#i do draw the line at insects though

[why-rock-look-tasty-if-no-eat]

Because I don't care how or what I eat (moldy grapes/bread, paper, uncooked pasta, ants, undercooked foods, stale cereal, freezer burnt foods, pineapples, burnt foods, suspicious meat, raw potatoes, pinecone (only a bite dw), dandelions, expired foods, foods covered with sand/dirt, grass, marrow) I like to traumatize my friends and family with what I'm willing to eat. Now I get an excuse to traumatize tumblr :D

Frozen milk. Thats the weirdest thing I've had and I'm not willing to so that again. It doesn't really freeze like water so it's really similar to a slushie, but the slushie is frozen. If that makes sense.

[bigfatbimbo]

Silly request but imagine helping Bill "groom" his triangle self. Gently wipe him with a cloth. Carefully dip it in the little space between the bricks, can't leave that zone unclean! Alternatively, a classic soapy bubble bath. Silly straws included, what the hell, he's probably drinking the bath water and listing the chemical ingredients back at you while you gently rub him clean. Fun times

The Bug Collector

1.1k words,, Bill Cipher x reader

a/n — Procrastination killed my soul during this, I think it turned out okay, though! Sorry for typos, your girl is tired.

warnings — SFW, post!weirdmaggedon, as ‘fluffy’ as you can get with Bill cipher, he is his own warning, kinda toxic relationships, fluff and bill being pathetic

summary — Reader assists a recently fallen Bill Cipher in self care, despite his general all-mighty asshole-ness.

The exoskeleton of a bug was practical, a water-tight barrier most commonly known for muscle attachments, and its use to shelter and protect the insects gushy insides from its harsh environment. 

The exoskeleton of a triangle was for mostly for aesthetics, as the underneath was far more horrifying than anything in the harsh environment around it. Or so the triangle claims.

You dipped a soapy sponge into the bucket in front of you, as bill propped his feet up on the bathtub. 

“You conquer worlds and destroy planets, but yeah, why not draw the line at cleaning yourself.”

“Please, what better way to make use out of my new human pet— partner, than this?” He corrected loudly and purposefully. Then looking to the side, he mumbled, “And besides, kid, you have no idea how hard it is to clean between the bricks. Euck— So many blind spots.”

The first part was a throwaway reminder that he had far more power than you in this dynamic, something you’d picked up on Bill casually doing in his time with you. 

Being roommates with a butt-hurt demon, given the ending of weirdmaggedon, allowed you the privilege of being more cautious than previous humans were with Bill. For example, you’ve taken to keeping track of his repeated habits and patterns. 

On of which, just so happened to be reminding you how small you were compared to him. 

You jabbed the sponge in-between on of the bricks, “Ow!” He narrowed his eye at you, “Watch it, pal. I’m starting to think you’ve never cleaned a triangle before.”

“I’d hate to give that impression.” You softened your hold on him, “Delicate work, I always say.”

And it was delicate work. After his defeat, he’d been roughed up a surprising bit, powers even weakened. 

Weakened.

“Not too delicate,” he shot you glance. Guess he’d heard that thought process. 

Although, most days he’d seemed to be in a thought process of his own. Weird.

You cleared your throat, “How often does this even need to be done?”

He blinked, “Well, let’s see. Once every—“ he waved his hand around “—few hundred years. Very high maintenance, do not recommend it.”

High maintenance, yeah. At this point, Bill had taken to talking about some other topic, you hadn’t been really listening, something about intergalactic food joints.

Every once and a while he’d bring up something that happened with one of his ‘henchmaniacs’ before getting slightly irritated at the lack of presence in his life now, and changing the subject. 

Bill was interesting to study, you couldn’t lie. His eyelashes curled away from each other, like the mangled legs of a recently dead spider. His hands were very present when he talked, like most people of business. His body flicked side to side slightly at certain moments. 

You became more gentle naturally, taking care of every crevice, and for some reason Bill becomes gradually quieter.

“Something wrong?” You asked, not stopping.

Bill blinked, “Eh, been a minute since i’ve had a human servant. Maybe, I was thinking of other things you can help with!”

You sigh, “Yeah, because i’m your servant. As if.” In your mind, your thinking do the fact he was your roommate, in your house, eating your food. 

“Hey, don’t get all butt-hurt. You’re all ants to me, buddy, nothing to be ashamed of!” His eye flicked back and forth between you and the room.

Then you stop scrubbing, “Bill, I might as well be your landlord.” You know he can read your thoughts, so you make a point to justify yourself. Already weakened from his failed apocalypse, anything other than vague respect for you would land him homeless. Most likely, his response to this would be killing you, but there’s only so much he can do afterwards. 

He’d have a place to stay, but with no electricity or heating, and in his damaged physical form he actively does need those things. And trying to get a new human would be a hassle, and unlike you, no guarantee they’d let him stay there without calling the authorities.

“Yeesh,” Bill remarks, “Buzzkill… You are still a bug compared to me, though—“

You drop the sponge in the bucket, “I think you’re done.”

He looks taken aback when you pull away, “What? Come on, over the bug comment? Jeez, buddy—“

“No I mean you’re actually done,” you gesture to his body, now shining and slick with soap suds. “I got everything, there’s nothing else to do.”

You go to turn around before you feel a small hand grabbing for the back of your shirt. 

“Wait, wait!” He breathes, eye farting from side to side, “… You have to dry me off first.”

He looked slightly panicked, like if you stopped taking care of him now, you’d leave and never come back. Your thought process earlier couldn’t have helped. 

The way he scurried and gasped for you was reminiscent of panicked earwig and a rock is lifted up. The comparison should have grossed you out, but it kinda just made you feel a little bad.

If he was paying attention to your thoughts, he didn’t show it. This would have usually given you the impression he’d wanted you to be thinking the way you were, but he seemed a little wrapped up in his own head. 

“Come on, kid. Don’t tell me you’re gonna kick me out because I asked you to dry me off. One last thing and then you don’t even have to talk to me the rest of the night! Sounds like a good deal, right?” 

His slightly desperate looking sales pitch was met with a sigh, you picked up a dry towel and began to pat the soap suds off of him. His body slowly breathed in, making it look like he was sighing, but no noise came out.

You wondered then if he was actually touch-starved, but cut your thoughts there because this time he had nothing better to do then pay attention to what you were thinking. 

“Ouch, i’m not that desperate, pal.” But he was.

His exoskeleton was dry, but you didn’t stop patting him down. His eyelid shut slowly, and the spider-legs on them curled into each other once more. 

The exoskeleton of a bug was practical, but one of a triangle seemed to simply be for aesthetics. 

However, on some rare occasions, it possesses the same desire for love as human bodies. Only, when very desperate, of course. 

[vyainide]

ㅤㅤㅤgratefulness (i'm sorry, can this be over now?)ㅤ౨ৎㅤ12.9k

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ2024 ©1864RERUNS

oneㅤ/ㅤtwo synopsis. luffy loves you— you know this with how abundantly clear love is in every ministration of his outstretched hand and a grin— yet your traitorous heart demands more, even though you're in no place to give him your loyalty. you know this so you do not demand his love nor to be saved, even when met with a relentlessly stretched hand.

warning(s). gn! reader, hanahaki disease, but some creatively liberated variation of it, angst, hurt/some comfort, slow burn, but does it really count if nothing happens?, unrequited love, pining and the works, background character death, blood, violent imagery, vague allusion to an unspecified mental disorder that involves eating habits (pls be careful!!!), luffy tries his best to be kind but it's cruel, reader spirals 🙏; minimal editing and proofreading (these are basically my thoughts raw and unadulterated)

from vyon. the card game they play is a vietnamese one also known as smth like thirteen in english and has too many rules to explain but it doesn't really matter :3 i was a beast at that game though i fear; this fanfic has been in my drafts for so long, it also grew into too big of a project than it was meant to be. i also had to split this up into two parts, it was getting too long, i'm sorry ＞︿＜

do not repost / copy / translate.

Once you know Monkey D. Luffy, you'll know his heart not a few minutes after. He's welded the unmoving, burning ingot to his bicep, always on display due to his amassing collection of armless vests; rubber skin melted around the golden gem, oozing past the lines of his beating heart to staple it there, an anomaly on the expanse of skin not otherwise susceptible to bullets or cannons. Your captain is a man that lives with his heart on his tongue, always ready to dictate the lay of your next move with an irregular beat that drums against the skinned men of war and an impulsivity that makes his crew scramble after him exasperatedly; oxygen taken from his cerebral arteries to his brain are stained in the grease and oil that stick to the meat he handles so carelessly. In the same endearing way, he's careless with his heart, allows for the small stuff to momentarily prick his heart, for judgement to cloud into anger before it picks up on the bitter taste of agony.

It's always easy to get a frown onto Luffy's face. Feign disinterest in his stories; make yourself too busy to help him look for strange insects; force him to shower, scold him after he does something he wasn't meant to; keep him away from something he seems interested in; starve him for more than five minutes— he makes it all exceptionally too easy. You're not audacious enough to claim to know Luffy any more than the Strawhats, especially not those that he had met in East Blue; you try not to let it bother you that they managed to meet a younger Luffy who had so many holes in his defence, whose smile threatened through skin more, who had yet to find scars in his palm from how hard he had to clench his fists.

To you, it seems unfair that Luffy had managed to uncover so many of your firsts. His unwavering presence by your side as you learnt how hard it was to live on sea, the intonations of your screaming when a marine canon was pointed at you, to live so freely away from the confines of restrictive justice, how it felt to have a hand in yours to promise forever and then some. Luffy has no preferential treatment when it comes to people he loves; he treats them all the same, no hierarchy could dream to disrupt that.

With the same sandals he uses to stomp on the faces of Marine's, he could demand food from Sanji, money from Nami, Zoro to play with him— instead, you watch him whine Sanji, food and dissolve into a puddle when his cook orders him to wait, he allows Nami's fists to fall onto his head when he makes any financially impulsive decision (or even thinks them), and he idles himself with drawing on Zoro's face with Usopp and Chopper, with the previous two of them taking the psychical brunt of their consequences. (Chopper is let off with a mere promise that he won't join in with their shenanigans again when it involves making Zoro into a fool and a growing bump underneath his hat.)

Luffy, from second to fourth gear, is tender aggression when it is love.

His form is bizarrely respectful when the door opens and light dawns upon your face; you see him through the gaps of Nami and Sanji's legs and towering forms over him, his hands on his thighs and feet tucked underneath his bottom. He slurs out an I'm sorry that lets you know that his face is definitely messed up and then follows up with an I was hungry though!

Then Nami messes him up some more for his shitty justification.

She leaves him— some caricature of her anger— on the floor with her hands on her hips and Sanji trailing after her with hearts in his eyes at her dominant display of power. As she passes Brook, he asks for the colour of her underwear and earns himself the same treatment. It's then that you laugh. Luffy snapped his head up, following after the trembling air of your laughter and then calls out your name, the syllables are all messy around his swollen cheeks and a missing tooth that will come back after a few minutes but you cannot rid yourself of the thought that it's sticky with love that you only remember hearing when you were just a babe, screaming and crying in the arms of a tired and ill mother in a hospital. You were introduced to a group of midwives with same love you hear now, their idle finger catching into both your small hands; Luffy's hand dances across the air, breaking apart your laugh with urgency and catching onto your wrist.

You're not sure if it's you who had been pulled to him or if he'd managed to catapult himself into you but you both end up a mess on the floor regardless. Limbs tangled around each other in a wave as you both fall to the deck, Luffy does not correct the length of his arm and takes to wrapping the limb around you like a vine snaked around the trunk of a tree. You don't know a start nor an end as Luffy nuzzles his beat–up face on your shoulder. "Hey captain," you raise your head to look down on him, trying to wrench a hand through the tight spirals he's coiled around you.

"I'm hungry," he whines in lieu of a response, "and I'm bored, Usopp kicked me out after I ate one of his ketchup stars." He doesn't relent with his hold on you, simply loosening the coil that you're trying to work your hand through before tightening again once your arm makes it past to trap it against your side. You don't question the fact that Usopp's ketchup stars may be laced with gunpowder or what the small dose of gunpowder may have done to Luffy's internal organs.

You guess even Usopp has his limits when it comes to his childish captain. "I can't do a lot about either of those things if you're keeping me hostage here." He looks up at you, his exaggeratedly large lips in a pout that matches the swelling of his cheeks and then says your name again, like you’ve done him wrong. It's a disordered collection of the letters again but you find you can't really do anything to fight against it. Instead, green tendrils sprout from your trapped arm, each vine wrapped in a light of leaves and strain against his extended limb before he gives in and, instead, laughs as he wraps his rubber arm around the spindly, twisted branches splitting open layers of skin on your bicep. His skin coloured against the green runner keeps the bine from wilting down to meet gravity.

You let Luffy do whatever he wants, with an expression that you're not sure you're too familiar with etched out on the lines of your face. Thinking back on it, you could've simply done as Nami had or Usopp, ignore or scold him enough into submission but his fingers catch one of the fronds and it curls between the meat of his fingertips, reaching out to tickle his palm and something soft blooms inside you. You know it must be you, not the work of your devil fruit, because as much as you've tried in your lacklustre pursuit of beauty, you've never been able to sprout any kind of flowers.

When Luffy finally lets you go, you find your way into the kitchen and give Sanji a smile. You apologise for interrupting him and tell him that you know that lunch had been served only an hour ago but, if he wasn't too busy, you were still a little peckish. Sanji shoots up immediately and asks you what you've got a taste for— you assure him any leftovers from lunch will do and he tells you, though this doesn't come as any surprise, that Luffy had worked his way through any grain of leftovers with a laugh. You laugh along with him and well, you seemed to be craving meat right now.

The plate he prepares seem to be more about quality rather than quantity, with sauce underneath the red meat drizzled across the white ceramic, a slab of meat already cut into bite sized pieces for you and a decorative herb stuck between the fatty slices but when the light oozes down into the stretch of meat, you don't think Luffy will complain too much.

You, of course, were right about that.

The shattering grin he greets you (the plate of meat, however small it seemed) with gives you the faint smell of sticky rain drenched in the light of the sun, and you almost give him your hand when he reaches out for the plate. Brook's guitar strums in the background and your heart shakes in time with his strings and Luffy's incessant chewing.

You've really no problems with Usopp asking you to help him with target practice, it's fairly common for you to help the crew with their unique fighting style— save Nami and Franky for fear of losing your life with their less than particular aimed area of damage— it's easy enough really. You don't even have to be mentally present for it; shaking through layers of flesh, vines grow across the deck of the Sunny and rise up straight to tower over Usopp as he fixes his goggles over his eyes. You keep a quarter of your mind instilled in every chloroplast that shivers across the skies so you can keep them moving but the other three quarters are focused on the card game you play with Robin, Chopper, and Franky.

You hear the snapping of elastic and your finger twitches against the back of playing cards as the particular vine shot to the left, glancing curiously at Chopper's hand across from you when he turned to Franky and accuses him of looking at his cards.

"It's not my fault!" Franky frowned, fixing his comedically small glasses to perch on his metal nose. "Your cards just happen to be in my view when I'm looking at the pile 'cause you're tiny!"

Chopper takes to this horribly (you reshape a vine that has fallen to one of Usopp's stones and keep it relentless across the wave of air) and he grows into the much less cute and broader, more human version of himself to hold his hand out of Franky's view. (Two vines snap together and they take the path to slice through air to where Usopp stands, you hear the cracking of wood as Usopp shouts at you, saying he only wanted to focus on offence. An apology is drawn out with the green arm in the air.)

"Ivy," your eyes flicker to Robin and she gestures to the pile of discarded where the two of spades had been placed on top. "It's your turn." You glance down at your hand, eyes flickering over the collection of 7's in your hand. 

"Bomb." (You feel a vine break apart into pieces, think about the fact that it's lucky you've no nerves attached to the tendrils, and keep the one down to give Usopp a little win.) Franky curses your name as Robin chuckles.

Chopper glances at the four 7's with a sense of wonderment that you're sure is too dramatic for the moment. "No wonder I had no sevens!" You give him a sly grin and watch Robin pass her turn, ignoring Franky's levelled glare behind his glasses.

In the end, Robin wins anyways, ridding herself of her hand with her final card being the two of hearts. The loss is taken bitterly by both you and Franky though you think Franky definitely takes it worse than you do as when he stands to sulk away, cards fall out of his speedos, and they leave a trail after him. Robin, in all her morbidity, laughs behind a hand as you and Chopper drop your jaws in disgust.

Chopper collects the cards, hesitating with the ones that had been on Franky until Robin points out that you've all played many rounds and there's a chance that all of them had shared the same fate. (Another vine shutters down to the floor, broken apart and particles flown across the deck.) The cards slowly fall to the floor as Chopper cries out in disgust. Shaking your head with some colourful amusement, you use the two vines fallen to pick up the cards and start shuffling them.

Responding to Chopper's call, Luffy shoots his way from Sunny's figurehead. "What're you guys doin'?" He falls graciously to where Franky had previously been sitting; his eyes are ever so impatient to glance over the cards being shuffled. "Oh," he says with great interest, "are you guys playing 'go fish'?" He leaned towards you— the cards in your possession, actually— and blinks at the shuffling. "Lemme in!"

"We weren't playing 'go fish', Luffy." The little doctor has since calmed down, taking a seat between Luffy and Robin and shaking his head. "We were playing—" he turns his head up to Robin, to which she supplies 'bài tiến lên' with the intricate accents and all, "that!"

A flash of thinking places itself on Luffy's face, crossing his arm and tapping the side of his sandals on the deck, then it's gone. "Let's just play 'go fish' then."

Chopper whines, saying that 'go fish' is boring and that Luffy always snatches more than one card from other people's hands, which is cheating, and that he doesn't want to play.

Luffy turns to you with a pout, eyebrows furrowed at the dip where his nose bridge starts and then straightened out towards the end. The two vines that had been expertly dodging all of Usopp's shots and taunting him by doing silly dances and twisting into words in the air both crumple down to the floor at the same time, they follow the curve of your spine as you double over, a breath stuttering in your throat. You hear Usopp call your name and the deck of cards slip out from the vines that had been shuffling this entire time, your hand wraps around your throat and you hack out a cough you've managed to choke on.

"Are you dying?" Chopper shoots up, frantic as you keep coughing and choking— both violent in temperament, and scampers around, shouting for a doctor.

Footsteps tap closer as a shadow forms over you, Usopp's hand patting your back ferociously comes after the sound of shoes stop.

The blur that came with tears invading your eyes gives you the confidence to look at Luffy again before you're calling Chopper to a stop. "I'm fine, just choked on air."

You don't mention how it felt like you were breathing through a cheesecloth, how your lungs feel so restricted with every inhale as you all compromise on 'chase the ace' and how easier it feels when Usopp pushes his way between you and Luffy, too intimidated to pick from Robin's hand; when you all finish up for dinner, Robin is looking at you in a way that makes you think she's caught onto how you've been struggling.

Dinner is a strange ordeal. It's characterised with its usual events: Luffy sneaking his hands into people's plates though his stands full, Usopp trying to hold his plate out of his way, Zoro tending to his glass bottle of beer, Sanji making some quip about Zoro's show of alcoholism, Nami getting increasingly annoyed by the noise around her, Brook's laughter, Zoro escalating the situation with Sanji, Chopper screaming when Luffy clears Usopp's plate and then goes for the doctor's, Robin watching the scene with the patience of a saint, Franky pretending he was better than the rest, Usopp exacting revenge on Luffy by swapping their plates. It all ends with Nami telling them all to shut up and Luffy taking one final chicken leg from Zoro's plate. You stare down at your plate and count the missing bits, Luffy hasn't really touched any of the potatoes or asparagus, so you finish them up.

Two chicken thighs sit in stark contrast to the plate, thinking about having them anywhere near your mouth makes you a little sick for some reason, the weight of them in your stomach, the taste of caramelised skins, crisped with wells of juice sat next to a tinge of burnt flesh; you push the plate over to Luffy and detest the way he can take the colour of well–done oranges between his teeth and not care about the juice dribbling down his chin.

Luffy says thanks with his mouth full of chicken; Nami glares at him and turns a more concerned face to you (that also makes you sick) and inquires about you not eating. You mumble out some excuse about not being hungry, not feeling well, having a little bit of a headache, feeling tired— something along those faux lines, you don't remember but you remember that you don't tell them the truth exactly. "Sorry Sanji," you fix into your shitty excuse after, running a hand through your hair, to make yourself feel better about the entire ordeal.

He offers to make you a more palatable porridge or soup instead.

You take a cigarette and a red apple, going to bed hungry and angry at some unknown thing that brews on the tip of your tongue.

The next island is of great interest to Luffy.

The entire crew knows that its history nor culture was not either reason behind his excitement, only the mere prospect of digging his sandals into new, uncharted land is why he's running around the deck, filling up the empty spaces with bubbling laughter. Sanji finishes up bentos for those that are leaving, taking unnecessary extra care with Nami’s, and wishing he had it in him to starve Zoro whilst Nami is giving everyone an allowance. You take two bentos, yours and Chopper's, and head out onto the deck. Luffy only seemed momentarily sad that you were going with the doctor but bounced back immediately after when the trees come closer enough to intimidate so you push down the offer to join him instead. Franky joins up with Usopp, Luffy'll run off alone regardless of who he ends up going with, Nami ends up going with Zoro (to Sanji's displeasure), and you and Chopper make plans to find a pharmacy and a library for Robin.

Being around Chopper is easy enough with this unsettling prick of poison that's forced minimal responses, curt words, a flurry of tiredness, a sickening chill through your days recently. The little doctor is a lot more mindful of changes in mood, it's not any imminent injury either so he doesn't press to know why. Out of guilt (for being a brooding asshole lately), you ask him about his rumble balls and all his different forms. He answers cheerily and you can only pick out every other word with a persistent headache as the smell in the air changes from salty skies and bloody fish to sweetened foods and something unfamiliarly clean.

It's a bright island. You hear a faint bell in the distance that is traced over with the sound of children and stall owners; Chopper's hooves rhythmically sound beside you on the pavement and you find yourself counting them in groups of four. "Ah, there." You pick up your head and turn to follow the direction of Chopper's eyes. A sign is hung on the side of the building, the library. "Robin wanted a book of North Blue diseases for some reason," Chopper mumbles to himself as you two push open the door.

It's a small bookstore, walls lined with books and the paths carved with more standalone bookcases. "North Blue diseases?" You repeat, confused, "do they have North Blue exclusive illnesses?"

Your question goes unanswered, though it looks like it opens a vault of new questions for Chopper. Books aren't of great interests to you, so you follow behind Chopper as he walks through each section and grab whichever book he tells you to bring down for him. On the way back, you tell Chopper to keep going and change your course in search of something you're not too sure of.

You stray away from the town centre and head deeper through the small alleys of the town, there's no destination in mind; without the urgency of a fights and with the domesticity of a small knit community, you wander adrift. There's a dampness in the air to the walk around a shadowed hide of the place that loosens up the tension below your ribs, many different eyes follow after your form as the heel of your shoes click against a null path; shadows ooze around the soles of your shoe and lacquer up between the carved maze of black rubber of your soles until you find your way into a dead end.

It's a little bit of a cliché to be met with a ragtag group of delinquents when you turn to go back. Your eyes trace over them. In the hand of the one closest to you sits your wanted poster.

Something blooms inside you again— it's a much more pleasant feeling than the unmoving sap of ire that's been invading lately. Each man before you is physically bigger, towering over you ominously and shadows eating you but they all have swords and guns in their hands and that's why they lose. You, to the detriment of all life around you, are a weapon in and of itself; you choke out the vitality from others and steal their nutrients. They strained against their confines as their skin blossoms through shades of blooms, you are not the merciful rubber of a human, so your constraints don't relent, they squeeze and squeeze until the bark splits apart, until blood is cut off at the source, until they wither, until you are full.

On the way back, you buy a gift for everyone with the money you hadn't used and when they take to it, all in their varying degrees of joy, you feel less bad about the dead end alley full of brothers and sons. You tell yourself, handing Zoro a gift of alcohol, if not them, then it'd have been you.

You end up staying anchored to the island for a week to your displeasure. The longer you're stuck there, the closer you are to exploding; you always keep an eye out on the log pose strapped to Nami's wrist like you could quicken the process if you stare enough. Usopp starts avoiding you out of fear you'll blow like a poorly constructed cannon, Zoro makes you train with him to see if it'll help blow off some steam, Sanji brings you iced drinks at a rate that keeps you dizzy but you always feed it to Luffy or redirect it to Chopper's or Usopp's office with a little note.

On the third day, you follow in Zoro's example and sprawl out on the deck to rest your tireless mind. You've always wondered how sleep was ever a possible option for him when the feet thundering across the deck came with obstructive vibrations, no doubt slapping any chance of sleep away from his mind, but you find that it's almost pleasant. Beats all from familiar loves translates through the groves of wooden planks and etch through the back of your spine, you feel a bone fall back into place after Nami's heels against the floor and the thunderous kick that lands where Zoro was standing manages to work its way up your head to ease a headache.

The sun burns cries into your eyes and the skies move fluidly, they don't ripple as clouds shrivel against a light blue you're unfamiliar with; even as you close your eyes, you continue to feel the burn of the sun. The slapping of weaved straw against a sticky, sweaty sole then the deck comes as you slip into sleep.

Dreams have never been so amicable enough to become a recurrent in your life; more often than not, you're shown memories all blended together into a mess that leaves you sick, the abhorrent now and the nostalgic then bleeding past their confines until you see your mother stood next to that deceitful Marine admiral, both with that same look in their face. You wake up with a start when a loud bang scours its way through a flurry images you're unfamiliar with and then your body escapes you. Your head weighs with the heaviness of the bodies dropped to the floor, arms cold as if dipped into the river Styx, bones locked in place with a restrictive pain, muscles burning, aware of every breath that shivers through your suddenly odd body.

"Owww," three Luffys blur around each other as you pushed a hand to the floor to straighten up, you try blinking away the other two, but they're glued to the captain reflecting in your eyes; he looks down at what he's tripped on and follows it back to you. Your hand is met with something curved in shape when you go to push yourself up and when you look down, you see vines underneath you. You realise then that a burst of them had grown beneath you, splitting through the lawn deck and uplifting some of the planks underneath the greenery and inching upwards towards the guard rails of the ship. They take the form of something you think you met in your most recent sleep.

Luffy has managed to crawl his way towards you in the time you spend wondering why your devil fruit had been acting up— in your sleep no less and he wraps a hand around your ankle to get your attention. "Hey, you're really cold." He pointed out, eyes flickering down to the flesh between his fingers and then trailing his fingers up your thigh as he shifts closer to you on his knees.

The touch makes you violent and tender. "Really?" You managed to puff out, giving too much air back to the world with how much you're panting, "I feel a little warm though."

Luffy hums, clapping his hand over your cheeks with gentleness he only shows to those he loves, and it feels wrong. You get an itch underneath your skin that urges you to move, move, move but you can only push Luffy away with a ferocity he'd never shown you as you tremble under the bursting of violent air hacking up your throat, your shoulders strain as you wrapped your arms around your stomach, trying to heave out something that wasn't there.

Luffy scrambles back immediately, not caring for you shoving him away, and soothes away the rattling of your core with his clammy hands on your arm. "Are you sick?"

No, you think as a retch comes up your mouth; maybe, you correct as the path is marked by drool slipping down your chin and tears streaking across your cheeks. You shake away Luffy again. He's less submissive this time, his legs open over yours to plant his knees by your thighs. You hear him call for Chopper and it's obvious he has something of a frown marked on his face; you keep burning beneath your skin, but Luffy keeps rubbing his palms over your arms like you're cold.

You realise what your vines had drawn underneath you when Chopper comes out, fretting over you as he takes Luffy's place close to you. A grave. The image makes you laugh as the reindeer instructs his captain to haul you up after you'd ignored his inquires on if you could walk; your arm bends around the shape of Luffy's shoulder and your laughter erratically convulses into a collection of coughs from the skin on skin high.

You forced into bed rest after Chopper does a preliminary round of tests on you and declares you've simply gone down with a cold. You take to the diagnosis apprehensively, though in Chopper's defence, how was he meant to accurately diagnose you if you don't tell him all your symptoms? Instead, you sit in his office and spend the minutes, all alone, trying to retch out the feeling of having a piece of hair down your throat; you claw at the blanket and keep hacking until you've got a blanket full of tears and spit. The feeling does not pass.

At lunch, you get a visit from Franky who comes by to complain that you've made unnecessary work for him. "—seriously, how did you manage that in your sleep? Were you having a nightmare?" He ranted, legs crossed and leaned back in the visitor chair in a way that pushes his skinny, hairy legs close to your face.

Scrunching up your face, you sit up. "It was the future." You rebut, in between all his fantastical stories of his nightmares and talking about how he'd never attack Sunny even if Chopper grew a mechanical, giant arm and overthrew Luffy to become their captain. "A future," you correct yourself before turning to Franky with eyes judgemental, "are you scared of Chopper?"

"You weren't there at Enies Lobby," he tells you, which serves as a cruel reminder of sorts. You think about all the scars you've seen littered on the crew's skin and wonder which ones they've collected while they were with Luffy and who knows of which. The faint, protruding marks underneath Nami's tattoo, the stitches around Zoro's ankles, the ones pulled across his chest; you wonder if Sanji's got one hidden underneath his bangs. "The future?" Franky repeats after a moment, "are you a prophet?"

"It's a working theory," you brush off instead. "Though I can see in my mind's eye that Luffy is currently eating all the food and you’ll be left to starve if you don't go back."

Franky scrambled up from the seat not a second after your words.

With him gone, you settle back onto the bed and wonder about too many things to recall.

Between the hours after lunch and before dinner, Luffy comes by. He settles himself on the bed and forces you up as well, the shifting causes another cough to burgeon in your throat and you turn your head the other way to spit it out in an uncontrolled group of four. "You're not feeling better?" He frowns.

You see now that he's holding two pieces of barbequed meat in his hand, he's got the bone in his palm as he holds it upright like a sword, juices from the flesh dripping down to his hand and the smell gives you a headache. "Do you want this?" You move your eyes to Luffy, he's got his eyebrows furrowed together and his lips straightened out in a line when you don't answer. "Both?" He looks over at you, then the meat, and then you. "You," he swallows, "you can have them," his knuckles turn red around the bone, "since you need energy and you're sick." You think he's trying to convince himself to give them up.

You reached out and watch Luffy's face turn sour as his expression squeezes altogether around a midpoint trapped in his nose; you retract your hand and watch his face relax and his body unwind, you think he's moved his hand back a little. You repeat it again a few more times until laughter comes up and dislodges the uncomfortable feel of hair set deep in your throat. "It's fine, Luffy, you can have 'em."

"Really?"

"Mhm, go for it."

He moans around a bite of meat, crying your name as he chews and says thank you. The feeling is back as soon as it left.

No one comes to visit after that. Chopper comes by before he heads off to bed to make sure you're all set for the night and tells you that he expects to be woken up if you feel any symptoms get worse. You agree to his conditions, though can barely make yourself seem like you were taking him seriously with his cute face scolding you, but it seemed to work well enough as he's gone after he leaves a cup of water by your side. Sleep lingers around the corner, shirking away from your twitching fingertips and restless eyes; you give up after a few minutes, thinking about Robin who'd been thrown on watch tonight.

After going back and forth on the details, you bundle up yourself in the blanket (not wanting to have to mimic any semblance of serious guilt to get through Chopper's less than intimidating scolding if you get any sicker in the morning) and wander to the deck. The darkness of the sea would be safe for you, twisting around every limb extended to grope your way through your chosen path and oozing out from strands of hair to empty at your feet if not for the lamp of the moon ahead of you. Its light a forecast of tragedy, reflecting off a blade that would drive through the blood of a man who faced an unlikely love with only disgust and betrayal. "Robin?" The light hangs onto your word with a vehemence to uncover your unjustifiable deeds.

"Ivy," a shudder of surprise rattles your head to duck to your shoulders as you turn around. "Sorry, did I scare you?"

You give Robin a frown, tugging your lips down. "Yeah, my weakened bones nearly fell to the floor." She huffs a laugh. "Please announce yourself before you appear." Robin traces over your palish face and your features soften into a smile when your eyes meet.

"Can't sleep?" She asks once you two settle at the side of the Sunny where you'd napped earlier today, some of your vines still wedged between planks and parts of the floor haphazardly missing. You lean your back against the side of the ship and lower your eyes to the floor.

It's a total void, welcoming you back home. "No," you answer, a little breathless. The moon doesn't shuttle into the hole of the deck and something reaches a hand out for you between the atoms of a black hole. Roots twist out, easing close to your feet and sinking beneath the soles of your shoes. "I napped a little earlier." It's safe.

Robin hummed— I know rattles through her hum— and her elbow falls onto the guard rail of the ship. For the next few moments, you regret coming out. Robin's always been more receptive to the details and fine lines; it's not surprising that she can nitpick through a flurry of fronts and covers to the feelings you want to hide. They beckon out to her, wanting to fill that hole that's grown smaller with every day she wakes up to the open seas and the lively sound of her crew. "Chopper said you were sick?"

"A cold," you sniffle, bringing the blanket closer to you. Finding some semblance of confidence inside you, your eyes flicker over to Robin but she isn't looking at you— only turns when she feels your gaze levelled on her. You hesitate, searching for something to say and land on extending an arm and opening the blanket to invite her into your bundle. "You cold?"

She laughs, "it's fine, you should go back in if you've got a cold though." Her head tilted with a smile, "it'll be bad if the night air makes you worse."

Not wanting to find yourself softened in moonlight nor her eyes, you nod and bid her a goodnight before shivering your way back into your room. The door opens and light from Sunny's hallway is swallowed into the darkness of your room before it's banished out with the slam of your door, you shuffle around odd things thrown on the floor and slip into bed.

Your sleep is broken through with intervals with coughing, curling into yourself, shivering still though you burn in the night like a sibling of a star. When you wake up, sometime in the afternoon, you're heaving and reaching out your arms all around your duvet to haul together the skin that feels like it's melted down. Your palms prick against the leaves of vines that have overtaken your room, they fluoresce around your body and branch outwards to all corners of your room. The mess all blur together as your brain thrashes in your head with every splutter, you shake and twitch, trying to make sense of anything. Skin burned raw as you attempt to kick away the shrubbery that's keeping the blanket contorted around your body.

Your throat skinned and crude with its imminent thoughts of water.

A hand reached back blindly to grope at your bedside table for the cup that Chopper left for you last night. What you find instead is the burning touch of the sun, it seeps through the micro wounds stabbed through lines of your fortune and inflames every nerve straight to your heart. Your hand snaps back towards your body, the bones shivering from the imminent heat. Your entire body twitches at different paces, an invasive and hungry need drowns your senses. You need water, you need not for this to happen, water, you need for your sleep to be calm, you need to stop burning, you want to stop losing control, water first. You want water. Water— you turn your head to find the water, you need— Luffy?

Luffy is sat on a chair that you don't remember being there and when you look a little closer, you see that your vines had granted him a throne to comfortably lay on, other than that, they avoid him like the near plague. His body is leaned forward, his chest laid against the side of your mattress and arms crossed on your bed to sleep on like a pillow. You retch up some acid and, like the bowed head of a priest, a gentle petal disrupts the stream, flowing against the tide. It's a beautiful purple colour that's light against the transition to white towards the middle and an eye-catching yellow streaking against the white; lines of a deeper hue stretch through the petal and it's oddly reminiscent of veins.

The petal sits on the puddle of stomach acid that warms your thighs, your head bowed down to stare at it; you feel your soul unfurl at the sight of it, branches stretched outwards over a riverside, the heavy head of buds pulling weighted branches down to drink from the stream. Everything else blurs with a ripple, the petal is withstanding no matter no much you try blinking away an oncoming headache. The river near dries up in your attempt to wash down this unnerving disgust; you hunger for more.

Little changes when you find out what this 'cold' truly was. The lighting in Sunny's library is several shades warmer than the light of the sun, it draws upon the hunched shoulders down to your back as you tilt your head to hear the bones crack under your ear. Four syllables, that's all your death is. A lot of words are four syllables. Anonymous; unfortunate; hilarious; adventurous; hanahaki. It doesn't mean a lot by itself, so you try giving it some context. You pretend to tell Chopper that you're dying, you have hanahaki and that it's something he can't cure in a way you'll accept and you still feel nothing. You think about Chopper's face. He adamantly tells you that he'll cure you, he'll do it. The you in your imagination tells him no. Faced with your refusal, Chopper cannot do anything. In the end, it is a grave that cures you.

Death, as it stands, was something you had accepted when you stepped onto a pirate ship. Even someone with as stubborn a character as Zoro could be welcomed in by death, even Luffy. For a while, you wonder about death. The air in the room pauses as if to grace you with the silence to ponder on it, all you hear is the sound of your own breathing.

The closest thing to death comes searching for you a few minutes later.

You've always been interested in Brook. A skeleton with nothing but a sword; he has no lungs yet still sings, no heart and still smiles, dead but human in all his actions and behaviours. "There you are." He sneaks up behind you, bones falling onto your shoulder as you think, he smiles down at you. "Luffy asked if I’d seen you earlier.” He looms over you for a moment before he's straightening back up and calling out loudly, "but I'm a skeleton so it's not like I have eyes to see anyone anyways!"

It's the two syllables 'Lu–ffy' that shakes you the most. You stifle a cough in your chest and feel it tear through your ribs instead, searching for a path out. "For what?" The breaths rattle in your chest and shudder through your words.

"He wanted to show you a beetle." He takes the seat next to you, peering down at the picture book that you have open. You wait for him to make a comment about seeing what you were reading before disregarding it all with a lack of eyeballs so he wasn't seeing it really but he doesn't say anything, so you're forced to talk instead.

"Brook."

"Yes?"

It takes a single breath to prepare you to say this, it's warm and evident that you've not yet truly succumbed to your illness. "Do you see yourself as dead?"

Death is the art of those who do not live. It's something that keeps people tethered to the moment; it's the one thing that keeps humans humane. It's evidence you've lived, no matter how full nor how long. She's beautiful in her own right.

"I cannot see myself as anything because I am a skeleton with no eyes!"

Brook does not get to elaborate because Luffy shuttles in moments later, whispering loudly. (He'd learned somewhere that you're meant to be quiet in a library when he was younger but his whispers still manage to shake the room somehow.) "You're here! I found a beetle to show you!" He tip–toes to your side, "what're you reading— oh, hi Brook! The flowers here are pretty!" He points a finger down to a sunflower; his index covers an entire petal and he strokes it upwards to the middle. "Do you think they're edible?"

He turns to you with a smile.

You meet him with the same, "their seeds are." He gasps and picks up the book to scour through the letters in search of a name of these seeds. You take in a shuddering breath and when you feel another urge to cough, you cannot stop it.

When vines splatter around the room, they uproot the place; they've always been disruptive in this way. A wave of them washes various bouts of furniture to the floor, through the pounding of your ears, you hear the sound of books thudding as green appendages snake through bookcases and rattle them at the base; Brook's chair collapses as a vine chokes out one of its legs into splinters, the world blurs into a hue of greens and purples. A hand reaches from down in your throat, you heave around gaps of allowance for air and gag, cough, retch up more acid and some tea that Sanji brewed earlier this morning in lieu of breakfast. It's unpleasant. It's ugly in a way death should not be, though you guess the dead don't get to choose how to live in the same way the living cannot choose their death.

You're hauled off to Chopper again.

Chopper's voice comes as the hollow sounds of keys on an old piano. He does another round of tests on you— this set lasts a little longer than the previous and he takes extra caution with some. He finds that your heart is a little faster than it should be, he nitpicks at the bluish tint around your fingers and notes the concerning amount of weight you've lost in the past few weeks. When he asks you, what's wrong, you tell him that that's what he should be telling you.

Hypoxia; another four syllables for your cause of death. "Some of the symptoms are there," Chopper frowns, mumbling to himself. "It's when your tissues aren't getting enough oxygen, do you have difficulty breathing?"

You placed your cheek into your palm, elbow on Chopper's desk. "You're a pretty good doctor, Chopper."

The effect is immediate, he starts blushing and kicking his legs in his seat, a hoof goes to rub at the back of his head and nervous laughter comes from him. "That isn't distracting me at all, you bastard." You smiled and watched the compliment break any semblance of professionalism in him.

He gets back on track a little while later, placing a stethoscope on your chest and asking you to cough. You're not sure exactly what he's looking for but you give a soft cough into your elbow and you can say for certain— just based off the way he jumps back and looks at you a little quietly for a second, it's nothing good. Chopper spends a few minutes looking at your fingertips, then your lips, then some other parts of skin already exposed and humming to himself, troubled.

For now, he says, he wants you to try not to exert yourself— maybe leave fighting to everyone else and focus on resting until he can figure out a better way to confidently diagnose you. His lips are pulled into a frown, hands in his lap and trying his best to be professional and keep his emotions at bay. Before you know it, your hand is on top of his pink hat and fondly rubbing over the material softly. "Thanks Chopper, I'll keep that in mind."

He nods. You hesitate for a second before you're getting up to leave so that everyone else can see that you're not dying— or maybe you should tell them you are, you're not sure you could take another session of Franky accusing you of destroying the Sunny to create more work for him.

Your hand wraps around the doorknob and twists, stopping when Chopper speaks again. "You're not hiding something from me," he accuses gently, "are you?"

Your hand tightens around the doorknob. A flash of that imaginary Chopper comes back to you— heartbroken and confused at your refusal to be cured— you steal an unnecessarily large breath from the world. "I get sudden cravings for sweet things if that means anything."

Chopper, unbeknownst to you, takes those words and carves them true and raw into himself. His eyes are unwilling to leave you for more than necessary during the times you eat together, he watches you push aside the food on your plate, tearing small bits of meat off the bone to chew on it for a couple minutes too long before swallowing. He makes note of the way you have no problems finishing up everything but any sort of meat, sliding them over to Luffy, or one of his victims.

You're met with another blossom soon after lunch. You've made a bad habit of leaving the table early to escape the smell and resign yourself to the open deck, sprawling out on the grass like Zoro usually does. You're certain you're about to fall asleep shivering but the slap, slap, slapping of your captain's sandals are nearing closer so your brain kicks awake with a start; your eyes twitch, eyelashes shuddering in the wind. The darkness over your eyes morphs into a shadow of Luffy hovering over you, head tilting with a hand on his hat— your mind supplies you with the frown— and then you hear him taking a step back and sitting down next to you.

A troubled melody hums through his lips and when you open an eye to peek at him, you see his hands wrapped around his ankles, legs loosely crossed; he turned back to you and you quickly close your eyes. Here is where you finally learn that when Luffy touches, he's never placated with a simple tap, a light knocking between skin— no, he must stroke, he drags his fingers up the side of your thigh, he shivers from the coldness of your flesh and, even then, crawls closer. Then he's silent for a worrying amount of time and for a moment, curiosity takes you over. You find yourself wanting to draw light upon the disgusted features when he's met with someone he thinks close to him is growing closer and closer to a grave amongst the roots.

He leans his forehead against yours whilst you shuffle through the despicable crawl of your heart through your bones, something shifts in you and when you reach to itch at your side, it dislodges. It takes no more than a simple flip for your entire world to shift; you think you saw Luffy hovering over you momentarily before you had snapped to the side.

A fragment of the world greets its end.

Something strangles you, a hand of a giant pressing two fingers against the sides of your neck until everything in you bursts and splatters against parts that have gone unknown until now. There's nothing new to the tremor of vine that erupts through your skin, bubbling through the surface of flesh like a geyser; the tentacles claw their way your throat until you're choking around them, searching for an allowance for air. Your knees shuffle up to find some balance, head ducked to meet the lawn across the deck and elbows digging deep into the dirt. Your spluttering comes in time with the sound of Luffy calling your name, shouting for Chopper; there's a knot tied inside your mouth, you shake away tremors and tears all the same. You erupt yet there's nothing to be burnt, it's only ash that leaves your mouth— only the colourful petals of the wisteria plant that wash over the green of the open deck, burnt in hues with blood.

The next island is a spring island, known for their sweet peaches and sweeter music.

You watched Luffy devour two peaches in his hands, the ripe skin melting underneath his teeth— pale with a dusted blush until it snapped into a bloody red, melted at the pit. Then he's gone with a rustle of mikan trees as you held out a basket for Nami to delicately place her mikans in; apparently, she'd managed to catch the attention of some peach vendor with her sweet tangerines and swindled the poor man out of his money for a basket.

The streets are lined with lively hums and a strumming of odd instruments, music escapes through every crevice of a worn-down building as Luffy jumps from stall to stall, drooling over the goods before you're beckoning him back with his lunchbox and a promise of meat after you finish this errand for Nami. On your way to the stall, you hear faint chattering that doesn't interest you but Luffy straightened up beside you and turns to stare at the people as they argue on who had managed to grow the biggest peach this year.

You sigh, grabbing hold of Luffy's collar when he stops to stare at them and drag him off to the stall vendor who had fallen victim to Nami's schemes. The exchange is easy enough— give him the basket (ignore the fact that Nami had managed to make it look like it was overflowing by artfully bunching up a cloth on the bottom and filled gaps between the fruits with flowers) and make sure you've got the correct amount of money. It's when Luffy asks the stall vendor who has the biggest peach this year that things begin to go downhill.

Rather than answering Luffy's question, the man goes on a tangent about some kind of festival for a God and how the biggest peach will be the offering to said God this year— apparently, Shumi (the woman who owns the fabrics shops) had managed to get her hands on this, that, or the other to help her husband grow a peach large enough to bring doubt to the fact that Gyupuri had managed to grow the largest peach (again) this year.

Luffy insists on tracking them both down to help the people come to a decision as he wiped away the drool on his chin. Resigned, you managed to find Shumi first with her shop being the only one in town that sold fabrics and she denies you both permission to see the peach; Gyupuri, on the other hand, is more than happy to show you to the peach he grows. He takes you straight out of town, into the forest, and then up the mountain to where there's a clearing full of nothing but flesh coloured peaches.

As you listen to Gyupuri's story on how he was merely taking after his father to grow these strangely sized peaches, you have to keep Luffy in your hold so he doesn't go running to the giant peach and take a bite out of what could be for a God. Somehow though, he manages to get a handful of flat peaches when you weren't looking and when you attempt to apologise to Gyupuri, he doesn't seem to be fazed, shoving a few more peaches into your hand and telling you it's fine.

"So, who is this God anyway?" Luffy asks, his legs wrapped around your waist and chin hooked on your shoulder as he leaned back, satisfied with cheeks full of the peach you were holding in your hand. You turn to give him a look, but he merely stares at you back.

The people here must have made a unanimous decision to answer questions from the left side of the field because Gyupuri only tells you the name of this God when he drags you and Luffy up a hill to stare at a statue of this God carved out of generic stone.

To be polite, you call the statue pretty; Luffy feels no need to be polite, so he says it's not really. When you look at him to furrow your eyebrows at him, he's already looking at you.

When you're back on the ship, money handed to Nami, you think about that moment so much that it grows moss in your mind and vines burst through the crevices of the worn–down artifact you've made out his gaze to be. You throw up everything you manage to eat and feel hollow and worthy when you meet Luffy's eyes in Chopper's office again.

There's a chill that follows your days after that.

It's persistent and stubborn in a way that cruelly reminds you of Luffy. On a brighter side, you've got an excuse to be lazy in bed though it irks your bones not to have the weight of you walking thrumming up your body. You get visits from the Strawhats, get your food delivered to you, some of the crew shuffling into your room to keep you entertained with some card games and the likes— you get Luffy consistently making his way into your room and treating it as any other room on his Sunny. He comes in, always makes himself home on the bed, and talks about what he did today. At some point, it becomes less endearing and more annoying to be treated as though you were actually dying. (You hadn't told them for a reason.)

Four days after Chopper had resolutely punished you with bed rest, Luffy decides that he was going to start sleeping in your room. Apparently, your face had translated over what your head was thinking too quickly because he starts whining, saying that he wouldn't get to see you enough if he doesn't do this and, well, since you've always had a tender, raw, skinned soft spot for the boy, you end up saying yes.

He spends his first night telling you what he was going to spend tomorrow doing and you come to the realisation that every other sentence contains you. (Going to find more beetles to show you... Chopper told Sanji it'd be good to get more meat into your diet... Zoro accidentally cut snakes and ladders in half so Nami is giving me money to see if we can find one for you so we can play... Robin said there's a really pretty flower on this next island… For you… For you...) It’s all there laid bare and you cannot face it. You hide your face into the crook of your elbow and wretch out a cough. Luffy frowns but doesn't mention it. He talks himself into sleep and you lay awake to him, trying to keep yourself from blooming throughout the night so he doesn't wake up, cold and still.

When you're startled awake with misty embrace in a dream, you see that Luffy has gone.

What he has left is his straw hat and a mouthpiece of his greatness. The straw is rough against your fingers, resembling the thorns that grows along roses and you stare at it in your lap until you can feel the roughness in your throat— just when you think you need to get water, Sanji shows up with breakfast. You eye the cigarette in his lips and ignore the settling of the tray on your bedside table, watch the smoke fight the smell of scrambled eggs and bits of bacon to take over your room.

"We're at an island?"

Sanji walks around your bed, finding himself comfortable on the couch across the foot of your bed. "We docked early this morning," you watched his smoke rise, ash falling to the wooden floor of your room, waving and grasping hands up to God. Sanji keeps himself entertained by looking around your room, his foot pushing around odd leaves and petals on the floor before he nods over to the plate. "Eat." Then he's gone.

You stare at the tray, settling Luffy's straw hat aside, you shuffle to the end of your bed and take the fork in your hands— you look at the plate until you swear you can taste the eggs in your mouth and the slight bursts of saltiness that'll come from the bacon and you have to wash it down with the glass of water he's given you. You push it aside and opt to go back to sleep.

You dream of a still life on top of a hill, overlooking a dock as the Sunny pulls back out into the sea; you thrash but find every part of you rooted down to one spot, the wind picks up and you feel tangles of what could be hair or leaves hitting against a part of your body. You're still rooted despairingly in a garden of silks and duvets when you wake, Luffy had found himself unable to keep away from your breakfast but when you sit up and look a little closer, you see a pile of the diced bacon bits shoved off to the side as he shovelled eggs into his mouth.

Shattering free from the earth with a faltering cough broken into four, you shuffled yourself up and spit out a cluster of wisteria. At this point, you do not need to look at Luffy to know what his face looks like; he turned to face you, cheeks full and quickly finishing the eggs to shuffle closer to you on the bed with a book in his hands. "You left your book under the plate."

It's a hardback children's book, pulled out of Sunny's library and coloured a light blue that resembled the sky and broken apart by a sunflower in the middle and petals around it, the title curled around the sunflower. You know that the book was left in the library when you were having your episode. The cover is smooth to the touch as Luffy gives it to you and ends up knocking his shoulders against yours in his attempt to get closer; your eyes moved over to the tray of food and you think of Sanji, who'd grown up in the North Blue where this children's story was more popular amongst the romantic commonwealth. 

He knows, you think, and it fills you with a dread that the wisteria blossoms feast upon delightfully; he knows, and he could tell everyone, the vines throb over your heart as Luffy opens the book over your lap and looks up, expectantly at you.

Myrsa was a pretty girl, enough so that praises sang for her ended up calling upon the scorn of love's Goddess. The depiction of her getting cursed is almost comical, stricken by lightning as she returns from a forest with a basket full of flowers and mushrooms. "What happens next? What happens next?" Luffy pushes his face closer to the book, tangling a rubbery leg with yours as he moves impossibly closer. "How does Myrsa beat up the God?"

It's the certainty he holds that Myrsa will beat up God that makes you laugh, it's the fact that she does not beat anything that makes you tremble, shaking coughs and petals out your throat. Luffy seems to think that the book is too excitable, trying to pry it away from you and saying that he can ask Robin to read it to him later so you should just rest. "Don't you want to know if Myrsa will beat up the God now?" You ask instead, knowing the answer will be yes.

Perhaps they were the wrong words to convince Luffy because when you're on the last page, Myrsa buried in a forgotten land and her love used as fertiliser for a field of sunflowers, he's threatening to beat up a God made up to exact revenge for Myrsa. It's a lot more cheerful than you had expected— all the characters drawn with round faces, small bodies, and black dots as eyes. It makes death seem redeemable. 

After Luffy hauls himself out of your room, in search of the God had turned Myrsa into sunflowers, you force the bacon down your mouth and bring the tray out to Sanji. You linger in the kitchen, eyes watching him as he scrubbed the dishes and danced around the kitchen, no doubt knowing why you were there. He doesn't seem to want to be the one to approach the topic just based on the way he refused to stop even for a moment for the past fifteen minutes you've been there.

You know nothing about Sanji past the fact that he's blond, he's a cook, and he used to be a prince from North Blue's Germa Kingdom.

"You know Myrsa didn't die because she had hanahaki." Your hip meets the edge of an island, arms crossed over your chest as you watched Sanji finally slow to a halt, throwing a glance over at you. He takes his cigarette between two fingers, breathing in for a moment and then takes it out, holding it out to you. "What she was cursed with, wasn't ever meant to be able to kill her."

"I know."

Sanji takes the cigarette back after you shake your head, shrugging a little as he continued. "Myrsa died."

You laugh a little, "I read the book."

There's a point he's trying to make that's as foreign to you as the notion of a love that doesn't hurt but he turns a glance to you that almost reads like he's disappointed in you and it settles nicely against the vines choking you through. You straighten up, uncrossing your arms and his visible eye wanders back over the pots he has boiling on the stove. "You liked the ending?" The ending of the North Blue story was a two–page spread of a sunflower field, a planet of bright yellows and a dull light blue, clouds breaking apart overwhelming tones of sunny golds and drowning diamonds.

A tree split awkwardly in half due to the spine of the book, curved in shape and pinched in the middle until you held the pages at the edges and pulled to straighten in down. "It was pretty," a gentle breeze running through the leaves shedding from the tree, a shiver to the wooden flesh that split apart if looked at the right way by the right man. Myrsa was beautiful, even in a death she didn't pick treated her well.

How could you hope to live when she did not?

You find a lot of things pretty now; you wonder if that's the dead crawling in you that is beginning to appreciate the life around. Robin sat on the deck with a cup of cooling coffee on a table in front of her and a book in her hand, Nami stood between her rows of mikan trees, Zoro straining under the weights of his responsibilities, Brook with a violin to his shoulder. The sky drowned over the ocean as Luffy leaned his head against you on Sunny's figurehead, his voice a soft beat over the water rushing against the hull of the ship. He's talking about Shanks and his dream and your heart aches selfishly; his skin gulps down the orange light of the dawning sun and you resigned yourself to a death loving him.

You wonder if Luffy still thinks of his dead brother, your tongue slips against the bark of your gums, and you open your mouth without thinking. "Luffy," you hear spoken into the wind, "will you tell me about your brother?"

"Sabo?" He's clapping his feet together excitedly, turning from the sky to you with a large grin on his face, "he's a part of the Revelation Army— no, wait revocation? Revenge Army? Renovation Army! Wait— that's not right."

"No, the other one." A whisper haunts the wind, 'the dead one' written in its movement.

There's a certain hesitation to his words that brings you to the realisation that being loved by Luffy is a wonderful thing. He's never been one to be articulate with words, picking the simple ones that come to mind first without a moment's hesitation but strangely the simple–minded way served him well when it came to love. Love is not articulate either— it's one of the simplest things in the world— so when it's met with someone like Luffy, it blossoms into an art form of all things beautiful.

You regret have not meeting Luffy when Ace was around. Dancing around his features is a tender skip of tightness; his shoulders pulled up to his ears, head ducked down, lips awkward and tongue thick as he told you the story of being accepted to be Ace's brother. Hues of embers fluoresce, dripping down on Sunny's figurehead as you reached an arm around him; his words are stained in blood and adoration, strained and slow but Luffy persists, his love persists.

"You should've met him!" He finishes, turning to you with a light chuckle. "You would've loved him."

Your hand falls onto his shoulder, pulling him closer despite the crawl of vomit up your throat and you leaned your head against his straw hat. "Maybe I will."

Death is another thing you think is simple. It's as easy as slipping into Chopper's office to find him hunched over his desk, his hooves holding onto a pestle as he circled the butt around in a mortar. "Ah, you're here?" He glanced over his shoulder as you walked around him and settled onto one of the beds he has in his room. "Give me a second! I nearly have your medicine ready."

"Chopper," you think you've played this out in your head before, "I have hanahaki."

His arms slow down to a halt, his face dropping by several degrees; the previous petals that made up his hopeful and cheerful expression flutter to the floor, guided by the winds you'd altered with those four words.

"Hanahaki?" Chopper's words are slow as he settled the pestle down, "I thought— but it doesn't exist?"

"Funnily enough, it died off." You tell him with a little laugh. "As more people took to the seas and chased after the one piece, less people fell victim to hanahaki." The Chopper you've told this to before in your mind was definitely less devastated and surprised to be greeted by the fact that you have hanahaki.

He's stumbling over his words, trying to pick something to focus on first as his face was scrunched up, eyebrows furrowed, and lips open into disbelief. "How long have you known? Why didn't you tell me? You'll have the surgery, right? You can trust me; I'll definitely save you. When did it first start?" Your head is pounding with the incessant questions he spits at you, unable to answer any of them as any allowance for a response was filled in by another inquiry. Suddenly, he's pulling his mind to a stop as he turned back to you, solemn and sad and asks, "who is it?" 

It's easy to tell how Luffy has touched people, Chopper makes note of the way your head tilts and you smile and it's obvious that there was no one else capable of calling upon your love.

"And the surgery?"

The look on your face, although foreign to you, tells him all he needs to know.

That doesn't stop him though, he keeps himself by your side and urges (pleads) you to have the surgery; his constant presence becomes a problem when he makes a point of forcing Luffy away from you. It's small at first, trying to distract Luffy with other things, claiming to want to be the one to watch over Luffy when you all dock so you're not given the chance, clinging onto your arms and demanding your attention when Luffy threatens to take it away from him. Then, when Luffy notices that he's been holding onto this flower for hours, fingers pinched around a sunflower stem to ask you how you get seeds from the flower to eat, and every time he's seen a speck of your colour from corners, Chopper shows up to drag you away or points a finger somewhere to shout about a meat mountain, he has a problem.

You notice it's about the meat mountain at first though.

He's slamming the door to Chopper's office after the fourth time, shouting, "Chopper! Where's the meat mountain you keep talking about?" He doesn't seem to care about the fact that Chopper is checking up on you as he stomps into the room, plopping himself down right next to you. Chopper pushes him away when your shoulders brush against each other and you're coughing out bloodied petals. His attention diverts when he hears the shaking of your cough, how you knock into him uncontrollably as your torso leans to meet your thighs, hands deep into the foam edge of the mattress. Petals splatter onto your shoes, clinging to the leather with saliva and re–painting the laces in a sickly red. Luffy’s touch is intrusive, a hand tightened on your thigh that burns your skin to ash and forces vines to splutter out your skin. They attack him, you reel yourself away from Luffy in hopes that they don’t reach him but in some disgusting way, they force themselves to new lengths to coil around his limbs. Spindling up and up and up and you can’t see his face anymore as a thick rope of vines in the shape of his hand reaches out for you, they keep moving up until you only see his hat— your back knocks against the wall. You sternly tell yourself this death is acceptable; the vines grow limp.

When you’ve calmed down enough, the first thing Luffy asks you is, “why aren’t you better yet?” And you feel as though you’re being scolded for some reason; your eyes flicker over to Chopper, fingers tangled together in front of your thighs from the corner of the room you’ve forced yourself into. When Luffy catches the wandering glances— as if you’re trying to keep him out of something— he treats you exactly how you’re acting. Like a criminal.

“Chopper?” It’s unnerving how his eyes are still on you, no trace of expression on his face, “out.”

“But—”

“Out.” Chopper throws you an unhelpful glance as he passes you to get to the door.

You’ve always had the wrong impression of Luffy— everyone that doesn’t know him has the same image; he’s a pirate that has taken down warlord after warlord, who has brought horrifying change and shifts the balance of authority wherever his feet take him. Hearing hushed whispers of him and his close affiliates in the lightened haze of booze, to distract from a tooth getting knocked out of place never does much for his image either. Though it wouldn’t be right to say that Luffy is wholly good either— he’s selfish. Selfish and impossibly kind and downright disgusting with the handling of his own needs; the sound of your name fizzing between his teeth has you startled, nodding your head back to him on the bed you’d left him at.

“You’re hiding something.” It’s not a question nor is it an accusation of any kind. It’s an observation. Luffy slides himself off the bed, his sandals comically slap against the floor of Chopper’s office, “tell me.” His hands fall onto your shoulders, one stays there and the other slides down. He treats your skin like an amusement park for his pleasure; his nails drag across the goosebumps of your bicep, pressing down on raised scars and then splashes into the palm of your hand, dragging ripples in the centre.

You hesitate, twisting your fingers together and pulling as if to attempt to dislodge the odd feeling that follows his fingertips. “Are you asking as a captain?” Despite how general expectations of Luffy remain pretty low to those who do know him, it’s also known that Luffy has a nerve in him that’s impossibly receptive to hurt. There’s a certain way to activate it and when it’s on, it doesn't quieten down until its idiot owner is pleased. Luffy scrunches his face up in an odd way, displeasured at your question as if he couldn’t believe you’d ask him something that hurtful, and his head tilts.

“Tell me.” You’re met with an unwavering stare, the hand on your shoulder tightens and there’s a hardness to it that you’ve never associated with your rubber captain— you can feel the bone in his fingers, stern and undeniable. Your eyes trace over the exposed, tanned skin of his bicep and you wish that you could force your vines through his skin to crawl into his chest and listen to the tremors that’ll run up your devil fruit from his beating heart for some kind of answer. There’s a sudden breath that’s available to you that isn’t tainted and clogged, trapped before it even meets your lungs, but it burns in a new way as you stare at Luffy, scared and terrified of a new life that’ll be forced upon you if you tell him what’s wrong with you.

You open your mouth with an excuse, but Luffy huffs and the words shrivel in your mouth, collapsing to a grain on your tongue and when you close your mouth, you taste dirt. “Luffy,” you beg, “I can’t— just, I’ll be fine.”

There’s a hint of some anger in his gaze before it turns into a haunting realisation, “Chopper knows, doesn’t he?” He pushes you aside, “I’ll just ask Chopper.”

There’s a ringing distant in your ears that chimes like the bell of the church from that place two islands ago, maybe three— you haven’t been too good with time recently. Sunny shakes like the earth as a body hits the pavement, you feel disgusting and heavy and an itch claws through your palms where Luffy’s hand has just been. You’re sure it’s Chopper he’s shaking an answer from but you hear Robin’s voice, calling for him to calm down and when that doesn’t work, Sanji cuts in. It all gets further and further away, you think about the planks of Sunny opening to welcome you back into that darkness from nights ago, you think about being choked by one of your vines, you think about the wisteria blooming whole in your lungs— you think and you think and think and suddenly, it’s all nothing. You’re dying, you think, that’s a fact, what else? Luffy is the reason. Or maybe you’re the reason.

“Luffy,” were you the one talking? “Luffy.” The voice comes again, stern and your eyebrows furrow with the same tension that the voice is carrying. “Thank you for being my captain.”

Not that it surprises you, Luffy punches you.

[zigrethsnotebook]

hey I wasn't sure if u were taking requests so I'm sorry of this is annoying. Do u think u could write a ford x witch reader who like lives in the woods and has a bunch of odd pets (snakes, frogs, small cryptids, etc) I js think it's a really cool idea lol

Have a nice night

Drink water, eat food, and feel loved ❤️

-led

I absolutely am taking requests! ^^ Thank you, and I hope you enjoy💞

In the woods somewhere

Ford x Witch!Reader

words: 1,515

tags: sfw, fluff

Now that Ford was back in Gravity Falls and everything had finally settled, he went out to explore the forests again. Stan had just chuckled and told him to better stay in one piece and be back for dinner.

Ford made sure to walk a straight line pointing away from his house. If he followed it for long enough he would eventually reach a part of the forest he had never before seen. So he did.

It took him about five and a half hours to reach that point. Out here, the forest looked... greener. He wanted to say lighter but that's not true. The sun shone the same way it did anywhere else. But the colors of the trees and plants looked more vibrant somehow.

As he walked he made sure to note down anything he hadn't seen before. While Ford was examining a plant he didn’t know a butterfly landed on it. Ford smiled and pulled out his journal, trying to get a quick sketch of the little guy in his notes.

The insect had other plans though and soon flew onward. Ford followed it with his eyes for a second before his legs decided to follow the creature until it settled again. It had such a pretty pattern on its wings, he really wanted to draw it.

His plans worked out and he got a nice drawing of the butterfly. As Ford stood and looked around for the path he'd been on, he noticed that he had strayed off of it quite a bit. Making the best of a bad situation he decided to just explore this part of the forest instead.

After a few minutes roaming aimlessly, he came upon a clearing. In the middle of that stood a little wooden house, tinier than his own, in parts overgrown with moss and vines. It wasn't abandoned though. There was smoke coming out of the chimney.

His curious nature getting the better of him, Ford decided to approach the house. As he got closer he saw some creatures scurrying around the house and away from him. They seemed very fluffy, it must have been beard cubs, he decided.

Ford carefully walked around the house, trying to see where the animals had run off to. Behind the house he found a little garden where someone had planted vegetables, as well as a little pond that buzzed with dragonflies, bees and all kinds of other insects. The sounds were rounded off with some croaks from frogs he couldn't quite locate.

It was truly idyllic. But it was also a long way from all other people. As far as Ford could tell, he was their closest neighbour. He turned back towards the house and walked back around to its front door.

Ford knocked on the door. It took a few seconds and then the door swung open, revealing a way younger-looking person than he had anticipated. For some reason Ford had assumed that he’d be greeted by some sort of witch that was way older than he was.

The person who had opened the door looked truly surprised. They hadn't been expecting any visitors today.

After a few moments of stunned silence on both ends, you realized who this man in front of you must be. "Oh, goodness! You must be the new neighbour! I am so sorry I never got around to welcoming you properly."

This caused Ford even more confusion. You smiled at him and tapped your forehead as you realized why he was irritated. "Oh, I see. Sorry about that. Why don't you come inside for a cup of tea and I will explain what's going on here?"

Ford just nodded and let you lead him inside. As Ford looked around you introduced yourself and he did the same. He found the house even more charming on the inside. It was decorated with lots of plants and a surprising amount of candles. The rooms were way better lit than he would have assumed from the outside.

It was comfortably warm and a faint smell of lavender hung in the air. While Ford was sitting down at your kitchen table you prepared some tea for the both of you. "So tell me, Ford, how did you find me?"

"I was out in the woods, exploring a part of it that I had never been to. I lost the path I was on because I was... sort of... blindly following a butterfly." He rubbed his neck sheepishly. While he spoke, he looked around your house, really taking in all the little decorations you had scattered around every surface.

You chuckled at his words. "Yes. It happens to the best of us." A few moments later you had finished the tea and brought it over to the table, sitting down in front of Ford, who looked at you with pure curiosity sparkling in his eyes. It was adorable.

"So who are you? Why did you call me your new neighbour? And what did you mean by welcome me? Aren't you a little young to remember me moving to Gravity Falls?" You smiled at him and hummed. His questions were more than justified.

"Yes. Well, actually I assume I am around the same age as you are. I inherited this little cottage from my mother about two years before the reclusive scientist moved into the forest."

You watched Ford's eyes widen as he came to understand that you were telling the truth. "I really wanted to visit you and welcome you into the neighbourhood, but I didn’t get around to it for a couple of weeks. Then, the gnomes started telling me about some mean man capturing creatures."

Ford furrowed his brows, a hint of shame bubbling up inside him. "As you can imagine, I wasn't particularly thrilled to hear that. I went out to confront you about it, but the creatures stopped me, they were worried you'd capture me as well. So instead, I just helped them from here however I could."

Ford shook his head. "I never meant to harm any of them! I only came here to study." You sighed and nodded. "Yes. I know and I believe you." He looked back up at you with an apologetic look. Then it changed into an inquisitive one. "Why would I have tried to capture you?"

You chuckled at the question. "Because I am a witch, silly!" Ford's mouth fell open. How could he not have realized this? "Did you really think I would still look this good if there wasn't at least little magic involved?" You winked at him and he blushed slightly.

You took a sip of your tea as Ford tried to sort his thoughts. Before he could get a new one out a frog jumped into his cup splashing him with liquid. You huffed. "George! You know you're not supposed to do that!" The frog just croaked at you and you countered with a stern look.

You stood and took the cup with the frog back to the sink. "I'm so sorry about him. I'll get you a new cup." Ford thanked you as he tried to wipe at the wet stains on his turtleneck. When you turned back around to him and set the new cup down, you frowned at his clothes.

"So sorry about that as well. Here, let me help you." You chanted a short spell and soon enough Ford's clothes were dry again, no stains left behind. You smiled. "Perfect. Like it never happened."

Ford was speechless as he sat back down. Nearly speechless. "So does he do that often?" You chuckled a little embarrassed. "More often than he should, definitely." Ford joined you with a chuckle.

"So does... George... live with you in this house?" You hummed in thought as you looked over at the frog relaxing in the now almost empty cup. "I always say that my doors are open to any woodland creature that wants to be here. There's only two that really take me up on that though. George over there," you pointed at the frog, "and Theresa."

Before Ford could ask who that was you moved your arm in an apparently very specific way. Ford watched as a little rose-colored snake slithered out of your sleeve and onto the table. He smiled. It was an adorable snake.

You two continued chatting for a while and when you had finished the pot of tea that stood between you, Ford remembered that Stanley had told him to be back by dinner. "You could take my bicycle. As long as you promise to bring it back."

With a smirk from you Ford blushed again. Yes, you'd be happy to see him again.

Ford took your offer and promised to bring it back tomorrow. You were in no rush to get anywhere but you didn’t tell him that. You just smiled at him as he left your house.

He was back the next day. And the day after that as well. You two quickly became closer and even the forest creatures learned to resent him less.

[femalefemur]

Stranger in the Woods.

this is an 18+ fic, minors do not interact!

warnings: dub con, bears, hybrid John Price, please let me know if I missed anything!

word count: 1.6k

synopsis: you take a walk in the woods and get lost, bear shifter John Price finds you and takes what's his.

A/N: finally finished this, this came from a dream I had and desperately needed to write down, I also don't write smut often, it is what it is, reader has a vagina but no pronouns are used.

The day was beautiful, golden sun shining bright in the azure sky, white clouds floating by like soft pillows high in the heavens as you stared wistfully out of your window. It was much too beautiful of a day to be inside despite the pile of housework you had to do so you grabbed your knapsack. You filled your water bottle and packed trail mix, along with a sandwich and the reddest apple you had before heading out. 

You walked past your neighbour’s house, glancing at their windchime as it tinkled on their front porch and the flowers lining the walkway up to their house that were in full bloom, their scent wafting through the warm summer air. You kept walking, past the other houses filled with laughter and people in their yards enjoying the warm sunshine. You passed them with a small wave and smile as you continued on your way. Soon there were no houses lining the path, only the occasional car passing you by as you headed towards the woods. You stopped at the dirt parking lot to take a sip of your water before continuing on and into the woods. 

The woods were calm, the sound of insects trilling and birds occasionally chirping filled your ears as you walked down the path. Your eyes drifted down towards the beautiful, green ferns that grew on the forest floor and covered it like a delicate blanket. There were small flowers that sprouted through the gaps in the ferns, a smattering of colour throughout the endless green of the forest. The sight eased your mind and made you forget about all your responsibilities for a few blissful moments. You felt as though you belonged there in the wild amongst the animals, as if the forest was calling to you, a home that would envelop you in the warm earth and take away your troubles. The thought made you stop for a while, standing there in the middle of the forest as you stared out into the sea of trees, your fingers digging softly into the rough bark of the tree you stood beside as you lost yourself to thought. 

By the time you had realised you’d stepped off the path and wandered deeper into the forest it was too late. Your mind had been elsewhere and your legs had moved on their own until you stood in the middle of nowhere. You had no map and no compass, you had gotten rid of the compass app on your phone when you had first bought it, and there was no reception so that you could redownload it. You felt foolish for having gone into the woods with nothing but food and water, your lower lip caught between your teeth as you glanced around and tried to ascertain a way back to the path. You started walking again in a direction that you hoped was north, picking the route by the position of the sun in the sky, hoping that you remembered enough of your survival training to be right about your choice of direction. 

You hadn’t walked very far when you noticed it, a large brown bear meandering through the forest, seemingly unaware that you were there. It made you freeze where you stood, trying not to make any noise to draw attention to yourself as you watched it carefully and noticing how it had its nose to the ground as it sniffed around. Your heart pounded in your chest as it started walking in your direction, your legs seemingly unwilling to move as you swallowed the lump in your throat before forcing yourself to slowly move to the tree on your left, gently removing your backpack and crouching in an almost laying down position on the ground. You squeezed your eyes shut, not wanting to see if it found you and the horror that would surely follow, your face buried in your hands as you bit your fingers to stop any sound that would leave your mouth. You heard it walk closer, the heavy steps of its paws echoing in your ears as you stayed where you were, now frozen in fear as you waited for whatever your fate may be. 

Then suddenly there was a nose prodding at you, it made you stiffen in surprise as you bit down harder on your fingers. The nose bumped into your arse before prodding at your thighs and pussy before you felt a clawed paw tear at your pants and flip you over. Your eyes met the cornflower blue ones that stared down at you, surprise written all over your face as you looked at the man, not a bear, before you. There were tiny bear ears atop his head that made your brows furrow in confusion before he was nosing at your pussy again, glancing up at you from between your legs as you tried to push him back and squirm away. Your actions only resulted in him throwing an arm over you and pulling you closer, groaning into your cunt as he lapped at you like a starved man, his fingers digging into your flesh and his tail twitching in excitement. Your face felt hot with embarrassment, you don’t know when you’d started to grind up against the stranger’s face but you’d realised when you felt your orgasm building, like a string slowly pulling taut as his eyes keenly watched your every reaction. His tongue ran over your dripping cunt, delving into your warm walls as his nose nudged at your clit and his beard grazed the sensitive skin of your inner thigh, sucking at your clit as he watched you get closer to your peak. His tongue rolled over the swollen bud as the string snapped and you came, slick dribbling from your hole and covering his face.

“Been a long time since I’ve had such a satisfying meal” he spoke, face still buried between your legs as he sucked at your clit and made your hips buck and try to squirm away, still sensitive from your orgasm. 

“Please, no more” You whined, pushing at his head as tears formed in your eyes, the overstimulation becoming too much. 

A gruff chuckle left his mouth, reverberating against your pussy before he lifted his head and crawled over you. His hands ripped your shirt with ease before he was rolling your nipples between his fingers and slotting his mouth against yours. The kiss was anything but gentle, his tongue pushing into your mouth and lapping at the taste of you as if he were devouring your very being, his saliva trickling into your mouth as you kissed and his fat cock grinding against your wet folds. You were panting by the time the kiss broke, a mess of saliva and your own juices smeared across your lips and face while he lapped at your skin with a soft groan. His tongue licked down your cheek and along your jaw, leaving a wet trail behind before he was pulling back to push your legs up to your chest with a feral grin on his face. Your pussy clenched at the thought of his thick cock inside you, slick drooling from your hole as you stared up at him with hazy eyes and his heavy cock tapped against your aching clit. The stretch as he pushed in was delicious, the thickness of him making you feel impossibly full, your eyes rolling back as he bottomed out.

“There you go, so good for me, hm, taking me so well” he praised you, pressing soft kisses to your calves as his fingers rubbed at where you were both connected, marvelling at the way you stretched around him as a soft whimper left your lips. 

All you could do was nod as he thrust into you, punching the air out of your lungs with a smile on his lips and his teeth nipping at your legs. He pushed them closer to you as he loomed over you, the position making his cock feel even deeper inside you as his fingers slipped into your open mouth, hooking into your lower jaw and giving a small tug with each thrust. The feeling of it all made your brain feel hazy and cloudy. The feeling of him so deep inside you, the thatch of dark hair at the base of his cock brushing against your clit with each thrust, his fingers in your mouth, his beard against your skin. It was all too much, too good, too heavenly and it made you cum so hard you were sure you saw God. 

He kept going, fucking you through your second orgasm like an animal in heat as you drooled around his fingers and watched him. He was beautiful, beard glistening with your slick, thick, dark hair covering his chest and trailing down his torso to his pubes, soft ears and tail twitching with each thrust. The hair on his arms was just as dark and thick and a thin sheen of sweat covered him as the sun shone down on him like he was being kissed by it, making him seem ethereal. There was a soft clicking from how wet your cunt was as he fucked into you, the look in his eyes animalistic and hungry as he picked up his pace. The increased pace making you moan and whine, squirming as if you could escape when his thumb found your clit and circled it.

“Come on sweetheart, one more for me, you can do that can’t you?” He cooed down at you, grinning as you nodded and sniffled, tears of pleasure welling in your eyes as he rubbed your clit faster. 

Your third orgasm ripped through you like it was wrenching you from your body, like your very atoms were being ripped apart and put back together by this man above you. He followed shortly after, hot, sticky cum flooding your walls and branding you as his, his to love, to care for, to fuck until his balls were empty, his to keep in this forest that had swallowed you whole.

[redslug]

NEUROSLUG NEUROSLUG NEUROSLUG

Ahem. So, I spent the last day force-feeding Stable Diffusion my art to teach it the concept of an anthropomorphic insect. As a result, I have a working LoRA that imitates my coloring style fairly decently and it can kinda do bug anthros. Emphasis on "kinda", it still needs a lot of iterations to be able to maintain proportions on it's own. However, it does quite great when provided with a simple line drawing as a quideline. Here are some examples I whipped up in like 2 hours. Input image:

AI's pure output:

After touchup:

There was quite a bit of touchup on this first attempt with the generation serving mostly as a rough under drawing, but then again I didn't stress the network with details too much. Then I tried squeezing more definition out of it. Attempt 2:

It can be quite competent when I supplement it with styles it knows well. I only used 30 of my own images to teach it, so it might be a little starved for examples at the moment. Adding "Bob Eggleton" seems to knock some sense into it for now. Okay, still images are working, now let's bash Neuroslug against some animation.

For something named Stable Diffusion it's not the most stable, huh. I'm still pleased with the result though, it's pretty cute. And while trying to make it cute I learned a little thing. AI art isn't art. It's a mixture of alchemy, gambling, detective work and demon summoning it seems. And a bit of just art. What I mean by that is that it can attach very unexpected meanings to words. Since I trained the AI on just anthro insects, it follows their defined anatomy quite closely. Specifically, they do not have breasts. As a result, adding "with big boobs" to the prompt changed the shading style and colors but not the actual anatomy. And so, most of my prompts have this lovely phrase just to improve the colors. 'Kay, time for the freak show. At some point during testing the machine decided that my moth isn't decent enough and put panties on her suddenly.

Now that's a booty

Look at those eyes

They have seen things As you can probably tell these have no sketch to guide the result.

It's still bad but it's got the right spirit.

THICC

Surprisingly cute even if janky.

Looks better than it has any right to Now I'll crawl back into my hole to play with settings for an indeterminate amount of time. I'll publish my mini-me for you all to mess with once I deem it stable enough.

[zsakuva]

What would Xanthus, Elias, and Issac think about morality (as they seem to be the more morally ambiguous characters)? Like how do they feel about the concept of ‘doing the right thing’? They have all expressed the willingness to kill if necessary, but what that was a point of conflict with listener? What if morals in general were a point of conflict between the character and listener?

Morality as a shared concept is not universal, and is only derived from values that individuals and societies uphold. All three characters have their own subjective definitions of it, as well as their own standards and limitations they perform within.

Xanthus has lived four lifetimes and has seen things others couldn't dream of. His perception of the world has changed through the centuries, and this knowledge informs him of what actions he takes and how he views others. As a vampire, this surpasses human beliefs and values that may seem trivial to him.

He'll risk more because he's immortal, he'll do what he wants because he can compel people, but he's not unrestrained. Xanthus is calculative with his kills and his prey. He knows to rein in his hunger because missing people and dead bodies drained of blood alerts hunters. He knows who to befriend or compel for his own gain. In ways, Xanthus could be considered one of the most objective characters if faced with a hard situation as his own emotions aren't normally a part of the decision.

Concerning Love's morals, I think they're somewhat thrown out the window because they're dealing with a supernatural being who knows more than they ever could. It's hard enough to wrap your head around a person living for more than 400 years, but it's even harder to sift through all those conflicting morals around the world from societies that have come and gone.

In contrast, Elias, as the youngest carries morals from his parents and those around him. Killing for self-defence. Fighting to show his power. He was taught the way gang members are supposed to act even though he didn't want that life in the first place. He understands the brutality and violence of the life he lives, and twisting his own morals would undoubtedly keep him alive.

I think Barista understands that considering what they've currently been through. But this all depends on what their own morals are.

Isaac is also a product of what he was taught and witnessed. His morals in the beginning were developed from his mother who taught him patience and good virtues. But his life events twisted that, and his morals changed along with it. The 'right thing' does and doesn't exist for him; many of his clients want outcomes that require illegal means to get or do, and he has little problem doing this. It all depends on what will be sacrificed and if he's okay with dealing with that loss, whatever it may be.

Pickle likely has similar morals to Isaac considering what they've been through. But again, it all depends where they draw the line.

Someone's morals won't be tainted with murder if they believe it. Others may think killing an insect goes against their morals. What is right and wrong is a huge topic of discussion and extremely divisive, but I hope I was able to shed some light on these characters for you!

[clare-875]

Until The End (Levi x Reader)- Chapter 35

[The beginning of the End]

_____ A/N: Posted on Wattpad (@CLARE_875) but also decided to post here :)

Summary: "You can push me away, but I will still fight by you, and I will still follow you… until the end."

The ever-so-stoic Levi Ackerman has only ever known the terrors that living in a cruel world could bring. This all changed one fateful day when he encountered [y/n]; a girl renowned for her looks and abnormal speed. As they escape the confines of the Underground together, they soon discover that freedom doesn't come easy in a world full of Titans. As they rise through the ranks, [y/n] becomes known as "Humanity's Angel", a beacon of hope to humanity as she melts the walls Levi had built around his heart. However, she has her secrets too, and a dark past that might just threaten to pull them apart.

The storyline and characters of Attack on Titan do NOT belong to me, but all to Hajime Isayama; however, I do own this story, and all that occurs disparate to that storyline.

[Series Masterlist] [Chapter Thirty-Four] <--> [Chapter Thirty-Six] _____

"Now then... Let's come up with a plan." Your tired eyes look up to Armin who stands before you all. Your squad members have started to settle, sitting into the available seats on the aircraft, heavy emotion in the air, but knowing you had to push it aside and move on... as always. Armin continues, grabbing a piece of chalk and drawing on the wooden floor of the airship. "Pieck, Captain [y/n], Captain Levi, is this roughly the shape of the Founding Titan?" You had to be honest, you hadn't had much of a glimpse of it, only seen a faint outline in the distance but you recognised it. Eren's founding Titan was massive, its head attached to a large skeletal body that was larger than even the Colossal Titan. The drawing Armin had created depicted it well, a massive spine and bone-like structures that were attached to it like ribs. "Yes, though I didn't get a great look at it." You reply, as Pieck also nods before voicing the same thoughts.

"Basically, it's a humongous bundle of bones that moves like an insect," Levi says from next to you, voice dull but blunt. "If it's like a normal Titan, Eren would be in the neck near the head, but given the War Hammer's abilities, that's not guaranteed," you add, remembering the ability the Titan had to alter the location of its holder from its nape. "In other words, we don't know which part Eren is in." Armin finishes your line of thought as he looks down at his drawing, deep in thought. "Even if we don't know where he is, we can blast the whole thing away," Pieck mutters as she leans further forward. "The same way you annihilated Libero's port... with the Colossal Titan." A long silence reaches the inside of the airship as your squad members along with Reiner look on at the tense conversation.

"That certainly would be the most effective method." Armin voices his agreement, only hesitating slightly, as Mikasa lets out a gasp at the proclamation, no doubt because it put Eren's life in danger. Armin quickly continues, however, knowing what his words imply. "But we'll leave that for after we've exhausted our chance to talk. If there's still no other way to stop Eren, that's our last resort." He turns to Mikasa who nods sullenly but maintains a spark of hope in her eyes that it wouldn't come to that. "It's great to have a last resort and all," Levi speaks up once more, tone maintaining his sharp front, "but isn't Eren controlling the Founder through Zeke? Won't the rumbling stop if we kill Zeke first?" Armin looks up, surprise catching onto his face as though in wonder he hadn't thought of that before. "True. That might work!"

"There's no definite proof, but Hange thought it would." Levi finishes his ramblings with the last voice of credit to the Commander who was no longer with us. "But if we don't know Zeke's location either..." Pieck starts contemplating the depths of the plans you all try to build, only to be interrupted by Levi once more. "We'll just have to find that shithead, the Beast, in those bones." There is a deep silence before Levi takes a breath in the quiet of the small airship. "I'll take Zeke out," you turn to him and are surprised to see his gaze is on you all. "Help me do it." Everyone looks to Levi, the ever-so-stoic Captain, asking for help. Their gazes brim with determination, and Jean is the one who speaks for your subordinates. "Of course. We killed many friends and comrades to get this thing in the sky. We can't allow that slaughter to have been for nothing. Everything is to stop the rumbling. I'll do whatever it takes."

"Jean..." Reiner looks to Jean, sentiment clouding his eyes as Connie also speaks up. "I shot Samuel and Daz and sliced up other people I knew. I got called a traitor as I did so, all the while telling myself it was to save the world." Connie then sits up from where he is slouched, burdened eyes looking to Reiner who meets his troubled gaze. "Hey, Reiner. It was agonizing for you, Bertholdt and Annie too, wasn't it?" Reiner's face contorts into dire nostalgia, as he lifts his hand as though reminiscing all it had done. "I can't even make up for the sins I committed anymore," he replies, "even if we save what remains of humanity, I doubt I'll ever forgive myself." Your squad member's eyes look to the floor of the airship at his words, Connie's eyes filling with tears and his face contorting into one that looks like regret. But he looks up once more when Reiner leans forward and clasps his hand onto his shoulder.

"So... Well, let's at least save what remains of humanity." Connie grits his teeth as he looks at his prior comrade and friend turned traitor and enemy turned ally once more, before his face morphs into a contrite smile. "You're right, Reiner," Connie puts a hand atop the one that touches his shoulder, "we still gotta do what we can." Stillness encompasses you in the wake of voiced burdens before Jean speaks up from where he sits opposite you. "That's right. We're the same, Reiner." Said man looks at Jean, eyes widening at his next words. "I never had any right to judge you. I became a murderer to save others." Reiner turns away before speaking up once more. "You know... On the night of the raid on Liberio, Eren said the same thing to me. I feel like I understand some of what's going on in Eren's head. Could it be Eren wants us to stop him?" Everyone looks to Reiner once more, but this time Mikasa speaks up, curiosity filling her stare.

"I mean, it's just a thought that occurred to me." Reiner merely replies before Armin looks down, now expressing his thoughts. "Something's been bothering me this whole time. Eren has the power to affect all Titans and Eldians. And yet our ability to use our Titan powers remains unchanged." Pieck’s eyes widen, "you mean, Eren is purposely giving us free rein?" Armin continues looking to the ground but replies all the same. "Exactly. He's letting us act freely. As if to test how we respond to what he's doing." Mikasa turns to him, concern on her face. "Why? We might succeed in stopping the rumbling," she asks, but Reiner now voiced his thoughts at the possibility of such a fact. "It has to be agonizing for him, too. Committing mass murder... that's not a burden you can just bear. If it was me, I'd be desperate to leave the Founder's power with someone else. And if that wasn't possible, I'd want someone... to end it."

Before anyone can retort once more, you feel yourself slipping. You stand, trying to hold your balance, but when you look around you realise that you are once in a strange land. Surrounding and above you is the starry sky, there is sand that is below you, and in the distance, there is a large and blinding white light. You are no longer on the airship. "What, was he listening in?" You hear Levi mutter from next to you darkly, as you wonder the same thing, now in the lands you know Eren uses to communicate to you Eldians. Knowing this your squad waste no time.

It is Armin who starts, yelling into the vast lands that surround you shouting that the mass murder can come to an end and that there is no need for massacre, that no one would dare touch Paradis for centuries and that it was our fault for pushing him into starting the rumbling. Jean and Connie join in, forgiving him of what happened to Sasha, seeing he was hurting too, and telling him that we can sort it out together. Mikasa shouts saying she wishes to bear his burdens with him, and even Levi talks irritably to the wind, threatening and calling for the man to answer. Several long moments of silence pass after the incessant shouting, but all you do is watch speechlessly until you hear the familiar and yet so foreign voice reach you all.

The rumbling will not stop. Nor will I leave Paradis Island's future to chance. I will keep moving forward.

You all freeze under the weight of his words until Levi points to the bright white light in the distance, a small figure standing before it. "Look." In an instant, your squad member starts running towards the figure, hoping it is him... that it's Eren. From the distance, it looks like a child and you hear the voices of your squad reach the air once more.

"Huh?! Ain't that a kid?!"

"Yeah, but that's Eren!"

"Eren!"

"Why refuse, Eren!"

"You think you can't rely on us?"

"Why did you leave us able to use our Titan powers?"

"We can talk for as long as we want here right?"

"Talk to us. We've always been together. Please don't go any farther away!"

"Eren!"

In order to obtain freedom, I will take freedom from the world. But I will not take anything from any of you. You all have freedom

Your squad members run only to come back to you, Pieck, Reiner and Levi who had been still the whole time from the opposite direction.

You are free to protect the world's freedom. And I am free to keep moving forward. As long as we each hold unbending convictions, a clash is inevitable. There is but one thing for us to do. Fight.

"But..." Armin's gaze is full of dread and trepidation as he listens to Eren's words. "Then... why did you call us here?"

To discuss the fact that there's no need to have a discussion. If you wish to stop me, make me draw my last breath. You have my freedom.

Your heart accelerates, breath uneven. The white light in the distance seems to grow more and more, blinding your vision. You feel yourself falling and yet being so still at the same time, and you jump, suddenly finding yourself back on the airship. You hear Onyankopon call out to you all in sudden worry as you all suddenly jump at the same time. You turn to Levi who looks at your state in concern but you shake your head, dazed but alright. There is a heaviness in the room that dictates the air but Reiner is the first to speak, a dark look upon his face. "It looks like I was right," he mutters grimly before Jean speaks up, an arm sprawled across his face. "So there's no way to work this out?" You take in a deep breath as Levi speaks up from next to you. "Looks like we aren't gonna solve this by talking. What now... Commander?"

.....

"Dammit! We're running on fumes!" Onyankopon yells out from where he steers the plane, now having expended the last drops of fuel available to the aircraft. You fight to keep steady on your heat, geared up and Thunder Spears now ready in your grasp. The airship is unstable moving with heavy turbulence and you were more likely falling than flying. "Get ready to jump!" Onyankopon calls out as Jean retorts quickly. "Onyankopon, you get over here, too!" But the man turns from the Captain's seat, face fierce as he turns to you all. "Not yet! I'll keep going till we're over the Founder! Afterwards, I'll make an emergency landing! So make sure you land on the Founding Titan! Got that!" But suddenly you all flinch as Onyankopon steers the aircraft roughly to the side. "That bastard's down there. That damned beast!" Sure enough, upon the skeletal body of the Founding Titan, there is the Beast Titan in a ghostly colour, throwing debris at us.

"That saves us the trouble of finding it!" You yell out in gritted teeth as you try to steady yourself while Armin nods. "Target the Beast Titan! Put all your power into taking him out! Let's stop the rumbling!" Onyankopon accelerates towards the Founding Titan diving downwards whilst simultaneously dodging whatever the Beast Titan throws away. As the airship levels out along the spine of the Founding Titan, that is when he yells out the confirmation that it is time to go. "Now!" You meet eyes with Levi once last time before Armin throws open the door to the flying ship, and you're diving. You attach to the bones upon the large skeletal figure, avoiding the obstacles of the Beast Titan and turning expertly at a high pace now neck and neck with Levi's speed as you approach the Beast. A bright glow suddenly envelops your surroundings as Reiner transforms, the familiar figure of the Armoured Titan appearing from within the sudden bright light.

Reiner is successful in grabbing onto the Beast Titan as he retches is free from where the ghostly Titan had been attached to the skeleton tumbling with it as it rolls down the Founding Titan heavily. You stop, attaching to a massive skeleton increment on the Founding Titan, as another gold light fills the air and Pieck transforms into the Cart Titan, explosives that had lined the airship now carried on her back. The aircraft that Onyankopon still mans lifts from where it moved over the skeleton into the air as you see it travel far into the distance. However, with the lack of fuel, you also see the propellers of the vehicle come to a stop, and you can only hope he can make a landing somehow. You hear the voice of Armin next to you when you land next to Levi on the Founding Titan's spine. "Eren. I have another question to ask you, once we drag you out of there... In what way are you free?"

.....

Reiner is in front of you, the Beast Titan, or what you had thought was the Beast Titan under his grasp. However, it turned out that the Titan not only looked like a ghost but that it was one. "I guess killing some empty husk, isn't gonna do anything..." Levi mutters from next to you as your squad members also start to surround you all, crowding around the skeletal remains of the Beast Titan which was merely a puppet now lifeless without its strings. "As I feared, Zeke's using the same method as the War Hammer Titan to hide himself," Armin says from where he stands on the Armoured Titan. "You mean we have to find one tiny body in this huge mass of bones?" Jean yells out, outlining a clearly impossible task. "There ain't no way! We gotta face up to reality! Armin!" Armin interrupts his incessant shouting gritting his teeth, "I know!" Jean falls silent as Armin continues.

"In one minute, I'm blasting this area away. Work with the Cart Titan to get clear! Eren knows this attack could be coming. I can't imagine this'll kill him! But if I blow these bones apart, we might figure out where Eren or Zeke is!" There is a silence that follows but you all merely yell out in confirmation before attaching to the Founding Titan's looming bones, flying so you are a good distance away. As you go along the large spine of the Titan, you can't help but notice the more ghostly Titan puppets that appear from the Founding Titan. Titans you have both seen and never seen before appear, mimicking their prior holders but with no presence of a person controlling them; an empty shell of what they represent. However, your attention is once more diverged when the voice of Mikasa yelling out Armin's name rings through your ears. You turn wide-eyed, just in time to see that a Titan has come from behind Armin, swallowing him whole, you freeze, but can do nothing as Titans have already started their descent. You watch as some of your squad members help Reiner fight some off, despite the threat of running out of Thunder Spears.

You grit your teeth in thought. Armin had already been captured by one of them and whisked away, all you knew was that he was okay, for if he was injured, he would simply transform into the Colossal Titan. His absence had however evidently caused great unease amongst your squad as it not only hindered the use of his explosive transformation but also caused the lack of a Commander. You and your squad now face innumerable threats, and the true power of the Founding Titan; the ability to resurrect past generations of Titans. You are outnumbered and overpowered. "We're no match for something like that!" Connie yells after you all discuss your observations with the other, but it is Pieck who responds, an untamed look in their Titan's eyes reflecting their words. "Exactly. So, we can't afford to be so easy-going with this. I'm not even friends with Eren, so..." Suddenly the Cart Titan is off running into the distance, the direction of where the Founding Titan's nape should be. "Hey! You're not gonna..." Connie shouts out but it's too late. Pieck bounds over the Founding Titan's immense spine, dodging Titans as she does so as you curse under your breath.

You watch her form move adeptly through the area before landing at her goal. She unravels the explosives she carried upon her back, instead wrapping it numerous times around the nape of the Founding Titan. You hear her gravelly voice reach the air through her Titan as she yells out, causing the fearful screams of Mikasa who yells out for her to stop. "No matter how you look at it, this is the first place to strike! I've only had one aim here!" Pieck ignores Mikasa who yells out to her to stop as she comes out of her Titan form to pull on the trigger of the explosive she has set around the Founding Titan's neck. "Begone, nightmare!" But just as she goes to pull the trigger she is stopped as a four-prong spear impales her. She freezes, blood seeping from her body and the Titan. It was a reborn Armoured Titan, the one that Eren had fought in Libero, and it held Pieck's form upon its weapon, though lifeless behind its eyes.

Unsure how to feel about Pieck's failure to cause the explosion, you have no time to react as another impending situation surrounds you. A Jaw Titan comes out of nowhere attacking Reiner who was momentarily distracted as he goes quickly to the defence. Jean then calls out to him from where he is attached along the Founder's spine. "Over here, Reiner!" He calls out, "Keep him still!" But as he goes to detach from the spine to assist Reiner, he doesn't notice another Jaw Titan leap from behind him in attack. Levi yells out to you in warning but you have no time to respond nor stop as you use all of your speed to flash over to him in a second. With a yell you knock him out of the way just before he is supposed to be eaten, landing harshly against the Founding Titan as you take the impact of Jean landing on you. You let out a groan at the harsh pain in your arm and back but also look to the boy in relief, at least able to save his early demise. "Captain!" He yells at you in concern, but Levi is who quickly approaches you, sharp worry in his eyes as he looks at you stumbling and hissing as you force yourself to stand.

"[y/n]!" he yells and you see the momentary fear that laced his expression. His hands tremble slightly as he goes to hold you by the shoulders, checking if you're still with him. "I'm fine," you say breathlessly, trying to ignore the pain you hope would subside quickly with your powers. "We've got to hurry; we're getting Armin back. That's the only way, or we die for nothing!" You say as you ready your gear once more, causing Levi to hesitate but nod. You all fly in the air, flying across space at a pace you had never even dreamed of trying before. "Let's go, Reiner!" You hear the voice of Connie reach the air as he also follows your attacks, laying waste to the ghostly Titans that await you.

You use your swords twisting in milliseconds and turning at unmatched speeds, cutting through Titans that cross your path. Levi follows and despite his injuries mimics his usual perilous movements, leaving no Titan standing after he is through with them. Reiner, Connie and Jean are close behind the both of you. Reiner rips through or charges through obstacles that come his way while Connie and Jean try to sparingly use the limited amount of Thunder Spears in their possession. Mikasa comes in from behind doing the same as she immaculately aims and kills pursuing Titans. You all make your way across the Founding Titan's spine, fighting to find any source of the presence of Armin. Your movements are sharp and your squad follows well, however, that is when you notice a looming shadow overhead causing you all to come to an abrupt stop. You freeze turning sharply and, your eyes widen at a familiar face coming from out of practically nowhere.

Bertholdt.

You see the massive form of the past holder approaching as everyone stands sullen in the disturbance. The Colossal Titan grasps Reiner within its hold easily as the Armoured Titan struggles against the massive grasp Bertholdt has on him. You look to the Titan, unease upon you and knowing the true extent of power this Titan beholds. You can't help but wonder if the consciousness of its past holder was truly absent. "Reiner!" You all call out, but even you can’t do anything when the Colossal Titan moves, bringing what's left of Reiner's body backwards and readying him your way.

Shit.

The impact of the explosion caused is massive. You can only dodge the debris by sheer will and speed, but you spot Levi who struggles in his escape, the weight of his injuries no doubt hindering his usual agility. You quickly go to him, grabbing onto your husband and attaching to the underside of the Founding Titan. You feel him lean heavily onto you as blood seeps from his mouth that he coughs out causing you to fall into a fit of worry. "Levi!" You say, trying to hold him up better and he forces himself to alleviate some of the weight he's pushed onto you, only to struggle in exhaustion. Some of his blood taints the clothing you wore but it doesn't bother you in the slightest next to Levi's struggling form. Your sharp eyes look around, as Levi catches his breath, safe in your grasp.

Connie hangs from the Founding Titan, barely conscious and only held up by his ODM gear that attaches itself stubbornly to the spine of the massive Titan. Jean is also in a similar position except he holds onto Reiner who escaped Bertholdt, ODM gear jammed just like Connie's. Mikasa is the only one who freely flies about the area, protecting Connie from an incoming Titan, trying to get him to wake up. "[y/n]" Levi groans through gritted teeth as your attention goes to him once again and you feel yourself swallow thickly at his fraught form amid the depths of war, wanting nothing more than to take him away from here. "I'm alright," he mutters, letting go of you and attaching to the Founding Titan using his ODM gear, you nod slowly as he looks to you determinedly, knowing now isn't the time to argue. You look up just in time to see a snake-like Titan now approach Connie, Mikasa yelling out his name and so you go to leave Levi to save him... well at least you try to.

Levi sees your intension of throwing yourself in the face of danger once more and grits his teeth, using his Ackerman strength he pushes forward just seconds before you do, flashing over to his subordinate and slicing through the Titan, only he's too slow. Your eyes widen in shock as you watch as Levi’s left leg is now in the Jaws of the same Titan. Your heart pounds at the blood that spills from his injury pushing yourself forward. "LEVI!!" Luckily Mikasa is there to slice through the remnants of the Titan as you fly swiftly across the expanse. You swing and in a flash grab onto Levi's falling form that descends down to where the rumbling awaits him just below. You hold him against your body as you attach to the spine of the Founding Titan pulling the two of you up, cursing his stubbornness as you feel tears prick your eyes in frustration.

"Levi!" You hold the man against you, barely conscious. He coughs up more blood, but Levi doesn't even have the strength to reassure you. You look to the distance, Jean struggling with holding onto Reiner, ODM gear still stuck in place. Connie looks up from where he is attached, dread masking his expression and Mikasa flies past you in apprehension. You look down at the man you love your eyes travelling down his body to his left leg that seems broken beyond repair, no doubt torn under the weight of the Titan's jaws. "This is why I wanted you safe," you brokenly utter, holding him closer as you observe the sorry state of your team. It was hard to fight when you were so concerned over Levi's life and he was so stubborn over worrying about yours. Your last slither of hope at any sense of victory starts to slip away, but then you hear it, the voice of a woman you were sure you left behind.

Annie.

She comes to you sitting by Gabi on a flying Titan, a net attached to its back which they hold onto. They go to Jean and Reiner first allowing them to drop onto the Titan, then Connie, then you and Levi. You feel slightly relieved as you drop down, detaching your ODM gear and holding onto the net tightly, Levi secured under your arm as he struggles to do the same. When Mikasa also gets onto the flying Titan it is then that it starts to pick up pace. It dodges the Titans that approach, swinging side to side before breaking through the endless bones that depict the Founding Titan's shape. It flies away from the Founding Titan into open space, allowing a moment to think, as you and your squad turn to Annie in shock... because no doubt this Titan was... Falco.

"Listen, I didn't think he'd really be able to fly, either," Annie starts to explain knowing the chain of thoughts we had by our stunned faces. "But then he actually did it, so what choice did I have but to come?" Reiner and Jean have yet to pick up their jaws as they stare wide-eyed as Annie continues her brief but blunt explanation. "Still, I'm glad I did." Reiner's attention then turns to the young girl next to Annie, sharp eyes now facing hers. "Gabi, why did you come here too?" He asks the girl who retorts immediately, an annoyed tone lacing her words. "Because you left us behind Reiner! I can fight too, you know!" You sigh inwardly knowing that Pieck's plan to force them to stay atop the ship was now fruitless. "Annie!" Reiner yells out accusingly to the woman who faces away at his angered tone, no doubt upset she brought Gabi here.

"The Azumabito ship sank," Annie replies, "It couldn't withstand Falco's Titan transformation. Even though we had no definite proof he could fly, Kiyomi agreed to try it." Gabi then turns to Reiner, determination gleaming in her eyes. "So we have to repay her faith by stopping the rumbling!" Annie then turns to Mikasa in question. "So where's Arm- I mean, Pieck?" Mikasa replies instantly looking at the blond-haired woman intensely. "Armin was captured and his life is in danger. The Titan that took him should be back by the tailbone. Annie, we need your help." Annie's frown morphs into a contrite smile as she looks at Mikasa. "Your childhood friends are always getting captured, aren't they? We'll get him back. Count on it." Gabi now speaks up noticing the absence of her ally. "What about Pieck?"

"She' by the skull," Reiner replies grimly, "She tried to blow up the nape. But the War Hammer Titan is blocking her." Sure enough, in the distance, we see her static form impaled by the Titan that stopped her. "We'll launch simultaneous operations," you turn wide-eyed as you notice that it is Levi who now speaks, having composed himself after further injuries he now has to encumber. "One group rescues Armin, we need the Colossal's explosion. The other group goes after Eren and attacks the nape. We'll split into two teams and strike simultaneously." You nod, turning to your squad, namely Mikasa who looks at his words with despair. "We no longer have the luxury of worrying about Eren... we never had it to begin with," you mutter, facial features tense as you look to your squad. "Captain... but-" Mikasa starts, her voice weak but doing nothing to ease the palpable apprehension that came from bartering with death.

"But what?" It's Connie who speaks looking imploringly at the raven-haired woman. "Falco being able to fly was a miracle. Without that, we'd already be dead!" Jean turns away but agrees to the weight of Connie's words, speaking up. "Yeah, and never had accomplished anything..." Mikasa shakes her head before Levi speaks once again. "I had a long list of shit to tell that idiot off about... Fuck!" Connie turns to Mikasa once more. "I don't wanna give up on Eren, either! But Captain Levi can't fight anymore because of me, and even if he could, we're up against the Founding Titan! How can we win if we're still holding back!?" The air stills at his words and you all grit your teeth, knowing the time has come to divest yourselves of the restraints you held against the man that destroys the world. "Mikasa.... let's.... let's..."

"Kill Eren." You turn to Mikasa who looks as though lost in her thoughts, dazed and forlorn. You grasp the woman's shoulder tightly, trying to ease the pain you know you can't. "Mikasa!" You call urgently to the woman several times who finally turns to you tears brimming her eyes, the expression makes you hesitate but you continue your words nonetheless. "You just concentrate on rescuing Armin... You don't have to think about anything else." Your voice goes gentler towards the end of your words knowing what you are essentially asking her to do; to turn away as you all try to kill the man she loves. Your heart breaks at that notion, knowing that if it had been Levi whose life was on the line, you would have been devastated and inconsolable. Mikasa turns to you, facial features trembling but she replies softly into the wind.

"Okay." _____

[Chapter Thirty-Four] <--> [Chapter Thirty-Six]

Tags: @batboygirlie @crmnic

[dumbgoondog]

Kenjaku’s Brain Teaser

MDNI +18 NSFW

Pre established relationship, gn!reader, friends with benefits or dating, reader is a bit of a brat. He/they Kenjaku.

Cw/Tw - gore. Brain smut. No blood but you are up in his brain, literally. Licking and fingering. Eating that shit out like coochie. Cannibalism I guess?

You’re bored. Kenjaku had been entertaining the disaster curses and Choso for hours now playing their 3rd? Round of Life, now. Why? Mahito is making a legacy story that he’s starting a super amazing family line and each game is the kids from the last game. This also included that before they started the second round new rules were established to the game to make it fair. Choso has also become invested in his little family legacy story as well, Kenjaku is just having so much fun as well. Jogo looks like he’s about to blow though, and is trying to levy that a new rule should be added that if you’re sharing a space with a player you can attempt to MURDER their family.

Yeah, it’s fun to watch, especially since each round everyone has to convince Jogo to stay and not blow everything up. Two rounds ago you watched Mahito and Kenjaku under the table take bets how long will Jogo last, and you’re pretty sure that Choso has started to draw his family. Maybe you weren’t THAT bored, but still, you were wanting attention and were feeling restless.

Pulling yourself off the couch you give Kenjaku a little puppy pout over your shoulder and go upstairs once kenjaku gives you a smile and shrug, sticking his tongue out. You dramatically groan as you go up the steps already planning how to get back at your partner in crime. Maybe you could unorganize his things, or scoot things an inch to the left? You’ll think of something…

Kenjaku laughs trotting up the stairs to get out of the way as Mahito runs his arms out stretched like wings as Jogo sends insects flying after Mahito. Choso is ducking for cover shielding his drawings of his family characters, and Kenjaku loves it. 1, cuz he won the bet. 2, cuz look at this all, the way that these curses interact and their values! 3, cuz he knows he’s annoyed you and you’ve got something waiting for him upstairs.

Coming into his office, they look around quirking a brow a smile tugging on their lips. You’re clever and they love that, you do things that are fun and a lovely challenge. Slipping into chair he looks over everything and nothing seems out of place… mildly concerning but exciting!

You on the other hand are squeezed between the bookshelf and potted plant behind his desk holding still and being quiet waiting for him to settle in. You figured out exactly what you’d do, and he was going to HATE it. So once Kenjaku had settled in enough, you move out and sneak up-

“Hello you, what have you planned for me hmm?”

You click your tongue and rolls your eyes, “I’m not sneaky enough, or you’re just too aware of everything.” Kenjaku doesn’t even look up, he just gives a little laugh and shrug. Luckily that works in your favor as you move behind annnnddd-

Snip!

There’s a good pause before Kenjaku reaches a hand up and touches at the thread of his stitches you’d just snipped. You hold back a snicker of smug satisfaction while Kenjaku gives a heavy mildly bemused sigh, “Wow, really? Childish. As much as this is mildly annoying you could certainly do better. Get my thread.”

“No,” you muse but one side eye and you tuck your tail, walking to the drawer of twine, “can we use the pink stitching this time? It’d look so good!”

Of course you know he wants the black twine, and he knows you know so he doesn’t even answer. You snatch it up and walk back to him pulling the threading of his stitches out. To your lack of experience you don’t have a hand up to hold his brain cap in place as it starts to slide and Kenjaku has to reach up to catch it, “Careful now, have you no tact? Hmm? You know, the brain is extremely sensitive, delicate, and you can’t just be so careless. Especially since RCT comes from the brain and I wouldn’t be able to heal as well if you did to much damage. That is a good question that brings up however, would non lethal brain damage be able to debilitate a sorcerer from using cursed energy or perhaps help awaken one’s cursed technique even-“

You look up and stare at the ceiling with an exhausted groan. Looking back down you stare at the slightly exposed purple brain and the liquid dripping from the opening. Without much thought or consideration you reach out and trace a finger along the gummy, squishy organ.

“Perhaps the brain works with cursed energy but the soul is the ho-oh-oh! Mmph- and what are you huff… doing now, hmm?” Kenjaku groans turning his head to look to you a bit flush in the cheeks. You’re slack jaw, his brain was sensitive and got him to moan like a bitch! A mischievous grin takes over your face as you reach both hands up to trace and touch at his brain lightly pressing and massaging the folds.

Kenjaku gasps a hand jerking out to try and grab onto you, but falling short grabbing his arm rest. Their eyes screw shut as they bite their lip smiling trying to maintain posture but shuddering feeling you caress and tease a finger into the wrinkles a dirty “shlk” noise accompanying it. Kenjaku gives another stuttering groan and breathes raggedly, “aaah what are you- you ooh fu-uh-uck~ keep going. Yes, keep going.”

You dip your fingers in more squeezing them into cracks and trailing them through the purple squishy maze. Kenjaku chokes a bit on his own sounds their hips stuttering up trying to Buck and fuck into nothing, desperate. You smile, biting your lip seeing Kenjaku coming so undone from such gentle touches and just barely teasing them has them almost whimpering under you.

“Fuck- push, push in some more. The parietal lobe- mmngh yeah darling please, up and a bit to the-the back, oh you feel so good in me,” They’re still goin on and now it’s your goal to get the bitch to shut it. Moving your hands to where instructed you slip your thumbs between the halves and fingers into his wet folds milking out his juices. Oh the moan that draws out is the cry of absolute pleasure and the way a weak trembling hand comes to hold your hip has you giddy.

The man who’s normally busting your guts, weak and nearly whimpering trying and failing to maintain his composure. He’s got a tent pulled tight in their robes a wet bead already forming at his tip. With a little hum you roll your fingers and swallowing back the slight questioning of cleanliness, lean in dragging your tongue along his folds.

Best decision of your LIFE. The way his back arches and the cry of pleasure that rips from his center, how his hand clenched around your hip certainly going to leave a bruise. The drool that falls past their lips as they twitch their hips and squeeze their thighs together seeking more pleasure. Your face is flush and swallowing the juices that aren’t that bad honestly, just kinda salty.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck! Please, oh, please!” Kenjaku whines and who are you to deny? You keep massaging and lean back in to lick and kiss more, making Kenjaku jerk and moan. Both hands are on you now, squeezing and grabbing trying to find any stability while pleasure racks through him.

You can tell he’s getting close, from the way his breathing is picking up and getting more breathy than moan filled. The way his brows are screwing together as they go from eyes shut to open and rolled back. You kiss a slow teasing trail along the crest, and are about to dip your tongue between the halves to let him hit that peak when-

“Geto! Geto! Jogo is going to maximum meteor us! Calm him! Send help! Wee woo wee woo!” Mahito’s chipper and jovial voice breaks through the symphony of pleasure. You snicker, and pull back, sliding the thread on the desk more in front of Kenjaku.

“Looks like you’re needed! Sorry for distracting! I’ll let you get to it!” You sneer and skip away with Kenjaku’s exasperated sigh following you and his quiet murmur of curses. He’ll get you back for that. You know you’ll get your comeuppance.

[the-s1lly-corner]

hi ^^ If requests are still open, can I req jax x reader headcanons where reader seems like the most chill, mentally stable, and normal person as well as a bit oblivious out of the whole group but when jax tries pranking them by scaring them w creepy crawlies and insects or other things normally considered scary, reader becomes really happy and endeared by it instead? And starts trying to like befriend him because of it.

And then its revealed reader has the most questionable interests of which they have the most unusually large amount of detailed knowledge on, like say poison, reptiles, the horrific horrors at the bottom of the ocean (think subnautica) And whenever these interests are brought up (which is rare bcs if what they are) they go full infodump mode and have 100% accidentally scared someone with it. They have definitely scared Ragatha half to death at least once after hearing the word “centepede” and going on a rant abt giant centipedes oblivious to her fear.

qeue Jax asking the reader abt one of said interests for a prank and reader gives him way to much info on it, not because they want to help him prank someone, but because they think hes just genuinely interested in their interest and have no idea he wants to use it to prank someone.

sorry if this is too long ^^

Jax x reader w/ odd interests!

dont apologize for it being too long! this just means i have a little more to work with ! probably gonna do this and one more request then go stretch my legs !!

when he first saw you fall victim to his classic fake spider prank, he was surprised to see that you were absolutely thrilled to find the critter; real or not

i mean sure, maybe you just weren't afraid of bugs like a certain red head, but you were excited to find it; scooping it up into your hands without hesitation... i mean he wasnt exactly judging you, but he sure as hell was confused. and now stumped, now that he knows the fake bug prank wont phase you

on top of that he now has a new friend following him around

i think it would definitely take him a second to warm up to you, his pride is a little hurt that his little stunt failed, but before long you guys are on speaking terms

your interest in poison doesnt really come up until someone brings up the topic, prompting you to go on a tangent about all the different kinds, the effects, the sources, how to counter it if possible, things like that

how funny would it be if jax was actually scared of reptiles; specifically snakes or even lizards, and he finds you trying to catch a gecko outside in the grounds

you excitedly try to hand it off to him and begin listing off some facts about the real world counterpart, only to stop when you notice his discomfort

like imagine trying to help him get over this random fear of his, and eventually managing to ease him into holding the little thing

hes fine with centipedes but he draws the line at noodle boys

perhaps the extra time with you and listening to you rattle off about your interests sparks some interest in you? of course if you want this to remain platonic you can ignore this part!

this of course leads to him trying to spend more time with you

to be more specific, to try to rope you into his antics

so he tries to ask you about something, say, bugs... you, of course not knowing what his plans are, go off about a bunch of bugs; insects, spiders, hell you even add in some scorpions

he stops you midway when you segway over to bug-parasites, though

while some of it isnt really his thing, hes at least not a big enough asshole to ignore the look in your eyes you get when you finally get to talk about your interests and not be judged

[gemharvest]

wyd!Boyfriend (Beef) Reference Sheet

Extra info will be under a cut to spare y'alls dashboards, but here the guy is. The Beef Bastard. For anyone who desires to draw him.

-----

Design Notes:

Palette is flexible; can be drawn in this palette, with canon BF's palette, or given a custom palette. Colored lines are not a requisite, but if you do pure black lines while using the ref's palette, please keep everything using that color the same color (ie; his piercing, opt. nail color, sweater on Christmas outfit, etc).

Shirt does not have to be tucked! I mostly drew it like that just to have the belt visible; up to you if you want to draw it half-tucked or untucked. idc

Shading colors are optional, I just have them there because I like using them; I personally still draw the shade in on his hat/ hair, but that's just how I like doing it. His hair base can be either color tbh it doesn't matter much to me, I just have it marked as the lighter color bc that's what feels right to me personally.

Would have a square face shape & brown eyes when not as stylized as the ref. I do not have a specific eye color picked out, as I do not see myself drawing it, but anything works as long as it's a darker brown.

-----

His playlist is at the end of this post (both Spotify and YouTube versions), but if you just want to hear his sample songs, here are links (+ 2 honorable mentions):

(fw + eyestrain) WHOKILLEDXIX - Kismet

Marina - Are You Satisfied?

(fw + insect & xray clips) Will Wood - Cicada Days

Twenty One Pilots - Fake You Out

100 gecs - 745 sticky

-----

Base Info:

Cisgender bisexual (he/him); polyamorous.

Has: ADHD with RSD; anger issues that usually come out to “protect” himself (can be to “protect” others as well, tho); an inferiority complex that makes him highly competitive & masks as a superiority complex.

Astraphobic (fear of thunder & lightning) as well as having a fear of abandonment. Other than that, he’s comically fearless; acting on impulse rather than any sense.

Has a bad acne problem; some on his face, but the worst of it is on his back.

Wears loose clothes, and kinda just throws on whatever he finds first. (Which tends to be his usual outfit.)

Slightly chubby, but his clothes make it harder to tell.

Street-smart, in spite of his general stupidity. Able to hold himself pretty well in a fight, as long as he’s thinking clearly.

Fairly strong as well, though he doesn’t make an active effort to work out. Stupids his way into being able to lift shit, I guess.

Shaves his face (prefers the look) but doesn’t bother with the rest of his body. 👍

-----

Headcanons:

(there is a lot here, I do not blame you if you don't read all of these 🙏)

Stims with a lot of repetitive hand movements (shaking, snapping motion w/o sound, opening and closing); beeps are sometimes vocal stims as well.

Would benefit from chewlery dear god, but would also need high strength ones. Maybe one day someone will get him a chew stim.

Enjoys high energy & loud music. Obviously a rap fan, but would enjoy breakcore/ speedcore/ hyperpop and similar genres, as well as things like YTPMVs or stupid mashups.

His beeping is not a language, as is the same in canon, though it generally has enough of a rhythm to it that people can get the gist of the intended words the longer they're around him.

95% of the time he speaks in beeps, and if he needs to relay info to someone who doesn't understand it, he'll write his words down (as long as it's an option).

Not comfortable speaking regularly, but can do it if the situation calls for it. Takes a lot to get to that point though, and was way less confident in his words when he was younger.

His beeping can also be a vocal stim, as mentioned previously, which can throw conversation off. Beeps will also lose their proper rhythm if he's upset/ super excited and etc., making them harder to understand.

Loves small animals, rats being a particular example, and is also fascinated by insects.

Usually just ignores insects, but picks up a catch & release habit w/ ones that get inside from GF.

When they get a shared apartment, he's the one who spends the most time in it, usually alone and working on music. Sometimes he gets overwhelmed by missing his partners being around, but manages it well knowing they'll be back soon.

Likes involving his partners with his music. Most of his album covers are art by GF, and will ask Pico for input on mixing or just general thoughts on how it sounds. Will sometimes get them to do vocals as well (takes a lot of coaxing for Pico to agree, so GF features more often than he will).

Usually prefers his nails unpainted, but will let GF paint them to match with her and/ or Pico.

Before Pico entered their relationship, he had his nails painted more frequently to match her. Went down in frequency because Pico really likes it & it became something the two do together. BF is not excluded, he’s just more indifferent about it whereas Pico and GF actively like painted nails.

Prefers black above all, then blue, but also enjoys red or green for his partners.

HUGE issue with picking at acne/ scabs. Has tons of little scars from doing it.

Clingy as shiiiittt to those he’s close to. Will not be the first to let go of a hug and will be content to cling to someone for hours; need to take care of his body be damned.

Related; he has issues wanting to stay up to work on projects instead of get proper sleep, but is pretty easily convinced to go to bed if his partners are around. Because cuddle time babyyyyyy.

Can’t cook for shit. Is like a Sim with 0 cooking skill and insanely bad luck. Best dude can do is make a sandwich/ salad/ anything that doesn’t require the oven or stove, and even then he sticks to simple things because he wants to do other shit.

Relied a lot on fast food/ pre-made meals when on his own. Once moved in with his partners, Pico cooks a lot of the meals & eventually is able to teach BF and GF enough of the basics to where they can prep stuff on days he’s gone.

BF is way slower to take to cooking than GF is; ADHD partially at fault (not finding it “worth it” = not going out of his way to cook still = learns way slower, which also makes it more frustrating). He gets it eventually tho it’s Okay.

Can be kinda an ass to those he doesn’t know, though more because he’s not thinking about it than actually being malicious. Though if he realizes he’s coming off rude he doesn’t quiiiiteee care. This behavior bites him in the ass w/ how he thinks about himself but whatever he’s not thinking in the moment.

Can sometimes be hostile when first meeting people, though usually isn’t too bad.

(RGBFverse exclusive, he is super hostile to the other BFs out of confusion, and then lashes out to keep himself from getting close, because he assumes he will be let down if he does. This later feeds into a fear that, after he becomes calm around them, none of them really like him, because why would they, after how he acted?)

Has spirals related to his inferiority complex where he begins lashing out at others to push them away, because he feels they’re going to leave anyways. These don’t happen often, but it’s really hard for him to pull himself out of it when they do. Feels he’s wearing others’ patience thin, but he appreciates those who stick through it nonetheless.

List subject to change, most likely w/ new additions as I remember things I forgot, or just clarifying anything I may have worded poorly.

-----

3 songs didn't make it to the Spotify playlist because they aren't up on there. Otherwise, both have the same songs & are ordered the same.

[shewasverynice]

Fandoms: 呪術廻戦 | Jujutsu Kaisen 

⚠️ SPOILER HEAVY ⚠️

Major Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death 

Full tags/warnings on Chapter links post

Major Characters: Original Character, Gojo Satoru, Geto Suguru, Ieiri Shoko, Yaga Masamichi, Nanami Kento, Haibara Yu, Tsukumo Yuki, Choso

‎‧₊˚✧ Chapter 26 ✧˚₊‧

The first years and second years all slumped against the wall in the tiny bit of shade that was left. The sun was up high, melting everything into soup and making the air feel like you were spinning around in an air fryer. Summer had arrived violently.

"I, Satoru Gojo, being of mostly sound mind…"

"You writing your will?" Shoko mumbled.

"Yeah." He answered.

"In the dirt?" She asked, letting her head tip over to look at it.

"Yeah." He answered again, still lazily drawing the characters in the dirt beside him.

At least until Shoko brought her foot down and messed it all up. He didn't even have the energy to fuss and just let his hand lay flat on the ground. He just closed his eyes and groaned.

"Last year we went to the water park," Suguru mentioned, draping his arm over his eyes for some kind of sweaty relief. It was better than nothing.

"That place is closed for some kind of renovation…" Sarah sighed, just letting her hand still holding he phone land on her chest.

"So… what should we do?" Haibara asked, then jumped as Sarah suddenly stood up.

"We're gonna do a great American tradition!" She said, placing her hands on her hips. "Everyone? Come with me!"

⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂ ⠂⠄⠄⠂☆

The grand hall of the castle is an imposing sight. Golden chandeliers hang high above, casting shimmering light across polished stone floors. Massive banners bearing the kingdom's crest line the walls, flanking a throne of carved oak and gilded accents. The King sits with an air of quiet authority, his crown catching the light as he gazes upon the party standing before him. The leader of the group is Areval, the high elf paladin. His tall and commanding frame radiates strength and determination. His gleaming plate mail is adorned with intricate patterns of green and white, reminiscent of forest leaves interwoven with silver streams. His hand rests on the hilt of his longsword, and his piercing emerald eyes meet the King’s without hesitation. Beside him stands Dylan, a wiry rogue cloaked in dark leathers. His face is obscured by a scarf that covers him from his nose to his neck, leaving only sharp, calculating eyes visible. His posture is casual, but his fingers rest close to his belt, ready for trouble. The King’s gaze shifts to Fayette, the cleric. She wears white robes embroidered with golden threads, though her expression of disinterest stands in stark contrast to the holiness of her attire. Her staff is slung casually across her back, and she leans slightly to one side, as though the weight of the world bores her more than it burdens her. Beside her is Edgar, the fighter. Young and brimming with vitality, his grin is broad enough to rival the sun. His muscles strain against the leather straps of his armor, and a massive sword rests easily on his shoulder as though it weighs nothing. His bright eyes dart around the room with an eagerness that borders on impatience. Finally, the King’s gaze falls on Nanami, the wizard. A blonde-haired youth with round glasses perched on his nose, he stands quietly at the back of the group, clutching a weathered tome of spells. His robes are practical, and his demeanor is polite but reserved. The faint scent of parchment and ink seems to follow him, and the way he adjusts his glasses suggests he’s always deep in thought. The King rises slowly from his throne, his voice resonating across the hall. "Adventurers, you stand before me not as knights sworn to my banner, but as champions of courage and skill. The Swamplands to the east have grown foul with the stench of undeath. Corpses rise from the muck, and swarms of insects, creatures of grotesque size, claim all who dare tread there. My people cannot live in fear, and so I turn to you." His words are heavy, but his eyes are hopeful. "The task before you is not for the faint of heart. There will be horrors in those marshes that defy reason. Yet, for your bravery, I promise rewards fitting of legends: gold, land, and titles that will secure your names in history." The King pauses, his expression softening. "But more than that, you will have the gratitude of a kingdom. You shall be remembered not for the spoils you claim, but for the lives you save. Go now with my blessing, and may the gods guide your path. Return to us as heroes." With a final nod, he motions for the party to leave. The heavy wooden doors of the throne room creak open, revealing the vast world beyond. The call to adventure beckons, and the Swamplands await.

"Okay uh… so are we at the swamp yet?" Haibara asked.

"No, Edgar, don't be silly," Satoru said, narrowing his eyes at Haibara, "We're still in the King's throne room of course!"

"I suppose we should be going then?" Suguru asked, "Perhaps we should head over to the stables?"

"Wonderful idea, Dylan!" Satoru said, placing his hand on his chest. "Let us go! The swamp awaits!"

"How is this an American tradition?" Nanami mumbled, glancing at his plate of pancakes that still sat untouched besides his character sheet.

"Okay well, Japan doesn't have like… shitty breakfast chains okay?" Sarah grumbled, looking up from her notes. "There's nowhere here where you can slam an OJ and stab and orc normally. This café didn't mind if we hang out for a few hours in the AC."

The adventurers find themselves at the bustling marketplace near the city gates. Areval, ever the negotiator, steps forward to discuss terms with a merchant who deals in carts and horses. The man, a stout fellow with a heavy apron and a knowing smirk, sizes up the group. He quickly realizes this isn't a casual outing—they’re heading somewhere dangerous. After a bit of haggling, the party secures a sturdy wooden cart, its wheels reinforced with iron bands, and a reliable draft horse named Ember.

Fayette, ever disinterested, barely glances at the arrangement, while Edgar enthusiastically pats the horse on the neck. "Good girl," he says with a wide grin, his hand coming away slightly dusty.

Dylan inspects the cart's underside with a rogue's suspicion, ensuring there are no hidden flaws. Nanami, already seated in the cart, flips through his spellbook, occasionally glancing around as if trying to memorize every detail of their surroundings.

With the cart packed and the reins in Arrival’s steady hands, the group sets out. The road starts wide and smooth, flanked by open fields and the occasional farmhouse. The sun sinks lower, painting the sky with streaks of orange and purple. As the hours pass, the forest looms ahead, its dark canopy beckoning like an ominous gate.

The transition is gradual. The dirt path narrows, and the trees grow closer together. Their thick trunks rise like ancient sentinels, their branches intertwining to create a lattice of shadow. The once-vibrant chatter of birds fades, replaced by the distant creak of swaying boughs. Fayette lets out a long sigh, her staff resting lazily against the side of the cart. “Why do these places always feel cursed?” she mutters, her voice low but audible in the growing quiet.

Edgar, undeterred, flexes his arms. “It’s just trees,” he says with a chuckle. “What’s the worst they can do? Fall on us?”

Dylan’s eyes dart from shadow to shadow, his hand hovering near the hilt of a dagger. “You’d be surprised,” he murmurs, his tone betraying none of the humor Edgar attempts.

The last rays of sunlight disappear behind the treetops, and the forest takes on an entirely different character. The path beneath the wheels becomes uneven, dotted with roots and stones. Ember snorts in mild discomfort, her ears twitching at every faint sound. Nanami, adjusting his glasses, mutters an incantation under his breath, causing a faint orb of light to hover above the cart. It casts a pale glow, illuminating the immediate area but leaving the deeper woods in darkness.

The sounds of night creep in. At first, it’s the chirp of crickets and the rustle of leaves. Then come more unnerving noises—the distant hoot of an owl, the snapping of twigs in the underbrush, and a low, guttural croak that none of them can quite place. The shadows seem to move just beyond the light’s reach, and the air grows damp and heavy.

Arrival tightens his grip on the reins. “Stay sharp,” he warns, his voice calm but firm. “This is where the path becomes perilous.”

"How would you know that?" Shoko asked, raising her brow. "Areval doesn't look like a swamp kinda guy."

"He— uhh … he had a wild childhood?" Satoru mumbled, immediately waiting that down on his character sheet.

The cart jolts as one of its wheels catches on a root. Edgar jumps out with a laugh to push it free, his strength making quick work of the obstacle. As he climbs back in, Fayette yawns and leans back, though her staff remains within easy reach.

Dylan’s voice cuts through the night. “Something’s following us.” He’s crouched low, his eyes scanning the dark edges of the trail.

Nanami stiffens, clutching his spellbook tightly. “Are you certain?”

The rogue doesn’t answer immediately, his focus intense. Finally, he nods. “I heard it twice now. Heavy, deliberate steps. It’s keeping its distance for now, but it’s there.”

The group falls silent, the cart’s creaking wheels and the horses' steady hooves the only sounds for a moment. Then, as if on cue, a louder snap echoes through the woods.

Areval pulls the cart to a stop and draws his sword. “We face it here,” he says with authority, his voice cutting through the tension like steel. “Whatever it is, we don’t let it take us by surprise.”

The party dismounts, weapons drawn and ready, as the dense forest around them seems to hold its breath wh—

"Thank you!" Sarah said brightly to the waitress as she dropped off a fresh glass of water.

"Oh man," Satoru groaned with the rest of the group.

"We were really getting into it!" Suguru sighed.

"Keep going!" Haibara urged, "What's out there?!"

The trees part like curtains, and the forest seems to shrink under the weight of the massive figure stepping into the light. A towering blue ogre, his skin shimmering faintly in the magical light from Nanami's orb, emerges from the underbrush. His eyes are unlike any you’ve seen—brilliant golden orbs that gleam with intelligence and menace. He stands nearly twice Edgar’s height, his thick arms crossed over a barrel-like chest. Despite his intimidating presence, he holds his hands up, palms open, in what could almost be called a gesture of peace.

“Stay your weapons, little ones,” he rumbles, his voice deep and resonant, like distant thunder. His lips curl into a smug grin, revealing sharp, yellowed teeth. “If it comes to battle, you will not leave this forest alive. I wish to talk.”

The party exchanges glances, hands still resting on their weapons. Dylan shifts his weight slightly, his fingers twitching near the hilt of a dagger. Edgar looks to Arrival, who nods once before stepping forward. His sword remains in hand, its polished surface gleaming faintly in the magical light.

“What do you want?” Arrival demands, his voice calm but commanding. His emerald eyes lock onto the ogre’s golden ones, unflinching.

The ogre uncrosses his arms and gestures lazily toward the group. “You’re heading to the swamp, yes? The cursed marshes where the dead do not stay dead?” He chuckles, a low, gravelly sound. “I need something from there. A wand, wielded by the woman who controls the zombies. Bring it to me, and I will let you pass without… incident.”

Nanami speaks up hesitantly, his voice quiet. “Why do you want it?”

The ogre’s grin widens, but he says nothing for a moment, letting the question hang in the air. Then he chuckles again, the sound more menacing this time. “That’s none of your concern, little wizard. You bring me the wand, or you deal with the consequences of refusal. Those are your choices.”

The party huddles together a short distance away, their voices low but tense. Arrival keeps his eyes on the ogre, his sword at the ready, while the rest of the group deliberates.

“This is clearly a trap,” Fayette says, her tone dripping with sarcasm. She leans on her staff, “We go fetch the wand, and then he kills us and takes it. End of story.”

“We could just fight him now,” Edgar suggests, his grin faltering as he glances back at the ogre. “But… he’s really big. And blue. That’s gotta mean something, right?”

Dylan rolls his eyes. “We don’t need to decide anything now,” he says, his voice sharp and pragmatic. “We tell him yes, we get to the swamp, and then we figure out if we actually want to give him the wand. Simple.”

“That sounds mean,” Edgar huffed, crossing his arms.

“Why shouldn’t we be mean?” Fayette counters with a raised brow. “He’s a giant ogre who could kill us at any moment. I don’t think he’s worried about our feelings.”

Areval raises a hand, silencing the group. “This isn’t about being mean or nice,” he says firmly. “It’s about survival. If agreeing keeps us alive, then that’s what we’ll do. We’ll deal with the rest when we have the wand.”

Nanami nods reluctantly, clutching his spellbook. “We don’t have much choice, do we?”

With the decision made, the group turns back to face the ogre. Areval steps forward, lowering his sword slightly but keeping it ready.

“We’ll get the wand,” he says evenly. “But no harm comes to us, or the deal is off.”

The ogre’s grin returns, broader than ever. “Good,” he says, his golden eyes gleaming. “You are wise, little ones. I will be watching.”

Without another word, he steps back into the shadows of the forest, his massive form disappearing as quickly as it appeared. The sounds of the night return, though the weight of his presence lingers in the air. The party climbs back into the cart, their thoughts heavy as they press on toward the swamp, the ogre’s words echoing in their minds.

"Serious question," Satoru interrupted, "Is that a thing we could have fought?"

"Why would I tell you that?" Sarah asked with a chuckle, "You still might end up fighting him."

"Because," Satoru said with a grin.

"I'm not stupid," Sarah said, mirroring his grin.

"You could be?" Satoru fluttered his eyelashes.

The swamp looms ahead, shrouded in mist and shadow. As the party approaches, they are greeted by a miasma of odors that nearly makes them gag. The acrid stench of rot mingles with the damp, moldy smell of decaying vegetation. Beneath it all lingers the metallic tang of blood, sharp and coppery, as if the earth itself has been wounded and left to fester. The stagnant air clings to them like a suffocating veil, thick and unyielding.

Nanami wrinkles his nose and pulls his robe tighter around himself. “This is worse than I imagined,” he mutters.

Fayette waves a hand in front of her face, her expression of mild annoyance unchanged. “It’s a swamp,” she says flatly. “What did you expect? Roses?”

The cart halts as they near the edge of the path, and Areval climbs down to secure the horse to a sturdy-looking tree. The horse snorts and shifts nervously, ears flicking in every direction. “Easy, girl,” he murmurs, giving her a reassuring pat. “You’ll be safe here.”

The group gathers their gear and looks ahead. The path is barely distinguishable, a muddy track barely visible beneath the shallow pools of dark water that cover much of the ground. Gnarled, leafless trees rise from the swamp like skeletal fingers, their twisted branches clawing at the sky. The occasional thick root snakes across the path, threatening to trip the unwary.

Areval scowls at the scene before them, his green-and-white plate mail catching faint glints of light from Nanami’s orb. “This is going to be miserable,” he says grimly.

“Especially for you,” Dylan quips, gesturing to the heavy armor. “Bet you’ll sink like a rock in that stuff.”

Areval shrugs, unbothered. “I’d rather sink than be unprotected. Besides,” he adds with a faint smirk, “you’d just pull me out, wouldn’t you?”

Dylan rolls his eyes but says nothing as they set off down the path. The swamp’s stillness presses in around them, unnerving in its intensity. Dylan’s sharp ears pick up nothing—not the croak of frogs, the hum of insects, or the splash of unseen creatures in the water. It is eerily silent, the kind of silence that speaks of unnatural things.

“Too quiet,” Dylan mutters, his voice barely above a whisper. He pauses, tilting his head as if to catch any faint sound. “There’s nothing. No frogs, no birds, not even mosquitoes. Something’s wrong here.”

The party instinctively tightens their formation, weapons at the ready. Each step through the water sends ripples outward, the sound of their splashes the only thing breaking the oppressive silence.

Edgar’s usually cheerful expression is gone, replaced by a wary frown. “Shouldn’t there be… something?” he asks, gripping his sword tightly. “Anything? Even an alligator?”

Nanami nods, his voice low. “The quiet is unnatural. It’s like the swamp is… watching us.”

Fayette, ever unimpressed, sighs. “We’re walking into a cursed swamp ruled by a zombie-controlling witch. What did you expect, a picnic?”

As the group moves deeper into the swamp, the mist thickens, swirling around their legs like ghostly tendrils. The path becomes harder to follow, the mud sucking at their boots with every step. The water grows darker, and strange shapes can be seen beneath its surface—branches, roots, or something else entirely.

Areval pauses, his hand raised to signal the group to stop. His eyes scan the murky landscape, his grip on his sword tightening. “Stay alert,” he says quietly. “Whatever’s out there, it’s waiting for us to make a mistake.”

The silence breaks abruptly, shattered by the sharp cracking of branches and the unmistakable sloshing of water. It comes from all around—close, too close. The swamp feels alive now, the oppressive stillness giving way to chaos as shadows move in the mist. “Positions!” Areval barks, his voice cutting through the confusion. He raises his shield, the polished surface catching faint reflections of the mist and murk. His sword gleams as he draws it, the metal singing in the night. Dylan melts into the shadows near a cluster of gnarled trees, his movements swift and silent. Fayette steps back, gripping her staff tightly, her bored expression replaced by one of grim determination. Edgar lets out a whoop, his grin returning as he unslings his massive greatsword, the blade glinting with anticipation. Nanami fumbles for his spellbook, his round glasses fogged slightly from the damp air, but his eyes are sharp and focused. The first figure emerges from the mist—a shambling corpse, its rotting flesh hanging loosely from its bones. Its hollow eyes glow faintly with a sickly green light, its jaws snapping as it lurches forward. More follow, dragging themselves out of the water and from behind twisted trees, their moans rising into a horrifying chorus. “Here they come!” Edgar shouts, stepping forward with his greatsword raised.

"So, which one do I roll for damage?" Haibara asked, looking over his dice.

"No, first you have to roll to hit," Sarah said with a laugh, "So pick up the d20 and roll it."

"D20?" Haibara asked, only to be handed the twenty sided die from Satoru. One zombie charges at Edgar, its clawed hands outstretched. He swings his blade in a wide arc, cleaving through the creature’s midsection with a wet, sickening thud. The top half of the zombie falls into the water, still twitching as it drags itself forward, but Edgar plants his boot on its skull, driving it into the mud. Areval steps into the fray, his shield raised as a pair of zombies close in on him. One swipes at him with bony claws, but the attack glances off his shield. He counters with a precise thrust of his sword, piercing the creature’s chest. It stumbles but doesn’t fall. With a grimace, Areval pulls his sword free and swings again, this time severing its head. The second zombie claws at his armor, leaving shallow scratches, but he shoves it back with his shield and finishes it with a clean slash. From the shadows, Dylan darts forward, his twin daggers flashing. He plunges one blade into the back of a zombie’s neck, twisting it before pulling it free. The creature collapses into the water, and Dylan vanishes again, moving to his next target. Fayette raises her staff, muttering an incantation under her breath. A pulse of radiant light erupts from her hands, washing over a cluster of zombies. The light burns through their decayed flesh, leaving them smoking and writhing as they fall. Nanami flips through his spellbook frantically, finally settling on a spell. He points at a group of zombies advancing on the party and chants a string of arcane words. A firebolt erupts from his hand, striking one of the creatures and engulfing it in flames. The zombie staggers, its grotesque form lit up like a macabre torch. Despite the party’s efforts, the undead keep coming. The swamp itself seems to be birthing them, more rising from the water and muck with every passing moment. The air is thick with the smell of rot and burned flesh, the sound of splashing water and clashing weapons echoing through the mist. “We’re being overwhelmed!” Nanami shouts, his voice tinged with panic as he casts another spell. “We hold the line!” Areval calls back, cutting down another zombie. “We’ve faced worse than this!” Dylan reappears at his side, wiping blood and ichor from one of his daggers. “Speak for yourself,” he mutters, his eyes scanning the battlefield. “This is starting to feel like a losing game.” Edgar lets out a triumphant laugh as he cleaves through another foe, his sheer strength carving a path through the horde. “This is what I live for!” he roars, though his breaths are coming heavier now. Fayette casts another radiant spell, her voice sharp. “Less talking, more fighting!” The clash of steel and bone echoes through the swamp as the party fights on, their movements growing more frantic with each passing moment. Just as Dylan drives his dagger into the spine of another zombie, everything stops. The undead freeze mid-motion, their bodies locked in grotesque poses. The faint green glow in their eyes flickers but does not fade. An eerie stillness returns to the swamp, oppressive and unnatural.

“What the…” Edgar mutters, stepping back and hefting his greatsword defensively.

“Hold!” Areval commands, his shield raised. His eyes dart over the unmoving horde. “Everyone, back together. Now.”

The party quickly regroups, forming a tight circle with their backs to one another. Weapons at the ready, they scan their surroundings as the zombies stand unnervingly still. Some twitch violently, their heads jerking to the side, but none advance. Instead, a strange rhythmic swaying begins, as though the horde is being pulled by invisible strings.

A low, guttural chuckle breaks the silence, followed by the sound of shuffling footsteps. The wall of zombies directly ahead parts with a sickening squelch, and through the opening steps an ancient woman, her frame hunched and frail. Her face is a maze of wrinkles, so deep and numerous that her eyes are nearly obscured by folds of sagging skin. She wears a tattered purple shawl over a patchwork dress, her gnarled hands clutching the fabric tightly. Her movements are deliberate, almost theatrical, as she pauses to throw one edge of the shawl over her bony shoulder with an air of exaggerated elegance.

“Well, now!” she croaks, her voice sharp and grating, dripping with disdain. “What’s this sorry lot doin’ stompin’ through my swamp like a pack o’ wild hogs? Y’all got no manners, no sense, no purpose! Ain’t nobody teach ya better?”

The party exchanges confused glances, each of them still on edge. Edgar shifts uncomfortably, his grip on his greatsword tightening. “Uh… who—”

“Don’t you ‘uh’ me, boy!” the old woman snaps, jabbing a crooked finger in his direction. “You stand there all big ‘n dumb like a sack o’ bricks, thinkin’ you can just waltz in here uninvited?”

“Ma’am,” Areval begins cautiously, lowering his sword just slightly. “We—”

“Oh, don’t you ‘ma’am’ me neither!” she cuts him off, her voice rising in pitch. “I ain’t no dainty debutante waitin’ for tea and biscuits! You think I’m gonna roll out a welcome mat for a bunch o’ armored buffoons and sneaky cutthroats?”

Dylan opens his mouth to retort, but the woman waves her hand dismissively. “And you—bet you think you’re clever, skulkin’ around like a flea-bitten alley cat. I seen smarter rocks!”

Nanami blinks behind his fogged glasses, raising a hand hesitantly. “Excuse me—”

“Excuse you?!” she interrupts, hobbling a step closer. “I don’t need no excuses from you, string bean! You barely look old enough to be outta your mama’s pantry, let alone throwin’ sparks ��round my swamp!”

Fayette crosses her arms, unimpressed. “Are you done?” she asks dryly.

The old woman’s lips purse into a thin line, and then she grins—an unsettling, toothless grin. “Well, now, ain’t you a sour one? Got somethin’ crawlin’ up your robes, girl? Or is that just your face?”

The cleric rolls her eyes, but before she can respond, the woman digs into the folds of her dress. From a hidden pocket, she retrieves a set of false teeth, which she promptly jams into her mouth with a loud click. “Now,” she says, her voice suddenly clearer but no less sharp, “let’s try this again. Who the hell are you, and what are you doin’ tramping through my property?”

"Oh, this lady is great," Satoru laughed.

"Yeah? You would've loved my grandma," Sarah giggled.

"She still alive?" He asked, picking up a chip to eat.

"I… think so?" Sarah said slowly, her brows furrowing.

"OH— Well I—I uhh…"

Arrival steps forward cautiously, keeping his tone measured. “We didn’t realize this was your land,” he says, his eyes never leaving hers. “We’ve been sent to investigate the undead presence in this swamp. If you could—”

“Investigate?!” the woman barks, her eyes flashing with annoyance. “I’ll tell ya what’s goin’ on here! Nosy fools like you pokin’ their heads where they don’t belong, stirrin’ up trouble, makin’ my babies restless!” She gestures dramatically to the frozen zombies around her.

“Babies?” Dylan mutters, incredulous.

“Yes, babies!” she snaps, rounding on him. “They don’t need no prissy adventurers comin’ in here with their swords and spells, hackin’ and burnin’ like it’s some kinda sport!”

Edgar looks at the others and whispers, “Is it just me, or is this getting weird?”

“It’s always been weird,” Fayette replies under her breath.

The old woman huffs and glares at the group. “Now, unless y’all got a damn good reason to be here, I suggest you turn yourselves right ‘round and scuttle on outta my swamp before I make you regret it.”

The zombies twitch and sway once more, as if punctuating her words, their glowing eyes fixed on the party.

Areval takes a measured step forward, lowering his sword as he adjusts his stance. His voice carries the steady authority of a paladin accustomed to negotiation. “Madam, the king has sent us to address the growing concerns about the undead in these swamps. Multiple parties before us—”

Before he can finish, the old woman strides forward and slaps her bony hand against the metal of his breastplate with surprising force, producing a sharp clang as her rings strike the plate.

“Enough o’ that,” she snaps, her face twisted into a scowl. “I told the last four groups the same thing I’m tellin’ you: I’ve got permission from God to be here!”

The group collectively freezes, exchanging uncertain glances. Dylan shifts uncomfortably, rubbing the back of his neck as Fayette raises an eyebrow.

“Uh…” Fayette begins cautiously, her tone skeptical. “Which god might you be referring to?”

The old woman turns to her with an exasperated huff, as if the cleric had just asked the world’s dumbest question. “The only real one!” she replies, her voice sharp and final.

Areval’s brow furrows. “Madam, all the gods are real. Their blessings and magic are the source of much of what we—”

“Razzle dazzle!” the old woman interrupts, waving her hand dismissively. Her expression shifts into one of smug certainty, and she grins, revealing her crooked false teeth. “That’s all just fireworks and party tricks. The real magic comes from the big one, the main God. The one who don’t bother with temples and priests ‘cause He’s too busy keepin’ the world turnin’!”

The party stares at her, the silence stretching as their confusion deepens. Nanami adjusts his round glasses and opens his mouth to speak but immediately thinks better of it, his lips snapping shut.

The old woman lets out a dramatic sigh, rolling her eyes so hard it seems she’s looking into the back of her skull. “Oh, for heaven’s sake! You lot are slower than a three-legged tortoise in molasses. Follow me, and I’ll show ya!”

With a flourish of her shawl, she spins on her heel and begins to shuffle away, the mud squelching beneath her feet as she gestures for the party to follow. The zombies remain frozen, their heads twitching slightly to track the group as the adventurers cautiously fall into step behind the woman.

“I’ve got the proof you’re all too dense to understand,” she calls over her shoulder, her voice brimming with smug superiority. “Maybe seein’ it’ll knock some sense into ya!”

Dylan sidles up next to Fayette, speaking in a low voice. “This is going well.”

Fayette doesn’t even look at him. “Shut up, Dylan.”

Edgar leans toward Areval as they trudge through the muck. “Do you think this ‘big god’ thing has anything to do with the undead?”

Areval shakes his head, his expression grim. “I don’t know. Stay vigilant.”

The old woman cackles ahead of them, clearly enjoying the tension. “Don’t fret, shiny boy! I’ll explain it all nice and slow when we get to my house. You’ll see. You’ll all see.”

The swamp seems darker as they press on, the stench growing worse with every step. The path becomes narrower, flanked by gnarled trees whose twisted branches claw at the air like skeletal fingers. Somewhere in the distance, the faint sound of water dripping breaks the silence, an ominous rhythm to accompany their uneasy march.

Sarah sat back and closed her notes and the rest of the group sighed with both annoyance and relief.

"Why do you always gotta end these on a cliff hanger?" Satoru asked, chuckling as he ruffled her hair.

She swatted at him and grinned, "Because it's more fun that way and I know you wont skip."

"Pff, I'd never miss one!" Satoru laughed.

"Yeah, thanks for running these for us!" Haibara said happily, "I love it!"

"Glad you all like it." Sarah said with a satisfied smile, packing up her pencils and dice. The group chattered amongst themseves for a moment, when Sarah caught Nanami's eyes on her. She looked up at him and tilted her head.

"So, when can we play again?" Nanami asked quietly, making sure no one else had noticed.

"Whenever you want," Sarah said softly, keeping that secret between the two of them.

Prev Main Next

Taglist: @inthedarkshadows000

[carionto]

Nothing is safe from becoming "exciting"

I've read a bunch of HASO stuff and often when I'm writing something I know I'm drawing from a ton of somewheres, to the point where I can't pinpoint anything, it's all a big mush that my brain then spits out here. This one, however, I know was inspired by jpitha's writings, specifically the bit about Gene's High G Gym (I think that's the mostly correct name anyway). Shamelessly shilling their work cuz it's great, go read it!

______________________________

Humanity has begun expanding their hold over their native system. Like an insect hive, ships ferry just about everything to and from Earth, building stations both in planetary orbits and around the Sun. Nearly all experimental of some kind - a lot of ideas they couldn't try built up over the thousand years they were isolated.

They do also have countless small space worthy vehicles, nearly all with varying superficial designs and patterns, but also quite a few rather different underlying mechanical principles.

Soon we noticed a lot of activity throughout the entire system not affiliated with any organization or group. Just... individuals and small family units doing their own thing. We quickly gave up trying to categorize such behavior. When we asked, they said:

"Anyone with a license to pilot their craft can go pretty much wherever that isn't restricted. For some places and activities they do need to get a permission first though."

Worryingly lax on account that many of the larger "civilian" craft are still powered by their "Mini-Suns" as they call them.

One particular individual craft got our attention. It created a spike of thermal activity in one region of their Oort Cloud, so one of us went to ask this Human. Abigail was her name:

"Yo space dudes and dudettes, what's up?" Our translators were still incorporating the various Human linguistic peculiarities, but their liaisons are very helpful. We inquired as to what she was doing here so far out.

"Oh you are gonna love it!" another phrase we are learning to be wary of. "Victor, that's this bad boy right here," she affectionately slaps the armrest of her, now that we are closer, disturbingly modified vessel. Is that a second engine cluster bolted on the back? And a... weird exposed device with a large neon label - Space BBQ. We instinctively fear her and her next words. "He and I are making a race track with these here ice cubes. I got this idea when I was a kid, and it is going to be. So. Awesome!"

All of the red flags triggered. Then, Abigail demonstrates by shooting a harpoon claw... thing... at a nearby object the size of a few skyscrapers and begins pulling it towards a cluster of other planetesimals. Normally, these kind of clouds have stabilized over billions of years and each object is thousands and millions of kilometers from one another.

There were dozens stacked so close to each other that you could barely fit an escape pod between in some places. One in particular was surrounded by a small cloud of its own.

"Ooh, that one right there." She enthusiastically pointed out its somewhat flattened ovoid shape. "Doesn't it just scream to you that it wants to be the ultimate doughnut? Hector thinks so, he's my cat by the way - Say hi Hector! [hiss] (Fine, be that way, ya bum) Love that bastard. Anyway, just gotta finish blasting a hole big enough and it'll be the perfect finish line."

Not wanting to hurt our sanity further, we decided to leave her be, but not before she proudly exclaimed over all open channels:

"Remember to tell your folks if they ever wanna race to come here to Abby's Action Asteroids [quick whisper] (trademark pending)! Soon it'll have laser obstacles!"

[s4tvrnsays]

Hero lineup!! Featuring some extra cigognelles bc shes too pretty not to draw

I originally planned on doing both the hero and civilian designs and then posting, but im too lazy and impatient so here u go

My longggggg thoughts and extra doodles down below, as always :333

OKAY!

So here are some things i kept in mind while designing them! Its nothing extraordinary but i like hearing people talk abt this stuff so i thought others would enjoy it too

While designing the three of them, i didnt exactly keep any inspiration for their designs (other than cigognelle, sorry lb and cn…) but there were some things i DID want, ill go through them here.

It was also pretty important for me that they look cohesive, because they DO have the big three miraculouses (i do like the idea of the other heroes joining, no zodiac miraculous tho)

I also pointed out some parts of the design that might be missed bc im obsessed

Ladybug:

One thing i wanted to incorporate was LESS SPOTS!!! Movie chat was right she DOES look like a watermelon

I also remembered mr bug’s suit and how he had armor on, and i really liked that idea! In my mind, the shoulder pads and breastplate are made of some sort of hard material, something synthetic.

And i also made her look more like a ladybug, with antennae. The little spikes are similar to the little hairs on insects, though ladybugs themselves dont have them (the little segments on their legs are joints, and i didnt rly like the look of them on a suit). This is mainly so she looks more insecty

The lines on her suit are inspired by spiderman!! As another insect themed hero, it was fun to make ladybug similar to him in that aspect. Expect to see her in spiderman poses in my art lol

Cigognelle:

Her look is inspired by ballet, because is there truly anything more graceful and crane-like than that?

I had my eye on specifically 1920s theatre and ballet costumes. Her hair, her hat (yes its a hat lol), her heels, etc

I thought it really fit her style, and her mostly black and white color scheme

Speaking of color scheme, i was REALLY surprised when i found out how perfect her colors were. The black and red are both colors that chat and ladybug have, and i thought it fit really well, considering her role :)

The little daggers she has are in the shape of a crane beak

And of course, heels. Because she slays

Chat Noir:

Now, chat’s suit didnt really change much. Im in love with his actual suit, but i’d still make a few changes

Same as ladybug, i wanted to add in more elements from a cat. Again, his suit does this really well (the PAW TOES!!!!!! Im literally obsessed) so i only added some fur on his shoulders, wrist, and on his boots.

The little cat buckle on his concept design is far too cute, so i added it back, this time as a solid silver one for simplicity

I added some little silver studs around his suit, like his arms and mask and also his ears (it doesn’t show tho)

And lastly, i brought in more green into his design, cuz its more fun that way!!!

I feel like my throat is dry somehow from all that typing

Anywayssssss here are the doodles :3

Theyre so precious to me u dont understand

[alexbrunn]

I forgot to show you guys some more of my headcanons for looks. I only have Marcoh and Pav. But maybe if you're interested I'll do the others later.

But on the other hand, my body pictures are pretty clear and easy to see🤔🤔🤔

Pav is very handsome man. He seems designed to seduce everyone around him, but few can get past his obnoxious flirting and frank words. Pav has a sharp, sophisticated, almost smarmy appearance, despite his life. He is a few years older than Marcoh, however, he looks much more youthful, as if he is the youngest in the couple, with only fine lines around his eyes and nasolabial folds. He is very proud of his face, he tries not to let anyone take advantage of this beauty, and whoever damages it will be honored with a cruel death, and the Bremen lieutenant certainly knows what cruelty is. He has a sharp long nose, which does not spoil him in the least, but emphasizes his sarcastic character when you learn about not. If Marcoh has long eyelashes, Pav has incredible eyelashes to flap languidly when flirting. But his eyebrows are thin, sharp, and almost very often drawn down to the bridge of his nose. A smirk almost never leaves his face, and he often bites his thin lower lip when flirting. He has a cold and destructive look gray eyes it is he ruins the whole image of a romantic prince. With this look he rants to devour and sizzle, he is full of hatred, even when the situation is more than positive and he is doing well. He became a long time ago, it's all the consequences of his trauma and pain. Even though Marcoh is sometimes afraid to look Pav in the eye, he still does his best to make sure Pav doesn't feel pain, at least for a while around him.

What about Marcoh... In drawing him, I wanted to distance him as much as possible from the image of Jotaro that he was drawn from. After all, they are two different characters (and they don't look much alike, excluding the coldness and fighting with his fists). His appearance was based more on the sprite while fighting him. He's rather unassuming, and it's hardly a stretch to say he'd make the covers of fashion magazines cry for him. Despite living in one of the major cities in the Vatican, he looks more like a villager. He has a generally broader, more massive face, and his cheekbones, though still present, are less pronounced. His nose was broken several times in battle, so it now has a slight hump and drooping tip. Although he is only 31 years old, it is worth considering that people used to grow up earlier, plus Marcoh has been under a lot of stress in his life, which has also affected the wrinkles around his eyes and just below between his eye and nose. Perhaps the constant banging on the face was also an important factor. He has a wide chin and plump lips with a scar in the corner. Thick thick eyebrows and long eyelashes, as he has a lot of body hair in general. Marcoh expresses his emotions very badly and it's hard to see him smiling or crying, his face almost doesn't change from emotion to emotion, which makes him seem rude and angry, and with such dimensions the image becomes really frightening. But in his bright emerald eyes like a thick forest you can always see his sincere feelings. They shine in a special way when Marcoh is happy or when he is crazy about what is in front of him, with this look he looks at small creatures like frogs, mice, insects. However, when it comes to human interaction, he immediately tries to hide his gaze. Pav is terribly annoyed by this, because he wants to be looked at with admiration at all times, not looked away.

[wazzappp]

So. What if Jaime had chemoreceptors on spots his armor? I have four potential explanations/reasons.

One: the less creepy version: certain types of bugs taste with their feet, etc. Not beetles, but they do. They can land on things and identify whether or not they’re food that way. So, fingertips and or balls of his feet have the ability to taste.

Two: the raptorial version. The forearm blades/upper forelegs are raptorial. If he’s fighting/hunting, he might wanna be able to sense if this is food or not, once he sticks his blades in. So taste receptors on the blades. Possibly little pores like ampullae of lorenzini (detects electrical impulses, so might help with finding muscles to cut to incapacitate prey), or thermal pits like vipers (to help locate large veins to slice.)

Three: antenna version.

The upper forelimbs kinda look like antenna, could give them sensory function (in suit). Maybe sensitive to pressure on the tips, with chemoreceptors clustered on the tip (active investigation, like he’s poking at a thing) and trailing in a rough line down the limb towards his main body (passive investigation, like the wind blows a smell to him)

Four: scout version. The scarab is an infiltrator, part of infiltrating is collecting data, so the armor must have a whole fuck-ton of sensors on it, so the scarab can get lots of data to send to Reach. Khaj isn’t interested in the reach, but that doesn’t change what it was designed for. So lots of sensors everywhere, with taste/smell receptors clustered on the ends of limbs (feet, hands, blades)

Thank you, have a nice day!

Hey. Hi. Not to be dramatic but I’m going to marry you now. This is not a request. Put the ring on

Hoooooooooly fuck I love the Ampullae of Lorenzini idea so much. I know there aren’t really insects that have them (as far as I know) but I don’t fucking care they’re SO COOL. The gel inside ampullengang might need to change because it’s meant to detect electromagnetic fields underwater but that’s like. The only real issue here.

Fuckkkk you could have so much fun with behavioral shit too. Movement might cause his mantis blades to try and lash out to attack whatever’s triggering them. In battle this could help with quick instinctive attacks that might not be possible if he was doing it consciously. BAD news is that means he has to get a grip on them real fucking quick so he doesent hurt anyone on accident. OHHHH MY GOD WHICH WOULD MAKE DUCK-TAPING THEM DOWN IN MY LAST LIL AU BLURB EVEN MORE FUN LETS FUCKING GOOOOOO.

Oh god accidentally hurting a family member. His worst fucking nightmare. Delicious. I am drinking that shit like lemonade.

Yes I added his little clawsies in the diagram you can fit SO many knives on this boy.

THERMAL!! PITS!! Holy fuck I did not know there were beetles that have these but there ARE. They’re called fire chaser beetles and they can sense fires from MILES away and holy fuck I love them. Their sensilla (sorry for spelling it wrong in the drawing lmao) are stored in the thorax and are infrared receptors. These contain liquid which expand in response to the infrared radiation, and touch a nerve, which tells the beetle where heat is coming from.

For Jaime this would be weird as FUCK. It’s more just a sense of 'HEAT WHEREMST’ than infrared vision. It is nice for telling his mom when she forgot to turn off the oven though.