#i also try to keep to some basic genetics. will have to create a family tree at some point. not looking forward to it tbh.

[gophergal]

Behold, the six "unique" roles of Stonevale, one of the colonies in Fading Hollow.

I've been thinking about this setting a lot lately, including all the characters. Honestly, I want to make every cat individual under the hood, but that is slowly driving me mad. For now, here are six of them:

Chief Ra'shira - the leader. Aggressive, irritable, but fiercely loyal to kith and kin.

Deputy Haystalk - her second in command and gentle younger brother. He has spent the majority of his adulthood smoothing over the trouble his sister's temper causes

Raven, the Seer - religious leader and second eldest cat in the colony. A grumpy bastard for the ages. The only company he enjoys is Mera and his sister, Blueshell

Mera Yari-tsa - a lifelong queen who has had a paw in raising every litter in the past 50 moons, earning her great respect. The most knowledgeable midwife in the hollow

Acorn - a senior messenger. He won't retire until his former apprentice, Puff, is ready to mentor another cat to take his place

Puff - a young messenger. He seems empty headed and the wrong body type for his position, but he has a fantastic memory and a knack for social situations

[cellarspider]

13/30 Science interlude!

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We return to Prometheus, where I am taking a break to ramble about my job. A thing that I love. It will be a nice change. Also: weird blood!

I have been informed that some methods of accessing tumblr do not play well with long alt text rambles. To keep the flow between the main text and alt text separate, I’ll be copying the longest ones below the main text and citations. Captions that I think are going to be long enough to need this treatment will be marked with “Overflow Ramble [number]”, so they’ll be slightly easier to find. It’s not a perfect system, but Tumblr is not a perfect website.

And I am going to need the overflow space this time, because we’re getting into genetics!

After electrocuting a decapitated alien head until it exploded into a shower of green gore, the creatures that claim to be scientists stuck a bit of the goop in some sort of very science-y DNA machine, leading to this:

“Let's have a look at its DNA. Isolate the strand. Okay. Compare it to the gene sample?”

“[Overlay… Processing… Processing… DNA MATCH.]”

“Oh, my God. It's us.”

I want this preserved for posterity, because this made me absolutely hoot. They avoided fake science technobabble by going so far in the other direction that it becomes equally meaningless.

What the scene is trying to say is “this alien shares the vast majority of its genetic material with humans, indicating that they are in fact related.” 

I will get to how one would actually determine that, but first: The head turned into green goop. Green goop. Humans are notably not prone to turning into green goop. Otherwise Nickelodeon would’ve probably been shut down within a week.

(Image credit: Rich Fury/KCA2021/Getty Images for Nickelodeon)

This annoyed me so much that years later, I dug up a possible explanation that backfills this with cool biology.

Humans, and almost all vertebrates have hemoglobin-filled blood. And on a tangent that I must follow: The only vertebrate that doesn’t is the icefish Channichthyidae family, commonly known as the white-blooded fish. 

You’ll never guess what’s special about them. 

Yes, somehow these fish manage to live without hemoglobin, their blood only having 10% of the oxygen carrying capacity of their red-blooded cousins. Hell, most of them also lack myoglobin, which stores oxygen in muscle. The loss of myoglobin isn’t just a one-off event either, genetic studies have shown that these icefish have seen four distinct branches of their family tree lose myoglobin independently of each other. They have a wild series of adaptations to permit this, but basically they were already in such cold oxygen-rich water and moving so slow that they didn’t need all that extra oxygen-having stuff. They lost it, kept going, got bigger hearts, weirder muscles, and just. Kept. Going. They’ve actually expanded their range in the past 30 million years or so!

I love them! Evolution is wild. You know what’s also wild? There’s green-blooded vertebrates. Yes. You read that right. Yes, they still have hemoglobin. What they also have are staggering levels of biliverdin, which human bodies only produce when breaking down hemoglobin–when a bruise takes on a greenish hue, it’s because the dismantling of the blood under your skin has created biliverdin. While it’s generally been thought of as just a breakdown product, some research suggests that it also has protective effects against a number of diseases. In moderation, though. If you have enough of it to actually turn a bit green, you’ve got jaundice, which is not a thing you want to have. 

But for a number of fish species, bush frogs, and skinks, they have way more biliverdin. 

(Austin, C. C., & Jessing, K. W. (1994). Green-blood pigmentation in lizards. Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology Part A: Physiology, 109(3), 619-626.)

Humans usually don’t have much circulating biliverdin at all, so the table above compares someone with untreated jaundice to a number of other species–fish with two to fourteen times that amount, and the green-blooded skinks have twenty-two times as much! These creatures have green blood and turquoise-colored bones, and we still don’t know why. Maybe it’s protection against diseases, maybe it’s protection against parasites like malaria, maybe it’s to make them really blend in with foliage. Could be all of those at once, could be none of them, we don’t know! What we do know is that, as with the icefish, the green-blooded skinks in particular have independently evolved this feature four different times. (Rodriguez, Z. B., Perkins, S. L., & Austin, C. C. (2018). Multiple origins of green blood in New Guinea lizards. Science Advances, 4(5), eaao5017.)

(https://australian.museum/blog-archive/amri-news/amri-three-tiny-green-blooded-frogs-sing-like-birds/) 

(https://web.archive.org/web/20180619143048/https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2013/09/30/why-do-mysterious-lizards-have-green-blood/) 

We have no mammals identified with biliverdin-filled green blood, you would need a lot of tweaks to how our bodies function to make this work. But it’s not literally impossible, like I thought in the theater! I’m quite sure the prop department didn’t do this level of research on the subject, but think about it! 

I love biology! It’s! So! Weird!

And because I love biology, you’re not getting rid of me yet. My chosen field is genetics. This movie has presented me with a laughable sci-fi depiction of what we do. 

So! What do we actually do, when we want to find out how related we are to another species?

I’m going to get into excruciating detail, so here’s the top-line summary: We extract the DNA, mash it up into readable little chunks, use some wicked cool machines to do the actual reading, and then we compare the target DNA with our DNA, and do some cooler stuff the movie isn’t aware of. A competent analysis would not only be able to tell you how much overlap two genomes have, but also be able to estimate how long the two species have been genetically distinct. 

Is this way more than the movie needed for this plot point? Yes. But they didn’t actually have to do this at all, they could’ve just said the truth that science fiction usually ignores for budgetary reasons: “there’s no way these beings independently evolved to look so much like us, we have to be related.” 

(Although even Star Trek, despite being the classic example of “putting a rubber thing on an actor’s forehead to make them an alien”, actually does acknowledge this. Precisely once. TNG s6e20, “The Chase”. It has never been mentioned again in the main line series, possibly because Rick Berman didn’t like it.)

Now. Time for me to take you all on a grand tour of DNA sequencing and phylogenetic analysis. You are all getting into the Willy Wonka boat with me. You have no choice.

So! You have a sample you’ve taken from a non-human mammal, one that’s never been genetically analyzed before. You are very lucky. You get to do fun stuff.

But before you get to sequencing, you have to purify any DNA in the sample. Your sample is full of all sorts of other biochemical gunk, and when cells are happy, DNA is packed away in the nucleus–you need to crack those open to get at the DNA. 

Next, you need to break the DNA into chunks, that’s #1 on the diagram above. For most of the past twenty years, this has meant chunking DNA down into pieces 25-50 letters long–just enough to probably get something unique over most of the genome, though you will have some areas that look identical at that tiny scale. In recent times, we’ve been getting better and better at what’s called “long read sequencing”, which at this point means fragments of several thousand DNA letters in length–though that’s still pretty short, compared to human chromosomes though: the average length of a human chromosome is 134 million letters long.

Depending on the sequencing technology and its needs, the sample may also need “amplification”: getting copied over and over using a protein originally harvested from hotspring-loving bacteria (#2). I always love that bit just as a concept: it’s one of many places where the modern study of genetics uses the microscopic, biological machinery of proteins for our own use! 

After everything’s prepared, Then the sequencing itself can occur. That too is wild–the most common versions these days use tiny little fluorescent proteins to tag each letter of the DNA and read the sequence of lights (#3!). Some use infinitesimally tiny electrical modulations as DNA passes by a microscopic reader. There’s loads of different ways, anything works, so long as it can be read by a computer.

All this takes place in machines that are either small enough to fit on a countertop, or big enough to look like a fridge, and come in Apple White or Cheap Plastic Appliance.

Because you have a new species, you’re building what we call a reference genome. This tries to capture as much of the entire genome sequence as possible. Here’s an interesting wrinkle, though–A lot of samples won’t be just DNA from your target species! You might be picking up microbial DNA along the way as well. That can be really interesting and worth knowing about, though! Some people spend their whole careers studying the genomes of microbes found on people’s skin, or in their bodies. You’ll be computationally sorting out which sequences are in contiguous, mammalian chromosomes, which are from mitochondrial DNA (those cute little powerhouses have their own genomes!), and which come from microbes.

At the end of it, you have sequenced an entire genome. Because you want to find out how related it is to humans, you compare it to our reference genome–The human reference genomes we use is an assembly made from multiple individuals.* We use the reference genome as a common point of comparison that we refer to when studying genetic variation.

*Though if you’re working with data form the Genome Reference Consortium as is usually standard, one anonymous African-European donor, RP11, is still the backbone of the reference, accounting for 70% of the latest assembly.

(https://mk.bcgsc.ca/telomere-to-telomere-human-genome-assembly/posters.mhtml)

So, we’d compare this new mammalian genome to our own–how much overlap would we find? A lot. How you define our similarities and differences from other species can change the answer, but you’ll expect a lot of overlap. Some areas of the genome diverge faster than others, others are highly conserved–generally the more stable it is, the more important it is for our function. 

Through many, many, many studies and corroboration with the archaeological record, we’ve worked out how to estimate how long ago two species diverged from each other. Actually, you’d rarely be comparing between just two species at this stage–get out all the other relevant reference genomes you’ve got! Compare them all! Build a phylogenetic tree–the modern version of that “tree of life” idea that Darwin popularized. Then you’ll have a more accurate sense of how your mystery species relates to everything.

(https://www.embl.org/news/science/a-new-tree-of-life-allows-a-closer-look-at-the-origin-of-species/) 

I’m going to go off on a tangent to end this post, because that’s just the start, taking the entire genome of a single individual. This is what most people think is what we always do. But no! That’s expensive overkill for most experiments. Once you’re familiar with a species, and you’ve sequenced DNA from many individuals, you can identify areas where lots of them have sequence variants. These can be completely benign, differences that make us all unique, or make an individual more susceptible to disease. This allows us to target what we want out of DNA sequencing: Are we trying to diagnose an illness? Identify a person from a tissue sample? Or are we doing something more exploratory?

Depending on what you want, you select anywhere from a handful of locations, up to tens of thousands. The closest many people have gotten to this stuff is through ancestry services like 23andMe, which uses this kind of sequencing.

But that’s not all! There’s so many different targets to choose from, depending on what you want to do! So many techniques to get DNA in different ways! And we still haven’t gotten to the part that I actually work on.

I’m a computational geneticist. I get all the gigabytes of data that comes out of these experiments and I get to dig into the details, the patterns that emerge between genetic code and the details of the organisms we study, the connections between genome sequence and other, wilder things we can collect data on, the dizzying complexities of what goes on every microsecond of every day in every cell in your body.

I love my job. 

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Citations for alt-text rambles:

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_YuTMDkWfI 2. https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.116129 note: this source lists the image as credit to “J.M.B.”, which is not how I’m used to seeing images credited. Those are the initials of one of the authors, but I thought it meant “Journal of Molecular Biology”, so I went on a half hour wander around the internet trying to find where the hell this fish blood came from. 3. https://www.thebhs.org/publications/the-herpetological-journal/volume-13-number-4-october-2003/1729-01-hyperbiliverdinemia-in-the-shingleback-lizard-tiliqua-rugosa 4. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1439-0264.2009.00952.x 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandrill#Characteristics 6. https://www.vogue.com/article/dune-part-two-costumes-jacqueline-west-interview 7. http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.29564.08327 8. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357946568_New_approaches_and_concepts_to_study_complex_microbial_communities 9. https://karobben.github.io/2023/10/30/Bioinfor/PacBio/ 

Overflow Ramble 1

 the fuckin “DNA MATCH” machine. I already wrote a 380-word alt-text about this thing last time. I’m not doing it again. I’m going to talk about things I like instead. Such as Dune: Part Two! Yes! I mentioned it last week and then didn’t ramble about it after seeing it. Well, NOW I WILL. tl;dr it’s good, go see it. I only vaguely remember the book, but I liked the changes they made to center the fact that no, Paul becoming Lisan al-Gaib is not actually a good thing.

Man, it’s nice to see a movie where the costumers and set designers got good time to work on their craft. (cite 6) Even the generic Harkonnen soldiers looked great–reminded me a lot of my beloved Warframe, probably because the costume designer was using H.R. Giger for inspiration there. Everything felt real. Even the stuff that definitely wasn’t–the gigantic spice harvesters and ships felt like living, physically present beings. The sand worms looked great. The movie did a fantastic job visually communicating the massive size of so many things. Especially because the camera remains restrained: no weightless zipping around, the camera itself follows paths and finds locations that make sense. 

Chakobsa continues to be a fantastic conlang, now the work of both David and Jesse Peterson. It’s heard a lot more in this movie, and there are some great flourishes with it. While there isn’t as much Arabic vocabulary in it as in the original books, I remember from DJP’s work streams that he definitely was using the grammar of Arabic as one of his touchstones. Most key words remain Arabic though–jihad was removed, but it made me double-take in the theater when Stilgar referred to Paul as the Mahdi.

I’m of two minds about lowering the Arab influences on the Fremen–on the one hand, missing representation, which included some explicit ties to real world anti-imperial struggles in North Africa and the Middle East. On the other, these first two movies are about how the Fremen are manipulated by a colonial power, using their adherence to a faith that was manipulated by a different colonial power. They become both hapless victims and also perpetrators of colonial violence, with only Chani seeing through it.

I think the general decisionmaking process on cultural changes was motivated by a desire to remove some of Frank Herbert’s bad ideas–particularly around the Harkonnens, thank fuck. That seems to have been the thinking around altering the Fremen a bit as well. Did it succeed? Not my place to say. On all other notes, I have no reservations recommending the movie. It’s a very earnest attempt to bring that world to life, and I think it succeeds.

Overflow Ramble 2

A figure showing the basic steps of the standard Illumina sequencing method (cite 7). It is broken into four sub-figures:

Library Preparation. The genome is snipped into small fragments, then adapters are attached (“ligated”) to stabilize the molecule and make it behave. This creates a “library” of DNA that will be read from.

DNA library bridge amplification. The adapters on DNA fragments stick to a prepared plate, which is covered in little clusters of molecules that specially attach to those adapters. Biochemical processes are then carried out in repeated cycles to duplicate (or “amplify”) those fragments in such a way that the clusters on the plate are all filled with copies of just one DNA fragment.

DNA library sequencing. The DNA is modified so that the four letters it’s made out of all glow a specific color, with each DNA letter shining in sequence. This is pure awesome and I love it.

Alignment and data analysis. Because of some details on how step 1 is done, you have lots of fragments that create an overlapping patchwork of sequences. This allows (most of) the genome to be pasted back together by looking for overlaps (“contiguous sequences”, or “contigs” for short).

Congratulations! You have just attended an abridged graduate-level introductory lecture on Illumina sequencing.

Overflow Ramble 3

A diagram of PacBio Systems’ sequencing technology, Single Molecule, Real-Time Sequencing, or SMRT Sequencing, because scientists love acronyms. Pretty much every step is different from how Illumina does it. I cannot find a diagram that’s both brief and also good at explaining what it’s showing, so this is the best I could find. It’s split into four parts with attendant text, which I’ll try and explain as well.

“SMRTbell template. Two hairpin adapters allow continuous circular sequencing.”

Library preparation basically involves taking a longer chunk of DNA and splitting it in half lengthwise, in such a way that the two strands of DNA will form a single-stranded loop. This is called a SMRTbell library. Why? I have no idea! 

“ZMW wells. Sites where sequencing takes place.”

Then, these are fed into SMRT Cells, which contain zero-mode waveguides (ZMWs). I was once told what this means, and I have completely forgotten, but it sounds like something from Gundam.

“Modified polymerase. As a nucleotide is incorporated by the polymerase, a camera records the emitted light.”

What I do understand is that at the bottom of each of these little holes, they stick a molecule which the DNA sticks to. This molecule, a polymerase, has precisely one job: make more DNA, an exact copy of what it’s latched onto. So you give it this loop of DNA, feed it a soup of free DNA letters, and it starts cranking out a new strand. 

“PacBio output. A camera records the changing colours from all ZMWs; each colour change corresponds to one base.”

Each one of the DNA letters given to the polymerase has a special modifier, on it which flashes a color when the polymerase slots it into the new strand it’s making. A camera picks up this flash. And, because the DNA is a circle, the polymerase doesn’t know where to stop–it just keeps going and going until something breaks or it runs out of letters to work with. This means that even if the camera misses a flash the first time, it will have more chances to see it, and confirm what it already saw.

Wait what in the fuck this figure was from somebody’s thesis (cite 8), but that wasn’t what actually got this into search results. What got it there was a github page with a vtuber avatar sitting in the corner?? What??? (cite 9)

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[ultrajtb]

Quick disclaimer, this is not an attack on anyone. I’ve had problems in the past over misunderstandings on this issue as well as my own overreactions. I am making this post purely to get my thoughts out there and prevent potential similar issues with different people in the future.

I feel like it’s necessary to get this out there before I potentially get known enough in the community for people to be asking me questions relating to it.

So I don’t like Steve shipping. You can do it if you want, I’m sick of caring about it, but please do not purposely bring it to my attention (as in directly sending me stuff relating to it, such as questions on if I support a ship, ship art, etc)

I have several reasons, which I will list. If you don’t want to know them, then just skip the rest of this post. Again, these are my own thoughts, take them with a grain of salt.

So for starters, it feels kinda weird to me. Like depending on how you look at it, you could say these guys are all related.

It was established in steve saga that creating a Steve involves removing parts of yourself. So all Steve Saga Steves are all just pieces of one guy (Origin Steve), so you could say any ship with them is selfcest

SCU characters all stem from one generation, and the way they reproduce, that being that their energy is released into the air and eventually builds up enough to condense into a new steve, means they are genetic copies of one another, meaning it could also be viewed as selfcest.

On top of that, these ships typically result in people sexualizing the characters or even writing pretty inappropriate stories involving them, which is something that Sabre/Elan himself has said he’s pretty uncomfortable with.

Even ignoring all of that, a lot of the pairs are just insanely toxic or make little to no sense from a story standpoint. Like the pairings go against the characterization to a point where they may as well just be OC’s. For example, (this is not targeted, just the easiest one for me to explain) nightmare x rainbow. Nightmare is a mass murderer who genocided the species into near extinction. Rainbow was born with the soul purpose of defeating him and has experienced Nightmare murdering several of his friends and even some people he considered family as well as dealing with nightmare trying to kill him directly. Plus, nightmare and rainbow first met when rainbow was at most a few weeks old, like the age gap is egregious.

My point is, it’s insanely out of character for these two to be paired under the circumstances of the original story, and that bothers me because my brain is basically hardwired for lore stuff. And a lot of others erase what I think are more interesting character relationships. Like we need more platonic friends, sibling bonds, mentor/mentee bonds, and stuff like that.

Oh also the ships that involve Sabre since the character is literally just the real guy if the events were non-fictional, which feels wrong because shipping real people in general is kinda weird. Idk that’s just me.

So yeah that’s my reasons for not liking Steve ships. Please do not take this personally, I am simply explaining myself and only myself. If you yourself are a shipper, please understand that this is entirely my opinion and leave it at that.

Please do not send hate to the people who do this, I’m sick of being in shipping drama.

Hopefully gonna go back to my ss rework soon so keep an eye out for that.

And, as always, have a good day/night

[sweetbabymantykes]

Actually, Dhelmise isn't a single celled organism, that's a common misconception. Seaweed is a macroalgae, which is a multicellular form of algae. Single celled marine algae are diatoms, too tiny to see with the naked eye and also kinda what glass comes from I think?? I dunno I only know about the big stuff.

That said, research is still being done in regards to what type of seaweed Dhelmise should be classified as. While it seems many will develop a preference for green algae, it's rare for them to consist of that alone; most will still have traces of brown and red algae, and records exist of specimens that opted more for those than the usual green. Oh, but no correlation has been found between algae type and their color, I should mention— trying to figure out how and why exceedingly rare red Dhelmise form is an entirely different can of Orthworms, let me tell you. (Not as difficult as finding a way to ghost and anchor-proof a pokébean container, though...)

The issue is already complex just by virtue of the fact that they technically consist of multiple different organisms in the genetic sense, such as, say, both dead man's fingers and giant kelp. It's like trying to classify lichens. The real kicker is that the species consistently shares the same general body plan and shape, even between populations that primarily utilize entirely different types of macroalgae.

In fact, depictions of them from hundreds of years ago, when they were first encountered by sailors, share a remarkable amount of similarity in basic shape. Though, they did apparently vary in size to a greater degree; some used rocks and driftwood and would be small compared to today's average, usually described as shorter than a human. Others may have made use of entire Wailmer and Wailord falls— perhaps the remains of their unfortunate prey— if some other depictions and descriptions from those times are to be believed. (It is important to take into account the possibility of embellished stories and the like, as interesting as the latter sounds...)

Dhelmise really are quite the mystery, even among other ghost types! It still isn't well understood what causes them to form in the wild to begin with. We know from captive individuals that they are capable of asexual reproduction through fragmentation, similar to many other types of seaweed, but that creates genetic clones and wouldn't explain the diversity amongst wild populations. The prevailing theory involves souls lost at sea, but there is little conclusive evidence to support that.

Ah, I should probably stop rambling on about this now, though. I tend to get a bit carried away, which is weird given how I used to not be interested at all in this sort of thing... What getting reverse chosen by your first Pokémon while visiting family on the coast does to a mfer. Sorry 'bout the wall of text!

I feel like a fraud. I got a fact about aquatic pokemon wrong. It's fine, it's fine, I can still keep my reputation, Dhelmise isn't a water type, it's a grass type. And I actually don't know that much about kelp to begin with, so I guess that's what my problem is, haha.

That aside, man. I could listen to people tell me about other pokemon forever, don't apologize! My sister is really into ghost types but she's not really chatty, either, so it's really nice to hear about them from someone else. Previous Johto anon in a fight with your dad- give this a read! Everyone else, too, I had no idea about their historical 'chains'...

[alfvaen]

Summer's ended, not for the first time. I guess I can see that it was not as ridiculously hot and smoky as some of the other recent summers around here, but still not great. Also ended is another month, which means it's time for me to ramble about books and stuff.

Possible spoilers for Kim Stanley Robinson's "Science In The Capital" series, Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching books, C.L. Polk's Kingston Cycle, and, for the last time for a while, Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga.

Lois McMaster Bujold: Gentleman Jole And The Red Queen, completed September 4

Here I come at last to the end of my latest Vorkosigan Saga reread. And my first reread of this book at all. It came out after I reached the end of the series in my reread blog in 2015, which was probably the last time I did a full reread of the series up to that point. I did read a number of books in the series to my sons when they got old enough, but I was unable to persuade them to go much past A Civil Campaign with my lukewarm assessments of the later books.

My primary impression of my first read of the series is that nothing happens. Which I'm sure is not a fair assessment, but, basically, it does not reach the level of excitement of any of the previous books in the series whatsoever. I kept catching what I thought where clues about where the plot was really going to go when it picked up, and then every single time it turned out to be a false alarm and the plot continued to not pick up. It's a fairly gentle book, and I found that excruciatingly annoying.

Sure, we return to Cordelia, we return to Sergyar, we revisit some of the landmarks (literally) from Shards of Honour. See, the surprise ending of Cryoburn (which I am now spoiling for you all) is the death of Aral Vorkosigan, and all that we get to deal with it is five drabbles (100-word snippets from the point of view of Miles, Cordelia, Ivan, Gregor and Mark). For this book, it's three years later, and Cordelia, now sole Vicereine of Sergyar, is contemplating changing her life in two ways: by resigning as Vicereine…and starting some embryos of new children of hers and Aral's from his frozen seed.

We also get to really meet Admiral Oliver Jole, who's in charge of the fleet around Sergyar. Previously I only remember him as one of Aral's staff officers back in The Vor Game. And it is gradually revealed (perhaps a spoiler, but I don't really care) that that whole time, he was Aral's lover. In fact, Aral, Cordelia and Jole were a secret throuple. It makes a kind of sense, since, by Cordelia's assessment, Aral is bisexual but more attracted to men, particularly military men. He probably wants to be monogamous, to be a good Barrayaran, but Cordelia's from Beta Colony and they have far fewer sexual hangups, so she wouldn't care, and so he gets to have his same-sex relationship as well.

Cordelia tells Jole that out of her frozen eggs, some of them weren't viable, but they can do a thing where they can remove the nucleus and replace it with genetic material from another cell. Including a sperm cell. So she offers him the chance to create his own embryos with his and Aral's DNA. Which he accepts. And so now they're both gestating some children in uterine replicators…and then they end up starting their own affair. It sounded like they had had their own sexual encounters before, but only with Aral also participating; now they're trying a relationship with just the two of them, sub rosa at first.

About halfway through the book, we get Miles and his family coming to visit, which is nice to see (though it still doesn't lead to anything exciting happening), including all six of their kids. Miles is in the loop on his mother's plans for new children, but not about Jole.

There's also a few subplots--Jole's assistant who ends up dating a ghem-lord from the Cetagandan embassy, plans to build a new facility so they can relocate the capital away from its current too-close-to-a-volcano location that keep going awry, and bored teenagers getting into trouble (which provides one of the few moments of tension). One explosion near the end which provides one of the others.

When I think of similarly low-excitement stories from elsewhere in the saga, I mostly end up with novellas--"Winterfair Gifts", perhaps, which is maybe principally a romance; "The Mountains of Mourning", which was a mystery, and still had attempted horse-murder and firebombing, and infanticide, so it packs way more of a punch; and "The Flowers of Vashnoi", which still has a little drama in it. This one is attempting to be an entire novel and it feels like it doesn't have enough steam. It also kind of reminds me of Ursula Le Guin's Tehanu, which I recall being equally dull for large chunks of it, and even that had some excitement at the end. This one just feels like waving a languid goodbye.

Goodbye, Vorkosigan Saga. We'll always have Memory. We'll probably never get to see stories with Miles's children (or Cordelia and Jole's children, or Ivan's or Gregor's) growing up, outside of fanfic. Lois isn't being mean to the characters any more, they can have their happily ever after.

Jenn Lyons: The Ruin of Kings, completed September 11

It was time to try a new author again, a female author. But considering the last two books were SF and urban fantasy, probably not one of those, which was a bit of a quandary because many of the one I was interested in were one of those. But I browsed the epic fantasy books on my shelf and decided to go with Jenn Lyons. I've heard good things about it, and my wife recommended it (and has read the whole series), so I guess. It seems thick, but it's actually not even 600 pages in the copy I've got, and I'm not worried about long books putting me behind on my Goodreads challenge any more anyway. (Since I changed my goal from 100 to 90, then added those two short humorous library books, I've been consistently ahead. I might be able to fit in a Neal Stephenson before the end of the year.)

The book is oddly structured. In the first part, our main character, Kihrin, is in jail and being watched over a being named Talon who seems to have absorbed the memories of a lot of other people. They pass back and forth a "recording stone" and tell Kihrin's story at different points (Kihrin started later than Talon thought he should so she takes it upon herself to fill in the backstory). This happens over alternating chapters (labelled with who's doing the telling), fairly short, Kihrin's in first person and Talon's in third, and often from different POVs. Oh, and this is also being annotated by a different character that we don't even meet until half to two-thirds of the way through the book, who puts in footnotes that I'm not sure even add much value.

I'm not entirely sure it all works. There's the disorientation of the rapid timeline shifts, the confusion of when the further-forward timeline mentions something that hasn't happened in the backstory timeline, the fact that due to body-swapping magic I started to lose track of who was who and who was whose child/parent and who was dead and who was alive… Sometimes information was dropped that seemed irrelevant, and so I didn't retain it, until it turned out that hey, that god was going to be an actual character and things that happened centuries ago are actually relevant. It feels like a book I'm going to have to reread, and not because "it was just that good" but because there's so much that I missed the first time through. (For instance, it's got icons at the beginnings of chapters, which I missed about 95% of on my way through, even after I first noticed them.) I also belatedly noticed the family tree at the back, which might have been helpful earlier (or perhaps spoilery), and it's confusingly annotated because of the body-swap thing mentioned above. And yeah, a lot of godlike characters with weird relationships to each other and Kihrin. (I do actually kind of like Talon, who is an interesting and dangerously amoral character mostly being used a tool by others.) Plus a significant item which seemed to just randomly appear to the main character during the climax? That could have been done better with a little bit of foreshadowing and/or lampshading to explain why it was more than just a horrendous coincidence.

It reminded me in bits of other series. The backstory structure reminded me a little bit of the Kingkiller Chronicles, some of the characters and worldbuilding reminded me of the Eli Monpress series, and the mostly nasty noble characters made me think of Pierce Brown's Red Rising. I will doubtless continue reading the series, but it hasn't fully won me over.

Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, completed September 15

I definitely wanted a palate-cleanser after the Jenn Lyons, something that wasn't fantasy. And maybe not even speculative fiction at all. And, because of my schedule, with a male author. And Huckleberry Finn has been sitting there for a while…and sometimes even gets some discussion on Tumblr, mostly to do with people claiming it's a bad book because Huck uses the n-word, and other people rebutting that that's part of the whole point, having it examine Huck's learned racism, or something. So it's still being talked about, is the thing, more often than, say, Madame Bovary.

As you may have gathered, the vast majority of my reading is science fiction or fantasy, and very little of it is what anyone might call "literature". (My wife and I had a disagreement recently about whether or not Sherlock Holmes stories count as "literature". I think that they're detective stories and thus still kind of genre, like the Dick Francis books are thrillers. But it's a fine distinction.) I read very little mainstream until I was in university, when I decided to branch out a bit. I actually liked Thomas Hardy's The Return of The Native, so I went out and read some more on my own initiative (mostly I liked them except for Jude The Obscure), and I also liked Dickens and Twain and Victor Hugo, and to some extent George Eliot and Jane Austen. But most of it just doesn't scratch that itch and give me what I want in a read.

I am already somewhat familiar with the Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn milieu. Which is to say, I had a tape of the soundtrack of a Tom Sawyer musical when I was a kid (lost decades ago, I couldn't even hum any of the songs, but I remember the bit about the fence whitewashing and the confrontation with "Inj*n Joe" at the end), and I had the Classic Comics version of Huckleberry Finn so in theory I know basically how it goes. I read the actual Twain version of Tom Sawyer a few years ago, but I haven't read this one yet.

So, is it the greatest American novel ever written? Chyeah, right. I mean, it was fine, I guess. It had its moments. It was very episodic as they went down the river (and, as was lampshaded in the text, why would you head south down the river, apart from the obvious answer of "it's hard to go upstream", when you're trying to help a runaway slave get to free states)? It was entertaining in parts, when Huck was coming up with regular off-the-cuff entire fictional backstories. Constant use of the n-word, which I was expecting, though perhaps not quite that much. But it's first-person POV so I guess it's just Huck's vernacular. Still, I can see that it would be off-putting.

The most annoying parts of the book, I'd say, were the parts actually involving Tom Sawyer. Tom apparently has a mental disorder where he reads a lot of bad books and absorbs their clichés and then insists that all of the clichés have to be present every time or else you're not doing it right. We see it near the beginning of the book where he's trying to set up the local boys as bandits or something (though grudgingly he admits that it's all really pretend), but it also dominates the last quarter of the book. Due to outlandish coincidence, Huck is staying with Tom's uncle and aunt who think that he's Tom, and when Tom actually shows up he has to pretend to be his own brother Sid. But Jim has also been captured as a runaway slave and Huck wants to free him. And Tom insists that Jim has to do all of the prisoner clichés and make the actual rescue 1000% harder, to the point of having to spend days digging a tunnel, warning the household in anonymous notes, getting a grindstone for him to scratch messages on (which they have to actually let Jim out to help them do), giving him random animal companions, and I was not there for it. It was trying to be funny but mostly it just came across as stupid.

And the reason Jim got captured in the first place was because of these two con artists they'd been traveling with, who were generally referred to as "the duke" and "the king" because of their respective claims to alleged nobility. They are nasty pieces of work (well, not so bad as Huck's actually-abusive father that he fakes his own death to get away from in the early part of the book, but highly distasteful) that at least do manage to get themselves tarred and feathered by the end, but I didn't enjoy most of the time we spent with them. So if we take the other third of the book without them or Tom Sawyer, it was pretty enjoyable. The rest of the time it was mostly just tolerable.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Sixty Days And Counting, completed September 21

After the laugh-fest that was Huckleberry Finn, I didn't want something too light-hearted, and I was still feeling a little off fantasy, so I went through my male-author books looking for something else, like maybe some science fiction. It had been more than a year (my usual "long-enough" criterion for continuing in a series) since I read the last book in Kim Stanley Robinson's "Science In The Capital" series, so I thought it might be a good choice.

I'm not always the biggest Kim Stanley Robinson fan. His Orange County trilogy was middling, and while I did enjoy the Green Mars trilogy, some parts were a bit of a slog. But, to my surprise, this series has been pretty readable. It focuses on a group of people in and around the National Science Foundation in what is presumably a near-future or, by this time, possibly-alternate-near-past. (The books were published during the second Bush administration.) We have the Quibler family--Charlie and Anna, and their kids Nick and Joe, and then we have Frank Vanderwal. Frank starts out in San Diego but comes to Washington to work for the NSF, Anna also works there, and Charlie was an assistant for Senator Phil Chase. In the first book, Forty Signs of Rain, there's a big rainstorm and the capital floods; in the second, Fifty Degrees Below, there's a very cold winter and the Gulf Stream starts shutting down. Because the series is primarily about climate change.

Frank seems to have the most interesting plotlines--he meets a mysterious woman mamed Caroline during the flood, whose husband seems to be into some shady dealings such as election tampering, and they have an affair, and during the second book he starts sleeping rough in his van and in a treehouse in a local park; he may also have gotten a brain injury that affects his decision-making processes. Meanwhile, Senator Phil Chase ends up running for president (spoilers: he wins) and somehow manages to commit to trying to deal with climate problems (which is how you can tell this is actually science fiction).

There's also a subplot about a group of climate refugees from a fictionalized place called Khembalung in alternate-Tibet, who were displaced onto islands in the Indian Ocean which are now disappearing as ocean levels rise. Charlie deals with parenting young Joe (who some Khembali suspect might be a reincarnation of a Dalai Lama-type figure) while his job for Phil Chase becomes more important.

I guess the nature of the plot (and the fact that it's supposed to be mostly realistic) means that, without a large timeskip to the future, we can't have a strong resolution that ties up all the climate loose ends. We deal with the Caroline plot, and there is progress made on the climate problems, but the rest mostly seems to just…end at a point. Plus there are plenty of scenes which are just there for theme or atmosphere or something (did we really need to see so much of Charlie and Frank hiking the Sierra Nevada with some of Charlie's friends?) It didn't gel for me, and it's gotten to the point where it feels like alternate history more than extrapolation. I'm sure it won't be the last Kim Stanley Robinson I read, but I liked the other books in the series better.

Terry Pratchett: A Hat Full of Sky, completed September 24

Reread time again, and now that I've finished the Vorkosigan reread, what's next? Well, some of the series I've been rereading have been longer ones, but I couldn't settle on another one of those. I kept thinking of shorter series to reread instead. And when I did the Katherine Kurtz Deryni series in four trilogies, I found it was nice to stick my interstitial rereads one at a time in the middle of the series rather than put them all at the end, and that's also what I did during the Vorkosigan reread. So this time I am going to be doing three shorter series rereads, and my four interstitial rereads before and after each one.

Among the "interstitials" is my slower Discworld series reread. I elected not to reread the whole thing all at once, because that's like 40 books, that would have taken too long, so instead I've been doing one book per other series reread. In fact, I started the reread before I got into doing all the series rereads, apparently, way back in like 2005, before Unseen Academicals was even out, which explains how I've managed to get this far into the series at this pace. One or two a year, and it kind of adds up. (In the interim I did read a lot of the series to my daughter as well, from Mort through to where we bogged down and abandoned The Fifth Elephant) My wife, who had fallen behind in the Discworld series apart from Amazing Maurice and the Tiffany Aching books, elected to read the books she'd missed just fast enough to stay ahead of me. (And now that I'm actually reached the Tiffany Aching rereads she may end up pulling even further ahead.)

When I first read The Wee Free Men I had no idea that there would be more Tiffany Aching books (and I don't know if Terry Pratchett did, either). I don't recall that it made a huge impression on me at the time, then. It was definitely aimed at younger readers, with a young protagonist and the Nac Mac Feegles for comic relief (and tiny but sort-of-adult reinforcements), and I, at the time, was not a younger reader. But I did like later books featuring Tiffany, and so this is the one where things do start to pick up a bit.

Now she's no longer trying to do everything on her own, she's being taken into the witching apprenticeship track, such as it is, which is a bit of an adjustment. And this ain't no Harry Potter. This is more like, say, the first part of A Wizard of Earthsea, before Ged goes to the wizard's college on Roke and is still studying with Ogion on Gont. Or maybe Tehanu, which I haven't read nearly as much and don't remember as clearly. But we also have a spooky creature, like Ged's shadow, for Tiffany to confront.

Apparently when I first read this I was kind of meh on it, since I only gave it three stars on Goodreads, but this time around I liked it better, and I'll bump it up to four. The Nac Mac Feegle scenes no longer strike me as gratuitous comedic pandering, and the book does a good job of showing Granny Weatherwax's power as a witch, as well as Tiffany's burgeoning powers. (And one has to wonder if Lois McMaster Bujold read this before "Penric's Demon" or if it's just a coincidence.)

C.L. Polk: Soulstar, completed September 28

"Female diversity" slot time again. (Anyone else getting tired of hearing me call it that? The more I repeat it the worse it sounds. How about "non-white non-male"?) Last time around I snuck in another Michelle Sagara, and perhaps I should be trying one of the new authors I have piling up for this slot, but I did kind of want to finish this C.L. Polk series first. She(/they) is a person of colour from the Calgary area, though I've never managed to see her in person.

This book is the third in the Kingston Cycle, set in a kind of analog of Britain, where they use magic to keep huge storms from devastating them. The only trouble is, having magic is illegal unless you're part of the existing group of magic families, who guard their prerogatives jealously, and illegal witches are locked up (to secretly power the weather magic). The first two books concern two siblings, Miles and Grace, from one of these families, one of whom was hiding his identity after undergoing experiences likely to get him locked away, and the other trying to use her political power for good ends. For the third book, though, we switch to an unrelated side character, Robin Thorpe, who was one of these hidden witches, but the political landscape has now changed and they can come out of hiding--and need to, to save their country. Robin is heavily involved with an anti-monarchist group who wants a full democracy in the country; with all the upheaval, is it the right or wrong time to move forward?

The books also have romance subplots, which are…well, let's just say none of them are heterosexual. In this one, Robin is reunited with her nonbinary spouse who has been a captive for decades, so it's a renewal of relationship rather than a new relationship, but still with a romance feel to it.

There were times in the book where I was just seething at some of the horrible things the (generally rich and arrogant) antagonists were able to get away with, but in the end they got their come-uppances. It's a kind of a short book, actually, and at the end I did feel like I wouldn't have minded more of some plot threads, but overall it did feel like a satisfactory conclusion to the trilogy. We also have Polk's The Midnight Bargain and clearly that will have to go on my shelf.

I also read a few more comics from April 1994 on Marvel Unlimited (and a handful of back issues, now that they've started putting those in again), and then I started reading the Ed Yong book An Immense World that I believe I got for my birthday a couple of months ago. It's about the senses that various animals and other living beings use to experience the world. My progress has been kind of fitful, depending on how my fiction book reading progresses in a day and whether I feel like just doing puzzles or games or something, but I can often manage a few pages near the end of the day.

[script-a-world]

Submitted via Google Form:

I am creating a world where there have been interracial marriages since like they met and it's been thousands of years since. It's a very interconnected world now with basically no racial purity (is there a better way to say that? because that seems rooted in racist vocabulary and my world is the opposite). The only people who do not mingle are those akin to the uncontacted tribes in real life. Mainly, I'm trying to figure out how to figure out what people look like - there's only so few people out that are very mixed race, there's too many that are mixed but only specific mixes like White/Black, White/Asian, White/Hispanic. No..now, this isn't taking place on Earth but they are still human and I'm only able to come at it with how real actual people look like. No, bascially all of my world will be people who look White/Black/indigenous American/indigenous Pacific Islander/indigenous Asian/East Asian/South Asian/Hispanic/etc... Everything gets mingled, churned up in the gene pool and spit out. I'm not sure how to go from there. There are so so few actual examples that are very mixed. Also, I'm not at all an expert at looking at faces so yeah.. a lot of times I'm not even sure what I'm looking at in a racial trait. Hell, there are real life instances of let's say, looking at a Chinese and Japanese side by side, someone can tell them apart and where the differences. I still have no idea what they're looking at. Hell even someone actually Chinese couldn't tell what the differences were. Of course, I don't need to get very specific in details at all, but I have to have some sort of description that isn't well a lazy description that says nothing.

Feral: So, this ask gives me the idea that you were raised in a pretty racist culture (I can relate) and are trying really hard to leave that behind. And I want to encourage you to push into real education. Intention is not enough when it comes to shedding what we were taught, often subliminally, and consciously relearning - and that doesn’t feel good the way the color-blind approach many nascent liberals tend towards does.

It seems like you’re still caught in certain patterns of thinking, especially in the idea that eliminating racial distinction and sublimating and homogenizing is anti-racist when it’s actually kinda colonialism in a fancy new hat. And the “races” in your ask - a mixture of racial identities, ethnic identities, and very broad geopolitical groups - already have a huge genetic diversity within them and in several cases do in fact already overlap with each other.

There’s also a misunderstanding of how physical traits are genetically passed. They aren’t amalgamated like mixing blue paint and red paint and creating purple paint. Skin color, hair color, hair texture, and face and facial feature shapes and sizes don’t just meet in the middle between what the two parents have - and keep in mind that this kind of thinking is usually only applied when thinking about the children of a racially-mixed couple and not of say a white parent of Italian descent and a white parent of Scandinavian descent. 

 And there are traits that can seem to disappear from a family line only to pop up generations later. A more diverse gene pool will not produce a population of individuals indistinguishable from one another; there will be even more diversity of physical traits - specifically traits that we’re not accustomed to seeing together in our more racially segregated world.

Utuabzu: Something you should seriously consider is the background of your world. Is this the planet humans (or equivalent species, but let's just assume you're asking about humans) evolved on or is it a colony? Because if it's the former then it's pretty unlikely that you could homogenise the entire global population without some sort of catastrophic bottleneck event, something that reduces the global population to a small number in a single location that then recolonises the planet. Because the reality is that most people don't want to leave their communities of birth, not permanently anyway. People like to live in the place they consider home, and to live in a culture they understand, and absent a significant push or pull factor they will want to stay roughly within their home environment. This is part of why you don't generally see mass migration between countries with equivalent levels of economic development and political/social stability.

Given that, it's pretty hard to see how you could get enough migration around the world for long enough to homogenise the gene pool. There's probably always going to be general regional trends. There's also what Feral said about how genetics works. Appearance isn't just controlled by one or two genes. It's controlled by a huge array of genes that we still don't entirely understand, and many genes impact multiple seemingly unconnected things. A good example of this is that the gene for red hair also produces pale skin, because it prevents the production of eumelanin (the black pigment) while allowing the production of pheomelanin (the orangy-brown one). This is also why red haired people freckle - freckles are made with pheomelanin - and don't tan - tanning uses eumelanin.

Now, if you aren't writing about the home planet, you could have a fairly homogenous population due to something called the founder effect. Basically, because when a new population is established the genepool is limited, the traits of the founding individuals can have an outsized impact on the later genepool, with normally recessive genes spreading to enough individuals that the trait they code for becomes extremely common. So long as the population is predominantly composed of descendants of these founders, this effect is likely to remain active - so, so long as there isn't mass immigration that outnumbers the people born in the colony to at least one parent descended from the founders. This is easily enough accomplished by having the colony be really far away, and thus having an unreasonably long travel time for most people. If it takes many years to get there, few people would be willing to abandon their whole lives to migrate to a place they've never been.

A final thing to consider is that race is not and has never been a genetic or biological category. It's a social one. It can be correlated with certain physical traits, but it doesn't necessarily need to be, and in many parts of the world the salient 'racial' categories share most phenotypic traits. In others 'race' isn't particularly correlated with phenotype at all, and is instead primarily about culture or even religion. And not every society even has a concept of 'race'. You can simply not mention it, and instead have characters with a range of phenotypic features that nobody ever comments on, and it can be assumed that 'race' is not a relevant concept in that culture.

[warriors-cats-smoke-and-mirrors]

heyo uhhhhhhh i have a question, how do you decide what to work on for your rewrite? I'm trying to make one of my own but I can't decide what to work on.......

Hey! Sorry for the late reply—life's been reeaaaallll busy lately.

To answer your question...currently, for the reason stated above, I haven't actually been working on this a whole lot. If I do have time for planning/writing, it's typically another project. But I can tell you what I was doing and will eventually be doing again.

(This is gonna be long. Sorry not sorry.)

This entire rewrite was born of the idea that there was another apprentice when Firestar came to the forest. You take that main idea, let it evolve if necessary (in my case, that other apprentice became Firestar's sibling, and then grew to be the main character), and then make a list: what are the main things I want to change from the original series? What world-building changes are there? And, for Smoke and Mirrors, what changes would be caused by this new character? That early on, you don't worry about the how—you just want to get down the what.

(I'm still figuring out a lot of the how. It's a process.)

From there, I personally began with the Allegiances. I went through the originals (as of right now, just The Prophecies Begin) and made basic notes on each character—if they aren't around from the beginning of Into the Wild, when are they born? When do they die? Who's their mentor? What's their rank? Do we know who their parents/siblings are? Do they take an apprentice?

Then, of course, came the arduous process of trying make sense of the families less incestuous, which, in my case, meant making the Clans bigger by creating a lot of OCs, changing some of the original story's rules (Warrior/Medicine Cat Code, I'm looking at you), and shifting around some backstories. Any physical appearance changes happened at this point, too—I don't know a lot about cat genetics, and I'm not about to go researching them, but some things are just common sense that the Erins...did not necessarily follow.

And now, finally, we're up to where I am now—the timelines for each Clan. Same as the Allegiances, I went through, made a list of what events happen in what season (and which book), and am now adjusting it to fit the version of events I want to tell. Some things happen right where they did originally. Other things don't happen at all. And quite a few things get shifted to another book.

(In this story, Redtail doesn't die in Book 1 because I want Firestar and Company to have more of a connection to him. As a result, I've only just now reached his death in my personal notes, and it ends up not happening until my version of Forest of Secrets—a whole two books later than it should.

Unfortunately, this also means dealing with the consequences of your own decisions. Redtail doesn't die until Book 3, which means Tigerclaw's schemes are also behind—Forest of Secrets is the book where ThunderClan is meant to find out about his betrayal, but if his plans don't even really start until then, is it possible to still have that reveal? If I want to keep it there, I have to figure out that pesky how. Otherwise, I have to figure out when it'll happen instead.)

From here, the plan is finish the timelines, continue with Allegiances as necessary, and create the character profiles and world-building changes as I go. And then it's off to the races. Drabbles? One-shots? Full-length chapters? Who knows! It'll happen if and when it happens.

I hope this helps give you some ideas! Thanks for the question, and sorry again for the late reply!

[acertainmoshke]

Hello, your w.i.p.s all sound interesting! Hope you don't mind questions! I love worldbuilding and To Die Among the Stars has really caught my attention. It sounds like a sci fi/found family type of story. Do you know why the first FTL test was a disaster? I'm hoping they tested it remotely/without humans before testing it with humans. Judging by your use of “mental wellness centers” I'm guessing this isn't a particularly nice future for some people. So probably not. Was the new crew briefed on why the first one failed, to try and avoid the same mistakes? Have they tested FTL on sentient androids yet or are they like Data from Star Trek, rare and highly experimental? Why did they choose to combine cat and human DNA to get Peppermint? (Not judging, I'd love to read something with a catgirl in space!) Have they tried merging other species with humans before? Oh noo, have they tried bringing back dinosaurs and mammoths? XD Has Space Jurassic Park happened? Sorry for all of the questions, your story blurb there just really intrigued me! I couldn't help myself.

Please please please don’t be sorry!! I love questions and talking about worldbuilding. So, in order:

1. The first test was a decade before the story and it was a huge disaster in the news because it was manned. It wasn’t technically the first test, though. They knew the technology worked and had run small scale tests around the solar system in tiny unmanned crafts. However, putting it together into a system that would work long-distance was too expensive at the time to plan for very many tests. They tested each part but not everything working together. Several trained astronauts and scientists were killed. It has been a while, so things are less expensive now and have been improved. However, this one is manned so they have the data on how people physically and psychologically react to FTL. I don’t want to be too spoilery but…it’s still not perfect.

2. The new crew did have a few weeks of training, much of it on the reports they’re expected to prepare, but also some cursory knowledge of ship upkeep and planetary life should they get that far—for liability reasons, mostly.

3. Both Void and Peppermint are dubiously legal experiments. Void is arguably the first provably sentient android and was kept quiet because they were unable to repeat their success. Also, important to note, unlike Data it doesn’t look human at all. It was like the 30th test and they were running short on funds, so it’s housed in a clunky metal body and honestly is a bit goofy looking.

4. Peppermint is…ok, meta explanation is I wanted an excuse to have a catgirl in space. But this type of genetic experimentation is banned because of eugenics (cruel, futuristic society still has some standards). So January, the scientist who designed both of them, had to keep them quiet too. Nominally, the point was to create a human enhanced with animal abilities, and they tried a bunch of different types. Peppermint was the only one to survive past infancy, and while they are basically a person with cat traits, there are downsides that make it currently unmarketable, either for military or private sector uses. January doesn’t care, she is kind of a mad scientist who does things to see if she can. Technically Void and Peppermint belong to her, so she brought them along to space. They’re the only ones who didn’t actually volunteer.

5. Ok space Jurassic Park has definitely happened NOW. I honestly didn’t consider a lot of the worldbuilding for this story outside of technology and living conditions (I did the least planning for it yet somehow I’m a third of the way through and have barely started the others). But yes this is a world where the justice system is like now but worse, same with healthcare and other factors of life for regular people. But if billionaires in real life can fund random space travel, rich people in my story have definitely funded extinct genetic experiments (which are legal because they aren’t on people). There have definitely been incidents, both with exotic extinct pets and with extinction zoo experiences, but on a less centralized scale than in Jurassic Park.

Thank you so much for this ask and feel free to send more if you have thoughts or questions! I love being made to actually think about the logic of my world!

[uniqpathlab0023]

What is the ‘Diabetes Test in Noida Care’?

Types of Diabetes and Their Possible Causes

What are the risk factors of diabetes?

Conclusion

Living in the era of the pandemic, getting to know about some other rising health concerns is already overwhelming. In the 21st century, Diabetes is hailed as a silent killer threatening the lives of millions of people every year. The burden of diabetes in India is currently above 76 million and increasing rapidly day by day due to several triggering factors such as a sedentary lifestyle and consumption of high-calorie unhealthy food.

Even in the last few decades, diabetes test care has advanced bringing several novel medications to regulate blood sugar levels and devices to monitor glucose and insulin levels continuously. Still, there is a large part of the society where basic diabetes care facilities aren’t available to the patients. Drawing attention to this crisis, the theme “access to diabetes care” is actively revolving around providing support to manage their condition and avoid complications.

What is ‘Diabetes Test In Greater Noida Care’?

One of the complicated diseases, Diabetes test affects almost the entire body if it remains uncontrolled. From creating several issues with your blood vessels and heart to increased risk of eye conditions or sending tell-tale signs of kidney failure and frequent infections and so on. However, keeping things under your control and pushing such complications away from you isn’t unachievable. Our experts have shared some important tips to regulate sugar levels and lead a healthy life. Here is what you should do:

        Managing blood pressure and cholesterol by not stressing too much and taking your prescribed medications on time.

        Try to remain active throughout your day including 30-minute walks, exercise, or yoga

        Pay attention to unusual symptoms, swelling in legs/ ankles, skin darkening, urine infections, etc.

        Follow a healthy diet– restricting high-calorie or carbohydrates in your diet. Prefer to take home-cooked meals as possible. I

        If detected diabetes, never miss taking insulin, or oral medications and monitor your blood sugar daily.

        Visit your ophthalmologist at least once every year.

        Refrain from excessive alcohol intake and regular smoking.

        Keep your sleeping schedule intact

        Take your oral health seriously as diabetes can affect your gum and teeth health.

Types of Diabetes and Their Possible Causes

Diabetes is a long-term medical disorder characterized by blood glucose levels that are frequently above normal. There are two types of diabetes, namely:

Type 1 diabetes

Type 1 diabetes is thought to be an autoimmune reaction in the body where the body’s immune system attacks its immune cells that produce beta cells in the pancreas. Also called juvenile or insulin-dependent diabetes, in type 1 diabetes, the pancreas can produce little to no insulin. Insulin therapy is necessary for Type 1 diabetics to manage their blood glucose levels. It frequently appears in childhood or shortly after that.

Type 2 diabetes

A common form of diabetes is associated with lifestyle and genetic factors. The pancreas' capacity to generate insulin may gradually decline with time. Insulin is a secret that helps break down the sugar into glucose, converting the food into energy. However, if the inulin level decreases in the bloodstream, the sugar levels increase simultaneously. The primary causes of Type 2 diabetes are obesity, a sedentary lifestyle, genetic factors, age, and gestational diabetes history.

What are the risk factors of diabetes?

There are numerous risk factors associated causing diabetes. The HbA1C test is beneficial to confirm the likelihood of diabetes and take effective measures to avoid diabetes complications.

Let’s discuss the main risk factors for diabetes.

Family history - The major risk of developing diabetes is having family records of this health issue. Commonly, this health risk passes from generation to generation. So, if you have type 2 diabetes, it must be that your family record has encountered this disease.

Excess body weight - Gaining weight above normal is also responsible for developing diabetes in people. Excess deposition of fat near the abdomen region is linked with insulin resistance.

Physical inactivity - The lack of physical activity or having a sedentary lifestyle can lead to type 2 diabetes. Exercise enhances the body's use of glucose and insulin.

Age - The risk of developing type 1 and 2 diabetes begins in childhood. Type 2 diabetes is more common in older adults, but obesity in children also increases its risk in younger ages. Diabetes can occur at any age and its risk increases after age 45.

Conclusion:

Summarize key points.

Encourage readers to prioritize diabetes testing in Greater Noida.

[chibi-tsukiko]

Hi Em, how are you?

I have questions for W&D Wednesday if that’s okay🙈

Does being a child of the damned or the light mean that child’s parents are demon or angel? With Takashi being a child of the damned, does that mean his father is demonic? For some reason I originally thought Takashi was a descendant and Ryuji was Azenean.

Why is Ryuji’s father so cold towards his son and hates all magic users? Are the Zenko family Nobles or work under Takashi’s father?

When Ryuji is tasked to hunt down magic users, how do they track them? Do they leave a sort of magical signature or footprint whenever they preform magic?🤔

How did Ryuji get his characteristic scar under his eye?

How did they mistakenly kill Ishida’s sister, Sora, as a magic user if she wasn’t one?

Where was Ishida when this all went down? What happened when he found Sora?…if it’s not too big of a spoiler😅🙈

I was reading your OC-tobers.…again🤭😅, they’re very addictive… what happened after Ryuji lost consciousness in the burning building??😱 Does Ishida save him?

I really didn’t mean for these to be Rishida focused. It just sorta happened 😅. I’m missing these boys.

I hope you have a good day. You’re a gem💜

Hello buttercup!!! and HOLY MOLY I'M ON CLOUD 9!!! This is amazing!! Let's get into these answers! 😆🤗

I apologize for the length up front...😅🙈

1. Technically speaking, both Children of the Light and Children of the Damned are “descendants of angels and demons.” And the angelic/demonic blood (or power) gets passed down genetically. So Takashi’s Father is demonic, but not a “demon” in the traditional sense of the word (like the monstrous ones). The Han demonic family line goes back generations. I hope that makes sense!

Also! You are not crazy! Originally, Takashi was a descendent, and Ryuji was Azenean. However, as I wrote the story and developed it, I changed it. Mostly because Takashi was born with powers…therefore, he needed to be a direct Child of the Damned. Ryuji was changed because I adjusted his family background to fit in with the story and in order to have his backstory make more sense tied in with Takashi’s a Drele fit better than an Azenean. :)

2. The Zenko family does work under the Han family. They were a noble family that joined forces under the Han family. Ryuji’s Father has always hated magic users because he feels threatened by them and is envious of their powers since he himself doesn’t have any powers. So when he hears that the Han family doesn’t want anyone to threaten their control over the lands, Ryuji’s father offers to create and train a group of Assassins to hunt and kill all the magic users.

3. Because the Han family controls much of Nubik territory, they have spies and soldiers constantly walking around who would see magic users and give out their locations. Magic signatures can only be traced and felt by other magic users. In some cases, they would use other magic users to help track down their friends. But for the most part they just gathered intel on where they lived and went from there. And even as magic users tried to go into hiding, people would rat them out to try and stay in favor with the Han family (and avoid punishment).

4. Ryuji got his scar under his eye after he tells his Father he is quitting being an Assassin and basically that he thinks what his father is doing is wrong. And his Father back hands him. 😤The family ring his father wears, cuts under his eye.

5. Ryuji was not told who the target was. Only that there was a magic user that lived in the house on the hill. This was his first mission and the team was reluctant to have him with them so they didn’t give him any information. In fact, when they arrived at the house, Ryuji was told to keep watch from another hill top & to shoot his arrow if necessary. Minutes in, Ryuji heard and saw explosions coming from the house, he saw the leader of the assassination team come out and a person (he did not realize it was a child) firing magic explosions at him. So, to protect his comrade, he fired. When he came down from the hill, he saw that it was a young child and he saw the broken glass. Horrified, he realizes that she was throwing potions, she was not the magic user. He’s completely distraught over this mistake, but the team doesn’t care. “It’s one less magic wannabe” is what they tell him. But when Ryuji returns home, he tells his father he is quitting the team. Unable to cope with his mistake. Furious about his son’s embarrassing behavior, Ryuji’s father sends him to a Warriors Academy. Where he meets Takashi. 🤗

6. The “flashback” scene about what happens to Sora (and how Ishida responded to it) is written here 😊

7. Takashi goes to get help and tells Ishida that Ryuji had gone back into the burning building to save the young girl. When they see the building has collapsed, Ishida digs through the rubble and nearly uses all of his magic to heal Ryuji when he finds him. ♥️

THANK YOU SO SO SOOOOOO MUCH FOR SENDING THESE IN!!! 😘😘😘 I hope I was able to answer everything for you!! If you have more questions or want me to clarify more things let me know!!

I'm gunna tag the rest of the W&D gang because I figured you guys may have the same kinda questions or may wanna know

Tag list : @littleturtle95 @phoenix-and-dragon @khaleesiofalicante @my-archerboy @clumsyowl-in-a-fandom @radisv @raziyekroos @magnus-the-maqnificent @spotsandclawsthings @shadowhuntingdemigod @elettralightwood

[babblingstacey]

Welcome!

Thought I'd update my pinned post with some info about me & my tumblr. Also a handy place to find links to my mods.

Reblogs: BabblingStaceyReblogs

(updated October 6 2023)

Basic info

I believe I'm much older than most simblrs out there! I played the original Sims way back when, then didn't play any versions until a month into the pandemic for something to do. I've always loved storytelling so this was perfect to rejuvenate my creativity.

I don't really play any other games, to be honest.

I do not have a gaming computer I just play on a laptop. I don't have any fun reshades, only editing I do to my screenshots is cropping and occasionally will brighten them. So they will not be high quality but I enjoy taking them/telling stories anyway.

I'm terrible at CAS but I love to build. I don't know how good I am at it, but I do it for my own amusement anyway. Gallery ID BabblingStacey.

I've had this tumblr for a very long time but only started sharing my gameplay through over the few years - mainly because I kept taking screenshots with nowhere to put them.

My game and blog is LGTBQ+ and BIPOC friendly. If that bothers you, then this is not the simblr you want to follow. For the record, while I'm a CFBC straight middle aged white CIS woman, I try to keep my gameplay as diverse as possible. If I do get something incorrect, please send me a message. (unless you are a TERF or racist, then you can kindly just fuck off).

My avatar is my simself, or as close as I can get to one.

Gameplay (I've been swapping a lot, just to stop from getting bored)

Current: Gerdie the SuperSim, using @lostinsophiesave save file. Gerdie is from my Julissa the Unlucky Chef and Gerdie the Genius. gameplays, but in a brand new save. I just like this girl.

Current: Power Pop Legacy. My own little legacy, inspired by power pop songs from the 90s. Making it up as I go along. Using Prxnce Love Letter Save File

Previous play and mods/CC below the cut (it got really long)

On hold: Yvette's Wandering Life with Yvette Deaton, a continuation of Anna's Vagabond Challenge. Using @haledela's savefile.

On hold: Landry's Growing Together with Vanessa Landry. Just a little family I'm exploring the new update & pack with. Vanessa was created by NoMoreBadTownies on the gallery, the rest of the fam were created with her genetics. Total vibing, no real storyline so far. Vanilla-lite gameplay in ratboysims' amazing save file.

On hold: my own legacy challenge. Mainly on hold because I need to replace a lot of B&B CC in my homes anyway because I've been deleting a lot of problematic creators who leave their content locked behind paywalls for too long for me to be comfortable with using any longer. I've done Not So Berry (the updated version) in a previous save and started my current legacy with the Chromatic Legacy Challenge but during the 6th gen I decided I wanted to write my own that fits more of the way I like to play. You can see my plans here: BabblingLegacy, I update it as I get an idea for a generation. Using SweetieWright's save file. I do change up the houses/lots a lot, but it's a great way to have a starting point.

On hold: Tianna the Wolf with Tianna Pancakes, daughter of Iggy. I really wanted to play this pack - I'm not even that much of a occult simmer but man, this is a lot of fun. Using Fleuralia Save File. On hold because there are now triplet toddler wolves and...i needed a break.

Previous Play: Iggy's Frogs with Iggy Pancakes (again). Just one post.

Previous Play: Aliens Stole My Parents scenario. Can Anna & Kasen Deaton get their father back? Using @anotherplumbob save file.

Previous Play: Stuck in Their Shadow Scenario with Nova Curious. Just a a quick scenario play.

Previous Play: Teenage Kicks. 5 Willow Creek teens transferred to Copperdale High. How will they survive high school? Will they actually all go to school at the same time? Time will tell! Using lilsimsie's save file.

Previous Play: Globetrotter Challenge with Iggy Pancakes. Using lilsimsie's save file.

Previous Play: My Perfect Life challenge with my Sim June Yamamoto. Also with lilsimsie's save file.

Previous Play: Robles Family. Started as a Sim Scenario Making Money. Used @anotherplumbob save file, though I've downloaded random lots/households from the gallery to fill out the world's.

Yvette getting electrocuted, since I needed an image to break up the text.

Abandoned: Iggy's Making Money Scenario with Iggy Pancakes. Using Fleuralia Save File. Started because I was bored, abandoned because it did the trick, got me interested in a different challenge. Maybe I'll come back to it to finish it but it's not looking likely.

Abandoned: Expansion Berry Legacy, created by @becciisiim, featuring the Shaffer family. However, I'm not doing the generations in the same order as the original. Using @ratboysims's save file. Abandoned because I got bored. I may come back to when I feel more inspired.

I prefer to play one household and don't really play occults very often.

I have all the packs except for some kits and stuffpacks.

I play with mods, a partial list: MCCC , WonderfulWhims, UI Cheats, Personality Please!, Meaninguful Stories, First Impressions, Control Any Sim, many from LittleMsSam (@littlemssam) and Bienchen.

I use a lot of Maxis Match/Mix CC; some of my faves: Clumsy Alien (@clumsyalienn) , Okuree (@okruee), LittleDica (@littledica), Peacemaker (@peacemaker-ic), CharleyPancakes (@charlypancakes), myshunosun (@myshunosun) and probably a bunch more. I've been trying to use less build/buy CC but use it for my own gameplay frequently.

[fellowstrangetownappreciator]

The Strange Case of The Strangetown Metamorphosis

There is a mysterious Sim that appears in Strangetown.

That's like saying "there is a fish that appears in the ocean", I know, so I'll be a little more specific.

They are an adult whose memories show inconsistencies with those of their family members. Something is missing!

Alright. That's also not saying much, that's like half of the premades in vanilla, non-clean hoods.

They are immediately recognizable by their appearance and, dare I say it, have distinguishing features unique to them.

Well, that also kinda fits everyone...

They feature in more than one installment of the series.

Again, not that helpful. I mean, almost everybody from the base game hoods is (for better or worse) represented in TS3 or TS4.

They appear in TS2 for PSP!

Hmm...

They are a member of a wealthy family connected to science and paranormal.

And...

They are somehow connected to (possible) cloning.

I imagine that now you’re probably rolling your eyes and asking: Why didn’t I just simply say I was going to talk about Bella Goth?

Because... I’m not!

It’s Loki Beaker. In this mini-essay I’m going to speak about Loki, what is the mystery around him, what hints are there and what are some of the theories and which one do I fancy.

It’s basically a routine round of the popular game “connect EAxis’ oversights and glue them together into a headcanon”.

So without further ado, let me introduce you to:

The Mystery of Loki Beaker!

0: Preface: Loki who?

“As soon as he perfects his latest invention, Loki is sure to get the recognition he knows he deserves. In the meantime, he keeps himself busy by trying to assemble a nuclear reactor out of common household items.”

On the first glance, Loki as a Sim seems quite straightforward. He is a Knowledge Sim with a very eccentric personality. All his trait points are in the extremes, as you can see:

He is a scientist, a competent one at that, as proven by his high career level and the fun fact that some of the game’s horrible machinery you can buy for Aspiration points is attributed to his creation.

(It explains why are the Beakers the only ones who have the stuff lying around by default. It is normal for a Strangetown family to own a non-buyable reward object or two but those are career rewards, the Beakers are the only one who canonically own Aspiration points rewards.)

Even though he knows his stuff when it comes to his profession, he is very corrupt and tests his questionable projects on his captive, Nervous Subject.

To say that Loki is unpopular would be an understatement. No one but his wife Circe likes Loki, even his own sister is indifferent towards him. Yes, he has a sister. Her name is Erin and she also lives in Strangetown with a colorful collection of roommates.

Nothing mysterious about him so far. (apart from his eyebrows)

1: Characterization fallen apart

And then The Sims 3 happened. It was actually quite late into the game’s life cycle, the early 2013, when a beautiful nordic-themed world was released on TS3 Store. Its name was Aurora Skies and it featured Loki, Erin and their parents.

TS3 Loki is a child and Erin is a toddler.

Now I haven’t actually played Aurora Skies. I own (and love) TS3 but the price range for the Store worlds is too high for me, content-to-money wise. So there might be some hidden clues about the Beakers in their house or relationship panels that I haven’t been able to inspect but... not to sound cynical but I doubt it. I doubt such attention was given to detail of this family in Aurora Skies, as they don’t even have individual bios.

But... that is... fine? I mean, we have Loki’s TS2 bio...

Nope. Sure we do. And it would be fine if hair color and ambitions weren’t the only thing Loki and his younger self (from now on referred to as smol Loki) had in common.

Let’s take a look on smol Loki’s personality.

The first noticeable thing is that there is not a trace of Loki’s trademark villainy. He’s not Mean Spirited, he’s not Evil, he’s not even a No Sense of Humor Sim. His extreme neatness and hyperactivity are nowhere to be seen either. While it is true that TS3′s capabilities of defining personality are very limited as it picks “outstanding points” rather than a position of each trait on a scale, and it only has 5 slots (and tiny teeny 3 for children), it doesn’t make any sense still for the devs not to pick some more loki-esque traits for the precious slots they had.

Unless...

They didn’t care about Loki’s personality and there were no deeper intentions.

Unless the devs were trying to purposefully show us new angles of his character that either got suppressed while he was growing up, or manifest in ways that TS2′s scale system wasn’t able to show.

Could the Lucky trait in particular have had something to do with the change?

(Also, those traits of smol Loki are reason why I usually go for a Family Secondary Loki in TS2 and thus make Strangetown the purgatory of two unstable blonde Knowledge/Family sciency guys.)

We also must not omit that even though smol Loki didn’t display any of them, he still had all of Loki’s signature traits in him, as Loki in TS2 has his actual personality synced with the genetic one, meaning that there was something in there that caused him not to act so mean that got lost as he grew up. In other words, something brought up the worst in him.

And that’s not all. Smol Loki is not a regular TS3 child. You see, in TS3, premade children aren’t particularly known for being highly skilled experts. Neither are in TS2, for that matter, and it’s okay. It’s realistic.

Smol Loki has a skill maxed.

It is very rare for a premade regardless of age to already start with a maxed skill and I personally don’t know of any other premade children that do.

And it’s writing.

What does writing have to do with Loki? Does Loki write? Probably he has to, those academic papers aren’t gonna spawn out of thin air, but that’s not what the writing skill in TS3 (or the hidden writing skill in TS2) are about. They’re about creative writing only.

Ok, ok. How high is Loki’s Creativity skill, then? In TS2, skills are much broader, they more resemble skillsets than individual skills, and writing categorizes under Creativity. Bring out the skill panel!

Two. He has 2 points in Creativity. That is... low. That is actually very low, especially for a Sim that has supposedly been writing for fun since childhood. (and was a prodigy, while we’re at it) It is safe to say, I think, that if the player doesn’t make him do it, Loki doesn’t write anymore and he hasn’t been doing that for a long, long time.

While I would cynically admit that the dissonance in personalities might be just the lack of damns given from EAxis’ side, this seems to me too on the nose to be unintentional.

They would have no reason to bring the Beakers back without the “evil scientists” thing in mind. I mean, that’s what they’re iconic for. That’s what they’re recognizable by. (apart from their eyebrows)

So the person who was in charge of creating smol Loki probably knew they were recreating “Loki the mad scientist”.

So when they were picking the skill they use to demonstrate that this kid is gonna go far, they thought... “evil scientist = writing”...?

I would understand going for Creativity in general. I mean, Loki’s an inventor. That comes with the territory. But creativity as such isn’t really a skill in TS3. It’s divided to different activities.

Wouldn’t it make more sense just in general to pick logic, then? I mean, Loki isn’t that extremely logical by default but it is his second strongest skill and a feature unmistakably connected to being a scientist.

That’s what leads me to believe that writing plays a role in the story and it was chosen on purpose.

So how did a sweet little family-oriented boy talented with words transform into the ruthless catboy inventor we know and love?

And that, my friends, is the mystery of Loki Beaker.

2: A closer look at our environmentalist friends, the Beakers

If we want to get the full picture and come to a satisfying conclusion of some sorts, we need to inspect smol Loki’s surroundings. Maybe there is a clue to the continuous force or a traumatic event that shifted smol Loki’s direction in life?

Loki’s and Erin’s parents are named Gundrun and Bjorn. Even though their age would still allow it, they’re not present at the start of TS2′s Strangetown play, they’re long dead. Bjorn died before Erin became an adult and Gundrun died shortly before her son’s engagement to Circe. Because they died by the time Loki had (presumably) already long enrolled in his current life-path, we can safely rule out any tragic early death of parental figures scenario as a possible answer.

Gundrun is the only Beaker that canonically also writes. She has 5 points in the writing skill. She also shares some traits with Loki, namely the smarts and ambition.

But she has little to do with science and is way more business-oriented which is a trait she shares with Circe’s ancestors, for example her father. Maybe the families knew each other from business ventures even before they moved to Strangetown? It is stated in their memories that Loki and Circe first met when they were children. But I digress!

Anyway, I don’t see anything in Gundrun that would suggest any abusive behavior towards her son that might have triggered his drastic change. Possibly but not necessarily she might’ve been a bit absent but nothing out of ordinary.

And now the father, Bjorn.

Bjorn is the sciency half of the couple and works as an Aquatic Ecosystem Tweaker. Again, he has zero traits that would raise any red flags and he shares 4 out of 5 traits with either smol Loki or Loki. (I don’t know if Loki is a “natural cook” but he cooks quite well, so I think that counts.)

What’s interesting about Bjorn, though, is his speech that serves as a flavor text for the Aurora Skies store page.

(Image transcript: “Do it for science! Science is everywhere around us, but at Aurora Skies it’s not just something you learn; it’s something you do!  We need bright young minds to make the dreams of the future a reality. Even now we’re finding more uses for garbage to help the planet. Charging batteries, powering machines - the sky is the limit. Just this last year we created a modified Hot Air Baloon using garbage as fuel and turning it into pure air with a pine breeze scent.  Now you can have efficient travel and an amazing romantic adventure with no cost to the ozone (or your nose)! Every year we’re creating more and more exciting things in the world of science. Garbage-powered hearts, heart-powered cars, solar-powered cats; what will you think of next!  It’s all up to you. Do it for Science! Did you know? Hot Air Balloons are an epic form of travel based around the simple principle that hot air is lighter than cold air.  They lift in the air based on the heat system in the balloon. Increasing the temperature of the air inside the balloon makes it lighter than the air outside and the balloon begins to float.  More air is required to lift heavier things; that’s why the balloons have to be so huge! How cool (or hot!) is that?”)

From this piece of text we can see Bjorn’s passion and dedication to “green” science. Nothing in his traits suggests he fakes it, so I think it’s safe to believe that this peppy idealist is a glimpse into Loki’s father’s genuine self.

He might have encouraged his children to follow in his footsteps (”We need bright young minds to make the dreams of the future a reality.“) and smol Loki, who later in life seemed to have similar levels of enthusiasm (science is his One True Hobby), might have been receptive to that.

Now just close your eyes for a second and imagine an alternate reality in which Loki picked up where Bjorn left and instead of a energy-refilling machine that electrocutes you if you’re not happy enough, he invented “solar-powered cats”.

Still no hints on what could’ve messed Loki up, though.

Let’s take a look at the parents in TS2. Even though they’re not present and aren’t even resurrectable, they’re still coded in the game for purposes of genetics, memories and family trees, so some of their characteristics are salvageable.

And by the Watcher, they were both Romance Sims.

They were workaholic Romance Sims who cared about the environment and liked recycling (and Hot Baloons).

And they were both extremely Nice and very Sloppy, if their personalities on wiki are something to go by. Which they unfortunately aren’t, at least not completely because most ancestors don’t simply have “their own” personalities and use presets instead, so they tend to be quite similar.

The same goes for most of the Beaker clan, unfortunately. Fun fact is that there is no Knowledge Sim in sight (before Loki, of course). Maybe they weren’t a scientist family, but a bunch of Romance Sims who used to spend their free time in between woohoos saving the planet with eco-science. (3 out of 6 of Loki’s and Erin’s ancestors were Romance Sims, 2 were Fortune and 1 was Family)

But! There is one outlier. Her name is Gertrude Beaker. She is Loki’s paternal grandmother.

And similarly to her grandson, she certainly has a personality to remember.

She doesn’t use a preset, this is a personality that someone went and manually assigned (...or generated) for her. And she is Neat, Outgoing and doesn’t have a nice bone in her body. But unlike Loki, she has a sense of humor (which makes her even more dangerous, in my opinion) and is extremely Lazy.

She is a Fortune Sim and the only Beaker who shares the darker sides of Loki’s personality. (to be clear, I don’t mean their taste for cleaning but the round 0 of Nice points)

Because she doesn’t feature in TS3 at all, it is safe to say that she wasn’t in her grandchildren’s lives until the family moved to Strangetown. Could she be the corrupting influence on smol Loki?

As far as personality comparison goes, she seems to be the only possible culprit, the only one who’s personality shares the same unpleasant qualities he became infamous for. But! That’s not saying much. There is no evidence she actually did anything.

There’s not even any evidence that she ever met her grandson, given he has no memory of her dying which means she might have died before he was even born. That would be a solid evidence on the contrary and would rule her out. But I’m leaving some maneuvering space for theories here because she is the only Beaker ancestor with custom personality, after all, and that is suspicious.

That’s all the Beakers we know of if not counting Atom and Ceres, who came after Loki, so they’re not relevant to the question of his childhood. Or... are they?

3: And that’s when the trouble began

Another part of this question that might help us discern what happened to Loki is the when. All we know so far is that there is a big void of unknown between smol Loki and regular Loki and the point of transformation happened in there somewhere.

Thankfully, we have something to give us an idea. It’s this snapshot in storytelling pictures for the Beakers:

It shows smol Loki destroying a dollhouse. It seems to be in an impersonal environment of some sorts. The cheapest bed in the game is against a bare white wall, the window is hid behind blue curtains and there doesn’t really seem to be anything else but the dollhouse, a teddy bear in the background and that... very unpleasant bed.

It clearly tells us that Loki’s shift started in his pre-teen years.

And seeing that room which is definitely not in the Beaker Castle at 1 Tesla Court, it makes me think of a hotel or a cheap apartment the family was staying in while moving from Aurora Skies to Strangetown. Maybe the castle-like something the household inhabits at the start of the game wasn’t a property of the Beakers at all, maybe that was where the Salamises used to live and now it belongs to Circe?

Anyway, could it had been leaving Aurora Skies that sent smol Loki down an existential crisis and settling in the not exactly welcoming environment of Strangetown, enrolling in a local school, that sealed it?

But why all the stuff with writing? This would work with any other hobby but somehow it had to be writing and it’s our task to find out why.

4: Not your average tragedy

Now in our search we already have some ideas but it wouldn’t be thorough if we didn’t take into account smol Loki’s actual personality. I mean, we went into what traits he doesn’t have but what about those he has?

Namely Lucky and Family-Oriented.

I think Lucky is a very interesting choice. There’s nothing inherent about Loki Beaker that would make you go “that’s one lucky guy!” (if you don’t count his relationship with Circe as a stroke of luck, that is) and the same goes for smol Loki.

But... it could be a clue. His metamorphosis either couldn’t be triggered by trauma because he’s lucky and it would avoid him, or it must’ve been something tremendously horrid so he’s lucky he’s still alive.

Now we know we are searching for something that happened in his late childhood, verging on the start of his teenage years. His family was going through the turmoil of moving to a desert and he has already known his future partner Circe. Meanwhile Erin-

Oh, wait. Erin.

Smol Loki was Family-Oriented which implies he would probably have a good relationship with his little sister, as he would’ve naturally inclined to protect her and help his parents take care of her. But!

Not only do they have an amicable but distant relationship as adults but Erin seems to forget that Loki even existed in her childhood.

He has the usual set of memories of a sibling growing up well but she doesn’t, she has no Loki-related memories at all, not even of his marriage, which was a quite recent event.

Could the reason for Loki’s “downfall” be somehow related to his sister? Was there a dramatic event in which she lost a part of her memory?

5: Theories!

Ok, we’re finally here! Now I try to present some theories about what might’ve happened.

1. Burdens of the golden child

In Aurora Skies, Loki used to be the little wonder every relative was gushing about. With his father as an acclaimed scientist and a very liked person in general, there was little to no adversity his son had to face. He followed his passion and having nobody to really compare himself to, nor anybody who would terrorize him, he prospered.

But then the Beakers moved. Strangetown was... different. It was way smaller than Aurora Skies, so everybody inherently knew everybody and everybody had to interact with everybody... because the small space of a desert community didn’t leave them with any choice. And it was bleak and unfriendly. No one except for the Salamises knew the Beakers, so they found themselves under scrutiny from their new neighbors.

So Loki, who used to live thinking he was unique, was now sitting everyday in a much smaller classroom with Pascal and Vidcund Curious, whom he was immediately being compared to. But he wasn’t like the Curiouses. He was a kid of a scientist but wasn’t a science kid. He didn’t have much in common with Pascal who approached him and tried to befriend him at first but he wanted to. In Strangetown, nothing seemed to be cooler than being really, really into science. Pascal’s and Loki’s communication attempts were rather poor, though, and in the end, they never made friends. Loki slowly began to disdain the oldest Curious boy and it culminated a few years later in high school when Pascal made an attempt to woo Circe. It was even worse with Vidcund. Ever since Loki’s first day at the new school, Vidcund had been eyeing him with a disgusted look and Loki became quick to reciprocate.

In Strangetown, nothing seemed to be cooler than being really, really into science. Even Circe was on it! She was the only person his age he has know in Strangetown before his family moved in and he liked her. Not “like” liked her, yuck! But he thought she was cool. Her family used to visit the Beakers in Aurora Skies and they played together. She was a friend! Or so Loki thought. She seemed to like hanging out with the Curiouses much more.

In Strangetown, nothing seemed to be cooler than being really, really into science, yes. But not in the eyes of Buzz Grunt, the son of a general who lived in Strangetown. Their family were the self-proclaimed protectors of the hood but at the same time they weren’t shy to show a strong distaste for all that made Strangetown an important desert settlement in the first place. And little Buzz, although Loki doubted he understood the nuances, was very fond of asserting his dominance over his less sporty and hyper-masculine classmates.

Suddenly jealous of the Curious brothers, under pressure from both the adults and his peers comparing him to them and bullied by Buzz, Loki’s social life fell apart. He started having problems... and he came up with solutions. He has always liked science but from back then on he hyperfixated on it to prove everybody who picked on him for being a worthless parody of a science kid wrong.

Not only his social life and self-confidence were busted, though. Moving away from Aurora Skies to Strangetown that had much higher prices for housing because of the limited space, the living standards for the Beakers lowered. It was chaotic and uncomfortable. Plus, almost everybody in Strangetown was loaded. Why, Circe and her parents lived in a small castle! Loki felt like they’re the only “poor” family around and it played into his new-found insecurities.

And then there was Erin’s accident. She suffered a severe head injury and even though she fortunately survived, she was never... the same. She had issues with her memory. Loki tried to convince himself that he’s big enough not to cry but when they were visiting Erin in the hospital and she didn’t recognize him, he cried. It was his little sister! And... it was all his fault anyway! If he was quicker and pushed her to safety, she would’ve been fine! Or even better, he wished the car would’ve hit him instead.

Loki was becoming more and more snappy, focused on his grades and projects, unavailable. The siblings never mended their relationship, Erin, even though she recovered, never got to make new memories with her brother. Not remembering them growing up together, he was like a stranger to her. A scary mean teenage boy she didn’t know and, even though she was a very friendly child, she was too intimidated to willingly spend time with him. And Loki was always busy and moreover, he felt guilty and inexplicably angry, so he postponed approaching her, until it was too late, he was in college, she was in high school and it was too awkward.

And... there was no time to write anymore.

2. Gertrude the Neat and Mean (and Lazy)

Ok, Loki doesn’t have any memories of his grandma. But hear me out! Erin does not have any of him either and yet they met. This theory doesn't require any additional write up – he simply got under the influence of his 0 Nice points granny and she cultivated him to be just like her.

My personal take: This is maybe my least favorite theory of them all, even though it is quite straightforward. It doesn't take much into consideration and demonizes Gertrude, who as far as we know, might not done anything wrong.

3. The accident

This theory takes advantage of TS3's canon sciency machinery, namely Cerebralizing Brain Enhancing Machine 2.0.

It can, among other things, change a Sim's personality. There is (quite unfortunately, in my opinion) no chance of consequential failure in the actual game, the most it can do is to (non-fatally) electrocute your Sim. But...

Imagine smol Loki sneaking into his dad's laboratory, most probably at his workplace.

He was curious. Ever since his father showed him all the equipment in there, all he could think of was the machine that made people smarter.

Maybe it could make him smarter?

I mean, Loki knew he was already quite smart. At least, he's been told he was and he had no reason not to believe it.

But he could be even smarter.

He could be like his dad. Or his mom. Or Erin. Everyone was talking about how clever young Erin seemed. Loki was proud of her but part of him just wanted that, too.

So what if... he went to dad's laboratory, just for a little while, and made himself smarter?

He made all the necessary preparations. It meant to memorize dad’s schedule, so he knew just the time when he could sneak into the laboratory. It also meant to get a good costume so he won’t be recognizable on the security footage!

And then finally, he was ready. To infiltrate the laboratory was easy enough but it only made Loki more nervous. He was on the edge but determined. He wanted to make it big in the world. He needed to seize the opportunity. And fear... fear was there to be ignored! Hands, stop trembling!

His confidence grew a bit once he got to the machine itself. He knew how to run it thanks to his dad and it made him feel competent and ready.

Little did he know that there was a huge oversight. Although Loki could operate the technology on a very basic level, his knowledge went nowhere near deep enough for him to detect that the machine has yet another set of settings and those currently expect an adult user. It wasn’t configured for a child patient.

But unaware of that, the boy in his patchy dinosaur costume climbed on top of the machine and with his eyes wide open and his heart racing he connected the Brain Enhancer to his system. Then, with his hand sweating, he pushed a button on a remote he was clutching to.

When Bjorn, alerted by Loki’s screams, rushed into the laboratory, it was way too late.

As his terrified father was calling the ambulance, the child was alive and even still awake. He was too weak to cry. He just watched Bjorn, wishing for death and looking for signs of wrath in father’s eyes.

There were none. Only fear.

Physically, Loki Beaker managed to recover just fine. With the power of advanced medicine and plastic surgery, the burns he suffered were reduced to nothing but almost invisible scars.

But inside, he was never the same. Literally. Even though the procedure backfired horribly, it still worked to some extend - but even that extend was warped. Loki succeeded in giving himself the Genius trait but several of his traits were replaced also, including the Lucky trait that probably saved his life.

6: Conclusion!

I like Loki very much. (no sh*t, who would’ve guessed) He’s a very controversial and over-the-top character who tends to be rather unpredictable in the actual gameplay. I started writing this giant thing to find an answer to his backstory that would satisfy me and hopefully also some of you.

With a heavy heart I conclude I’m not successful.

First I have to admit I originally planned to present 5 theories instead of 3 but I scrapped 2 of them.

First was about Atom time traveling and replacing Loki, creating himself again and again in a time loop (would explain the huge personality difference between smol Loki and Loki-Atom) and it was very far-fetched but fun, alas I realized it was out of character for Atom, since he seems to love his sister and his Plumbot so much he would hardly leave them behind to pull that off.

The second was about Nervous and the corrupting power of Death he has inside that would slowly drive Loki and Circe “evil” even though it’s unclear whether they first adopted him with being a lab-rat in mind. But it would not make sense since a change like that would be visible on their personality panels. That’s not that important, though. What made me not include this theory is that it feels uncomfortably victim blame-y. It’s not directly since it wouldn’t be Nervous’ fault anyway but any attempt to shift the blame from Loki and Circe in this situation feels uncomfortable.

(To be clear, I don’t think the Beakers deserve demonization. In my opinion, the best way to treat them narrative-wise is like eccentric people capable of feeling love and doing good things sometimes, yet irredeemably self-centered, morally bankrupt and deserving a lifetime in jail for child abuse they have done on Nervous. Not one-dimensional but still villains and still objectively bad people.)

And those 3 theories above? They could’ve been better.

I think I like the first the most, even though I still feel like something is missing. I just tend to like relatively grounded explanations and this one doesn’t feature the supernatural nor any deus ex machina gadget.

What about you? And do you have any other theories? Sky’s the limit! It’ll make my day to hear them!

Whatever your takes are, they’re all valid.

[autisticsupervillain]

I don't talk about my inFAMOUS hyperfixation enough, so here's some stuff.

Dark Danny and Kessler are basically polar opposites of each other as far as Evil Future Me villains go.

Kessler: I fucked up, destroyed the world, and lost everyone I ever cared about. I need to go back in time and make sure that doesn't happen.

Dark Danny: I fucked up, destroyed the world, and lost everyone I cared about. I better go back in time and make sure that does happen.

It gets me wondering... what if Dark Danny was The Beast that Kessler wanted Cole to destroy?

Let me introduce the inFAMOUS Phantom AU.

The year is 20xx in the not so distance future. Danny Phantom finally dropped his heroic charade and embraced his ghostly nature, going on a rampage from Wisconsin to Amity Park, decimating all he sees. The Guys In White only manage to capture and contain him using their newly aquired Conduit unites. Conduits are humans who have the Conduit gene, a genetic failsafe that, when activated, could give the bearer extraordinary powers. The Conduit gene was only able to be activated recently thanks to the advancements pushed by their head scientist, Cole MacGraph.

Cole is put in charge of containing Phantom. His technology is several years ahead of the rest of the world, after all, and it's jis discoveries that unlocked the secrets of the Conduit gene and allowed Phantom to be captured to begin with.

However, Phantom is incrediblybclever and quickly thinks up a plan to escape. Taking the form of his younger, human self, Danny Fenton, Phantom tells him of his origins. Of the ghost portal that turned him half ghost, of the grand heroic adventures he had.... and of how his parents kept trying to kill him, despite his heroic deeds. Phantom claims that his ghost half and his human half have separate personalities, and that his ghost half came to despise the human race for their hatred of him.

"Please... I just want to go home. I miss my friends... I miss my mom... Wait, my parents... the Fenton Ghost Catcher! You can separate my two halves! That way my ghost half will dissolve when separated from his host!"

This is all an elaborate lie, painstakingly sprinkled with enough truth to be believable. Daniel Fenton is dead. All that happens when the Ghost Catcher is used is that the ghost (Phantom) is expunged from his non-ghost containment chamber. Phantom uses the opportunity to possess Cole with an invisible duplicate while the Conduit team recontain him. He then uses Cole's notes and free access to the facility to carefully plan his escape, whilst assassinating the Conduit team to ensure they don't stand in his way. He also kills Cole's family, both to keep them from questioning his odd behavior and to give his own strange behavior an excuse. Of course he's getting strangely close to the Conduit team, he's grieving and needs companionship.

Fortunately, Phantom didn't plan for Cole having friends outside the GIW. When Zeke Dunbar strangely stops receiving Cole's calls, he goes undercover to investigate. Putting together what happened from Cole's notes on Phantom, Zeke frees Cole with the Fenton Ghost Catcher in front of what remains of the Conduit team. Cole and Zeke escape as Phantom slaughters what remains of the Conduit team, as well as the rest of the GIW.

Zeke urges Cole to help fight off Phantom, but Cole instead becomes obsessed with resurrecting his family. He ignores Zeke's attempts to reason with him, runs away again every time Phantom shows up wherever he's hiding. Until it's to late. To late to fight back. To late to do anything. As far as Cole knows, he's the last man on Earth when Phantom sends Zeke's battered body flying through his door.

Phantom recognizes him and laughs, taunting him over the sob story he had about his family. "The best part is that it's all true, to a degree. I didn't even have to lie to trick you."

But, as soon as Dan tries to blast him, Cole is saved by two words.

"Time Out."

Clockwork appears and gives Cole a Time Medallion, before deciding to strike a deal with him. He offers Cole the chance to go 20 years back in time in order to prevent this future. Cole accepts. Taking the name Kessler upom arriving in the past, Cole gets to work.

Firstly, Kessler rejoins the GIW under his new identity, quickly rising through the ranks with his forehand knowledge and scientific prestige. He pushes development of the Conduit project ahead by several decades, giving himself powers and creating a cult of personality around himself in the process. Anyone who opposes his hostile takeover is quietly disposed of and Cole MacGrath finds himself expelled from college on mysterious grounds, never getting a chance to join the GIW.

Kessler creates a weapon called the Ray Sphere, a device designed to explode and kill any non-Conduit caught in it's blast. The Conduits will have their powers supercharged by the bio-electricity absorbed from all non-Conduits killed in the explosion, artificial advancing their development.

Kessler manipulates Cole into detonating the Ray Sphere in Empire City, before using the GIW resources to launch a hostile take over the city to "control the damage", all whilst having the government create a cover story so that Phantom doesn't get involved. Cole is forced to adabt and become stronger to survive with all the odds stacked against him, exactly as Kessler intended, forging Cole into the hero that he himself was not. After Kessler kills Cole's girlfriend to keep him from getting distracted from his mission, he challenges his past self to a climactic final battle to prove he's become as strong as he needs to be.

Cole emerges victorious and Kessler uses his final breath to show Cole visions of the future. Of the massacre of mankind, of the death of his family, of the sob story that Phantom manipulated him with. Cole is sent reeling from the revelation that Kessler is his future self and it is now up to him to save the world. As a reminder of the task he must now uptake, Cole grabs the Time Medallion off Kessler's body, not knowing it's true significance.

But, of course, that is only one path thay the parade might take. There is an equally valid timeline where Cole takes the opposite lesson from all the hardship he endures. He learns not to be responsible, but to be strong. Not to be compassionate, but to be vengeful. Not to save lives, but to gain power. While in one world Cole becomes a FAMOUS hero, in another, he becomes an inFAMOUS villain.

Both Coles set course to Amity Park, with their best friend Zeke by their side. One hoping to save the world, the other hoping to destroy the competition. Good Cole takes the sneakier approach when challenging Phantom. He has Zeke create a distraction for the Fentons by claiming to be an investor interested in their research, while Cole sneaks downstairs. MacGrath trashes the ghost portal, alongside anything else that might be useful to Phantom in the fight against him, before carving "meet me in Central Park, Phantom" into the wall with lightning.

Evil Cole takes the more direct approach, instead blasting the Fenton building apart with a giant thunder bolt. What Cole wasn't prepared for was for the Fentons to survive and for their ghost weapons to be able to harm him, forcing him back long enough for Danny Fenton to transform into Danny Phantom.

Either way, Cole MacGrath comes face to face with a Danny Phantom who is varying degrees of pissed.

Their fight is suprisingly even and both end up bring good counters to the other. Cole's resistance to mind control is sufficiently enough that he can ward off Danny's possession, his Radar Sense counters invisibility thanks to homing in on Danny's bio-electricity, while his own projectile versatility is strong enough to match most of what Danny can throw at him and then some. Danny, meanwhile, has actual flight to counter Cole's gliding, shapeshifting and Intangibility to dodge attacks, and is a better close range fighter when compared to Cole's over reliance on range. Evil Cole also has in edge in that he's willing to leverage civilian lives to give himself an edge, either by using them as hostages or by outright draining their bio-electricity to heal himself. Either way, it's a long fight that sends the two flying and fighting across all of Amity Park.

It comes to an end when Sam and Tucker and the sidelines realize Cole's weakness to water, spraying him with a hose to incapacitate him long enough for Danny to get close. Zeke rushes in to help, as do Sam and Tucker, but Danny ends up grabbing Cole's time medallion, sending the five flying off to meet Clockwork.

When there, the five witness Danny's evil future firsthand, with even Evil Cole suprised by the raw power on display by Dark Danny. Clockwork appears and explains how he sent Kessler back in time to alter history and prevent this future, but that plan "failed" so now he's going to "kill" them. However, Cole is able to quickly deduce the importance of the medallions and throws one on him and Zeke. Evil Cole only gives more to Danny and Friends upon Zeke's insistence. The five run into the future, coming face to face with Dark Danny himself.

Dan recognizes Cole, Zeke, and Clockwork's medallions, commenting about how "even dead, MacGrath's a pain in my ass". Cole and Danny try to fight him, but neither can get any good hits in, and the five are forced to run away. Cole only manages to save Zeke at the last second by blasting his time medallion, causing him to do the same to the rest of the medallions to keep Dan from following them into the past.

Cole initially thinks that that's the end of it. Danny saw his future self and was just as horrifed as they were. He's scared straight and won't be a problem anymore. Evil Cole, meanwhile, immediately goes back to trying to kill Danny to eliminate the competition. Either way, Sam and Tucker interrupt and point out that Dark Danny could still come back. He has the time medallions and if he puts them back together, he could travel back in time to prevent his past from changing. Indeed, Dark Danny is trying to do just that, as he has enough Vlad in him to try putting the advanced tech back together.

Cole and Danny are forced to train together to defeat Dark Danny, giving Danny the opportunity to learn who Cole is and what his deal is. Especially seeing how destroyed all the Fenton tech, so teaming up is the only real option. This gives Cole the opportunity to test his mettle against Danny's villains, from stomping Technus by draining all his technology to working together to beat Vlad.

Within the span of a few months, Cole and Danny are stronger than ever... and they'll have to be, because Dark Danny has arrived. The Ultimate Enemy is here, and they're the only ones who can stop him.

[isabellehemlock]

Hiatus Announcement

Hi loves, so as I talked about here, I’m taking a semi hiatus.  I have two months of stuff queued up, so hopefully I can basically support content creators in our fandom - just from afar as I delete the app for at least one month, and potentially a little longer.

This is for a few reasons which I’ll talk about under the cut, but I’ll keep it vague for privacy reasons, and because it’s a bit exhausting to rehash all of this.  CW/TW for mental health issues, and c-ptsd mentioned, but not detailed, nor the reasons behind it.  Chronic health issues, and the American healthcare system is also discussed, though fairly vaguely.  But figured I’d mention it anyway!

I had shared back in March about needing a fandom break from tumblr, and though that was essentially only a small part of my fandom experience, it obviously had a pretty big impact on my mental health.  I returned in April, and wrapped up a big fic in May and basically tried taking care of my mental health by curating my feed as best as possible and changing my privacy settings and just really focusing on how I could offer the kind of support that wasn’t personally draining for me - which most consistently seems to be hyping up the content creators in our fandom :)  I love to see so many talented people in our fandom and cheer you all on!

I also focused on writing and drawing more than ever, and honestly I did mean what I talked about here on the anniversary, about how much this fandom means to me. 

However, what I haven’t shared - since this primary/personal blog has basically turned into a fandom blog - was that I’ve been dealing with some chronic physical health issues since the end of April.  Some dear friends are aware that I have a genetic condition that requires me to take weekly infusions to combat the long term effects of this. 

Unfortunately my insurance has been denying me this treatment since April.  I have now gone fifteen weeks without it. 

I recently learned (just last week actually!) that I won an appeal and my hospital and med team are coordinating to get me an infusion asap.  But it hasn’t happened yet, and I’m not sure when it will :/ 

All this to say that I simply do not have the mental, and physical energy, to keep up with real life of being a wife and mother (my kids have been home full time since March 2020, and bless them for their patience as we homeschooled with bundles, vs online school, but this new Delta variant is scary because they do not have options for vaccines yet), and helping take care of other family members who also deal with chronic health issues, and trying to nurture relationships that have fallen to the wayside during the pandemic, and embrace new ones I have made over the last year, and write, and draw as a way to combat stress and as art therapy for myself and be on tumblr trying to keep up.

So for now, I’m staying in a fandom server, and reshifting my focus on my WIPs which should keep me busy through October.  I genuinely hope to be back before then! 

I am hoping by taking a step back from one more app to manage, I can shift and refocus my limited energy to some things I need to take care of in real life (mostly med management, and organizing things before my kids go back to school next month).  People who are close to me know how to reach me, and please know my discord app is open for DMs if again there’s anything I need to update on a fic or a meta post of mine, or you need some encouragement from me in regards to something you created, or just want to talk :)

I am so grateful for the support you’ve given me so far, and I hope to return refreshed and restored!

Plus, maybe I'll finally whittle down my marked for later list (there’s currently 200+ fics for me to read!). 

I was hoping to wait till I finished the last two bingo fills - so feel free to keep an eye on them on my AO3 - but I’m not sure if that will take a few more days. 

So I’m logging off now, and wishing everyone well.

And please know my mental health is stronger then it was back in March (yay!), I just unfortunately am dealing with a lot of personal stress right now, but it’ll all be okay!  I will return, and until then fill free to browse my pinned posts.  And I hope you enjoy some things I queed.

Until then loves, be well and God bless ~ Katharina  

[gthreepio]

i’ve been thinking about the future of the mcu and realized there’s a LOT that i didn’t know/didn’t remember in terms of where things are going so i figured i’d sum it up incase anyone else was in the same boat!! 

quick recap of (unresolved) mid-credit scenes:

doctor strange: mordo (a sorcerer that is one of strange’s mentors, who by the end of the movie becomes disillusioned with magic/the ancient one and quits) confronts pangborn (the paraplegic who healed himself with the mystic arts, who tells strange about mystic arts in the first place) and steals his magic because according to mordo, there are “too many sorcerers." of note, this guy is typically a villain in the comics but hasn’t been thus far...

gotg2: ayesha (leader of the sovereign, a golden skinned alien race obsessed with genetic purity), after spending most of the movie chasing the guardians for stealing some stuff, is revealed to have created an artificial being named “adam” which is presumably, adam warlock. (other stuff that is less relevant: kraglin appears to take up yondu’s mantle; the ravagers regroup and several old and obscure comic book characters are introduced [charlie-27, aleta, martinex, mainframe]; the watchers are watching things.) 

far from home: j jonah jameson basically tells the whole world spider-man’s secret identity, and frames him for what happened with mysterio....making him public enemy #1. ALSO, turns out nick fury and maria hill in the movie were ACTUALLY the two skrulls from captain marvel (talos and soren) attempting to do their job, while the real fury (and presumably hill) is ... up in space on some spaceship!!!

wandavision: monica (who we can assume is photon) is called by “an old friend of [her] mother’s,” up in space, which presumably means fury, talos, or carol. ALSO, wanda sits in the middle of nowhere reading the darkhold and hears the voices of her children who.. by all accounts, should not exist. 

aaaaand what we know about future movies (i’m not even going into the tv series.....): 

black widow: 

takes place after civil war

nat confronts a “dangerous conspiracy with ties to her past,” likely has to do with taskmaster who has apparently taken over the red room where nat was trained as an assassin

prominent new characters: yelena belova, who will take over the mantle of black widow after this; alexei shostakov aka red guardian, an ollllld marvel hero analogous to captain america except for the soviet union.

tony stark will make an appearance... SOBS

shang-chi and the legend of the ten rings:

shang-chi has never been seen in the mcu before, but he is, essentially, a superhero that is a master martial artist, and in some adaptations can also create duplicate (fake) versions of himself to confuse opponents

main villain will be the the mandarin who we have *sort of* seen before... he is the leader of a terrorist organization called “ten rings” whose main goal is to destroy world peace. brief history -- in iron man 1: one ten rings cell kidnaps tony stark and tries to force him to make weapons (he of course, makes his suit instead). stark and ten rings become enemies and fight a bunch. nat and nick fury fight them too. in iron man 3, the villain aldrich killian hires a dude to pretend to be the mandarin and claim responsibility for a bunch of stuff, but its not the ten rings or the mandarin at all. this makes the mandarin v mad and he has a dude kidnap the faker to punish him. they also briefly show up in ant-man, when a ten rings agent tries to buy the yellowjacket suit that darren cross is selling. BUT IN SHANG-CHI....... looks like we are FINALLY going to see the real mandarin after over a decade!! 

the villain razor fist will also show up, he is lesser known... he has no superhuman powers but he has surgically replaced his hands (1 or 2, depending on the version) with a steel blade, and is highly skilled at hand to hand combat.

besides the presence of these characters, the only bit of plot we know is “shang-chi is drawn into the ten rings organization and forced to confront his past.” so... yeah. we don’t know much at all.

eternals: 

quick explanation: the eternals are an immortal alien race who have been secretly living on earth for thousands of years. they were created by the celestials, who are most prominently in gotg2. 

more entirely new characters!!! their names are: thena, who can form any weapon out of cosmic energy; gilgamesh, who can make a super strong exoskeleton out of cosmic energy; ikaris, who has superhuman strength, flies, and can project cosmic energy out his eyes; kingo, who can shoot cosmic energy projectiles from his hands; makkari, who creates sonic booms, has super speed, and is deaf; phastos, who has enhanced intelligence, and is also gay (and married with a kid!); ajak, who has healing powers; sprite, who can project illusions; sersi, who can manipulate matter; druig, who can mind control; and dane whitman (black knight), a human with a mystical sword. 

regarding the plot... it seems the eternals have kind of dispersed, but have to come together again to fight the deviants, who are their “evil counterparts” (also created by the celestials, though i’m unclear on why). thena and gilgamesh have apparently been in exile, unclear why; sersi, who is posing as a museum curator, has apparently been in love with ikaris for centuries and it seems as if their love story may be central to the film; and kingo is a bollywood film star in his spare time. aaaaand that’s pretty much all we know.

directed by chloé zhao of nomadland fame! 

spider-man no way home: 

based on the post-credits scene in far from home, peter parker will now be known as spider-man to everyone. unclear if he’s going to be seen as a bad guy due to mysterio framing him, but i guess we’ll see! 

jamie foxx is electro, and alfred molina is doctor octopus; which is VERY interesting considering they played these roles in other spider-man franchises, once again stirring up excitement for possible multiverse. 

there have been *multiple* reports that andrew garfield, kirsten dunst, tobey maguire, and emma stone will be in the movie but tom holland has repeatedly denied this... so... who knows. 

there are also rumors that matt murdock / daredevil (from netflix) will be in several scenes! not confirmed though. 

MJ is still his girlfriend and i hope it stays that way!! 

doctor strange will be featured in the movie, taking on the mentor role now that tony stark is gone :( this will be interesting as i.. haven’t really seen them interact much before. because of this inclusion some people speculate that the film may draw inspo from some comic storylines where peter’s secret identity is restored with magic. 

doctor strange in the multiverse of madness: 

scarlet witch is essentially co-starring!!! it’s going to be really interesting to see if they bring vision or the twins into this at all, though i’m not counting on it. 

seems like mordo will be the main villain -- recall the ds1 post credits scene where he is apparently running around trying to steal people’s magic.

america chavez will make her debut!!!!!! i have no idea how this plays into anything but i am so excited!! 

regarding the plot, all we really know is that strange has been researching the time stone, mordo messes with him, and this results in him accidentally unleashing “unspeakable evil.” presumably there will also be heavy involvement of the multiverse, and who knows what kind of craziness that will bring!! 

initially was going to be directed by scott derrickson who did ds1; however he stepped down to being just EP due to “creative differences.” i am presuming this is because derrickson really wanted to make this more gothic and horror than disney was comfortable with. i REALLY hope they keep some of those elements though and don’t erase the idea entirely! anyway, it will be directed by sam raimi now (of evil dead and spiderman 2002 fame). 

the film also reportedly ties in with the loki series (will loki show up!?) and spiderman 3 (which is obvious enough, given that strange is in that movie and those curious electro and doctor octopus castings...)

thor: love and thunder

directed by taika waititi again, hell yeah!!! and he has stated, the film will be “so over the top now in the very best way" and would make ragnarok look like a "run of the mill, very safe film" .... so.... oh god

so many great returning players!!! including.... valkyrie (now the king of new asgard), jane foster, lady sif, korg, star-lord, mantis, drax, nebula, and kraglin (takes up yondu’s mantle after he dies in gotg2)

in this movie, thor isn’t thor anymore.... it’s JANE!!! she gets cancer :( and is undergoing treatment while simultaneously being thor. i’m a little nervous how this will be handled, but i’m excited. (it’s based off an amazing comic series by jason aaron) 

the big bad: gorr the god butcher, played by christian bale! the gist of it is, this dude HATES gods because nobody helped when his family was dying and in need. his weapon is “all-black the necrosword,” forged from the head of a celestial, and allows the user to create wings and fly at extreme speeds. honestly, he sounds cool as fuck. 

valkyrie is going to be made canonically bisexual!!! 

it will explore more of korg’s backstory, and also include... space sharks!?!?! an alien race from the comics.

taika has called the script “very romantic” so take that as you will 

black panther 2

will again be directed by ryan coogler

not much is known at this point, does not have an official name

t’challa will NOT be recast (which i’m happy about) so..... honestly no idea what to expect for this one. i think we can probably expect shuri to have an expanded role. all we know so far is they will be “exploring the world of wakanda.” not clear to me how this is different from the upcoming wakanda D+ series. 

tenoch huerta has reportedly been cast as a villain, but no one has any idea who. there’s also rumors that donald glover is in “informal talks” to play a role. note all of this is unconfirmed.

captain marvel 2

will be directed by nia da costa (candyman!) and written by megan mcdonnell, who is one of wandavision’s best writers! 

will take place in the present day 

will feature kamala khan / ms. marvel, monica rambeau / photon!!! this will be so interesting.... kamala is a huge fan of carol’s in the comics, she is her mentor/idol. the ms. marvel series will also resportedly lead into cm2. and monica, well, monica knew her when she was a little kid. wandavision implies that there’s some bad blood between carol and monica though, not sure why. maybe because carol left and never came back? (until endgame) 

post-credits scene of wandavision appears to tie into this, having monica go up into space at the reqeust of her “mom’s old friend.” again, not clear who that is. this could also be a tie in to secret invasion though, so we’ll see. or both.

zawe ashton has been cast as an unknown villain... a lot of people are actually speculating that she may play rogue? which would be fascinating, as there’s a comic arc where rogue steals her powers and memories. BUT there’s still no confirmation that X-men exist in the MCU so for now i remain skeptical.

they are looking to cast a ‘john boyega’ or ‘michael b jordan’ type which makes me wonder if they are going to create a new character, a “younger” war machine to be her love interest? (note: carol and rhodey are a huge thing in comics!) carol obviously does not look her age but her and don cheadle.... that just doesn’t work. which is why i wonder.

ant-man and the wasp: quantumania 

in addition to scott and hope, pretty much all the major players are returning including: luis, hank pym, janet van dyne

cassie lang has been recast with an actress 5 years older, which is really making me wonder if they are going to make her stinger in this movie! (aka one of the main young avengers)

the villain: kang the conqueror! this dude time travels. original name nate richards. in the comics, kang travels back in time to rescue his younger self (nate) from an attack that would help shape him towards a life of villainy. kang also gives him some fancy armor. his younger self actually is like, what the fuck dude? and renounces his destiny, becoming a hero. and he makes his armor look like iron man, calling himself iron lad. who is a young avenger. which also makes me wonder about cassie lang.

otherwise not much is known! 

guardians of the galaxy vol. 3

james gunn is returning, i’m mixed about this...he really does *get* the guardians though. 

based on the gotg2 post credits scene, i think we can assume adam warlock will be a HUGE part of this. there are multiple versions of him, some villainous and some heroic, but no idea how this is gonna turn out.

no word yet on whether thor will be involved, or if those ravagers they introduced will be involved. 

fantastic four 

will be directed by the spiderman guy, john watts.

otherwise we know literally nothing.

aaaaand that’s the roundup! 

[chipper9906]

Maybe

WARNING: SPOILERS FOR LOKI SEASON 01 EPISODE 05: ‘JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY’ AND SEASON 01 EPISODE 04: ‘THE NEXUS EVENT’

Pairings: Loki/Sylvie

Rating: General Audiences

Word Count: 4,124 

Status: One Shot - Complete

Chapter Preview:

He had meant for it to come out more as a question, an offering. A possibility for the both of them. But what it really sounded like was a… well; a sincere, hope-filled attempt to keep hold of… this. Whatever this was, he knew he wanted it. However things went, he knew-

He wanted Sylvie in his life.

His heart was racing in his chest, pounding almost as hard as it does in the midst of battle. In the unlikely event he’s a free man after all of this over, he’ll have to go and find his brother - if he’ll even talk to him, that is - and apologize for the harsh insult he used; for berating his older brother over his affection for that Earth woman.

He understood now.

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Author Note: 

Oh Boy, here I go again, getting sucked into yet another ship. Basically, this is a dive into Loki's thoughts during the blanket scene in Episode 5 "Journey Into Mystery" because man, I sure do love getting into a character's head and breaking down their thought process.

P.S. No joke, I think I re-watched the blanket scene like... over 40 times I counted, roughly. Wanted to make sure I got every detail right lmao.

Oh wow, would you look at that - yet ANOTHER fic based on the blanket scene? I'm sure this hasn't been done by many different people ever since Episode 5 aired! Nah, I'm sure this is purely original stuff.

(Listen, this scene and - consequently - this fic got stuck in my head and I just had to write it down and... well here we are.

* * *

This was, as he had said, new for him.

It was… strange, to say the least. Not just because the woman who was sat next to him was, technically, on some sort of level, himself. And yet… not. Sylvie was her own person, that was for sure. And the only Loki, from who he’s met, who refuses to be called Loki. She had chosen her own name, and was currently choosing – or carving, was more accurate – her own path. A way out of the never-ending, self-sabotaging, “only use is for improving others” apparent destiny they’ve all found themselves in.

She had lived an entirely different life from him - and the use of the word ‘different’ here is strongly applied. It makes him a little uneasy when he dwells on it for too long if he’s being honest with himself. Yes, there may some similarities between them, as to be expected, but Sylvie had lived her own set of experiences different to his. Differences that had shaped her, made her see the world… universe… timeline? All of that, in a different way to him. Learning of the things she had gone through, what she’s trying to accomplish… it made his “glorious purpose” of ruling over “Mid-guard” seem like a spoiled boy's desperate attempt to feel important.

Everything with Sylvie and the TVA had shut down that ideal very quickly. Or, at least, has changed his view of his “Glorious Purpose”. The one change that he hadn’t seen coming, that Sylvie herself had told him; the very first words she had actually said to him:

“This isn’t about you.”

No, it wasn’t about him. Not just him, anyway. It was… it was all of him. Every version of himself out there, and every other variant of... Of everyone to have ever existed. Those, just like him, who are punished for stepping out of their pre-written timeline. Those that, when they try to change themselves, to be the person who those that loved him did everything in their power to guide them to be, were snatched away by the TVA and sent here to this pit of unwanted, broken things; left with nothing but unforgiving and dirty survival, only to lead to their inevitable death. 

And it’s cold.

“Mobius isn’t so bad.”

Sylvie breaks the comfortable lull of silence they had found themselves in. They were, technically, supposed to be ironing out the details of this plan to enchant a creature much, much larger than them, whose only desire is to eat everything that enters the world they’re currently in. Which is why, perhaps, they had taken the moment to just… breathe. A moment of rest, side by side. Whilst it was true that his plan of killing the gargantuan cloud thing was near suicidal, it would be fair to say that Sylvie’s plan was equally as dangerous. Then again, what did he expect? Seemed that every type of Loki out there isn’t the best at creating plans…

“Or so good,” Loki counters. It seemed almost cruel to say, but… it was also true, wasn’t it? Sure, Mobius had done the things he’d done because he thought they were the right things to do – but that didn’t take away from the fact that he’d done them. How many variants, not only of him, but of so many other poor souls had been doomed to this place because of his work? Still, it wasn’t like Mobius had the full picture with everything. Mobius had been lied to just as much as he had. “I think that’s why we get along.”

A small smile pulls at Sylvie’s lips. She takes a deep breath in, staring out to the horizon where Alioth awaits prowling his territory. “He cares about you.”

That catches him off guard. He supposed that she and Mobius must have had some type of conversation in however long they’d spent driving to reach them. Apparently, the topic of conversation must have steered towards him at some point. And somehow, through that, Sylvie had deduced that Mobius… cared about him?

There’s a soft, knowing smile on Sylvie’s face as she catches sight of his reaction. It was probably the closest similarity they shared: friendships… didn’t quite seem to happen for them. 

But there’s something else there in Sylvie’s expression as she looks to him. Almost a twinge of… of sadness. It sends an aching sort of pain through his chest as he sees it, coming to a sudden realization in his head. He knew that, deep down, the reason for his own loneliness was all due to himself. He knows now that there were plenty in his life that loved him, that always treated him like family even when, genetically, he wasn’t. But he had been blinded by jealousy and hatred, hatred that they had kept the secret of his true nature quiet for so long. It was because of this; this stubbornness and this selfish, false ideal that he deserves more, that he had made himself alone. 

But Sylvie…? She had been well and truly alone. From such a young age, an age where his mother had barely begun teaching him the basics of magic, she had been snatched away from her life. Everything she ever knew and loved had been wiped away, the timeline dumped here just like everything else the TVA – or whoever the hell is actually in charge of the damn universe and its multiple timelines – decided was too much of a threat. Ever since then, from that very same day she had managed to escape their clutches, she had been running alone. All those years, fighting to survive, completely alone, existing in one apocalypse after the other. Even if she did try and interact with the people in those timelines, what would be the point? They were doomed to die, anyway… 

Her words echo in his head for a moment, her sad smile seemingly etched into his memory. A part of him, that strangely soft side he didn’t know existed that had been growing stronger and stronger these past few days, burst with the need to do something, to remove the pain she was feeling. For just a split second, he nearly gives into it. He nearly says the words that were forcing their way to the forefront of his brain. 

‘I care about you.’

But the words stay safely locked away in his head. Sylvie looks away from him, and the moment passes. He didn’t know if she had been expecting for him to say anything, and he certainly didn’t know what it is she might have thought he would say. His mind clambers for something, for anything to try and bring the moment back.

A strong gust of cool wind blows over them, sending chills across his pale skin - despite the long-sleeved shirt he was wearing. He knew that, if he really wanted to warm himself up, he could shift into his true form. Except, he didn’t see it as his true form. He has been an Asgardian as long as he can remember, and for all intents and purpose, this is who he’s meant to be. He is the son of Odin, son of Frigga, brother to Thor, an Asgardian, and he’s proud of that. 

And that’s when the idea pops into his head.

“It’s cold,” Loki states the obvious to Sylvie with a shiver of his upper body, glancing over to try and catch her reaction out of the corner of his eye. For a moment, he wonders if Sylvie has the same views on their true heritage as he does, considering that, in her timeline, she was told she was adopted much earlier than he was. 

She doesn’t mention anything about it, though. Instead, she simply agrees with his statement with a hum of “Mmm-Hmm,” but it’s exactly the kind of answer he’s looking for.

From the outside, it looks like an easy twirl of his fingers and a burst of lime-green light, but in reality, it’s years and years of practice, both by himself and… and with his mother. The weight of the blanket - though light - is comforting as it wraps around his shoulders; silky smooth to the touch and of a darker green than the light of his their magic. 

The burst of color gets Sylvie’s attention, looking over to Loki again to see the new blanket he had materialized out of seemingly thin air - which… he did. 

“I could conjure one for you, if you like?” Loki offers.

Sylvie smiles for just a split second, enough for Loki to believe that she might just say yes. But then her nose scrunches as she comes back to herself, and the belief is gone. “Tell you what, you could conjure me a new outfit,” Sylvie says off-handedly, pulling at the tight collar of her outfit. “You have no idea how uncomfortable something like this is.”

It’s a deflection. He knows that all too well, because… because it’s something he’d do. Not that he can blame her in the slightest. As he had said, just before he was pruned through the heart and sent here - this was entirely new for him. Sure, he had had his fair share of flings back home. Rare occasions when he would give in to temptations, let himself experience a slice of normality. But it was never real. He did not doubt that those that fell into his bed did not do so because they felt a connection, or saw a future. And neither did he. He was a prince, a God, and for most, saying you were able to seduce a prince was an achievement. And for him? Well, it was an easy means to an end, he supposed. 

But this? This felt real. It was strange, it was something he had never experience before, and quite frankly, it scared the ever-living God’s out of him. So sure, he knew how to flirt… somewhat. But with this, with Sylvie? Everything was different, and he had no clue whatsoever what he should do.

“So��” Sylvie breaks him out of his thoughts. “Mobius, and his theory about…”

Oh. Well, he certainly hadn’t been expecting for the conversation to go there. Really, he had thought she might try and pretend to have never heard what Mobius had said. 

“Right, right. About our Nexus event-,”

“Total rubbish, right?”

He’d be lying if he said that didn’t sting a little bit. “Absolutely,” ‘Liar’, a voice in his head hisses. “Of course, I mean-,”

“I don’t mean that it wasn’t a nice moment,” Sylvie hurries to say, and it lessens that sting just a little bit. 

“No, it was great! It was really nice.”

“It just… sounds like another TVA lie.”

Which... Yes, when he thinks about it, could you easily have been a lie. Not that he thinks that Mobius would lie to them about this, no, but that someone else within the TVA had fed Mobius the lie. For what reason, he's not entirely sure. To throw them off the scent perhaps? Keep them from figuring out what can really cause a Nexus Event so powerful that it could conceivably take the TVA down. 

Or, perhaps they just enjoyed lying. More than him even - and that's saying something. 

"A hundred percent. I mean totally, yeah."

And oh, what was this? Loki tries to meet her eye, expecting her to nod her head vehemently in agreement to his statement. But... She won't look at him. She gives a somewhat strained-looking smile, more like a grimace than anything, and if he looks hard enough - by which he means projects his own feelings onto Sylvie and hopes she feels the same - he could almost imagine there was a flicker of disappointment there, too. 

"I don't know how to do this," Sylvie says, an admission he didn't expect. She looks about as awkward as he feels, eyes fixated on her fingers as she plays with them. 

"I don't even know what we're doing," Loki returns, and dear oh dear did he genuinely mean that. One moment he thinks he should take that step, say something, anything. And then the very next moment it becomes the wrong time, the wrong thing to say, and he's back to square one. 

It was frustrating, to say the least.

"I don't have friends," Sylvie carries on, and it's another dagger through the heart. Yet another thing that was so similar, yet so, so different. He had been given so many opportunities for companionship, for friends, but he repeatedly threw them all away. But Sylvie? She wasn't even given the chance. She truly had-

"I don't have..." Sylvie trails off, a long gap where she struggles to find the right word to use. Her eyes had locked onto his, and he knew that nothing less than Alioth appearing right above their heads would get him to tear his eyes away.

"... Anyone." 

"Well, there are more important things, right?" Loki desperately grasps for something to wipe away the blank, dejected look that was etched onto her features. 

"Right? Yeah, like bringing down the TVA." 

For once, one of his plans was going well. "Saving the universe, even."

"Well, there's no need to be dramatic - but yeah, kind of!" 

Then there it was again - a particularly strong breeze pushing up to the little hill they were sat on. Sylvie gives a little shiver as it washes over them, a barely noticeable shuffle in an attempt to get warm, and Loki jumps at the opportunity. 

It only takes one small adjustment, a brief push of magic, and then the blanket is growing, wrapping itself around Sylvie's shoulders in a motion so smooth, you'd think he'd done something like this hundreds of times before. Loki smiles gently to her when she notices the change, and his smile only grows more as Sylvie pulls the blanket tighter around her shoulders, shuffling closer to him by just the smallest of movements. Yet another plan he could now say was a success. 

"It's not very snuggly."

Or, maybe not. "Okay," Loki manages to get out through a surprised laugh, but he does get some sort of gratification in seeing her smile at his response. 

"Is it a tablecloth?" 

"No, it's a blanket," Loki finds himself strangely defending his materialized choice of cloth. 

There’s a pause, the quickest of glances up to him. He sees a brief flash of pink as she pokes out the tip of her tongue between her lips, wetting them as she struggles to get out her next words. “Thank you.”

Loki gets a strange feeling she doesn’t get to say that all too often. Whether that be because she chooses not to, or because she’s never had the opportunity to. When was the last time someone did something nice for her…?

“My pleasure.”

Sure, this was all new, and all types of scary. But, as he sat here, shoulder to shoulder with Sylvie, looking out to the dreary yet oddly beautiful landscape scattered with remnants from pruned timelines, he can't help but feel that this moment right here? It was… nice. Despite the TVA, despite Alioth, despite the fear of imminent death he’s had to live through nearly every moment since the Tesseract flung him into that desert in Mongolia, he had managed to find himself some semblance of peace. 

And it was because of the person next to him.

“How do I know that, in the final moments, you won't betray me?”

Now, this was a conversation he had been expecting. How can he not? It seemed that nearly every single person he’s ever come across, who he hasn’t immediately tried to murder, wonders the exact same thing. The ‘inevitable’ betrayal every Loki seems incapable not to carry out. 

And he couldn’t blame them, just as he can’t blame Sylvie for wondering the same thing. Really, he had thought the whole reason she had wanted this moment to talk to him was to have this very conversation. It was… it was something he had thought about himself, ever since being dragged in by the TVA. It was Mobius that had shown him his consistent deceitful nature - quite literally, by showing him film of every moment in his life where his flair for dramatics and affiliation for backstabbing was apparently used for ‘the bettering of others’. 

It had become deeply ingrained into his nature. It became what he was known for, what his family knew him for. He supposed it gave him some sense of… satisfaction, perhaps? A false sense of security, that he always has the upper hand when need be. It was almost like a trial, opportunities to prove to himself that, when the time comes, he can do what it takes to claim what he, false-fully, felt he was owed. He was certain that the only path to being a rightful ruler was one filled with betrayal. 

And now, after only a few days with Mobius - and an even shorter amount of days with Sylvie, his previous ambition he’s been working towards for so long suddenly wasn’t as important. Things had changed. 

He had changed. 

And that was part of the reason the TVA wanted him dead. 

“Listen, Sylvie, I…” Loki starts, but then stops. He sighs deeply, wanting to find the best way to get this across to her. He needed her to understand. “I betrayed everyone who ever loved me. I betrayed my father, my brother… my home.”

He at least had her full attention now. No more awkward glances at one another, unable to maintain more than a few seconds of eye contact. This was important, and they both knew it. “I know what I did. And I know why I did it. And that’s not who I am anymore. Okay?”

There’s nothing on her face that he can read, nothing that says whether she believes him or not. She had been expecting him to say this, he supposed. “I won't let you down,” Loki says, and he says it like a promise - one he fully intends to keep. 

“You sure?” Sylvie asks, and he nods his head straight away in response. “ ‘Cause if we make it, and the TVA is gone, there might be a timeline for you to rule.” Sylvie continues with a challenging - yet slightly teasing- narrowing of her eyes. 

“Ah,” Loki says wistfully, looking out to the horizon as if dreaming of such an event. “And then I’d finally be happy.”

Except, he wouldn’t. He only has to look at his older self to know that. The only one of himself that had beaten the one event that’s supposed to define their lives. He had tricked the mad titan himself, found himself a little corner of the universe to live out his life in peace. No more people he has to challenge, no more opportunities for betrayal - by him, or to him. 

And he looked… miserable. 

Now, though? Right here and now, he wasn’t miserable. He certainly wasn’t relaxed, that was for sure, but far from miserable. He had ended his little exclamation with a rare smile that wasn’t a smirk - or forced- and miraculously, Sylvie returned one just as wide as his; wide enough even for him to see the little laughter lines crinkling at the corner of her eyes.

“What about you?” Loki asks. “What will you do when this is all over?”

Sylvie takes a moment to think, tucking an unruly strand of hair away from her face. “I don’t know.”

He couldn’t even begin to try and put himself in her shoes. Sylvie had spent… hundreds, perhaps even a thousand years of her life just running. Surviving. Doing whatever it takes to make sure she wasn’t wiped off the board by some mystery figure, or group, that had deemed her too dangerous to the timeline. And for what? Some kind of sick desire to have control over every single living thing in every type of Universe to ever exist?

Which… which sounded an awful lot like himself, now he thought about it. Maybe whoever was in charge of the TVA was another variant of himself…

“I don’t know either,” Loki said, and that added to the tally of growing truths he was admitting to people - perhaps the most in his life. 

At some point, this all had to be over. Whether… whether it ends in his death once again, another defeat by a power-hungry being, or with their victory. No more TVA. No more pruning of variants. No more control. Sure, Sylvie had made that joke about him ruling a separate timeline, but… what would he do once this was all over, assuming her survives it? What did he want to do?

What does he want? 

‘Look at your eyes! You like her!’

‘What?’

‘You like her! Does she like you?’

‘Was she pruned-’

‘No wonder you have no clue what caused the Nexus Event on Lamentis; both of you are swooning over each other!’

‘Tell me the truth-’

‘It’s the apocalypse! Two Variants of the same being, especially you, forming this sick, twisted romantic relationship - that’s pure chaos! That could break reality, it’s breaking my reality right now! What an incredible, seismic narcissist - you fell for yourself!’

‘Her name was Sylvie’.

Mobius had truly tricked him there. At least now he knew how cruel it was to be on the other side of such a bluff, he supposed. He had always prided himself on his acting abilities, his innate way of lying to others. Yet, apparently, when it came to Sylvie… he puts his full emotions on display. He had become too overcome with emotions at the mere thought of Mobius telling the truth, that Sylvie was well and truly gone, and he had snapped. He was…

Yes… That was the word. 

He was heartbroken. 

‘You conniving, craven, pathetic worm. I hope you know you deserve to be alone and you always will be.’

‘Do you really think you deserve to be alone?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well then you better figure it out quick, because the Nexus Event the two of you caused, whatever that connection is, can bring this whole place down.’

Maybe, just maybe… Mobius was onto something there. Maybe Sif, even in that small, once insignificant memory buried in his mind, was wrong. 

Maybe he didn’t deserve to be alone.

Maybe he didn’t have to be. 

“Maybe…” The words get caught in his throat, spoken softer than he intended to. He involuntary finds himself leaning closer to Sylvie, to the warmth radiating from her, trapped within the blanket wrapped around them. “Maybe we could figure it out... together.”

He had meant for it to come out more as a question, an offering. A possibility for the both of them. But what it really sounded like was a… well; a sincere, hope-filled attempt to keep hold of… this. Whatever this was, he knew he wanted it. However things went, he knew-

He wanted Sylvie in his life. 

His heart was racing in his chest, pounding almost as hard as it does in the midst of battle. In the unlikely event he’s a free man after all of this over, he’ll have to go and find his brother - if he’ll even talk to him, that is - and apologize for the harsh insult he used; for berating his older brother over his affection for that Earth woman. 

He understood now. 

He almost misses the slightest of reactions as Sylvie looks up to him - and what he knows is an earnest, vulnerable glaze in his eyes. It’s the smallest of things, almost impossible to see, but there’s a slight pull to the corner of her lips as she looks to him. Almost as if she was fighting back a smile at his proposition. 

“Maybe,” She whispers back to him, just as quiet and tender as his own words. It’s not a yes, not in the way his frantically racing heart was hoping to hear, but it was a start. It was Sylvie’s own returning of a proposition, her own olive branch. The possibility he had given that she was extending right back to him. 

Maybe. 

Maybe.

Maybe.

Yes… Maybe they’d survive this. Maybe he and Sylvie would bring down the tyrant who oversees ‘the sacred timeline’. Maybe he’ll find Mobius again, alive and well, having turned the entirety of the TVA’s workforce against the organization they devoted their lives to, and burn it to the ground. 

Maybe Sylvie will let him stay by her side. 

Maybe, he’ll carve that new path in his life - with Sylvie’s intertwined with his.

Maybe he’ll find that new Glorious Purpose.

Maybe he won’t be alone. 

Maybe he’ll be happy. 

Maybe…

You know what? He was starting to like that word.