes.” She agrees, her face all aflame with embarrassment and shameless desire.

“Yes… Good girl…” His stare lingers on her for a while longer, one eye almost seeming to trail down, lower, between her legs. His eyes turn back to the children and he continues the conversation until the hostess finally comes in to wrap up the show.

“That’s unfortunately all the time we have kids. Say goodbye to our special guest!”

The kids all make their scattered goodbyes. “I’ll be seeing you all again very, very soon.” Pennywise says with a gracefully theatrical bow.

“...Promise promise?” She says, breathless, to herself.

His eyes flicker towards the center of the screen again, and he winks, blowing Angel a kiss.

“Promise promise.”

~~~~

It had only gone uphill from there. If Angel had considered herself wooed by her guardian angel in the past, it was nothing compared to now. Now that Pennywise had officially introduced himself into her life, he saw fit to accompany her on a day to day basis in as many ways as he could, saw fit to make his presence very undeniable now. It was no longer limited to warm auras and vague feelings. There was no longer guesswork in the equation. Pennywise knew he had more than gotten the greenlight, as it were, and he would waste no time continuing to enrich the bond that he had already established with her, would waste no more time with mere implications or other such frippery. They were past that juncture at this point. She liked him, that was plainly clear, and she wanted to see more of him, so really, what harm was there in indulging her desires? He’s still giddy at the thought of it all, of having all his hard work pay off after months of patience, months spent biding his time. It had all worked out so beautifully in his favor and now it seemed his persistence was finally bearing such delectable fruit.

Ever since the night he visited and the day that followed after, Pennywise would do his best on a day to day basis to remind her of his presence, looked for any possible way to be with her, at least in spirit, as he conducted his hunts and preyed upon the fear of the town. She would sometimes wake to the sound of him singing ever so delicately in her ear. Sometimes, when she walked to work, he was in her head, whispering to her hushed encouragements, telling her that she needed to get through today, needed to be strong and keep a smile on her face for him. Knowing full well that she had self esteem issues aided him spectacularly, as it made her so innocently trusting of his words and flatteries. His support didn’t by any means fix Angel’s problems or qualms with her job, and it certainly didn’t keep her from a downcast mood but it was a far cry better than relying on her own feigned spirit to get through the grit. He would still cheer her up when she was down, although this was less in the form of gifts now as it was often his own soothing voice in her ear, his own invisible hand sometimes clutching hers in a comforting vice, running smooth silk over her oft-shivering thumb.

“It’s okay, my pet… Only a few hours left now… You can do it, you can. Pennywise knows it.”

On some better days, he would spend less time coaching her through adversity and more time following her around, commenting on how cute she looked. He’d kept his comments mostly innocent, but there were days when he could sense the yearning in her head, could smell it coming off her like a deliciously delicate perfume, and he would say something lecherous, something just naughty enough to have her squirming at the front desk. On one particular afternoon at the library, he’d gotten Angel so hot and bothered with just his words alone that she left right in the middle of assisting with checkout so she could run to the bathroom and splash cold water on her face. It didn’t help at all that Angel couldn’t exactly talk back to him in public without looking like a complete and utter loon, so she was left defenseless and vulnerable to any and all of his comments, all of his subtle little pushes and pokes and prods. He liked that. Liked to get her all flustered, because that meant that his manipulations were working. Liked to have her on the edge of her seat, the poor dear, because in the end it only made her want more. Liked to make her whimper and whine with exasperation, knowing she couldn’t possibly respond to him without making a complete fool of herself in front of God and everyone. Pennywise did sympathize with her frustration of course; he knew it was cruel to put her through such teasing when she had never been the target of anyone’s interest prior to this. He knew it to be wicked and certainly devilish of him to plant such seeds of hope in her fragile and battered mind, but he could justify it since he fully intended on nurturing those seeds. He fully intended to let them grow and harvest them when the time was right. In time, he would give her everything she had ever wanted, but only when she was ready for it. Only when she couldn’t take it anymore. Only when she wanted him just as much as he wanted her.

[acannthuss]

FluttershyXSpitfire = Fallen Embers

> children

- Phoenix Rise

“It’s not my destiny, it’s not who I want to be. I reject your reality and substitute for my own.”

Species: Pegasus/female

Build: female short/sturdy/bulk

Special Talent: tea making/brewing

Occupation: royal aerial guard (private guard to Prince Apollo Helios)

Nicknames: Phea, Mint, Rose burn

Background information:

- Phoenix was quite a handful as a child, often terrorizing the poor creatures of the Everfree Forest. Often giving her mother’s quite a scare when she’d return with a Timberwolf leg in her maw and several splinters, saying “I never found the ingredients I needed!” When in reality she could’ve just went to the market only a few ways from their cozy home.

- Growing up with a shy mother and often busy mom, Phea never really had a normal childhood. Often spending time at home with Flutters while making tea for the animals. When she could, she’d follow Spitfire to work and practice her flying. Being the daughter of two fine fliers (even if one hadn’t been an avid), she expecting to have her cutie mark in some sort of flying but one day when she was brewing tea for her mother’s party she found an image of a steam cup of herbal tea. This couldn’t be, she was destined to fly beyond peaks of ice! To burn trails of fires in her speedy wake! Not make some filly tea for some pretty upper crust’s party!

- With this knowledge she begged her mother’s to enroll her in flight school although they’d both already agreed prior that they’d take her there anyways. After enrolling, she quickly rose up the ranks. Eventually becoming one of the youngest fliers to graduate flight school. Afterwards Phea worked to become part of the royal guard, and now is the guardian of Prince Apollo Helios.

Trivia:

- her favorite color is purple, and she hates the color blue.

- she has a crush on Apollo Helios.

- she had a crush on Dawnovan until he started dating Cassandra

- Phea secretly dreams of opening a tea shop

- Once she graduated flight school she enrolled in the aerial guard and moved away.

- Phea is Bi

- Phea (Fea)

- no one is really sure why Apollo and Hestia on occasion calls her ‘mint’ and ‘rose burn’ but it’s just become her name and at this point she just gave up correcting them.

SoarinXRainbowdash = Morning Flight

> children

- Dawnovan

“Hey, don’t blink or you’ll miss me.”

Species: Pegasus

Build: male bulky/lean/tall

Special Talent: racing/lightning affinity/spacial awareness

Occupation: wonderbolt/aerial guard

Nicknames: Daws, Dawn, Dash. J(r)

Background information:

- Arrogant in every aspect, Dawnovan believes his skills are surpassed by no one but his mother and father. He is very prideful of his mother and father almost to a fault, often bragging that they were the best ponies in equestria.

- As a colt he’d often find himself in some trouble as he’d pick fights with his fellow flight school students, including his best friend; Phoenix Rise. Longtime rival and best friend. During his time as a student, he’d often claim he would surpass his parents and become the fastest Pegasus in Equestrian. Unfortunately his speed averages only a little below his friend Phoenix and sister Iris.

- Dawn isn’t the brightest in the bunch, but he when he knows he’ll put his words where his hooves are and make it work. Even if he doesn’t entirely understand.

- Even though he’s rougher than diamonds in stone, he’s very caring for those he’s close to. Especially his family and friends. But often he remains oblivious of new people, forgetting names and not acknowledging them.

Trivia:

- He knows he will never really be as fast as his parents or sister. To be honest, he is the slowest in the family. Only faster than the average Pegasus but nothing more than that.

- He, Apollo and Cassandra are the only ones who know Phea’s secret about wanting to open a tea shop.

- His favorite color is blue and his least favorite color is green

- Soarin and Rainbow were concerned for him when he was younger because he had impulsive tendencies.

- One time when he was at the store he forgot to take Iris (his little sister) back with him home. Dawnovan has a tendency to forget about Iris, but in truth he does care.

- His parents instructed him on his flight skills in hopes of helping him improve. But with time, his ability to read the environment very much helped him standout.

- He is best friends with Phoenix Rise.

- Cassandra De Li, daughter of Fluer De Li and Fancy Pants, is his girlfriend. Although rumor has it that they are a bit on the rocks currently.

- He hates Prince Apollo Helios

- He tried to become part of the royal guard and ended up dropping out and rejoining the races

- Iris

“Unfortunately I think that snake is smarter than you...”

Species: Pegasus

Build: female slim/small/lithe

Special Talent: search and rescue/heightened sight

Occupation: search and rescue

Nicknames: Ire

Background information:

- being the younger sister isn’t fun, but she’d rather be that than some stupid noble. Which is what she’d claim and swear to her best friends, Duchess Gala and Princess Arte. At a young age she discovered how much attention you get when your the oldest, and being the youngest you often are overlooked which brings some good luck when you accidentally broke your mom’s favorite trophy or punched that filly in the face for calling her a birdbrain.

- Iris noticed how she had a talent in looking, watching, observing. She’d seemed to inherit her mother’s speed and sight, making her a good pony in rescue missions.

- Iris never really was close to either of her parents, due to them often fretting over her brother’s mishaps. She didn’t care, maybe a little bit, but either way she didn’t care. If someone needed help, then as long as they got it it wasn’t her problem.

- When her team wasn’t out in search of some missing pony or some pony in trouble, they’d station in Canterlot and rest till they were called up again. During this time, she’d become good friends with Duchess Gala and Princess Artemis. Even though she’d already met the night princess prior due to Aunt Rarity being such a close family friend. Sometimes, the two royals would even accompany her on missions.

Trivia:

- she is faster than her brother and father (barely), but cannot surpass her mother.

- One time, she was forgotten at the store and it became a traumatic experience for her as she wandered for hours in search of her way home. Eventually her mother found her and took her home then gave her hot cocoa and cookies.

- She’s close with Phoenix but not really, mostly rivals to a certain extent.

- Gala and her dated briefly but nothing really came of it.

- She holds regret over a certain mission she was apart of, one night a bat pony settlement in a valley caught fire in the night so she and her team went to help rescue and evacuate people. When a single mother was screaming for her lost filly, Iris went back to search for her but could not find her due to the dark and smoke. She was forced out due to the place going down in flames, the filly’s body was never found but it is assumed she burned to death. Iris still holds regret over this incident, never really forgiven herself for not being able to find that little filly.

- Artemis tried to help calm the nightmares that followed this incident for Iris, but ultimately could not help her with her grief.

[kaile-hultner]

Dialogues With A Dreg, Part Four

Spoilers for Destiny and Destiny 2 ahead.

Hello, Guardian.

Let’s drop the allegory for a while. I don’t think it was working to begin with, and I prefer to speak plainly instead of in prose.

I love the game you serve as the protagonist in, at least mechanically. Part of the reason I’ve put nearly a thousand hours in piloting you around and clicking on enemy heads is because I’m chasing that satisfying “pop” when something’s brain explodes after I get them with a linear fusion rifle. I guess it’s better than being addicted to drugs or alcohol or video games with gambling mechan- oh shit god dammit wait, fuck, there’s Eververse here, I forgot.

Anyway, Destiny 2 has my full buy-in when it comes to gameplay, as I think it’s grabbed many folks in its three-year lifespan. I’m not as big a fan of the many modes to choose from in the game, and I think the story – when looked at holistically – is more-or-less a wash. But one aspect I can’t ignore is one I’ve tried to reason out in these Dialogues: Bungie, the game’s developer, wants me to live at least part-time in this world, and there are certain ramifications that come with that.

I first noticed these ramifications during the Faction Rallies in D2Y1, when it asked me to pick a faction and fuck shit up across the solar system. I picked what I thought was the coolest-looking faction, a group of (it turned out) thanatonautic, neoliberal warmongers calling themselves Future War Cult. They basically killed themselves over and over to see the future, and as a result they want Guardians everywhere to become absolute war machines. But as far as I could see, they were a “better” option than the other two factions: Dead Orbit, who just wanted to get the fuck out of the solar system and away from the Traveler, our slumbering charge, and New Monarchy.

New Monarchy is the MAGA hat gang of Destiny 2. They want to keep humanity safe by locking them inside the Last City, forming an eternal Guardian-led kingdom, and ruling with an iron fist. Yeesh.

In my first Faction Rally, I fought hard for FWC. I liked the gear they were giving me, not to mention the guns I could earn from them. They had an aesthetic I liked, and the story of thanatonautics is interesting enough for me to want to know more about how all that worked. But I didn’t like the insistence that we “reclaim” the far-flung reaches of the solar system, as if they belonged to us inherently. I didn’t like the ramping-up, constant drumbeat for war they were throwing out. Even if Lakshmi-2, FWC’s leader, seemed like the eye of a hurricane – calm, yet clearly still dangerous – the hurricane she was the center of was starting to irk me.

I’m sorry to say I didn’t drop FWC in subsequent Rallies, even if I wasn’t as enthusiastic about them as I was initially. If I could pick again, though, I know now I’d pick Dead Orbit. They had it the most right, plus Peter Stormare plays Arach Jalaal, the faction’s leader, which is just cool.

But the winner of pretty much every rally was New Monarchy. I couldn’t see the appeal, even if you stripped the clear trump-ass bullshit away. But a LOT of other Destiny 2 players fought for them, and they were the victors constantly. Bungie took the Faction Rally away in D2Y2, but it basically put me on an inexorable thought track to where we are today.

Simply put, I think the world that Destiny 2 is advocating for is at best a fascist one. At worst, we’re talking about reinstating the divine right of kings. Not only does mortal humanity lose in this bargain, but every other living creature inhabiting our solar system suffers for it as well.

Now, Guardian, I can see that this is an unwelcome statement to hear. I get it. After spending the entire five years of your existence thanklessly putting around the solar system and killing gargantuan, god-level threats to humanity and life itself, watching some nerdy, doughy writer cast aspersions on everything you do probably extends past irritation and into wishing you could shoulder-charge me into Glimmer particles. But I want to be clear: yours isn’t the only video game world – or even the only sci-fi world in general – that does this. As Nic Reuben (the original Destiny 2 fascism warner) put it in his 2017 post on the subject, Bungie writers are “blindly following a set of culturally encoded science-fantasy tropes”:

“‘True leaders are born. It’s genetic. The right to rule is inherited.’ Any time you play as a really, really ridiculously good looking person killing mobs of ugly things for a vaguely defined reason, you’re witnessing this kind of ideology first hand.”

One thing I would like to point out, though, before we continue: Guardian, I know you personally. I’ve fought as you across the stars. I know you don’t inherently want to rule over anything. You are intentionally a blank slate, you never voice your own desires except for that one time when a possessed Awoken prince killed your best ramen bud, and I want to believe that the only thing you want — which is the only thing I want — is to race Sparrows on Mars. But the version of you I play as is not the only version of you that exists. There are over a million of you. And aside from that million iterations of you that exist in this game world, there are others who absolutely want to rule. It’s high time to interrogate this world.

Fantasy Space Fascism: The Game

In his book Against the Fascist Creep, freelance journalist and Portland State Ph.D candidate Alexander Reid Ross defines fascism as “an ideology that draws on old, ancient, and even arcane myths of racial, cultural, ethnic, and national origins to develop a plan for the ‘new man.'” He continues:

“Fascism is also mythopoetic insofar as its ideological system does not only seek to create new myths but also to create a kind of mythical reality (ed. emphasis mine), or an everyday life that stems from myth rather than fact. Fascists hope to produce a new kind of rationale envisioning a common destiny that can replace modern civilization. The person with authority is the one who can interpret these myths into real-world strategy through a sacralized process that defines and delimits the seen and the unseen, the thinkable and the unthinkable.

“That which is most commonly encouraged through fascism is producerism, which augments working-class militancy against the ‘owner class’ by focusing instead on the difference between ‘parasites’ (typically Jews, speculators, technocrats, and immigrants) and the productive workers and elites of the nation. In this way, fascism can be both functionally cross class and ideologically anticlass, desiring a classless society based on a ‘natural hierarchy’ of deserving elites and disciplined workers. By destroying parasites and deploying some variant of racial, national, or ethnocentric socialism, fascists promise to create an ideal state or suprastate – a spiritual entity more than a modern nation-state, closer to the unitary sovereignty of the empire than political systems of messy compromises and divisions of power.”

Ross, A. R. (2017). Against the Fascist Creep. AK Press.

The Destiny franchise begins with you, a freshly-reborn Guardian, shooting and punching your way through a hive of vaguely-arachnid aliens your Ghost companion calls “Fallen.” You find a decrepit jumpship deep in the heart of the Old Russia Cosmodrome, which your Ghost fires up and uses to take you to the “last safe city on Earth,” a walled metropolis underneath the Traveler. You first meet with the Vanguard triumvirate, Titan Commander Zavala, Warlock Ikora, and Hunter Cayde-6, and then, after completing some tasks for them, you are granted an audience with the Speaker (voiced by Bill Nighy):

“THE SPEAKER: There was a time when we were much more powerful. But that was long ago. Until it wakes and finds its voice, I am the one who speaks for The Traveler.

“You must have no end of questions, Guardian. In its dying breath, The Traveler created the Ghosts to seek out those who can wield its Light as a weapon—Guardians—to protect us and do what the Traveler itself no longer can.

“GUARDIAN: What happened to it?

“THE SPEAKER: I could tell you of the great battle centuries ago, how the Traveler was crippled. I could tell you of the power of The Darkness, its ancient enemy. There are many tales told throughout the City to frighten children. Lately, those tales have stopped. Now… the children are frightened anyway. The Darkness is coming back. We will not survive it this time.

“GHOST: Its armies surround us. The Fallen are just the beginning.

“GUARDIAN: What can I do?

“THE SPEAKER: You must push back the Darkness. Guardians are fighting on Earth and beyond. Join them. Your Ghost will guide you. I only hope he chose wisely.”

Bungie. Destiny. Activision Entertainment, 2015.

This introduction to the world of Destiny is… shockingly reductive. Even playing the campaign when this happens, my first thoughts were, “wait so we’re not even smart or good enough to hear the children’s scary stories about the history of this world? what the fuck?” But over the course of years, we find out more and more about the so-called Golden Age of Humanity, the tools humans built with implied assistance from the Traveler, the various rich families and corporate megaliths that consolidated power over people across the solar system in the years and decades leading to the arrival of the Darkness and the ensuing Collapse.

Not only that, we start to get a pretty clear image of what life was like immediately following the Collapse. Humanity was almost driven to extinction, and the people left alive after this apocalypse soon wished they were dead. The Traveler “defeated” the Darkness but in the process put itself into something similar to an emergency reboot mode. It deployed the Ghosts, who resurrected people who could, as the Speaker put it, “wield its Light as a weapon,” but the first of these “Risen” were nothing short of horrific. They used their Ghosts’ regeneration and resurrection powers to become regional warlords, subjugating what few mortal people remained, draining the desolate wastes of what few resources they had, and basically sealing the deal on the “Dark Age” brought on by the Collapse. It wasn’t until the advent of the Iron Lords that these warlords were defeated and the “age of Guardians” could begin, but even the Iron Lords did some pretty heinous shit – like use a whole town of mortals as bait to lure in a band of warlords on the run.

But when it comes to creating a mythical reality, the Speaker has his formula down pat. Don’t get too bogged down with details, paint the conflict in stark good vs. evil, literal “Light vs. Darkness” broad strokes, and mythologize the actions of Guardians (but most importantly, our Guardian). And oh, what fodder for mythology we are.

By the end of the first campaign, we’re the hero who severed the connection between the Hive, the Vex and the Traveler and tore out the heart of the Black Garden. By the end of The Taken King, we’ve slain a god-king. In the Rise of Iron expansion, we stop the spread of a virulent nanoparticle with murderous intent called SIVA in its tracks, using nothing but our fists. In Destiny 2, we become the Hero of the Red War, the one who put an end to a Vex plot to sterilize all worlds, and who killed a Hive Worm God. We avenge our fallen Hunter Vanguard, we kill a Taken Ahamkara. We are the hub on which the spokes of history are turning.

In terms of video game power fantasies, I really truly can’t imagine a better-feeling one. It’s basically pure uncut dopamine being transmitted directly to the pleasure centers of the brain, one Herculean feat at a time. And if we were the only Guardian, if we were not part of a larger world, if everything around us was in a vacuum, I don’t know if I would be writing this article. But Bungie has been very clear about wanting to make a world where our actions do materially affect our surroundings. As such, we are essentially a walking propaganda tool for the Consensus, a pseudo-democratic government over the Last City, consisting of faction leaders, the Vanguard and the (now-presumed-dead, hasn’t been replaced) Speaker.

The Consensus wants badly to declare the advent of the New Golden Age, a time in which Humanity can finally emerge from under the shadow of the Traveler to pick up where it left off prior to the Collapse. The problem we supposedly face is the never-ending onslaught of Enemies. Four alien species showed up on our doorstep after the Collapse, all seeking to finish us off (according to the Speaker): the Fallen, the Cabal, the Hive/Taken, and the Vex.

Of the four-ish races of enemy, only one can said to be truly, deeply “evil” in the sense the Speaker intends: the Hive and Taken, led by Taken King Oryx and his sisters Sivu Arath and Savathun, the only force in the galaxy more fascist than the Guardians. The Vex are a race of machines whose only focus is on making more of themselves, a threat similar to SIVA. The other two alien forces, the Fallen and the Cabal, are certainly antagonistic toward Guardians but our initial reasons for fighting them are, frankly, butt-ass stupid. Basically, we fight them because they’re there. They have the audacity to land on planets that “belong to us” and scavenge resources from them. Until the Red Legion showed up on Earth, we basically only ever fought Cabal on Mars, and there’s really no reason as to why.

The Fallen, or Eliksni, on the other hand, end up coming off more as the tragic victims of our flippantly rampant genocidaire practices than actual “enemies.” They’re probably the weakest alien species we come up against. Their backstory involves them living in peace under the Traveler before their entire society was caught up in a Collapse-like “Whirlwind” and destroyed. Rather than give them Guardians, like it did with us, the Traveler instead just up and peaced out, leaving the Eliksni for dead against the maelstrom of the Darkness. The surviving “Fallen” got in their skiffs and desperately chased the Traveler across the heavens, stratifying the remnants of their society into “houses” and developing religious devotion to machines like Servitors in the process.

They tried to take the Traveler back at the Battle of the Five Fronts and Twilight Gap, and lost. Their armies were shattered, and we’ve been nonchalantly killing them en masse ever since. They are the “parasites” our Guardian must exterminate, along with the Hive, Cabal, and Vex. When we make friends with, or even simply allies with, a Fallen (like Variks the Loyal, Mithrax the Forsaken, or the Spider), it is made clear almost immediately that this 100 percent doesn’t change the relationship we have with the Fallen as a group. Variks is absolutely subservient to Mara Sov and the Awoken. Mithrax wants to create an Eliksni House that bows down to Guardians and Humanity for being “better stewards” of the Traveler than the Eliksni was. The Spider makes it clear that he only wants to grow his crime syndicate, but that we can help him out if we want. Never once does the Vanguard or the Consensus reach out to these allies and try to broker peace. And in-game, we simply don’t have an option but to fire on and kill Eliksni in droves. Kill or be “killed,” right?

When it comes to Humanity itself, while we never get a chance to actually leave the Tower and walk through the streets of the Last City, there are at least hints as to the deep class stratification at work here. You can’t get much more on-the-nose than an ivory tower of immortal beings overlooking an enclosed human race. Guardians atop humanity, the Speaker above the Vanguard over the Consensus over the people, and you, the very fulcrum on which history pivots, functionally over everything else. But in the mythical reality of this game, it’s really the Traveler über Alles, and humanity underneath the Traveler has become a wonderful, diverse melting pot without class, without fear. An ideal state where the walls keep Darkness at bay and humanity can discover the joys of tonkotsu ramen yet again.

A Light Story Vs. Lore Steeped in Darkness

Destiny has a reputation, unfairly earned, for being an okay game with a bad story, or at best a nonexistent one. The story isn’t really all that bad, it’s just poorly implemented up front, and I think my willingness to engage with the game’s world to the extent that I have is a testament to how powerful and evocative some of the beats in Destiny’s writing truly are. If we dissect the game we can separate the writing of the “story” from the writing of the “lore,” and in watching the plot develop over the past few years, we can see a gradual unification of these two areas start to occur.

This is helped greatly by third-party resources like Ishtar Collective, and by mechanical decisions Bungie made in D2Y2. Adding the lore back into the game with Forsaken was a good idea; choosing to fully integrate the lore into the world starting with Season of the Forge was a great one.

A side-effect of this lore-plot unification is a dismantling-in-real-time of some of the game’s most beloved and widely-spread legends, like the legend of Shin Malphur and Dredgen Yor. Even our personal legend is challenged in this way, and it’s a really neat way that Bungie writers new and old are critically engaging with their work. But it also really throws into stark relief some of the issues I’ve laid out in this article so far.

Take, for example, the lore book “Stolen Intelligence.”

Presented to us as intercepted secret Vanguard transmissions, “Stolen Intelligence” shows us exactly what the Vanguard really thinks of our actions, and what their goals really are. It was part of Season of the Drifter, which overall had a “trust no one” vibe to it, but some of the entries here are BLEAK, y’all.

Here’s an excerpt from the first entry, titled “Outliers.”

“Fallen armed forces continue to fall back from active fronts across Terra. Factions of House Dusk remain active in the European Dead Zone. Throughout the rest of the globe, refugee attack incidents have dropped by more than 70 percent since the conclusion of the Red War – largely attributable to depressed Fallen and human populations rather than any significant change in interspecies relations.

[…]

“The recent trending emergence of so-called “crime syndicates” (cf. report #004-FALLEN-SIV) is emblematic of the continuing destructuralization of Fallen society. Likely an artifact of multi-generational colonization of human strongholds, this agent believes that because these syndicates have no relation to indigenous Fallen culture, young Fallen are appropriating and imitating human mythology in absence of a strong cultural heritage of their own.

[…]

“VIP #3987, another former confederate of the Awoken, is a lesser-known personality known as Mithrax. Scattered field reports suggest that like #1121, #3987 styles himself a Kell of the so-called “House Light,” an otherwise unknown House apparently founded by #3987 himself. We have secondhand accounts that Mithrax has engaged in allied operations with Guardians in the field, though we have not as yet been able to corroborate these accounts with any degree of veracity. This agent is inclined to treat these reports with a healthy degree of skepticism until otherwise confirmed, as they may be propaganda from Fallen sympathizers in the Old Russian and Red War Guardian cohorts. We have requested intelligence records from the Awoken which may further clarify the matter.

“In addition, whatever the findings of said intelligence records may be, it should be stressed that one or two sympathetic outliers cannot be relied upon to erase the wrongs of past centuries, nor should their good-faith efforts to correct the sins of their forbears be taken as sufficient symbolic reparation.

[…]

“We have come too far to pull our punches now.”

Bungie. Destiny 2: Forsaken – Season of the Drifter. Lore Book: Stolen Intelligence. Outliers. Activision Entertainment, 2019.

Here’s another piece of “Stolen Intelligence,” about our relationship with Cabal Emperor Calus:

“Related to the above, #3801’s aggressive propaganda campaign appears to have been successful. Despite #3801’s recent inactivity, sentiment polls captured in the Tower at regular intervals over the last several months indicate that he has successfully swayed a significant percentage of the Red War cohort to believe that he may be a potential ally. Given our history with the Cabal as well as the events of the Red War itself, this is shocking and perhaps attributable to a case of mass traumatic bonding.

“It is my strong recommendation that the Vanguard pursue a reeducation curriculum before #3801 invites any Guardians of the City to defect to his service, a possibility which we have documented in multiple previous reports.”

Bungie. Destiny 2: Forsaken – Season of the Drifter. Lore Book: Stolen Intelligence. Passivity. Activision Entertainment, 2019.

Other entries detail the efforts of the Vanguard from keeping ostensible “conspiracy theories” from being published in the Cryptarchy’s journals; show the apparent oddity of mortal-Guardian “integrated neighborhoods;” and discuss the ongoing surveillance of the Drifter, a rogue Lightbearer who has survived since the early Dark Ages and who uses Darkness-aligned technology to run a PVEVP game called “Gambit”.

There are many other stories like these, scattered throughout the lore. Stories of Cryptarchy students being banished for making fun of New Monarchy’s leaders, of Guardians messing with Hive technology being burned alive and killed fully by the Praxic Order for their crimes of experimentation. Stories like these wouldn’t happen – couldn’t happen! – to our Guardian, because they’re too important, but are seemingly everyday occurrences to less consequential members of this society. In the real world, we’d call that an increasingly oppressive police state. In Destiny 2, it’s just flavor text.

There was a degree of narrative complexity added to Season of the Drifter that hadn’t been in the game prior. The entire season was essentially boiled down to “which side are you on, the Drifter’s or the Vanguard’s,” and in our path to make a choice, we heard from various bit players in our world. The Drifter told us his story in greater detail than perhaps we needed (and how much of it is true is debatable), but his story is also the story of a less morally-pure Guardian class. Everyone from the warlords to the Iron Lords did heinous shit to humanity while the Drifter watched, and it hardened him. The Praxic Warlock Aunor goes all in on her adherence to the City’s propaganda and ideology, trying to show us how untrustworthy the Drifter is. She ends up revealing more of her order’s goals than perhaps was wise.

This narrative complexity is nice, but it still betrays the game in a fundamental way. We now have the documents. We know what Guardians are actually about, and how they’re not exactly shining beacons of unwavering good like the Speaker would have had us believe. Regardless of declining Fallen activity, of a shift in Fallen culture, of actual living Fallen who want to ally with Guardians, the Vanguard is still adamantly pursuing “extirpation,” which is a fancy way of saying genocide (I’m not kidding, it literally means “root out and destroy completely”). We know the Vanguard and the Praxic Order have a hard-on for exile, reeducation and information suppression.

On top of everything, the narrative complexity was not met with any kind of mechanical complexity. Even with proof that the Vanguard wants to kill every Eliksni in the system, conscientious objectors don’t get to opt out. The narrative path that forks between the Drifter and Aunor converges again by the end of the quest. The “conspiracy theorist” that has been trying to publish paper after paper detailing exactly how the Nine worked with Dominus Ghaul to sneak his fleet into City airspace undetected was proven right by lore WE FIND IN THE GAME, but that doesn’t change our combat relationship with the Cabal remnants anywhere in the system, and homeboy still gets his papers rejected.

Ikora and Zavala, our remaining Vanguard members, insist repeatedly that Guardians are not a warfighting force, that the Vanguard and the Consensus is not an authoritarian organization. But everything we do says otherwise.

“A peace born from violence is no peace at all.”

Guardians do not get to choose their paths in the world of Destiny 2. The paths laid out before them lead to a life of warfare, of pain, of endless murder. Ostensibly, they are agents of good, trying to beat back the forces of evil, but if you look too close you see that really they’re just a bunch of indiscriminate killers with a mandate from the Orb God. Desperate to get out from under the heels of warlords, the Guardians created a fascist society, and adding insult to injury they pretend it’s a democratic, free one. Killing the Fallen is genocide, but you can literally never stop killing them because the game won’t let you. The only right way to play at that point is to turn off your console and go outside.

Destiny 2 isn’t the only video game to fall into this trap. As Nic Reuben said in the follow-up piece to his first story on how Destiny 2 is fascist, “I’m not saying Destiny is propaganda, just reliant on some of the same narrative tricks that make propaganda so powerful. At the same time, I don’t think that it’s too much of a stretch to say that games like Call of Duty make certain assumptions about what is justifiable, righteous slaughter and what is terrorism. Replace modern military hardware with future tech, replace terrorists with alien races that have traits synonymous with cartoon portrayals of traditionally marginalized social groups, and you’re effectively playing through the worst aspects of Call of Duty with a new coat of a paint.”

There is one glimmer of hope in the game. One sliver of lore that gives us pause and helps make the game bearable in its current state. It comes in the form of Lady Efrideet, former Iron Banner handler, youngest member of the Iron Lords, and a Guardian in self-exile from the City, the Vanguard, and its fascist dogma.

Lady Efrideet is one of the most fearsome Hunters in the Destiny universe. She is known as one of the best marksmen, if not the best one. She is impossibly strong, having once thrown Lord Saladin bodily off a mountain into a Fallen Spider Walker, destroying it. And she is also one of the only named pacifist Guardians who isn’t a member of the Cryptarchy. Her story is the story of the fall of the Iron Lords, as well as the beginning of the SIVA crisis, many years before our Guardian’s rise is documented.

But it isn’t SIVA or the Iron Lords that we’re interested in. Instead, we know that after SIVA was sealed away, Efrideet snuck away from Earth. She saw the deaths of everyone she knew and her will to fight was shattered. If this was the result of fighting for the Traveler, she didn’t want any part in it. So she took to the stars. In doing so, she ended up in the far reaches of the solar system, beyond even where we currently roam. It turns out, a small enclave of other Lightbearers, hesitant or unwilling to use their powers to kill, had also fled to this part of the system and had established a colony. It’s there that Efrideet resides, and it’s there I’d like to go.

Unfortunately, our Guardian is too “important” to the vast tidal forces at work in the Destiny universe for us to be able to leave for the outer reaches whenever we want. Because we are the hub on which the wheel of history turns, and there is no escaping that now, if ever we could. We are death, the flattening of a complex and intricate universe into one of simple shapes, the sword logic in a human/Awoken/Exo body. We are needed for the plans of the Nine/Mara Sov/Hive Queen Savathun to come to fruition. When or if the Darkness ever does come back, we will be the force that faces it and, win or lose, shape our future afterward.

Sometimes it’s nice having a video game place your character on a linear track. Games like Half-Life or Titanfall present to us simple choices in otherwise-complex story environments: progress, or die. Our characters are not immortal, but they have help from the technologies around us, are tenacious, are resourceful, are quick to adapt to changing situations. In Destiny, we simply exist. We can’t truly die. Even when it comes to the rules of the game, our immense “paracausality” causes us to shrug Darkness Zones off as mere inconveniences where other Guardians have died their final deaths. Because we are necessary. The Vanguard and Consensus need us to justify their horrific fascist policies. The great forces at work in the background need us to work as a pawn. Even Bungie itself needs us, powerful, trapped beings with a sense of right and wrong but no agency to actually act on those ethics, to continue its game.

I haven’t preordered Shadowkeep yet. For once I’m glad we’re not focusing on the Fallen or the Cabal. Going to the Moon means we’ll pretty much just be dealing with Hive, to say nothing of the unreal Nightmares we’re supposed to face. But I’m still undecided as to whether I even want to order Shadowkeep in the first place. If Lady Efrideet can go to the edge of known space and live peacefully with other pacifist Guardians, maybe I can put my controller down and step away, once and for all. It would be nice to have the extra space on my Xbox One’s hard drive. Other games exist to be played, and having the time and energy to do so would help me here, with No Escape.

But even then. I’m not expressing agency as a Guardian, but rather as the person who controls you, Guardian. While I go off to play other games, you sit and wait in stasis. Even if I don’t play, there are a million iterations of you willing to commit genocide daily for cheap rewards (shoutouts to the sixtieth Edge Transit drop in my inventory this month alone). Sure, it’s just a game. But this is what having a dynamic world means in practice. There are consequences to your actions. There always have been.

There is no reason why Humanity couldn’t share the Traveler’s gifts with, at the very least, the Eliksni. There is no reason why we couldn’t just ignore the Cabal in a state of mutually assured destruction, given how small a faction the Red Legion was relative to the Cabal army’s full size. Of the two remaining enemies, the Vex are less evil than they are simply a thing that wants the universe to be like it, and that’s threatening to diverse life throughout the universe, not just Humanity. The Hive/Taken are the true enemies in the game, but even they are directed, pawn-like, by their Worm Gods.

There is, likewise, no reason why the Risen had to organize in the fascist context they did. They could have created a society in which everyone could come and go freely, where ideas and actions could be given and received absent interference, where a true “golden age” could have sprung up naturally simply by living together harmoniously and using the Light the Traveler gave them to create, rather than destroy.

But that’s not how this story shakes out.

[mst3kproject]

Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe

This is another treasure from the dollar bin at Wal-Mart, and unlike some movies I have acquired thus (Samson vs the Vampire Women comes to mind) it was actually worth spending a buck on.  It’s bizarre and hilarious and put me in mind of MST3K even before it became a Rifftrack – and the Rifftrack is great.  It gets off to a very strong start with Mike laughing out loud and going, “no seriously, what’s the real title?”

Abraxas is a Finder, one of ‘the cops of the universe’. His partner Secudus has gone rogue and is out to create a being called the Comator, who will solve the Anti-Life Equation.  What does that mean?  I have no fucking idea but it’s definitely bad, so Abraxas is sent to stop him. Secundus is eventually captured, but not before he impregnates a woman named Sonya, who promptly (and I do mean promptly) gives birth to her son Tommy.  Abraxas is ordered to kill Sonya and Tommy both, but spares them – which just means that six years later, Secundus can escape from prison again and returns to Earth to claim his son.  This is all set to music that sounds like a Kenny G. Christmas album.

This entire movie is just one big what.  You can usually tell what they’re going for but the execution is always weird, starting with the title.  Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe sounds like a shitty 80’s cartoon created to advertise a line of cheap action figures. What the film actually is, is a ripoff of Terminator II: Judgment Day, and nobody much bothers to try to hide that. There’s a precocious little boy with a very important destiny, his independent and protective mother, and two equally threatening burly dudes, one of whom is trying to kill him and one of whom is trying to protect him.  A family dynamic forms between good Burly Dude and the mother and son, while bad Burly Dude pursues them implacably until the final showdown between good and evil.

Because the makers of Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe couldn’t afford to be sued by James Cameron, they have of course made a number of changes to the story, most notably using aliens instead of robots from the future, but the script gives the impression of having been written in too much of a hurry to get these changes right.  For example, one of the rules of the Terminator universe is that you can’t take anything with you back in time, so nobody has any weapons or even any clothing from the future.  Abraxas doesn’t need to keep this rule, but it does anyway, by ‘crossing the teleportation streams’ or something so that both Abraxas and Secundus lose their weaponry (but not, thank god, their clothes) on their way to Earth.  There’s no reason for this, it’s only there because it was there in the Terminator movies.

Occasionally the movie tries to be funny.  It rarely works – the only bit that actually got a snicker out of me on purpose was when a waitress presented Secundus with his bill and he ate it.  The rest of the jokes just fall flat.  There’s a scene in which one alien snippily informs another that “parsecs are not an appropriate Earth time unit!”, and it’s obvious what they’re referencing but that’s not the same as being funny.  Another really bizarre moment has Abraxas telling some campers that the artificial intelligence implanted in his wrist, his ‘Answer Box’, can find Secundus by detecting his vibrational frequency, and what he actually says is “my Box has V.D.” Was that a joke?  If so, was Ventura in on it?  Or did somebody just think it would be really funny to trick him into saying that his vagina has an STI?  What?

On a similar note, there’s a bit where Abraxas, sitting in bed with no shirt on, tells Tommy he’s going to tell him a story ‘about two men who were partners’.  I’m at least pretty sure that wasn’t an intentional innuendo but man, it’s an icky thing for a large hairy man to say to a six-year-old boy.

The main thing people who’ve seen this movie remember about it is the soundtrack, which is entirely inexplicable.  There’s one little strain that really does sound like the opening to I’ll be Home for Christmas on alto saxophone, and the fact that the whole movie happens in the winter only heightens the effect.  This is the entire score, too – Sonya contemplates killing her child, then decides against it, to saxophone music.  Abraxas and Secundus pursue each other through the woods to saxophone music.  The one major exception is the song that plays over the final showdown and that’s equally out of place.  What were they thinking?

Performances and casting are weird.  Ventura and Sven-Ole Thorsen mostly come across as robotic, which is okay for nigh-immortal defenders of the cosmos but quickly crumbles when they’re supposed to display emotion, as when Secundus proudly addresses Tommy as ‘my son’ or when Abraxas starts to develop feelings for Sonya.  I have no idea how old Sonya is supposed to be – an early scene with her parents suggests that she’s a teenager but Marjorie Bransfield (Jim Belushi’s wife, if you’re interested) is clearly thirty-odd and nobody tries to make her look younger.  Everybody else is kinda low-level bad with one rather stunning exception, and that’s Francis Mitchell as Tommy.

Tommy never speaks throughout the movie, until he finally gets two words in voiceover at the end – this means that his entire character arc must be communicated non-verbally.  We see that Tommy loves his mother, that he knows he has strange powers and is afraid of them and the harm he could do with them, and that he’s terrified of Secundus but doesn’t know if he should trust Abraxas either. Mitchell isn’t a brilliant child actor but he’s good enough in a movie where very little even rises to that level, and that’s fairly impressive.

If this movie has a point, it’s that there is no destiny – Tommy can be the Comator and bring about the end of the universe, but he doesn’t have to be if he doesn’t want to.  He can choose how he uses his powers.  This is the same thing Kyle Reese tells Sarah Connor in The Terminator: the future isn’t written yet, and our choices are important.  In this one instance, Abraxas actually manages to make its point a bit better than Terminator did, because it doesn’t have the time travel.  The story of Terminator was a closed loop: John Connor sends Kyle Reese back in time to meet Sarah so that John can be born.  All this must happen because in a sense it already did.  Abraxas is not chained to its own ending in this way, and so Tommy’s destiny is entirely his own without requiring a sequel to make it so.

This is also, as the summary implies, a film about rape, and the way the topic is treated ties in with the idea of our destiny being based on our choices.  When Secundus kidnaps Sonya, he tells her I need your body, and makes it clear that he will use it with or without her consent.  When she comes home with an infant, her father throws her out, accusing her of being sexually irresponsible.  Sonya herself is tempted to do violence to the child who will always remind her of this traumatic evening.

But Sonya is actually a pretty tough cookie. She defends herself to her father, telling him she has nothing to be ashamed of.  When she finds herself out in the cold, she picks herself up and builds a life for herself and her child, and she never lets the awful circumstances of Tommy’s conception colour how she treats him.  Because Sonya raises him with love and support, Tommy is able to understand that his destiny does not have to be destruction.  He can at last allow himself to speak, knowing his words will harm no one unless he chooses.

That’s honestly a really powerful arc for a movie, but Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe doesn’t use it effectively.  The acting is way too bad and the situations far too silly for it to have an impact, and the ending focuses on Abraxas and Secundus fighting when it should be about Tommy’s internal struggle. Admittedly, external fistfights are way easier to film, but Sonya and Tommy are the emotional crux of this story, and after the arcs they’ve been through they deserve better than to be spectators at the end.

At some point in the writing process for this movie somebody seems to have realized that if Abraxas is going to be the main character he needs to learn something or evolve somehow, so that’s what they try to do.  How do they do that?  They have him learn emotions.  Yes, it’s really corny.  Yes, it involves falling in love with Sonya and deciding to retire and stay on Earth.  I wonder… if they have more children, will they do it the human way, or will Abraxas hold a hand over her stomach while his Answer Box announces reproduction commenced?  The other way they show us Abraxas learning emotion is having him argue with his Answer Box and eventually tell it to shut up, signifying that he’s becoming less of a machine, himself.  The movie seems to think this is really funny but it’s not.

After two pages of complaining I need to reiterate that Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe is not annoying­-bad, it’s hilarious-bad.  In true B-movie style, its entertainment value lies in the disconnect between what the film-makers were going for and the result they produced.  It’s much like Space Mutiny that way, trying so hard to be epic and falling comically short, and it would have made for similarly classic MST3K.

[worryinglyinnocent]

Fic: A Streak of Luck (1/?)

Summary: Lady Belle of the Marchlands sets out to break the curse that has doomed all the women of her family line for centuries, seeking out the legendary sorcerer Rumpelstiltskin to aid her in her quest. Even if she finds him, will he be able to help her break her curse?

Rated: T

[AO3]

====

CW for this chapter: Death in childbirth.

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A Streak of Luck

One

To say that the entirety of the Marchlands was on tenterhooks when Lady Colette was revealed to be expecting the heir to the duchy would have been an understatement. The lineage of the Marchlands nobility had always been an area of great interest for everyone who dwelt within its borders.

Every single person, without fail, including Lord Maurice and Lady Colette, were praying that the unbroken line of male heirs that had continued throughout the past three hundred years would remain constant. There had not been a girl born into the Marchlands duchy in all this time, and the land was incredibly pleased with that.

Still, as the time for Colette’s confinement drew closer and closer, Maurice could not help but worry. What if this child was the one to break that line? What would happen to the Marchlands then?

There was nothing to say that a woman could not inherit the duchy. In fact, the Marchlands had been one of the very first lands within the kingdom to do away with the archaic rules that only men could hold titles in their own right and abolish male primogeniture.

That, however, was before the curse.

Sitting in his study in the top of the castle that had been his family’s home for over a thousand years, Maurice looked over at the carving that was set into the stone above the window. Many of his forefathers had tried to remove the stone or somehow chip away at the writing that was indelibly marked upon it, but their efforts had all been to no avail. The curse that his family suffered under was set in stone and it was here to stay until someday, someone found the means to break it.

For the past three hundred years, the family had remained untouched and untroubled by this curse. If his and Colette’s child was a girl, however, then he knew that the curse would come into full effect, and quickly. It had been waiting and biding its time for so long, cheated of a victim by the fact that his bloodline had produced only boys, immune to its effects. Maurice did not know magic, but he knew how unpredictable and fickle it could be, and just how vindictive.

When the time finally came for Colette to be delivered, Maurice knew. Everything looked bleak from the outset. The midwives and physicians who had been brought to the castle from all across the lands were worried, he could see that much as he paced up and down outside Colette’s room, listening to her screams of agony, helpless to do anything except wait. People scurried in and out with towels and basins of water and potions upon potions, all of them with grim faces, refusing to give him any news of what was happening with in. It only served to give further light to his suspicions.

When everything went very quiet, he knew that it was all over, and he sat down heavily in the chair outside the door that had been placed there for him several hours ago. It was a long time before the physician came out of the room, but Maurice had already heard the whispers within.

“My lord, I am very sorry. We could not save your wife.”

Maurice nodded, he had already surmised as much.

“The child?” he asked, choked.

“A healthy baby girl,” the physician said. “Although I must warn you…”

“She already bears the mark of the curse,” Maurice finished for him.  “I know.”

The midwife brought the baby out to him, swaddled in blankets, but they couldn’t hide the white lock on her brow in amongst the wisps of dark, downy hair. Maurice touched the little white patch; he could already feel the magic humming through it. The curse that had lain dormant for so long was at work once more.

The first girl had been born into the Marchlands noble lineage for over three hundred centuries, and there would not be another heir, not now that he had lost his beloved Colette. All hopes of breaking the curse now lay in his daughter’s tiny, helpless hands.

X

Twenty years later

“Belle, this is madness. You’re going to get yourself killed, I know it.”

Belle turned around from where she was securing Philippe’s saddle and bridle and ran a hand through her hair in frustration, feeling the warmth of the magic that flowed through the white streak that she’d had since she was a baby.

“At the rate I’m going, I’m going to get myself killed simply by existing sooner rather than later,” she said. “I’m not asking you to come with me, Will. In fact I remember expressly telling you not to come with me and telling you to make sure that no-one else followed me either. This is something that I have to do, and it’s something that I have to do alone. If I’m going to break the curse, then this is what I have to do.”

The stable boy sighed. “You don’t have to. You know that you don’t have to do this to break your curse. All you have to do is survive, and going off on madcap adventures to find mythical sorcerers that no-one even knows if they really exist or not is really not the way to survive. You’re just asking for trouble!”

“My very existence is asking for trouble,” Belle snapped. “I’m amazed that I made it this far with all the near misses that I’ve had. I think that despite the curse, there’s some kind of guardian angel looking out for me up there. They want me to break this curse and they’re making sure that I have the opportunity to do it.”

Will didn’t look at all convinced.

“Personally I just think you’ve got good luck,” he muttered.

Belle raised an eyebrow. “The entire point of the curse is that I have bad luck,” she pointed out. “Every girl born into the noble house of the Marchlands is cursed to lead a miserable and incredibly short life filled with bad luck, unless she can find a way to break the curse. If my life is destined to be both miserable and short then I’d rather spend it trying to break the curse, if I can.”

Will had already given up trying to persuade her away from her course, Belle could tell that.

“Will you at least tell your father where you’re going?” he pleaded.

“No, because his reaction will be the same as yours, only he’ll send out a mounted guard to come and bring me back.” Belle left Philippe and came over to Will, giving him a hug. “If my life is to be cursed either way, then I’m in just as much danger here in the castle as I am out there, taking my chances in the wider world. At least this way, if I do die, then I know that I spent my days doing something useful and trying to break my family’s curse.”

Will nodded gloomily. “I’ll miss you, you know.”

“I know. I’ll miss you too, Will. So much.”

Will had been her only friend in the castle for as long as she could remember. Oh, she got on well enough with her father, of course, but there was a part of him that was always distant and closed off from her, a part that had died alongside her mother when she had been born. The rest of the castle’s staff and her father’s advisers had always treated her with deference and kid gloves, but they had never really made the effort to get close to her. She had never made a friend amongst them. She was cursed after all, and destined for misery. No-one wanted that for their own children and their own lives. No-one except Will, who was an orphan himself and was quite happy to have some company in his misery. It was Will’s friendship that had prevented Belle’s childhood from being quite as miserable as her curse had perhaps hoped that it would be.

“I’d best be getting on,” she said. “I’m going to leave a note for Papa. That will explain everything to him, even if it doesn’t tell him exactly where I’ve gone.”

“Belle, you don’t even know that this man you seek exists. All you know of him is from old wives’ tales and rumours.”

“Well, if I don’t find him then I’ll come straight home and we can think up another plan,” Belle said brightly. “I’m not giving up before I’ve even begun just because it might be difficult. I might as well just lie down now and wait for the curse to claim me.”

“Belle, don’t be dramatic.”

“I’m not being dramatic. I’m trying to be positive. For my entire life, I’ve constantly been told that there’s no point in me doing anything because of this stupid curse that’s been haunting us for hundreds of years and that no-one currently living had anything to do with. Don’t you think it’s time that we stopped being at the mercy of something that happened hundreds of years ago?”

“Well, I suppose that when you put it like that, it does make sense.”

Belle smiled. “I knew that I could persuade you to see my way of thinking. Now, I just need to go and leave the letter for Papa. I won’t be too long.”

She left Will with Philippe in the stables and made her way back up through the castle. It was the middle of the night, and the sky was overcast, no moon to light her way. She knew that taking off in such conditions was a risky idea, but there was always so much risk in whatever she did that she didn’t think waiting for clement weather would make the slightest bit of difference to her.

The rest of the castle was fast asleep, and her father’s study door was unlocked and open, inviting her in. She stepped inside, laying the note that she had written earlier in the day down on his desk where he would see it the next morning, hopefully before she was discovered to be missing.

Dearest Papa, she had written. By the time you read this, I will be far away, on a journey to change my destiny. All my life I have been told that I am cursed and that I am doomed to a life of misery, so I have taken it upon myself to try and break this curse. To that end, I have gone to seek out the most powerful sorcerer in all the realms. I know that Rumpelstiltskin is a legend, a tale of warning to desperate souls, but with a curse so old and complex as ours, I believe that he has the best chance of being able to break it.

I will send word as soon as I can, and if my journey proves fruitless then I will of course return, but I will not give up this quest. No matter what, I cannot be protected from this curse, it claimed me from the moment I was born and keeping me shut away in the castle will not change this destiny, but perhaps I can change it myself.

With all my love,

Belle

She held up her candle and looked at the inscription in the wall that had been set there so many centuries ago, the identity of the caster long since lost to the annals of time.

For as long as my curse endures, all ladies born to the noble house of the Marchlands who bear the maudlin streak will be doomed to a life of strife and suffering as I was. Should a lady survive till her crown is as white as her streak, the curse will be lifted and the lineage restored.

Break the curse and the streak will be broken.

Belle touched her fingertips to her own maudlin streak, pure white that no stain or dye had even been able to darken. Whoever had cast this curse had invoked a terrible and powerful magic for it to have endured for so long and still be so powerful after so much time.

She knew that she could not have been the first to try and break the curse, as so many people within the household had told her that it had long since been thought to be impossible. None of the books that she had read had ever mentioned the curse or anything remotely like it, and had given no hints as to what might possibly be able to break it. That was why Belle was seeking out a legend.

Rumpelstiltskin, the greatest sorcerer in all the realms, called upon by desperate souls. Although Belle would never admit it, she was a desperate soul herself. She was determined that she was not going to be cowed by this curse. She was even more determined that when she did eventually marry and have children of her own, she would not pass on this curse to any daughters that she might have.

Of course, suitors for a cursed woman were few and far between, and Lord Maurice had privately given up all hope of the line of Marchlands nobility ever continuing, but Belle still believed. Everyone else in her family may have given up or become complacent from the three hundred years of first-born sons securing the bloodline, but Belle wasn’t.

Her conviction was unwavering as she made her way back through the castle and out to the stables where Will was still waiting with Philippe. She was doing this for herself, certainly, who wanted to live with a curse when they had the chance to break it? But more than anything, she was doing this to secure the future of her family and the peace and prosperity of the Marchlands that had always been her family’s home. If the noble family could not continue, then the place would fall into ruin and disrepair, carved up by the greedy landowners on either side of them. Belle would not let that happen, and if undertaking this dangerous  journey was the only way to help herself and her home, then that was what she would do.

“You’re definitely going then,” Will said as she came back into the stables.

“Of course, Will. I’ve made up my mind. I’ll write to you as soon as I can and let you know how I’m getting on once I find him.”

“I’m not going to say that he doesn’t exist, because you’ll only correct me.” Despite the melancholy air of their parting, Will was still smiling at Belle’s stubbornness, and she pulled him into a tight hug.

“Take care of yourself, Will, and please look out for my father for me.”

“I always have, Belle. And you make sure that you take care of yourself, too.”

“I will. I’ll see you soon, and when you next see me again, I’ll have broken this curse.”

“Your optimism is both inspiring and exasperating. Just… Don’t stay away too long, Belle. It’ll be lonely without you.”

It would be lonely on the road without her only friend, too, but Belle had to do this. She couldn’t sit around and wait for her hair to turn white, knowing that time was ticking away from her.

She finally released Will with a little reluctance and he gave her a leg-up onto Philippe’s back. She tightened her grip on the reins and checked that her packs were fastened into his saddlebags securely.

“Good luck, Belle,” Will called as she set off out of the stables.

Belle just waved to him in return. Luck was one thing that had never been on her side, and one thing that she was certain to need an awful lot of.

A few rays of pale silver moonlight were just beginning to push weakly through the cloud cover as she trotted down the lanes away from the castle.

Now all she had to do was to find Rumpelstiltskin.

[aion-rsa]

Marvel’s What If…?: The Huge MCU Ramifications of Episode 2’s Ravagers Lineup

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

This article contains spoilers for Marvel’s What If…? episode 2.

Marvel’s What If…? episode 2 was already a big deal due to it being the late Chadwick Boseman’s final performance as T’Challa. “What If… T’Challa Became Star-Lord” is definitely a bittersweet half hour, showing the would-be Black Panther turning the Ravagers into a force for good and having a truly positive effect on the universe itself.

In this reality, Yondu didn’t personally oversee the kidnapping of Peter Quill as he did in the opening moments of Guardians of the Galaxy, and instead let Kraglin and Taserface take care of the task. They came across a young T’Challa, saw something unique in him, and figured they had the right kid. Fast-forward a few decades and T’Challa is a galactic hero to the point that Korath the Pursuer can’t help but geek out upon seeing him in person.

It’s shortly after this confrontation that we see the biggest bombshell in the timeline. While the episode indeed comes with plenty of sentimentality thanks to Boseman’s wonderful performance, it does bury a pretty major lede: the Ravagers include none other than Thanos in their ranks, with Josh Brolin reprising the role. Yes, the biggest villain of the first three phases of the Marvel Cinematic Universe had a change of heart, and it changed pretty much everything else in the MCU timeline.

Thanos

At first glance, you’d think that T’Challa recruiting Korath would go up the ladder and eventually lead to Thanos, but not so much. Instead Korath is the newest member. That in itself suggests that Ronan the Accuser would have been searching for the Power Stone with or without Thanos being his benefactor. Ronan’s fate in this reality is left a mystery.

In what is considered to be one of Star-Lord’s greatest adventures in this reality, he crossed paths with the Mad Titan and battled him with words. Through debate and logic, T’Challa was able to explain to Thanos that his plan to destroy half of all life in the universe was in fact evil nonsense and there was a better way. Thanos was swayed by these words and chose to serve T’Challa as a member of the Ravagers, helping make the universe a better place without all the random slaughter.

Although he gets ribbed for his genocidal notions, Thanos does still think there was merit in his scheme and refuses to fully disown his behavior. It’s all incredibly ironic. In regular continuity, Star-Lord gets a lot of blame for allowing Thanos to succeed. Change the man under the helmet and Star-Lord is suddenly the best deterrent against the same threat.

Nebula and Gamora

Thanos being reformed means that he can’t really be torturing his adopted children and forcing them to assassinate people. There is no mention of Gamora, but considering she wanted to escape Thanos and all he stood for in Guardians of the Galaxy, it’s likely that she simply got as far away from him as possible.

Nebula is a different story. Blue skin aside, she’s shown with a more human (and even glamorous) look, albeit with cybernetic markings over one eye. Her behavior around Thanos shows that he did indeed torment her, but T’Challa intervened before it could have been much, much worse both physically and emotionally. Nebula hates Thanos with a passion, but not enough to dedicate her life to revenge.

Instead, Nebula is living her own life. One where she’s in debt to the Collector, but still her life is completely her own. She’s affiliated with the Ravagers, even if that means having to interact with her adopted father.

Really, Thanos and Nebula replace Yondu and Quill’s role with the broken parental relationship that finds its way in the end. The two do eventually bury the hatchet due to Thanos’ heroics and Nebula is later shown to be more embarrassed by her father’s behavior than furious.

A World Without Avengers

What about Earth? T’Challa spends much of his life thinking that Wakanda is gone, which would have tracked for a What If…? story, where zigging instead of zagging so easily leads to things like planets exploding. Not only do we discover that Wakanda is totally fine (with T’Chaka still its king), but so is the rest of Earth. Granted, all we really see is the Dairy Queen that Peter Quill works at, but there aren’t any red flags on the surface.

At the same time, the Collector’s special weapons collection raises some questions. While he uses Hela’s headdress at one point, we do see that Captain America’s shield and Mjolnir are in there. Mjolnir certainly is an exclamation point because, well, how did it even get there and how is the Collector able to presumably wield it?

The happenings on Earth would indeed be incredibly different without Thanos trying to get all six Infinity Stones. Without Thanos, there would be no Loki-led invasion. Without that, there would be no Avengers. The Dark Elves would still be stopped with or without Loki’s involvement, but eventually, Thor would be dumped by Jane. In this reality, it would be logical to say that Jane was Thor’s only major tether to Earth, meaning he would have no need to stick around. He would also have no reason to hunt for the Infinity Stones.

Not sure about Captain America, though. There’s nothing really getting in the way of him stopping HYDRA and enacting the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. The Collector would have to be going out of his way to get his hands on that shield, since Steve Rogers wouldn’t be traveling the cosmos in this reality. Unless the lack of Avengers means he joins SWORD or something.

Either way, without Thanos mucking things up, Earth ends up without an Avengers roster, but with no noticeable issues that come from it. Hell, without the Mind Stone being thrown into the mix, there’s no Ultron, Wanda Maximoff gets to live without becoming the harbinger of doom, and Baron Zemo has no reason to be angry (ergo, no need to assassinate the King of Wakanda). Not bad.

Happy Drax

Instead of being Drax the Destroyer, Drax is a mere bartender and happy family man with sensitive nipples. He credits Star-Lord and the Ravagers for saving his people from a Kree invasion. Since the mainstream Drax considers Thanos to be the puppet master behind Ronan’s doings, it’s very possible that it was this adventure that led to T’Challa meeting Thanos.

Then again, as mentioned earlier, Ronan would have gone for the Power Stone with or without Thanos. It stands to reason that he would have invaded Drax’s world, even without Thanos calling the shots.

Regardless, that’s another violent vendetta cleansed from the timeline.

The Black Order

Ebony Maw, Cull Obsidian, Proxima Midnight, and Corvus Glaive are no longer part of Thanos’ grand plan. Without their cult-like purpose in the galaxy, the Black Order instead end up working for the Collector. Goons gonna goon.

It is rather surprising to see that despite Thanos’ spot as their feared leader in regular continuity, even he is no match for taking on Cull Obsidian and Proxima Midnight at the same time.

Peter Quill and the One Caveat

Things end very well across the board. Almost too well. Even while the first episode showed that Captain Carter would have been a more efficient choice than Captain America, there were still drawbacks to her existence and tragedy still occurred. We really need the same kind of treatment to keep the narrative from beating us over the head with how Peter Quill is a totally lame failure compared to his alt universe replacement.

Having never left Earth, Peter Quill works at Dairy Queen. For some reason, actors from Parks and Recreation who play roles in the MCU end up working for ice cream chains. Go figure.

He’s never put in a position to wield the Power Stone and get his name out there. That doesn’t stop his father, Ego the Living Planet, from tracking him down himself and making him aware of his purpose. This is a cliffhanger that suggests extremely disastrous consequences. Without the Guardians of the Galaxy, there’s virtually nothing to stop Ego from using Peter to fulfill his so-called destiny.

The Ravagers may have helped the universe in so many ways, but it’s very possible that the bill is coming due.

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from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3CYv5f1

[chthonicbeekeeper]

The Book of Joseph. Chapter 4

“They may be united by blood

or joined by fortune, but they

cannot claim to be family.

For the only legitimate family,

the only one spared from evil,

is the family of those

who serve the Father.”

Sermon from the Project at Edens Gate.

While my father was whipping me with his old leather belt that June, the Voice didn’t just order me to hold back my brother Jacob.

It proclaimed that we three — Jacob, John, and me — had been chosen to achieve Its destiny. And to give humanity one last chance.

Not for a moment did I doubt that I was hearing the Creator in my head. It was much more than just a voice. It was, and still is, a presence that envelops me and warms me to my core, a language that every cell in my body understands, one which I am spreading far and wide to try to convince the pure of heart to join our family.

Nothing can stop me, because this is the mission I have been assigned and nothing can contradict me, for I am the messenger.

That night, I spoke to Jacob in the tiny bedroom we shared. I managed to convince him not to confront our father. Later, he would recount how my eyes shone feverishly in the dark and how my faith had stayed his hand. I was no longer his quiet, timid little brother. The Voice had transformed me.

I had awakened.

As it was, our father never did hit us again: a few days later, two cars, one from the police and another from social services, pulled up in front of our house.

Teachers at John’s school had noticed the belt marks crisscrossing his back and immediately called child protective services, who had been forced to send officials all the way out to Rome to investigate.

They examined us. The scars on our backs told the same story three times over.

We climbed into their car.

I looked back at our house through the car window for the last time, then at the neighbour’s yard. Amid the brush, I spotted the familiar shape of a rusty lawnmower that had been there as long as we could remember. It sat as a testament to a bygone era when we still cared about such things — a time when the lawn was still manicured, when we hosted barbecues and gave to those less fortunate than us (because there were such people). All that was in the past now.

Soon there would be nothing, because the world I knew was going to disappear, but I didn’t know that yet.

I never saw my father again.

He got into the police car along with my mother.

The officers’ desire to mete out punishment of their own was palpable. I imagine they did that later, somewhere where we couldn’t see. We had seen enough as it was.

My father died in federal prison in Atlanta towards the end of his sentence. Many years later, when I started preaching, I ran across a former prisoner who remembered this Old Mad Seed, as he was known then. The ex-prisoner told me that he had died in prison after falling down a set of stairs. Was it really an accident? It’s hard to say. But I remember that my father’s sermons could be very annoying.

I do not miss my mother. She was already a ghost when we all lived under the same roof. Today she must be haunting some institution, doubtless glad to be far from the man who erased her life. She might already be dead. She will be soon anyways, like the others.

We went to an orphanage at first, where doctors and psychologists examined us. I quickly understood that it had little to do with caring. This was more about determining the amount of mistreatment that we had suffered than it was about healing our wounds. Our suffering might make us violent and poorly adapted. We might represent a threat to society. And that was to be avoided at all costs.

They gave me a rag doll and asked me to point to where he had touched me, but I was one of the rare children in the orphanage who was lucky enough to have only been beaten.

They placed ink blots in front of me and asked me what I saw. I saw butterflies, dancers, squashed animals, black swans, skulls, dwarfs, and a little girl with pigtails whose stomach had been opened up. All of that was perfectly normal.

And I talked about what the Voice had told me.

The men in white coats talked to me about imaginary friends, post-traumatic stress disorder, subconscious defence mechanisms, transient schizophrenia, and emotional scars — none of which I understood.

I understood only one thing: that I had been chosen.

Throwing up their hands, they finally told me to keep my mouth shut about the things I was hearing if I ever wanted to find a family before the age at which I and the Voice in my head could be thrown out on the street.

I decided to keep quiet.

Several months later, social services placed all three of us with a childless couple who lived in a small town not far from Rome. As soon as we were in the car, winding down the small dirt roads to our guardians’ house — who the social worker told us not to hesitate to call Mum and Dad — they started talking to us about our new start, our new life. We were promised love and fresh air. We dreamed about pies cooling on the window sill, laughter under thick blankets. We imagined ourselves putting up fences, pushing a mower across the lawn in front of a white-painted house. We thought that we would grow up in loving hands. We thought we were living in a TV show.

But what was awaiting us was even worse than our parents. This couple did not want children — they wanted free labour.

They treated us like livestock. We worked before and after school until we fell asleep, without a single day to rest. We took care of the animals and the garden. We cooked meals, cleaned the house, and did the laundry for our guardians, or rather, our owners.

We could not complain. We did not even think of trying. The adult world was too hostile toward us. We had to handle it on our own. We were child labourers shackled to their workbench, child soldiers on the front line, more despised than beggars and day labourers one searches for on the other side of the border, in slave markets by another name.

We slept in a barn and were only fed because otherwise we would not have the energy to work.

Today, I know that was a test we had to undergo to harden us and prepare us for the heavy task awaiting us. To help us understand how this world is flawed, how it deserves to disappear. We suffered daily, beaten down, but we also became more resilient, stronger.

And one day, Jacob was strong enough.

[alterautomata-blog]

Destiny Fanfic: Lost Days

Author’s Notes: Destiny fanfiction set months before House of Wolves, featuring my Hunter OC, Ashe Winters, an awoken who begins to question the Speaker, the Traveler and the shadow it casts, even her own paracausal existence.

AO3 link: http://archiveofourown.org/works/10342830/chapters/22857783

Tags: Angst, Existential crisis, Snark, 

Chapter 1: Fire and Ashe

“I don’t know why you insist on doing this every morning,” a Ghost whined, it’s internal circuitry grinding with irritation.

“You know for an AI, you complain a lot.”

Year 2631, 0600 hours, Tuesday morning.

Earth’s orbit.

Space’s grasp was vast and everlasting, and its view had remained even greater than that calibre for the last eternity. It was an interstellar spectacle of distant worlds, and star stuff, which, even when broomed through thoroughly, not even the most seasoned of space explorers would find every nook and cranny of this all-omnipotent being.

Just off the coast of the distant Planet Earth, not so far from it’s atmosphere was a Guardian class jumpship, floating off in the embrace of space. Inside it was what one would expect; a Guardian herself—Hunter class—and the Ghost who oft criticised her of the many unhealthy decisions she dared to make.

Ashe Winters was very enthusiastic about the sunrise, and viewing it from space at that.

Her Ghost, who she had cleverly given the name of Blink—an odd name from a being from some Golden Age program used for children’s amusement—was barely accepting of her latest escapades, mostly the ones that would land the both of them in trouble with the Vanguard. He would often advise against Ashe’s rash decisions, but alas, she never even considered the consequences. But that’s how she was on leisure time. On missions, the Hunter was often compared to Cayde-6 when it came to getting things done.

She didn’t care how she did it—as long as it was set and over with.

If anything, Blink was the voice of reason in these types of situations, that Ashe had no intention to listen to anytime soon.

The Ghost floated near Ashe’s head, whirring it’s gears in irritation and worry while the Hunter had a big smirk plastered on her face.

“So tell me; are you insane? Because Zavala tells you, personally, time and time again to not linger outside of Earth’s orbit—due to the fact that Fallen ships could easily pick you up on their scans, and are oh-so eager for Guardian blood to be spilled.”

“So?”

“And yet, you continue to do it!”

“Uhuh.”

“Why!?”

Ashe turned her gaze out of her ship’s port window, a resolute curve of her lips still plastered on her face. She appeared to be amazed, enveloped in the type of awe that a child would have. She directed her Ghost’s attention out to space with a point. “Because on Earth, you’ll never get to see something like this.”

The black and white patterned shell turned, and his single eye blinked for a moment.

Through the ship’s window, the sun glared, reflecting from the very surface of the large blue planet before the two. It’s golden view were like brightly shining arms made of pure light, wrapping around the sky. This sight enthralled Ashe; brought out expressions from her no other Guardian or Ghost would ever hope to coax. It was a simple thing to be so fixated with, yes. But in times like these, the small things were all a person—even a Guardian—could ever want before everything turned to shit. It wasn’t out of the ordinary at all, especially for a Hunter, to have an interest for something of nature and science. Warlocks were often the same, even more with science, however, and Titans with their trinkets—items from a distant time before The Collapse that managed to maintain their shape and form.

In particular, Ashe was interested in the sun, and strangely enough, she was hardly a Gunslinger.

The Awoken woman sighed with elation in her voice before her hands reached over, and touched the controls of her ship.

“Sit tight. We’re going back.”

The Traveler.

It was practically within the grasps of those who beheld it’s somber-like presence. While yes, life no longer stirred within it, it remained a moniker of hope to those who beheld its glory—a metaphorical and funnily enough, literal sigil of Light, which spurred on the desires for peace—to drive Guardians and humans alike to fight for the day where Darkness would no longer lust for their lives.

At least, that was what everyone’s beloved Speaker would tell them. And repeat like a mantra.

In truth, the Traveler was only a facade. A lie, and the Speaker along with it. It was only a gargantuan floating ball that smelled faintly of vanilla; casting an overbearing shadow on top of The Last City.

While, yes, it did well to stave off the Dark; as ever-growing and infinite as a plague. With as much as the concept of Light was deconstructed, only to be revealed as something so morbid, Guardians—those who are lost to natural causes, who defy death constantly—it was a necessary evil. Knowing so, must such a wonderful falsehood be broken?

Would it even be insulted to be called something wonderful?

These were Ashe’s constant thoughts, day and night. In space. On patrols. Even on supply runs, such things would not leave the Hunter’s mind, that she figured someone such as her might as well had been a Warlock. Funnily enough, not even their kind questioned this very way of life. Instead, they had their heads buried in a book, wondering why the Moon wasn’t made of cheese, or something along the lines.

Was everyone content with this life, though? Constantly fighting, while knowing that even something as majestic as the Traveler casted darkness as well? Maybe they didn’t know, and continued to go about life as normal.

Was that the life Ashe wanted to lead? Would she had rather been as ignorant as any other Guardian?

A neon glare turned over towards the Hunter, from an Exo from the same class. Rather it was her mentor, a member of the Vanguard, Cayde.

She pretended to not notice him at first, and Cayde pretended to actually be angry. He knew Ashe’s schtick better than anyone else did, that and he had to put on a good show for the other two Vanguard members.

“Look, I’m not saying that you can’t handle yourself,” he began, his geared jaw illuminating for every time a syllable sounded. “But we made it clear that Guardians aren’t allowed to linger in orbit like that. We wouldn’t want you getting fried by the Fallen or, whatever is out there. You’re too valuable an ally to lose, Ashe.”

There was an inkling of a moment where her eyes turned to the Exo, then passed over to Zavala who wore that eternally stern expression, and finally to Ikora, forever to be carelessly buried in her collection of pre-collapse books and ancient texts of dragons and whatnot.

“Is that why you’re sticking me with a permanent fireteam? For the fifth time?”

“Sixth. Franz was only one man, but we thought he could really…” Cayde’s eyes darted behind him so indecisively as he could feel the tension rise. “Keep you in check. Zavala’s words. Not mine.”

As if on cue, the Titan stepped forward and stood adjacent to Cayde, looking down on the wayward Awoken Hunter who quirked an incredulous brow back at him.

“You are a menace to those around you and yourself, Winters. That Ghost won’t last long with this continued behavior,” the big blue statue according to Cayde bellowed. “Show more pride as a Guardian, and perhaps this would be a permanent fireteam for you. But time and time again, your lack of tact either drives them away or worse, get them—”

“You act as if I want to be on someone’s leash.”

She didn’t realize it before, but the negative effect of her reflexes were showcased right there. Ashe was already standing up, staring down the Commander.

Me and my big mouth, the sensible part of Ashe thought, grimacing.

Zavala wasn’t phased however. That stoney-faced Awoken didn’t even flinch when Ashe engaged in a stand-off with him.

If Cayde had sweat glands, he would’ve been soaked.

And there was Ikora, still immersed in her books, a care spared not.

For a moment there, Ashe thought she was going to find her entire body rocked to it’s core from a Storm Fist—and then the Tower would have a fight on it’s hands—but she knew Zavala better than that. He wasn’t your average, everyday Titan, mindlessly punching things that provoked them.

“Your team will be issued to you tomorrow, Winters. In the meantime, you’re dismissed.”

Fuck you, the irrationally angry side of Ashe wanted to say. She really did. With a click of her tongue, she turned on a heel and stormed off.

As the Hunter reached the hall, her Ghost materialized next to her, following the hastened pace she walked, giving her a look of counsel that said a lot without words.

Don’t give me that, Ashe looked back.

“That could have went better. You know Commander Zavala is like a rock on this sort of thing.”

“I know he has more authority than he does brains, and throws that around mindlessly.” She continued walking, towards the Tower’s hanger where she passed by overhung logos, riddled through the place, used as daily reminders to what she was brought back from the dead to become.

“You and I both know that isn’t true—and where are you going?”

“The Cosmodrome.” She let only a second pass before speaking again, not enough time for Blink to ask why she was going to such a place. “I need to blow off some steam.”

“Oh, nothing says blowing off steam like firing lead into the filters of a Fallen Captain’s Ether mask.”

“The ship, Blink.” Ashe’s voice was laced with impatience. She walked past the floating AI, and it in turn whirred with exasperation at her soiled countenance.

With a sigh, the Ghost soon phased out of existence. Ashe did as well once her all-around grey jumpship revealed itself in the hanger, rising up along the platform as if being offered to her by a mechanical host within the Tower. With a pull of the throttle and a few flips of a couple switches, the engines roared to life and the ship took off, the Cosmodrome of Old Russia in mind as it’s destination.

[agreementtale]

Chapter 6: The Guardian

Mom was happy.

Not just any kind of happiness, she was beaming.

They could see it in her eyes how important they were to her, and the way she tried not to smile at their every sentence was a heartwarming sight.

How could they have forgotten Mom? She had always been there for them. Fed them, kept them safe, given them a home, a family. She was for a long time the only constant in their life!

But now they remembered her, from the way she had suspiciously asked what they liked better Cinnamon or Butterscotch, to how she would make picnics every Sunday at the park, enjoying the sun under the trees.

None of that happened, the dark fog on their mind added, they had made all those moments disappear forever.

Yet.

They quickly replied. It hadn’t happen yet.

Sooner or later she would ask them and they would answer that they preferred Cinnamon, then, when they got to the surface, she would surely want to spend time with her child by the park, they would wrap the little sandwiches she would make and sneak in a few candies on the picnic basket.

It still wouldn’t make it right what they had done, but they had spent time enough mourning for the past, now they were determined to move forward.

Searching through the closet drawers, they heard the familiar screech.

“What are you doing?!” they turned to see him behind a loose wood tile, hidden under the bed.

“So here you are! I looked for you earlier, but you disappeared on me” they went back to what they were doing before “I’m trying to find a measuring tape”

“Why?”

“I can’t remember what my height is” and more important, their current age.

“Why does it matter?”

“I’m a curious person” They struggled not to laugh at his irritated growl.

It wasn’t a lie.

It had been bothering them for a while.

What age were they? They had no scars, so it had to be before… everything… Just to be sure they checked again their arms and legs, not a single scratch.

On all the other resets they never had just forgotten everything like that… Sure, sooner or later it became a blur on their memory, but the important things always had found a way to stick on their minds… This time it was just… foggy…

They held their head, thinking what a mess had they had gotten into… passed the fingers though the scalp and...

Wait, no scars at all? Not even the one of the glass bottle, when they were five years old? how was that happening? They were above five! Hell, they were above ten, that much was as clear as day! Maybe even 15?

They needed to find that tape... Yeah, there it was.

It didn’t took long, for them to measured themselves.

1.50m.

That answered one question… but raised so many others…

Trying to make sense of what they were seeing they concentrated on the information they had.

“How curious” their mother cooed after measuring the fresh marking on the kitchen door frame “You’ve grown exactly 5 cm again”, the birds sang on the threes behind the window.

They smiled at her like a hamster, cheeks puffed with the delicious omelet. A little cute sign over the plate that had ‘Have an egg-cellent 14th birthday’ written in a beautiful cursive handwrite, they were happy.

“Earth to Frisk” Flowey interrupted their memory, they made an effort not to be mad at him.

“Hm?”

“How long are you going to stare at that?” their vision faded back from the distant morning to the measuring tape in their hands.

“Enough to find out that I’m 14” they put the tape back in the place.

“Ok… whatever, since you’re inside the house we have to be quick, you have to wait until she is busy then go downstairs, she can’t know you are–/”

“No” said firmly.

“No what?”

“She is kind” They wouldn’t just leave her like that “I’m not running away without saying goodbye” Besides, they wanted to sleep on their own bed today.

He stared at them for full three seconds without moving a single bit “I hate you”

“Thank you for worrying about me, Flowey” His angry grunt was adorable.

“Whatever” Said too loud, rolling his eyes “Don’t go crying to me when things go wrong”

“I’m a big kid, I can take care of myself” They appreciated his help, but they had been through this without any help before.

“I’ll be outside” he dismissively grabbed the wooden tile.

“Why don’t you stay here?” He just looked at them like he had run out of patience and vanished without answering. It was worth a shot.

They inspected the tile, it was loose enough to be removed, but stable enough that stepping on it wouldn’t move it. Satisfied with his stealth abilities they let themselves fall onto the bed, yawning and stretching their sore muscles.

They were tired, two days of constant walking after three days of not getting out of the bed had taken its toll on them. It couldn’t be healthy, but they had needed the time to recollect themselves.

They pulled the covers over them and refused to move.

She said she would come and wake them up when dinner was ready, and boy, they were hungry.

But tired too.

They felt their body relax under the warmth and coziness of the blankets, they missed this.

A lot.

Comfort…

* Seeing such a cute, tidy room.

They missed a lot more than they had realized, until now.

* Feeling the comfort of your own bed after so long… it fills you with determination.

Mom.

They missed her.

And they would fix things for her.

They would watch the sunrise together and see her happy tears at the school inauguration.

But there was something else bothering them.

Why were they 14?

Of course, they had been 14 before a couple of times.

But they always started at 12. It was one constant of the resets, other was that everything that happened before the save point by the bed of flowers never changed.

They at least had to have the few scars, the glass bottle, or the time they fell from the bike, all prior to underground.

But they didn’t have those.

That was weird.

And a subject for another day.

Now they would take a well-deserved nap.

She woke them up by lightly petting their head, if they were too fast asleep they doubt that would be enough to wake them up, but they were hungry.

“Good morning” They said, knowing it was still dark outside. But it did work, they made her laugh.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have woken you, my child, it is still night” They sat on the bed, while she retracted her hand, standing beside them.

“If I am waking up it’s good morning, if I’m going to sleep it’s good night, the actual time is irrelevant” They said in a professional tone, like giving a lecture on their own antics.

She kept smiling, eyes softening “Dinner is served” stepping away from the bed “Follow me, child”

She didn’t had to say it twice.

They could smell the pie from the corridor, mouthwatering.

She served them a big slice and they enjoyed the crunchy crust and the delicious filling. It wasn’t cinnamon-butterscotch, but it was pretty good.

“Thank you for the pie” they said spilling a little bit on the table, and quickly swallowing avoiding speaking again with a full mouth “If it’s not too much to ask, could you please put some matter in it? I’m a human, we need more matter to grow” Magic food would give them enough energy to function, but they needed real matter or they would be stuck on 1.5m, also something about vitamins that they didn’t entirely remembered.

“Oh, I know dear child, I’ve already put some in there” She wiped the table where they spilled food and went back to the kitchen to wash the piece of cloth, still talking from there “I’ve been hunting for some every once in a while, don’t want my children to go sick”

How thoughtful, “Thank you for going through the trouble” they picked more of the filling to adjust the crust/filling ratio on their mouth.

“Is no trouble at all, dear, dust is rather easy to find”

They stopped the fork half way.

Pie crust crumbling wrongly between their teeth.

“By dust” they struggled not to bite into the food already on their mouth “you mean dirt, right?”

They wanted to swallow the over salivation, but couldn’t find the strength to, the not-masticate food swinging from side to side, making the words sound funny.

“Do not worry dear, I would never put dirt in a pie, it’s just a little monster dust”

They spat the pie on their hand.

“It is claimed to make humans stronger” kept talking from the kitchen, as if there was nothing wrong with her words.

Stomach turning, mouth salivating, they weren’t thinking anymore.

“Kings and queens used to feed from it, they thought it would give them magical powers, how silly of them”

They had to get out of there.

“But humans never had a problem with eating other beings, is it not?”

They got out of the table slowly then ran to the door.

“Child?” They ignored her confused voice and ran out of the house.

“Hey!?” They ignored him, letting their legs take control of their destiny “Wait for me!” They couldn’t.

They ran and ran without a destination, just far away from whatever that was. Ran until their legs also betrayed them, making them trip and fall to the ground.

Little scratches on their hands and knees, but that wasn’t a problem.

Their soul desperate as if it was being called to an encounter, but that wasn’t a problem

Their still salivating mouth was the problem, they spat and heaved until everything, every bit of wrongness, was out of them.

It didn’t looked like usual stomach contents. The magic waste as a brown paste, like a… spilled milkshake?

The thought made them threw up again. A shiver running through their spine.

That was wrong… It was just wrong…

Suddenly there was a pain on their side, HP dropping to 5.

They looked around, half expecting to find Flowey, but were greeted with other familiar face.

* Vegetoid – ATK 6 DEF 6

* Serving size: 1 Monster

* Not monitored by the USDA

* Don’t step on the greens

Their legs were trembling, their head spinning, their DEF sure was negative.

How funny…

It was a nightmare…

It had to be…

Reset          Continue                                                  6690:32                              Timeline 2 end.

They woke up to their own screams, their room, their bed.

“What is wrong, my child?!” the door opened with too much force, she darted to protect them… they felt ashamed…

“I…” covering themselves with the warm blanket they wiped the tears “had a nightmare”

“Oh, child” She sat on the bed, near them ��fear not, you are safe here”

“I…” empty stomach turning “ate something…” they made an effort to swallow the over salivation “…bad”

She got startled, brushing their hair from their face “you look sick, child, what have you eaten?”

They dry heaved.

Immediately her paws glowed green, and she carefully pressed one over their stomach and the other at their back, it helped a little.

“Someone” they answered shamefully. She made a confused noise “A living being” they complemented weekly.

“In… the dream?” she question carefully.

“Yes”

Her voice was calm and the paws in their back drawn little circles softly, but the glowing faded “Was it still alive?”

“No... but it…” it was wrong “it should be alive instead!” that sensation was just wrong.

“I thought humans survived on eating living beings”

“We don’t!” They looked at her in surprise, humans didn’t eat monsters!

“Don’t you eat fruits and vegetables?” She said softly and unfazed.

“Yes, but they don’t count” That was just normal food.

“Don’t you eat fish? And the creatures of the sea?”

“Yes, but is different…” you could eat fish… it was still food…

“Don’t you eat the creatures of the sky and the earthly beings?”

“… Not all of them” they felt their argument getting weaker.

“Only the weak ones?” that sounded awful.

“Only the not sentient ones”

She chucked and hugged them, they melted to her embrace “They are all sentient, child. You didn’t dream of anything different than reality, there is no need for worrying about it” it didn’t make them feel better though, it was still wrong.

“… I don’t want to eat someone” just wrong.

“Hush child, it was only a dream” except it wasn’t.

“They have feelings and hopes” monsters weren’t food.

“Hush hush” she was warm.

“I don’t want anyone to get hurt” that was all they could ask.

“No one is going to be hurt”

They wiped the last of their tears, making an effort to stop crying completely “Promise?” they asked looking her in the eyes, her red, soft and loving eyes.

“I promise”

“Thank you!” they burrowed their head on her fur “thank you” hugging her tighter “thank you…”

“You are a kind one, are you not?” She laughed again and they let her tuck them in “Sleep child, tomorrow it will be a better day” She got up.

“Can i…” They interrupted her, a surge of panic returning to their soul at her movement.

“Yes?”

“Can i hold…” She waited patiently, a wave of embarrass washed over them, and they hid their mouth under the covers before completing the sentence “…your fluffy paws?” she looked confused, but complied.

They held her paws feeling the fluffiness and warmth, it calmed them, until the last timeline looked like a distant nightmare, until they fell asleep on her arms.

*--------------------*

They woke up with something poking their arm, opening their eyes they could see a soft light coming from under the door, warning them it was already morning. Their stomach protesting the lack of food.

“Wake up” another poke caught their attention, Flowey was hovering over them.

“Good morning”

“Good?” that early and he was already annoyed with them “What was all that last night?”

“I had a nightmare”

“A nightmare?” He knew what had happened, they knew what had happened, they weren’t keen on going into details right now.

“But don’t worry, Mom came and made–/”

“She’s not your mom” he said serious.

“Sorry” They really didn’t wanted to call her that so soon “it slipped” but he was wrong, she was their mother, last night proved it “But she is all motherly, she helped with my nightmare, hugged me when I cried and said everything was going to be ok”

“You are incredibly quick to call random people ~‘your family’~” he mocked “Don’t you have your own humans to go back to?” They identified a little jealousy on his tone and expression.

“Not really” they said simply “I’m an orphan, if I want any family I have to build myself one” that plain admittance caught him out of guard, and he went back to below the bed without a witty reply.

They got up and stretched, the first night well slept in a long time. They didn’t expect to see him still below the bed, facing the ground, in silence...

“Do you want to join us on breakfast?”

He laughed dryly “I’ll be outside” they felt a pang of guilt.

“Wait…” they didn’t want him to feel like they were taking her from him “You heard me yesterday, right?”

“It is hard not to when you scream your lungs out in the middle of the night”

“No, not that… when I called you brother” He didn’t react “Is it ok?” still nothing but a blank stare “Because I really care about you, and for me that’s who you are… But if it makes you uncomfortable, I can stop” From saying out loud at least.

“Whatever” he said, but still looked a little sad “I don’t care what a stupid human calls me”.

“Thank you, Flowey” they said with relief “That means a lot to me” He sighed.

“I’ll be outside” went to the tunnel, but gave a little peek before vanishing completly “And don’t get yourself killed”

That counted as a win.

*--------------------*

“What is that?” they stared carefully at the food before them.

“A simple pie” she said, cutting them a piece.

“That’s all?” the crumbling crust stared back at them, it looked delicious, it smelled delicious, their stomach was not keen on the idea.

“You are still worried about your nightmare, child?”

Nodded “you promised?” the affirmation came too weak and uncertain.

“I threw in a little something” she admitted without the mirth of the previous night “But only because you are still young and in need to grow”

“Any…” Feeling their hands get cold for an instant they rubbed their fingers together “…living thing?”

“A few earthly beings to add matter” She said as a matter of fact.

Still not willing to eat another dust pie, nor to clearly refuse her food, they just stood there awkwardly.

“Now now, you will not turn your nose on it child” she said sternly “It is for your own good”

“What’s in the pie?” The cold grew to their stomach.

She stared at them.

They stared at her.

She squinted her eyes, in a warning, as if daring them to say anything else and slowly said “Snails”

They relaxed “Only that?” they could deal with snails, they were tasty if you knew how to cook them.

“Yes child” she seemed pleased at their compliance.

They ate the first bite carefully, as if it could still turn into something else, the rest of the piece was eaten with the voracity of a hungry wolf, she looked at them attentive, so pleased with their response she hardly even blinked.

They took their time to peak at her appearance, now that the morning light made everything clear, they could see the matted and yellowish fur. It seemed out of place, on their memory her fur was always smooth and silky, a beautiful white… now that they stopped and really paid attention to it, even her sclera was a tad yellow, it stroke them as odd… Mom was more lonely than they remembered, if she let herself go like this.

“Did you enjoy the pie, young one?” she stared expectantly.

“Yep” they made sure to give her their best smile, she needed to know that they appreciated the way she took care of them “Thanks Mom”

Wow… that slipped way too soon.

For a moment she blinked “…do you…” she blinked so much it looked like she was getting out of a trance “wish to call me…” then she settled in a surprised tone “mother?”

Well, now that they had already messed this up… Yes, they did want to “I mean… if you are ok with it?” and if it’s not too creepy from their part.

“Why… would…” her eyes shone brighter and her smile came natural “would you like to call me that?” they let go the breath they were holding, there was their mother looking back at them.

“If you allow me” they missed her “I would really like that” for a moment they could see joy on her eyes, but then it was back to the foggy dull they were before.

“I… I need a moment” She retreated to her room, maybe it was too soon?

Well, two awkward family interactions in one day… maybe they should listen to Flowey and not ask people to be their family like that... After all it was just five days for them, it was sure too quick to be dumping years of emotional baggage.

It was settled.

From now on they would stop saying how much people mattered to them and start showing it with actions instead.

First step eat the whole pie!

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