#he's come a long way

[flashbastardsramblings]

From your ‘boyfriend’ (derogatory) to your ‘boyfriend’ (affectionate)

[t470n]

Dr Seward said "hold on a sec I'm having a thought"

[ffxivaltaholic]

Prompt #24: Bar

#FFxivWrite2024

"No."

"Pleaaaase. Just for a little bit...."

A grunt was the initial response the Miq'ote would give, his expression deadpan and uninterested. "I'll pass..." The man rarely drank anymore, having spent the last two years pulling himself out of his alcoholism to be a better person for himself and his wife. "I didn't like such establishments even when I did drink." They were too loud, too rowdy and rather expensive.

Watching the crestfallen Seeker, Jellal flicked his ears back and scowled. "Why do you even want me to join? You always say I am boring and not in the last bit fun." Granted he knew most of those comments were just to tease but it still begged the question of why out of all people his cousin could choose, she came to him.

Vassyl fiddled with her hair and frowned. "I dunno... I just figured it might be fun. Unless Iaella drags you out or you're on a job, you hold up in the workshop all day." For a moment he simply stared at the blonde woman before it all sank in.

"You're worried about me, aren't you?" Trying his best to soften his gruff tone, Jellal started to put some tools away. "If you want to check in or spend time with me, you can just ask, you know that, right?" He raised a brow, pausing to watch her expression, and as it changed, the Seeker knew he was right. Inviting him out was simply her attempt to check in on him and ensure he wasn't in a depressive spiral, she was just going about it in her own way. Granted, he hadn't had another spiral in a bit, but it was around that time of year when his brother was killed and it occurred to Jellal that those around him had been particularly attentive the last few days, especially his wife Iaella.

Fiddling some more, Vassyl frowned and lowered her ears. "I mean... We're family, worrying about each other is normal. Mom and Dad worry about you too sometimes. You haven't visited in a while." She couldn't bring herself to mention the anniversary of Seyrin's death, but both knew that was the root of this. A moment of silence passed between the Miq'ote and as Jellal glanced up at her again, seeing the anxious Seeker with genuine concern on her face, he couldn't help but sigh and give in a little.

In the past, he probably would have just locked her out to wallow in his own self-pity, but through the support of those around him, the bitter and angry soldier had mellowed somewhat. That and his Monk of a wife could rip the doors off if he did decide to hide away again. It was both terrifying and very attractive all at once."

There was a bit of consideration, and finally, a compromise formed in his thoughts. "Okay... But! No bar, club, or loud venue. If you want to spend time with me, it needs to be something we can both tolerate." Loud drunk people were definitely off the table. He might very well shoot someone. Vassyl's face lit up as she was slowly chipping away at the icy walls he put up. "Okay, that's fair... Something we can do together..." Wracking her brain for an idea, the Seeker appeared to struggle, and he could almost imagine a little steam coming out of her ears.

"Try not to overwork that one brain cell... It's all you have left." Jellal got in a small jab, smirking for the first time since she arrived at his shop that afternoon. Puffing up her cheeks in protest, Vassyl huffed and pointed a finger at him much like how her mother would do to her when making a point. "You're so mean Jellybean." One of the many, many nicknames she gave the poor man purely out of amusement and entertainment at his expense. A noticeable twitch from the soldier confirmed her comment had hit the mark.

"Ah... Well... I did finish your custom motorcycle..." A silly little smirk on his face as she gasped, immediately distracted. "REALLY? Can I ride it???" The excitement in her tone caused Jellal to flatten his ears back at the high pitch of her voice. "I suppose so... But you were so set on going out to a bar... I don't know if you'll have time for both..." Jellal was definitely doing his best to avoid the original invitation, even if trying to teach her to ride such a machine would be just, if not more, stressful than babysitting her at a bar and keeping unpleasant people away. It was a compromise... Sort of.

A small sound akin to a huff or a whine would leave the woman's lips at his ultimatum, and she finally caved. "Okay, fine, no bar... But you have to actually teach me. Don't just yell from a safe distance... That's boring. So then it's a deal?" The comment would get a roll of his eyes, but he was a man of his word.

"Fine, it's a deal."

[the-composer]

↑ fiercely possessive of his partners & fiercely protective of his friends

[merlinaknight]

@virtualbunny @4gh0st @elemiller, you may wanna take a look at this early 90s made-for-TV movie. It has a tragic but interesting subject matter, and most importantly: Barry Pepper's first acting credit on his filmography according to IMDB. You'll probably wanna skip it after you see him but trust me, it's a decent movie all things considered.

[chrismequick]

Meguro Ren, Rookie actor of the Year awards (2022)

Kinema Junpo (for 月の満ち欠け& おそ松さん movies)

Japan Academy Awards (for 月の満ち欠けmovie)

Hashida Awards (for silent & 舞いあがれ! tv dramas)

[radio-charlie]

Woke up after sausage coma with this looping in my head

[originalartblog]

Don't forget to eat to keep the demons at bay

[chaneajoyyy]

😌

Chris Evans reacts to his red carpet evolution over the years.

[sunderwight]

Shen Yuan who glitches in his transmigration, but the original Shen Qingqiu still dies of a qi deviation.

So the System still needs someone with narrative relevance to throw Luo Binghe into the Abyss. In a fit of desperation, it contrives circumstances after Shen Qingqiu's death to move Luo Binghe to An Ding Peak (not that difficult), and then the System makes Shang Qinghua be Luo Binghe's new scum master who casts him down.

Airplane's thrilled, really. Cultivators aren't supposed to get ulcers but damned if he doesn't come close to one anyway. Between Shen Qingqiu and then just a while later Liu Qingge both dying from qi deviations, and Shang Qinghua looking like a stiff breeze could take him out any day now, poor Mu Qingfang is also just about at his wits' end.

But it's not all bad news! On An Ding Peak, Luo Binghe actually finds himself surrounded by the kinds of people who are accustomed to being bullied by the rest of the sect. So they're pretty sympathetic to him, and it's easier for someone with basic laboring skills to advance on that peak too. His chores don't decrease too much, but he actually gets rewarded for doing them well, and no one tries to kick him out of the dorms or anything. Shang Qinghua doesn't either go out of his way to bully or praise Luo Binghe, correctly reasoning that his best shot at not getting a gruesome death is to just be a more forgettable bad guy than an abusive dirtbag or a heart-wrenching betrayal. He doesn't sabotage Luo Binghe's cultivation (no point, and it would just farm resentment later) but he also doesn't go out of his way to help him improve (not gonna arm his inevitable maybe-probably-murderer with better weapons!), so Luo Binghe's situation sees an overall improvement but not the zero-to-hero treatment he'd have got with Shen Yuan either.

When Shang Qinghua shoves Luo Binghe into the Abyss (he just full on picks him up and tosses him like a sack of beans, better to rip it off quick like a bandage), LBH is upset, but he's not especially surprised or dismayed about Shang Qinghua's part in it. Later on he'll be kind of confused, because he just assumed that of course the righteous sect cultivator would abhor the demon, but it turns out Shang Qinghua has been working for a demon since before Luo Binghe even came to the sect? But then it still kind of makes sense because a Heavenly Demon would definitely pose a risk to Mobei Jun and to Mobei Jun's rule. Shang Qinghua, he supposes, is just really loyal to his specific demon.

Luo Binghe's subsequent revenge quest is also somewhat mitigated by the Abyss actually not being that bad.

The Abyss is not actually that bad thanks to the glitched out Shen Yuan having been camping there for several years now.

So when Shen Yuan's transmigration failed it failed because he "woke up" during the process, realized where the System intended to put him, was like no way in goddamn hell am I being that guy about it, and actually kind of won the ensuing tug-of-war. The System couldn't put him in Shen Qingqiu but Shen Yuan didn't want to go back to his dead body either, so he ended up stuck in the nearest available space for lost interdimensional beings. Which was the Endless Abyss.

Luckily Shen Yuan's quasi-transmigrated imparted an equivalent cultivation level as Shen Jiu's to him, and the glitch made him able to sense and manipulate certain extra-dimensional energies, so he manifested as this weird godlike being able to manipulate and control aspects of the Abyss. So he set about transforming Airplane's Torment Nexus into a viable ecosystem (the current version would not be anything approaching sustainable were it not for divine/narrative intervention, and is constantly on the verge of destabilizing into unlivable ruin that would only be fit for some particularly hardy microorganisms).

It's still like, a monster land full of demonic creatures and terrifying phenomenon, but with Shen Yuan's assistance it becomes something more like a demonic wildlife reserve than a dimensional horror plane. Though it is still a dimensional horror plane, and Shen Yuan is its chief dimensional horror. He treats it sort of like those dungeon building or wildlife park sims, figuring out how to keep everything in balance while still preserving all the interesting parts. A lot of the extreme survival issues of the Abyss are more of a result of it being environmentally unstable than a result of its actual denizens, and once he smooths out a lot of the messy dimensional edges and creates stable vents for the fluctuating energy run-off, the demonic inhabits start behaving less like horror movie monsters and more like animals. They're still wild and dangerous and prone to killing one another, but also more cautious, and able to access enough stable resources that they can even start to be picky about what they pursue.

Turns out that a lot of creatures in the Abyss actually don't like fighting and dying and being brutally injured on a regular basis, even if they can heal from it!

Shen Yuan has even discovered that some like chin scritches (he's not terribly worried about habituating them to people, given how rarely any people actually access the Abyss, but also because he's not really all that people-ish himself these days).

This means that one of Luo Binghe's first encounters with the horrible creatures of the Abyss, is in fact a pack of wolf-like monsters thoroughly avoiding an actual fight with him. In fact most of the denizens of the Abyss just avoid him. They can smell the Heavenly Demon energy rolling off of him, and given the current abundance of alternatives to dealing with that, virtually none of the monsters actually choose to challenge him. There are still a few that will go after anything that's bleeding, but that problem stops once Luo Binghe's physiology heals his wounds, which takes like... a couple hours, max.

Despite the stories he's heard, Luo Binghe is relieved to find that the Abyss is not quite so terrible as all that. Normal survival skills suffice for seeing him through much of it. He's able to hunt for food, scavenge for tools, and even finds potable water fairly easily. After a few weeks, he also comes across a ruin which seems to be inhabited.

The being inhabiting it is plainly a god, although he demurs and refutes such assertions whenever Binghe is too frank. He's a strange being, at turns looking like some queer approximation of a human, at other times blinking and winking in and out of existence, in patterns of strange lights and oddly geometrical fire. But he's surprisingly not hostile, letting Binghe rest in his residence, and even directing him towards points of interest. Accompanying him, too, though he seems to think that Binghe doesn't notice the odd almost spiderweb-like patterns that appear on things which he's influencing. The god calls himself The Peerless One, or at least that's what Luo Binghe infers from some writings on the ruin. The Peerless One offers instruction, seemingly without thinking about it, and gets flustered at being addressed by title, so Binghe also begins to refer to him as Shizun after a while.

[bacchuschucklefuck]

they licensed his ass

my finished piece of the FWMS (official name definitely 100%) thing we started a few days ago! I had fun I hope folks had and/or continue to have fun with the sketch as well.

[flamingpudding]

Guys it's just merch

Danny watched with a smile hidden behind his mug of hot cocoa his new family. Originally he was only going to mess with them a little, since he wanted to keep his civilian live he gained with them but at the same time wanted to kind of provoke them to tell him about their night time jobs on their own.

Not like he could just flat out tell them he knew about their vigilantes lifes and that would be embarrassing to explain.

It's not every day that Danny's powers fluked on him, but with the stress of the past months, it happened. Right at a moment, he had to be clumsy and trip over his own feet and accidentally phased through a grandfather's clock, finding a hidden passage. Well at least he learned that way that Batman hadn't placed him with some other rich fruitloop that wasn't his godfather but well... with Batman himself and his family out of mask.

Yeah no, he did not want to explain that and hoped they would do that themselves. But apparently, they took Danny's statement of wanting a normal life a bit too serious.

Which brought him back to his current entertainment in the form of messing with his siblings.

"I don't get what the problem is guys. It's just merch." He chuckled slightly at the face Damian was making. While Jason chose to kick Tim under the table.

"Soooo how much merch on Red Robin do you have with this shirt now?" Dick asked instead with a bright smile, Danny still hadn't figured out how to tell what emotion he hid behind them sometimes.

"I think this is my third shirt of him." Danny mused, placing his cup back on the table and tapping his lip in a thinking motion. "Though I was going to pick up a couple of custom-made jackets of Red Hood and a Nightwing plush later today."

He acted like he did not hear the triumph like hiss of 'yes' from Jason as well as the very upset huff of Damian.

He just grinned at the amusement about how they apparently were competing over how much merch he owned of each of them.

When he found a Robin figure and several Robin pins mysteriously placed on his desk the next morning, he broke out laughing. Yet still just to mess with them gushed about his newly gotten merch to his family while sharing a knowing look with Alfred who knew he was just messing with them.

If there was a surprising amount of Batman merch, suddenly mixed into what he already owned the following week without his knowledge. Well, he wasn't going to complain about free stuff.

But he still would get a good laugh out of their reactions on the day he decided to full on dawn every piece of Batman merge instead of theirs.

[kittykatninja321]

My less popular opinion (and what I believe to be implied by the art in Lost Days) is that rather than waking up in a fully grown body Jason didn’t actually complete his puberty until after his Lazarus pit dip while he was on his murder tour. Imagine you’re tied up in a basement in Berlin getting interrogated by a teenager and his voice is cracking the entire time and if you laugh he’s going to shoot you

[puppyeared]

act 4 :(

@chipper-smol and i came to a realization

[noxcheshire]

I think I’d be really funny, if Bruce was a reincarnated Vlad.

This is going to be based off of a prompt I saw (I will find you) where Bruce suddenly remembered his past life as Vlad.

HOWEVER, my take on that is the de-aged Ellie and Dan because the amount of ANGST and self hate that Bruce will go through thinking his past self was not only a villain, but also that sort of person?

It will eat him alive.

It will eat that man alive every time he goes to sleep and another burst of memories pass underneath his eyelids.

It burns him when he wakes up with the phantom touch of a body underneath his hands, of a boy just as young as Damian and thinner too, struggling to escape a grip of a man whose hold was too possessive, and too cruel.

It feels like acid swishing down his throat when he wakes with the taste of oily words filled with threat and something more whispered over the form of a boy. A young boy whose blue eyes blazed furiously back and yet tried to hide the quiet bursts of fear underneath.

It feels like Bruce cannot scrub the man he had been right out of him, even when his skin blisters red until it bleeds. Vladimir Masters had woken spitting and screaming, burrowed like a cold sore underneath everything that is Bruce.

Bruce hates it.

Hates the monster he had once been and still is — because despite the fact Vlad is now Bruce, living and breathing and existing here in Gotham — Vladimir Masters still exists.

He is out there right now in a little place called Amity Park, pulling weight and blood just to get what he wants.

A man who has used and abused for far too long…

Perhaps it was time to see to it, that however and whatever way that Bruce came to be, that it began with Vlad’s unfortunate circumstances back into the Ghost Zone.