#i dunno if i can still call the transformers one “young” since its been here a good few years now

[feral-aether]

I trimmed them all lol

I bought a whole bunch of stickers off red bubble lol

Bonus points if someone can name all the different fandoms lol

Minus the state flag lol

[proudfreakmetarusonikku]

Day 10: Poor Unfortunate Souls

Another work in my Fae AU series, taking place sometime after the ending of “happy families and all that.” Dream reveals to Tommy the true nature of the realm he's in, and just what he could do to him if he so desired. Warnings for restraints, body horror, fates worse than death, very brief references to cannibalism (that turn out to not exist), abuse, torture, non consensual body modification, dehumanisation (both literally and figuratively), and infantilisation.

AO3 link, if you’d prefer.

“Did you know that we didn’t have animals like this in Faerie before I came to power?” Dream grinned lazily as a butterfly landed on his outstretched claw, the pattern on its wings similar to Dream’s own. “They were one of the many things I missed from my time alongside humanity. So, I… recreated them, shall we say. Do you know how?”

Tommy glared at him, hoping vainly that somehow his gaze could burn holes through the man he’d quickly grown to… hate wasn’t the right word, not quite, but neither was love. The best way he could describe it was definitely-not-Tubbo-feelings.

Oh, Dream wasn’t all bad- there were times, in fact, when it was easy to forget he wasn’t here voluntarily for tea parties and fascinating conversations and only slightly spine-shattering hugs. On a good day, time with Dream would be like an adventure, climbing to the highest mountain top and laughing all the while. On a bad day, well…

Impatiently, the vines holding him in place dug deeper into his skin, thorns tearing at his flesh. “Tommy.”

Tommy found himself answering without wanting to, his thoughts forcibly poured out of his mouth. “I dunno. You could make, like, illusions or some shit, right?”

Dream’s laughter had an inhuman tinge to it, one Tommy hadn’t been able to pick up on at first but had set him on edge ever since he had. “Definitely not. Even I have limits to my power, y’know. It’s adorable that you think otherwise, though. Aren’t you such a caring little brother?”

“Fuck off, I wasn’t trying to compliment you, prick.”

“I know.” Dream took a deep breath, almost exaggeratedly, like he was doing it as a mimicry of something. “The thing is, over the years, we end up with more human servants than we know what to do with, y’know? Not only do we take them from your world, they just always seem to be making more. It’s impressive, honestly. It’s a nightmare, making new fae, let me tell you.”

Tommy quirked an eyebrow. “And…?”

“It’s far easier to twist forms and minds once than to create a permanent illusion.” Dream’s lopsided grin widened, and despite his youthful features, there was something in his eyes both ancient and malevolent. “To put it simply, I changed their shape to match the animal I wanted, and… it’s complicated, but they certainly can’t think like you and I do anymore, no matter how hard they try. Do it young enough, and you don’t notice a difference, though the quirks of those who can still remember being sentient are certainly charming in their own right.”

It took a second to hit, but when it did, Tommy felt so fucking sick. Sicker than he ever had before in his life. Logically, he knew Dream’s power. Tubbo had told him hushed stories of the Faerie King, afraid speaking too loud would alert him even in a realm he could not touch. How he could warp flesh as easy as breathing, and loved to use it for sick games. But seeing it… seeing it was a whole different story. The idea of being completely removed from the body God made just for you felt like a violation of the soul and faith itself, a direct spit in the eye of all that was holy. Besides…

“What does that mean about the meat?” Tommy asked shakily.

“Transformed from plant matter, obviously.” Dream rolled his eyes. “Jeez, Tommy, you know I don’t kill things. That’s so boring. What games can you play with a corpse? What benefits can they give you over an ally? You know, you may call me cruel, but we’re not the ones who invented bombs. Last I recall, they were still dropping those in your streets.”

“Well, yeah, but…” I’d rather die quick and painless than be your playmate for eternity, was what Tommy wanted to say, but he held his tongue. No need to make Dream madder. No, he’d learnt his lesson on that front. Instead, he said, “Why are you even telling me all this?”

“Can’t I simply wish to talk to my dearest brother?”

“Uh, if you were doing that, you wouldn’t have tied me up with thorns.” Tommy pointed out.

“You’re very observant for a human, aren’t you?” Dream said. Tommy couldn’t help but scowl at that stupid fucking condescending tone that he’d used. The only reason he’d rather Dream’s pity than his wrath is that it wouldn’t get anyone else hurt. “No, I’m here to point out a very important fact you’d better learn quick. Every earthly animal you see here, from the tiniest bumblebee to the largest of boars, was one day like you. What is it that spares you from that fate?”

“You- you need me. For my memories of the human world.”

“That’s an excellent point, but all that requires is your mind.” Dream laughed, and this time there was a hint of malice. “Your body, however? I don’t require that remain human at all. Remember, I’ve altered it before out of the kindness of my own heart. But if you continue acting in the way you are, I might be forced to transform you into something far less able to bite and kick and scream all day. A moth, perhaps, or maybe a particularly weakened rodent. Just until you learn to behave, of course.” He paused, in genuine thought. “Maybe I’ll keep the wings, though. Then we’d match!”

“No, no- God, fuck no, you are not fucking grafting wings onto my back or whatever the fuck! It’s my body, and I’m not going to- to become some fucking monster!” The idea of becoming some sort of living crime against God seemed far more sickening than any of the beatings Dream had given him in the past.

Dream laughed. “Okay, I’m definitely keeping the wings, then.”

“Go fuck yourself.” Tommy spat.

“I’ll have to decline that offer.” There was an awkward pause before Dream spoke again. “You know, this whole conversation has reminded me of something, actually.”

“What, some other horrible torture you can force me through because you think making me cry is funny or something?”

“I’m not torturing you; I’m playing.” Dream shook his head. “Humans never get the difference there. It’s so strange. I like you, so it’s a game. If I hated you, it would be torture.”

“And that’s such a big difference that the person kicking me until I’m bloody and bruised doesn’t hate me, is it?”

“Yes, you’re getting it now!” The joy in Dream’s voice at that almost made Tommy feel bad about his sarcasm. Almost. But Dream was a dick, so he didn’t. “I was just thinking… it’s been so long since we’ve had a Hunt.”

“Go shoot some deer, then, idiot.”

“A Wild Hunt, I mean.” Dream gave him an almost wistful look. “See, back when I was still a Courtier, that’s what we used to do for fun. We’d gather the hounds- Faerie hounds, not human animals, obviously- and we’d go to the human villages and take as many as we could as trophies. Unfortunately, I had to… weaken that link between the worlds, so it’s been so very long.”

“Why don’t you just hunt some servants, then? You have plenty.” It made Tommy feel a little sick to suggest, but the idea of it happening to him was… terrifying. There were tales of those hunts, too, in the stories Tubbo had told him. At least Dream was predictable in his awfulness, and had some sort of fucked up soft side, kind of. Other fae… God knows what they’d do to him.

“They’re changed by this land too, y’know? Else I wouldn’t need you. We’ve tried, but it doesn’t work without proper humans. You don’t get the right amount of mortal terror.” The almost innocent look of Dream’s smile upon saying that was worse than any cruelty. “I mean, I can’t just go handing you off to whoever catches you, of course, I need you, but I’m sure I can think of some other suitable prize. Are you in?”

“What the fuck? No, of course not, prick.”

Dream rolled his eyes. “You do know refusing just makes me more likely to go ahead with it, right?”

“Why?”

“Because it’s funny, obviously.” Dream said like it was the most normal and not disturbing thing in the world.

Maybe seeing Tubbo again wasn’t actually worth this.

[leupagus]

My Stationery Box, or: The Douche Chest, or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Being A Terrible Parody Of Myself

So I really love to write letters, and have since i was a kid — when i cleaned out my grandparents’ house I found a few I’d written in grade school, and my parents’ files are chocablock full of the weird collage type things I sent to them in college. 

I’ve also been a huge insufferable fucking snob about stationery since way too young (yes I did have a fountain pen phase, no it did not go well) and have been collecting fancy paper and cute cards and assorted weird writing paraphernalia forever. Up until recently, things were just kind of haphazardly stuffed in various drawers and shelves and I could never actually find any said fancy shit when I wanted it; but a couple of months ago I discovered an adorable little chest of my late mom’s that had previously housed, I think, her knitting and has mostly just been collecting dust since. And voila: The Douche Chest was born:

(Pictured with my elderly laptop and coffee with my coffee warmer, which I STRONGLY ENCOURAGE everyone to buy one day when we’re not under worldwide quarantine, seriously it will change your life.)

Keep Reading for some top tier stationerdery

First off, the stuff that helps me write! I still use my family address book, which was purchased sometime in the early 80s and has the name and address of everyone my parents ever cared enough about to want their name and address, which is actually not that many people. I keep it updated and have added a few people, but mostly rely on my phone’s address book. Mostly I like it because it’s got a lot of my mom’s handwriting.

My planner, which has a whole correspondence section where I keep a record of who I write to regularly, when I write to them, and what kind of stationery they usually get (because there are different types and you don’t want to give a correspondence an inconsistent letter-reading experience! Yes I know, I can’t believe I’m like this either) indicated by the m, s, x, l, b notations. That will be relevant later. Also yes the planner is where I scribble down both story ideas and my gratitude journal. This is what I’m saying in re: yikes.

At my own house, I have a whole huge box of letters I’ve gotten over the years, mostly organized by sender and date. Since I’m at my aunt’s house for quarantine, my correspondence is all being kept in my dad’s old... I dunno what to call it, basically it’s a trapper-keeper type thing that I literally never saw him go to work without. (A running theme of this tour is that a whole lot of this stuff is inherited from/given to me by my parents and grandparents.) Inside is also various labels that have come in handy when addressing packages etc, as well as our local neighborhood directory.

Next up is my pen bag, which is — I mean, it has my pens. I prefer writing with a black .5 tip rollerball type pen, and by “prefer” I mean “I cannot abide writing letters with anything else and will go to Staples and buy a new box rather than use a ballpoint pen except obv not right now, which makes the bag real important for keeping track of all my special pens.” Also pictured: my grandpa’s ancient letter opener that I’m pretty sure he stabbed multiple people with, and my blue Le Pen which I use to annotate my letters when I’m reading them through before sending. I KNOW.

This is my assorted letter-writing stuff storage box (no we’re not even at the cards yet this is TERRIBLE); please note that I sort of jerryrigged this box together myself, which will be another running theme of this tour. Glue, roller whiteout thingies, washi tape (which I don’t really use but people keep sending me?) post-its and my address stamp because no matter what I do, the fuckin’ Audubon Society refuses to send me a single donation request with cute stickers showing my address even though they’ve sent my deceased dad like three THIS YEAR. Anyway. Also please note the incredibly awesome initial stamp thing — I came up with the rough design in college and use it in place of my name a lot, but I went to leoniebunch and they transformed it into this super professional and lovely design that I want to use for the rest of my life. Not pictured: the fucking wax seal I also had made with that design, because yes, I’m like this.

WE’RE STILL NOT DONE WITH THE PARAPHERNALIA: here’s the other misc. stuff that I use on the regular. Cup with sponge because we’re not really licking envelopes these days: tons of weird stickers that I’ve collected, YET MORE PENS, including rainbow ones because one of these days I’m going to write to one of my friends with alternating rainbow colors and they’ll have to murder me. Also pictured: the letter opener which I forgot to put back in the pen bag, as well as my dog’s nail clippers and brush because that’s a handy place to keep them. Also also pictured: my dog, who does not help in any way with letter writing.

OKAY FINALLY ONTO THE STATIONERY, Jesus just writing this all out is making me both proud and ashamed.

I’m sure you noticed in the first pic how everything is meticulously, not to say monomaniacally, labeled. Some stuff might require a little bit of explanation; some stuff is pretty wysiwyg though. For example, BEAR CARDS, which:

(These are sent exclusively to my nephews, who go absolutely apeshit over them every time. Come to think of it, I have a LOT of cards/letter stock/etc that is just for one person or one set of people, which maybe I should talk to my therapist about.)

PUN CARDS are likewise exactly what you think they are; they’re the most recent addition to my hoard, having found them at Powells when I went to Portland in February. They are extremely My Kind Of Thing.

Then you’ve got things like BIRTHDAY CARDS, THANKS, POSTCARDS which like — guess what:

(Please note that of these birthday cards, all but two were actually inherited from my grandmother who passed away in 1986. See if you can guess which two are my purchases.) (Also I’m running out of thank-you cards but to be fair I am rarely grateful so this should last me another few years at least.) (Also shit, I didn’t take a picture of the postcards I don’t think? Whatever, they’re postcards that I’ve either inherited from my parents or collected over the years. There’s also a very odd collection of wolf-themed cards that SOMEONE in my family collected, and that I have been using exclusively for allighater because she’s the only one who could ever appreciate them enough.)

Then there’s the BLANK CARDS and BLANK AND WRITTEN CARDS WITH/WITHOUT ENVELOPES, because sometimes I just need to know what I’m getting into before opening the boxes. I’d say a good 50% of these were inherited from my folks, with the cutsier ones being my own purchases. The cards that these boxes originally contained are looooooooong since used up but they’re nice boxes and that meme about adulthood being an endless debate over whether or not you should keep a box because it’s a really good box is accurate as all hell. 

(There are a lot of cards in here that I bought when I was like, in college — those square ones, for example, were purchased at Faces in Northampton when I was in college and I’m probably never going to actually send them which is kind of ridiculous but see: this entire post.)

And finally, the actual letter-letter stationery! Which I also have an embarrassing amount of! First up is what’s labelled MADOC TREE CARD/LETTER because I honestly had no idea how else to describe it; it was inherited from my grandma who everyone called MaDoc (on account of her being both a ma and a doctor, go figure) and it’s really lovely. I doubt it’s the original intention, but I like to unfold the paper and use both sides of it, because I always have a lot to say. These are used only for family members on MaDoc’s side, and of those, only the ones I really like, which accounts for there still being a lot left.

Then there’s the X-LARGE paper, which isn’t actually that large — it’s just normal computer-sized — but in context is the biggest stuff I’ve got. All of this paper is from my mom, who loved using cute themed paper, and I use this stuff mostly for the friends of hers I keep in touch with (which is actually kind of a lot).

Then there’s the letterhead I use for — okay, so like, we know by now that I’m deeply weird, but this is probably just DEEPLY WEIRD, but whatever, you came this far. So I found a metric shitton of 6 3/4 envelopes in amongst my parents’ office supplies — I have literally zero idea why they had about 5 100-count boxes of these envelopes but I’m one of those people who can never, ever throw shit out, so! I gathered together all the letterhead that they’d also collected over the years from the various universities and hospitals they worked at, cut said letterhead down so that it a) didn’t have University of Tacoma or whatever still on it and b) perfectly fit a 6 3/4 envelope if folded three times. The resulting shape is a little... odd, I’ll admit, but it pleases me greatly and that’s the important thing. In fact this has been my go-to correspondence choice for a couple of months now.

(Also pictured: the cover for this hinky-ass box I made out of a Beekman 1802 box from when we went to their store for their Rose Apothecary popup shop. Zero regrets. Not pictured: the really cute pad of paper I also use for these envelopes that’s a more normal size and shape because where’s the fun in showing you normal stuff?)

And finally, my pride and joy, my Crane Stationery, some of which I have had since I was in high school and my mom bought me a box of it for my birthday (I told you, running theme). It comes in small, medium, and big; yes, I absolutely have rules as to who gets what size of these, too. The medium box kind of fell apart a few years ago so I cobbled a new one together; Crane stationery is notable for not being as exciting as that cover might imply. I’m also kind of pleased that I still have the airmail stationery that I got in college that apparently isn’t sold anymore, which I find baffling because what the fuck is the point of international correspondence if you don’t have to use special stationery? Anyway:

(In re: the lined sheets — I actually have them for every size, because I loathe lined paper but also loathe writing crooked, hence these guides that I put under each sheet as I write. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

So that’s the complete guided tour! If you aspire to have a collection as viscerally unnerving as mine, feel free to send any questions my way. You’re welcome/I’m sorry.

[gunsxroses]

Introduction to my Ruby | This should have been the day

Wide silver eyes stared at the empty boarding platform.

"No."

They looked back and forth, trying to find any sign of life.

"Nononono."

They trailed over to the flight schedule and nearly bulged out of her head.

"NO!"

With movement so fast that only your veteran hunter could track her, she appeared in front of the schedule, grasping it with shaky hands.

"I missed the flight to Beacon!"

It had all been going so smoothly for the young huntress. First she stopped that dastardly Torchwick from stealing dust. Okay, maybe stopped was a strong word. All he did was dance around her and then taunt her before peacing out. But that didn't mean she wasn't successful in stopping his goons! Yeah. She did a good job there. And then that Huntress showed up to help her and she got in trouble. Then came the interrogation and Professor Ozpin eating cookies in front of her. He never even offered her one. The monster. She could see him twirling his imaginary mustache right now. So evil.

And then she got invited to Beacon. She was super excited about it too! She told her Dad, her Uncle and especially her Sister, who was super stoked about it. Maybe even more than she was herself.

But as the nonexistent bullhead may point out, things didn't go her way.

She pulled her red hood over her face, wanting to hide her flushed face. She was completely and utterly embarrassed.  She had made such a big deal about this and then ended up so excited that she couldn't sleep, which resulted in her sleeping in and missing the damn flight!

She punched a nearby concrete wall. "It's not fair!" She yelled before yelping in pain, the wall being far harder than she had expected. She grabbed her wrist and blew on her now throbbing hand.

"I even made sure to wear my combat skirt." She muttered, though her black and red outfit was obscured by her long red cloak. A cloak that she went nowhere without. Her father had made it for her, in honor of her late mother. Same design, just red.

This wasn't the first time that Ruby had been hit with misfortune. While she was a talented youth who worked really hard to get where she was currently, she was far from perfect. She was awkward around new people and hated crowds. Not to mention she had only ever managed to make a few friends in Signal, with the rest of her peers labeling her a Teacher's Pet and a weapon's weirdo.

See. Ruby loved weapons more than anyone. Because she could talk to them without being judged. She could put her heart and soul into tinkering with them because they were always there for her. They never looked at her with those judgmental eyes. Those envious eyes. They were a comfort to her, as unhealthy as she knew that was. It didn't matter.

Especially when it came to her beloved Crescent Rose. It was a scythe and rifle combination. But its ability to transform wasn’t what made it special to her. No. It was the fact that the metal used in it was recycled from her mother’s old weapon. Which her Uncle had brought back to them, after a failed attempt to locate her mother after she went missing.

It was as close to closure as they could get and it only served to further prove how unforgiving the world really was. If someone as strong as her mother could be killed (?). What chance did she have? At least, that’s what she thought at the time.

But she soon became resolved to surpass her mother. To make her proud. She couldn't fail!

And yet, here she was. Clearly failing. All because she slept in.

"Dammit." She muttered, frustrated at herself more than anything. "I got into Beacon early." She said in a whiny voice, mocking her earlier self. "I totally proved that I'm great. Blah, blah, blah. Now I'm going to make a horrible first impression by arriving late and everyone is going to judge me. Again."

"I dunno about that. People can only judge you if you let them."

That voice. It caught her off guard. In fact, it was so unexpected that she actually physically jumped with an audible 'eep!' but she quickly recomposed herself and turned toward its source.

Sitting on a bench not far from her was a man with wavy white hair. He had red eyes, not unlike that of a dead fish. His outfit was rather unorthodox, to say the least. Resembling something from Mistral. A blue and white kimono. A black and red uniform was situated underneath it. By his side was a wooden sword.

He looked up at her.

And she looked at him.

She wasn't sure what to say. She had been certain she'd been alone here. But if she wasn't, does that mean he had heard her earlier outburst?! How embarrassing!

But still. She had to reply. She couldn't let him have the last word. At least new people were easier to talk to when there was just one of them.

"That's easy for you to say. You don't live my life." She replied back, hiding her gaze with her hood once more.

He looked thoughtful for a moment before replying. "You're right. I don't. So forget I said anything."

He went back to staring into the distance, as he had been doing before she looked at him. It was like . . . he was fighting a battle she couldn't see. With how serious those eyes of his were.

She bit her lip.

"Thank you, though. I feel a little lighter knowing that someone was listening."

If he acknowledged her, he didn't show it.

But she had said her peace and was content. Now the important thing was finding a way to Beacon.

She just hoped that her sister wasn't too worried about her.

---

"And that's why I'm here. So please, I'm begging you! You're the only one who I can count on!"

She was bowing in front of a man. A man who worked as a blacksmith. He was a tall man. Much taller than even her dad. He had unkempt neck-length black hair and piercing yellow eyes. He wore a blacksmith's apron with a black t-shirt and dark gray pants on underneath. Finishing up his general appearance was a pair of black boots and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

"You know as well as I do." He replied to her in a gruff voice. "That I'm in the middle of a shift right now."

She bolted upright and glared at him. "I know, but this is important to me! I'll even work here for free if that makes up for it!"

His gaze softened. "Well. You aren't normally someone to impose on others. So I guess I can let you off with reduced pay."

Ruby's eyes lit up. "You mean you're going to take me?"

"Yeah, yeah. Consider it a favor to your old man. Him bragging about the weapon I made him is the only reason people come to this damn place."

She jumped in joy, about to yell out in a triumphant nature before his tired gaze caused her to stop. She didn't want to push anymore boundaries. Not after all he had done for her.

This guy was Vulcan. He was the blacksmith who forged her father's weapon and a man she saw as her honorary Uncle. Not only did he allow her to work part-time for him starting at the age of 12, he was also the one who taught her everything she knew about metalworking. He was her idol, more or less. At least when it came to weapon crafting.

That didn't mean he was a pushover though. He had a Pro Huntsman license. That was the main reason her father felt so safe sending her to work with him, knowing that she'd be protected.

She climbed into his car which they'd be taking to a Bullhead he had managed to set up ahead of time.

"Seatbelt." He grunted.

Ruby nodded and put hers on. It was funny. Yang never made her wear one. Was that irresponsible of her? Probably. But Yang never was one to follow the rules of the road. If all those tickets she had were any indication.

She let her head clunk against the window next to her, her cheek smooshed against it as she looked at the scenery that was passing by. This wasn't exactly how she thought she'd be spending her first day at Beacon, but at least she had a way there now.

"I hope you're going to clean that window when you're done smudging it up."

She rolled her eyes. He was such a dad without being one.

Hell, in some ways, he was more of a dad than her actual dad. Since he was far more responsible and mature. When she broke her arm, her father insisted that he could mend it with his patented home remedies. But Vulcan took her to the hospital and even stayed in the waiting room all night while she got her cast put on.

"Hey." She said softly. "Do you think I'm ready for Beacon?"

There was no response for a long time, but finally, he spoke up.

"No one is ready for anything, Ruby. Not you, not me, not your peers. No one knows what life is going to throw at them. So don't worry about that. Just focus on being the best person that you can be."

"Ahhh." She replied, a soft smile appearing on her face. His company always was soothing to her. Forget him having dad energy. If he was a bit older, he'd be perfect Grandfather material.

They rode in mostly silence after that, neither of them having much to say. That is until the grizzled blacksmith pulled up to the parked Bullhead.

"The pilot will take you the rest of the way. I have to get back to the shop." He said to her as she slowly climbed out of the car. "And Ruby?"

She looked back at him. "Yeah?"

"Here." He tossed her a knife. "That was my weapon back in Beacon. It's yours now."

Her eyes widened at the weapon that now rest in her hands. "Are you sure? What if I lose it-"

She was silenced by his steely gaze.

"Your family aren't the only ones who believe in you. I believe in you as well. I taught you everything I know. And that is why I'm entrusting you with that blade. Make this old bastard proud."

Ruby could feel her eyes watering up. People had always called her a prodigy. Called her lucky. Called her amazing. But it never felt genuine. But his words . . . they were the first in a long time that felt so warm. He truly . . . believed in her.

Just like mom.

Before she knew it, she had jumped back into the car and hugged him with all her strength.

"Thank you! I'll do my best!"

He grunted in approval before pushing her away. "Easy. I'm not one for hugging you know."

She blushed as she quickly jumped back. "R-Right. Sorry. I-I'll be on my way."

She walked toward the Bullhead before stopping and looking back one time.

This time, her nervous features were replaced with a beautiful smile.

"You know. If I ever get married. I want you to be the one who walks me down the aisle." She said before turning away and heading into the ship.

She wouldn't be there to see it, but those words brought tears to the eyes of a man who had been convinced that he had cried his last tears long ago.

[fantastic-rambles]

The Skylark’s Song [3 /4]

Fandom: Katekyo Hitman Reborn!

Characters: Hibari Kyoya, Kusakabe Tetsuya, Oikawa Tsuneo, Namimori Middle Disciplinary Committee, Unnamed Gang

Warnings: Gang, Minor PTSD, Language, Violence, Murder [Again, I apologize if this isn't accurate PTSD.]

Word Count: 3.4k [Lol, what? I don’t know how this happened. xD]

Summary: My personal headcanons of the (pre-canon) experiences that made Hibari into the man that he is today. Part Three: Hibari’s revenge.

[Part 1]

"Unless someone is trying to run away, you will not interfere. Is that clear?"

"Absolutely, Hibari-san!"

Kusakabe and his friends stood stiffly at attention, though Hibari caught the look of uncertainty on several faces, as well as a touch of fear. It seemed like some of them were just starting to realize just how serious the situation was, that this wasn't one of their silly little games. Those ones were probably going to end up running away, but he didn't really care. As long as enough of them remained to trap these rats in their nest, that was enough for him.

When he turned to face the building, he was momentarily startled by a shout from behind him.

"We're praying for your success!"

Glancing over his shoulder, he saw Kusakabe and his gang bowing to him, and the rest of them echoed their leader's sentiment: "We're praying for your success!"

Unsure of how to respond, Hibari simply nodded in acknowledgement before walking forward, listening to Kusakabe bark out commands for the others to spread out and cover the entrances. Oikawa scurried after Hibari nervously, staying well out of reach of the older boy as he carried a briefcase in his arms. Hibari had been reluctant to bring them along, but in the end, he didn't expect the police to side with a kid fresh out of middle school over a gang. It probably also wasn't right for him to have dragged these delinquents into this either; enforcing order on a bunch of children in school was entirely different than taking on actual gangsters. But they had insisted on following him all the way out here, so his only option was to take care of this quickly to limit its potential repercussions.

The building itself was nothing special, just a squat, three-story structure that looked like any other office. But Hibari hadn't only been training during all those years since he had lost his parents: with judicious bribes, he'd been gathering information on their murderers and paying off the right people to ensure that they would look the other way when the time was right, as well as maintaining their contributions to various services such as the hospital and the schools. It was fortunate that both of his parents had come from noble clans and made good investments while they had been alive: with the returns, he could do whatever he wanted for the rest of his life. Assuming he lived that long.

It wasn't that he was stupid or had some sort of death wish. He knew that it was crazy to take them on alone, but at the same time, that had always been his intention. Still, if he'd had the choice, he would have preferred to wait another five or ten years, building up his resources and gaining more strength and confidence. But circumstances had forced his hand: he'd learned that the leader of this group was going to join the yakuza, a promotion that would more than likely bring him to Tokyo, beyond Hibari's reach, both geographically and politically. Dealing with Motozawa Tomokazu while he was still just a small-time gangster in a little town was probably the only chance he would have, before the full might of a real criminal organization was backing him.

He exuded an air of confidence as he entered the building, walking up to the receptionist and leaning on the counter.

"Is Motozawa-san here? I have a proposition for him."

"This isn't a playground, brat. Get out of here," the man snapped, waving his hand as if trying to shoo the boy away. But that was pretty much the reaction Hibari had expected, and he glanced back at Oikawa, who looked ready to shit himself, and beckoned him forward. On shaky legs, the other boy approached, dropping the briefcase onto the counter with a loud thud, and Hibari reached over to unlock it, pulling up the top to reveal stacks of 10,000 yen bills. Casually, he picked one up at random and flipped through it, showing that it wasn't some sort of trick with newspaper, before tossing it back into the case and closing it again.

The man's eyes were wide with shock as he looked between the case and Hibari, and Hibari repressed a sigh at his obvious greed and stupidity.

"As you can see, I am very serious. Please convey my message to Motozawa-san."

He gestured to Oikawa again, waiting for the boy to retrieve the briefcase before walking with him to one of the leather couches in the lobby and sitting down. He watched the receptionist pick up the phone, speaking into it with an air of urgency as he kept glancing at the boy still dressed in his school uniform as though afraid he would disappear into thin air. Hibari had considered getting a suit, but decided in the end that his usual outfit would encourage them to lower their guards and underestimate him. He needed any advantage that he could get if he wanted to get out of here alive.

Soon enough, they were being ushered towards the elevators by a pair of men who were built along the lines of a bulldozer. Of course, it would have been extremely easy for them to beat up the two kids and just take the money--or so they probably thought--but the implied promise of more would keep him and Oikawa safe for now. But as Hibari had hoped, they didn't even search either of them for weapons or anything else that could be dangerous before admitting them into the head office. A young man who looked to be in his thirties lounged behind an executive desk carved out of black walnut, his shirt half-open and gold chains draped around his neck. As the two boys entered, he rose, spreading his arms in welcome as he walked around his desk.

"And what do we have here? Izumi said that you wanted to talk business? Please, sit." He gestured towards one of the couches in the center of the room, taking a seat on another so that a low, wooden table would separate them. For a moment, Hibari froze as the familiar voice threw him back to another time. No matter how long he lived, he'd probably never forget it: that cold voice that had taunted his parents and threatened them. The voice drunk on violence that had ordered, "Take care of this brat" right before Hibari had lost everything. The cruel laughter that continued to ring in his ears long after he woke up every night.

His hands clenched into fists, nails digging deep into his palms, and Oikawa approached him cautiously, his voice barely above a whisper. "Hib-- I mean, Kyoya-san?"

He'd impressed upon Oikawa to not use his surname, since Motozawa would probably remember it and become suspicious. But the man didn't show any change in expression at the small slip-up, so Hibari took the offered seat, inclining his head slightly toward the table.

"Leave it and get out."

Oikawa looked relieved to drop off his burden, but as he walked back toward the door, the two men who Hibari presumed were bodyguards blocked his way, looking toward Motozawa for instructions. Oikawa looked back too, his eyes wide with unconcealed fear, and Hibari feigned an attitude of nonchalance as he leaned back, draping his arms over the back of the couch.

"What's the meaning of this... Kyoya-kun, is that correct?" Motozawa asked, raising an eyebrow, and Hibari sighed.

"He's just my errand boy, like your two muscleheads over there. The less he knows, the better. After all, 'Even the mutterings of a man in a well are widely known after three years,' right?"

Motozawa laughed, a sound that scraped on Hibari's nerves, and waved at his men, who stepped out with Oikawa between them.

"I like you, kid. You've got spunk. How old are you? Fourteen? Fifteen?"

"Fifteen," Hibari confirmed. "Although I'll be sixteen in two months. Either way, I'm old enough to be tried as an adult if I do anything."

"Oh? Congratulations on your graduation. So what's this about, then? You wanna join up with my team? I dunno if we'll have space for a rich boy with an attitude though, 'less you're bringing something else to the table."

Hibari smiled, baring his teeth at Motozawa. "Well, then it's a good thing that I don't want to."

The gangster laughed again, reaching out to put a hand on the briefcase and tapping the sleek surface with a finger.

"Alright, I'll bite. What do you want us to do to get this money? Beat up some bullies? Pick up some designer items for your girlfriend? It can't be that you want us to do a hit for you, right?"

Still smiling, Hibari leaned forward, letting his arms fall to his sides even though every fiber of his being wanted to put as much distance as possible between this scum and himself.

"It seems like there has been a misunderstanding. This isn't for you."

He watched impassively as the greedy expression transformed into one of shock as his words sank in. Then, far more quickly, shock turned to anger, and Motozawa's eyes narrowed as he slammed his hands on the table.

"The fuck are you talking about, you brat? Is this some sort of joke? Do you really think that you can come in here with a couple million, have a laugh, and walk out? I'm fucking yakuza!"

"Not yet, and it's a hundred million," Hibari corrected him blandly, which only seemed to infuriate the man even more.

"I don't give a flying fuck!" Raising his voice, Motozawa called out, "Kazuo! Shimpei! Where are you? Come throw this brat out!"

His two thugs crashed back into the room, although Oikawa was nowhere to be seen. Hibari hoped that that meant the boy had been escorted out, since things were about to get messy. Slowly, he got to his feet while Motozawa pulled the case toward himself possessively, and one of the men grabbed Hibari by the arm, only to blink in surprise at the feeling of something slim and hard under the sleeve.

Hibari raised his other arm and slammed it against the man's hand, eliciting a scream and forcing him to let go as his fingers were crushed between the metal. His own fingers curled up toward his wrists, releasing the ties that secured his weapons and letting them drop into his hands as he spun quickly, using the momentum to drive the steel into the second man's gut. Hibari smiled grimly at the sound of the air being forced out of his lungs as the man collapsed to his knees before turning his attention back to the first man, who was recovering and had pulled out a knife. Briefly, the boy's eyes flicked aside, ascertaining the position of the third man in the room. Motozawa had scrambled away with the briefcase and retreated behind his desk with it, fumbling inside his jacket while scrabbling for the phone, and Hibari took a few steps to the side, putting the man-mountain between himself and their leader.

The man had recovered more quickly than he'd expected, but then again, he was dealing with semi-professionals. They'd undoubtedly been in fights before and learned how to work through pain. Still, he'd been able to gain an element of surprise with his sudden attacks, and he'd have to hope that would be enough.

Block. Block. Block. The sound of metal clashing rang through the room as Hibari drove in, using his dual-wielding advantage to put the man on the defensive. He gritted his teeth as he drove one tonfa into solid muscle, feeling the reverberations in his arm, but it surely had to be even worse for his opponent. On top of that, as he'd expected, Motozawa had pulled out a gun, forcing Hibari to keep track of his position as well so he wouldn't get shot. His only option seemed to be to simply brute force this guy and his friend, and then probably deal with whatever reinforcements Motozawa had called before taking care of the leader himself. Just as he had hoped.

His opponent's good arm swung at him, and Hibari leaned back, flinching as he collided with a solid wall. The blade scored his forehead as two arms wrapped around him with a grunt, the second man having apparently recovered. It only took Hibari a moment to realize that he was too short to smash the man's nose with his head, so instead, he drove both of his elbows back with the little leverage he had, the ends of his tonfa smashing into the man's torso. At the same time, he lifted his foot and stomped down on the man's instep with his heel, the combined attack making his captor stagger backwards. Still, he didn't let go, and Motozawa called out, "Great job, Kazuo! Hold onto him!"

With him off-balance, though, Hibari twisted himself around, forcing his leg behind Kazuo's and grabbing the man's other leg before adding his own weight to the backward motion, throwing them both to the ground. In the confusion, he drove an elbow into the man's groin, finally convincing him to let go, and scrambled aside, keeping a firm hold on his weapons.

His breath was coming more quickly now, but for the first time in years, he actually felt alive. Even though he had blood pouring down his face, even though he was facing down two adult men and a gun, even though there would be more men coming... everything just felt right. His joints felt loose and limber as he crouched behind the couch, contemplating his next moves. Shimpei should be close to going down by now, given the damage he had accumulated, while Kazuo had had his breath knocked out of him several times already.

Raising an arm, he wiped away some of the blood. A flash of movement at the corner of his eye had him diving around the end of the couch as a bang reverberated in the office. Staying low, he cocked his tonfa as he ran toward Kazuo, who had begun to struggle to get to his feet, and swung his arm, catching the man below the ear. Instantly, the man froze, then toppled backwards again, unconscious, and conveniently fell in the way of the door that was just beginning to open. A clamor of confused voices rose as the men outside shoved at it, trying to force it open.

"Boss? What's going on?"

"Get in here and take care of this brat!" Motozawa screeched, firing another shot that went wide as Hibari ducked behind the other couch. Shimpei appeared on the other side, and Hibari continued moving, using his smaller build to his advantage to duck inside the man's swing, flipping his tonfa out to extend his reach and bring it down on Shimpei's wrist. The knife dropped, and his opponent quickly moved backwards, out of his reach, while pulling out another. 

Now, though, Hibari was realizing the advantage of his size, particularly against half-trained, muscle-bound idiots. He pursued Shimpei, lowering his center of gravity and aiming for his legs. Doing so would gradually hinder his mobility and eventually bring him down to a level that Hibari could strike the final blow, as he had with Kazuo. Their walls of muscle had made it difficult to make a decisive strike, but there was a natural limit to how much the head, one of the most vulnerable parts of the body, could be protected. Encouraged, he attacked steadily, keeping an eye on Motozawa's position. The gang leader was at the other side of the room, pulling at Kazuo's dead weight to let the rest of his men in... or to open an escape route for himself. A familiar, chrome briefcase leaned against the wall next to him as he tugged at his bodyguard and the door slowly creaked inward.

"Tch." Hibari clicked his tongue, dashing across the room. But something seemed to have warned Motozawa, who turned around quickly, lifting his gun. For a second, the barrel was pointed straight at Hibari's face. But as Motozawa squeezed the trigger, Hibari whipped his tonfa around, leaning away as the gun was pushed out into the open air, the sound of the shot deafening him on the left side. Grimacing, he continued his attack, driving Motozawa away from the door as his subordinates wedged it open just enough to start squeezing through.

And then Shinpei was there, getting between them and pushing Motozawa away. But the bodyguard was clearly feeling the effects of their fight, his legs trembling as they struggled to support his weight. It probably wasn't even worth it to take him out at this point, so Hibari backpedaled, dodging the new members who were coming in and trying to encircle him.

"Him! That kid! Get rid of him!" Motozawa shouted, pointing at Hibari. He heard the clicks of guns, but he discarded that information promptly. In such close quarters and with so many of their allies in the room, their guns were simply a disadvantage. Unless they could pin him down with a clear line of fire, their weapons were essentially useless, more likely to put holes in each other than in him.

A few of the more intelligent ones seemed to recognize this, dropping their guns and advancing with bare fists or knives, only to serve as fodder for his tonfa. Unlike the two bodyguards who had been wrapped in shields of muscle, most of them needed only one nicely placed hit to go down. They were the true herbivores of the group, following the ones with power and swaggering around with the mistaken belief that they were the ones that were feared. Although there were several mixed in who could occupy him for about half a minute, their comrades got in the way more often than not, giving Hibari openings to take them down.

Even so, his muscles were screaming in agony by the time the last body fell and the room was filled with the sounds of whimpers and groans. A quick glance showed him that Motozawa--and the briefcase--was nowhere to be found, and he half-walked, half-dragged himself to the door, carefully stepping over fallen men to ensure he could keep his own footing.

At the end of the hallway, his prey stood by the elevators, jabbing at the call button frantically. The moment he saw the boy, he raised his gun again, firing a shot that hammered into Hibari's right shoulder and sent him staggering back a step before he even registered what had happened. But the next pull of the trigger fell onto an empty chamber, and Motozawa cursed, throwing the weapon to the ground and picking up the briefcase, heading toward the stairs.

Mustering the last vestiges of his strength, Hibari flung the tonfa in his left hand, sending it spinning toward Motozawa in a gleaming arc that caught him in the back. The man went sprawling, and the case fell and popped open, spitting out stacks of bills as it slid away from him. Motozawa scrambled after it, trying to shove the money back inside, as Hibari approached him with agonizing determination, shifting his remaining weapon to his other hand.

"What the fuck? Who the fuck are you? What do you want?" Motozawa demanded, clutching the cash to his chest as Hibari backed him up against the wall.

"My name is Hibari Kyoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die." [I'm sorry, I had to do it. xD]

"My name is Hibari Kyoya." He watched as recognition dawned on the man's face, followed by panic. Reaching into his pocket, Hibari pulled out a thumb drive, dropping it into Motozawa's lap. The man looked down at it with obvious confusion, then back up at the boy whose face was a mask of blood as his shoulder bled freely.

"That's your gift. What you couldn't find back then: the proof of your rotten dealings. The money is for the Inagawa-kai to compensate for your death so they won't cause trouble here."

"Wait! Wait, wait, Hibari-san! Let's talk this over! I'm sure--"

But Hibari was no longer listening. He stopped fighting gravity, letting it add to his blow as he swung his tonfa downward, crashing into Motozawa's skull with a sickening crunch before he fell to the ground. As the darkness crept in from the edges of his vision, he felt a sense of deep contentment and relief, and he fell into the shadows with little resistance.

[Part 4]

[thanksjro]

Eugenesis, Part Four Scene One: A Brief Aside On a Dude Who Was Nothing More Than A One-Off Joke At The Time Of Publishing

We’re starting a new Part, and I’d like to take the time to think about Rung for a moment.

In his singular mention all the way back in Part Two, he was brought up by Soundwave, in which he discussed the eventual fate of Galvatron in relation to his mental health.

This seems to imply that Rung is close enough to Soundwave that he would be able to speak candidly at all. Rung just might be a Decepticon in Eugenesis, and a well-respected one at that. It doesn’t really mean anything, since he’s not so much a character in this story as he is a brief, humorous poke at the history of psychology, but it’s still kind of a neat idea.

Okay, aside over. Let’s get back to the plot, which kicks off on the Ark. Wow, it’s been a minute since we checked in with the Earth Autobots!

Death’s Head is recording his verbal entry log. It’s been slow going on the Ark- something’s wrong with the engines, probably from ramming into the Quintesson warship- and they’ve been in hyperspace for roughly two days now. Death’s Head is bored bored bored. He’s also apparently not great with names.

He’s made a deal with Ultra Magnus, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t sell all of these Autobots out for the right price.

In the background of this little diary entry, Ratchet’s hard at work turning anything that isn’t nailed down into a makeshift medical bay. There are a lot of wounded, so it’s somewhat necessary.

Death’s Head then threatens Rewind with death for sneaking up on him. Rewind, who is actually very small compared to the peacekeeper- yeah, he’s a proper Transformer’s size, I was thinking he was about as tall as a human man- was sent to grab him and bring him back to the bridge. Ultra Magnus is about to make an announcement.

The two head for the bridge, passing by several victims of battle who probably wish they weren’t still functional, to where everyone’s huddled up and trying not to think about how many folks have died.

Are we to believe that there are Autobots out there who would do unsavory things to the dead? Between this and the aftermath of the suicide bombing, the Autobots might want to rethink their recruitment strategy, if they’re attracting this many necrophiles.

Magnus calls for everyone’s attention. They aren’t exactly sure why the Quintessons attacked Autobot City, but seeing how the last time they tried something like this went, they’re heading for Cybertron, to hopefully tip the scale in the Transformers’ favor.

Dang, Mirage, I’d nearly forgotten how much of a dick you were in this. Thanks for reminding me, buddy. Appreciate it.

Then Magnus brings Death’s Head into it, so he can explain what all he saw on Aquaria. Which he does.

Okay, so there’s a Quintesson onboard the Ark. He’s messing with the engine, messing with the comms, planted a tracker for Rodern to find them- just being a genuine menace to the ship. He overhears the announcement on the bridge, and he’s far too happy about it.

Back with the boys on the bridge, where Magnus has suggested something brilliant, if it weren’t going to get every single one of them killed- voluntary systems shutdown, so they can conserve their energy for when they get to Cybertron.

Meanwhile, back on the nightmare hellscape that is Cybertron- I mean New Quintyxia- Jolup’s being a dick to POWs. He stops in front of cell 1220, which holds two Transformers, one with an “A” branded on his forehead? Blitzwing? I dunno. Jolup wishes he could take him Downstairs- another horrifying proper noun- but can’t, because A-grades aren’t allowed.

It wasn’t Blitzwing, by the way.

He notices another, lower-ranked robot acting strangely.

Oh, this better not be who I think it is.

The poor ‘bot’s trying to self-destruct, but it just isn’t happening. The Inhibitor Chip also makes that impossible. They really thought of everything, didn’t they?

It’s fucking Wheelie. Roberts has Wheelie in a concentration camp trying to commit suicide.

Wheelie was a spy on the the Quintesson homeward before it got eaten by the time-rift, so he knows exactly what these guys are capable of in the torture department. Which is why it’s all the more terrible when Jolup choose him to take Downstairs.

Sunstreaker sees this go down from his own cell and starts screaming for Jolup to fight him. He gets really into it.

Really into it.

Jolup, not very much appreciating being spit on, orders for Sunstreaker to be taken to his personal quarters, so he can be taught some manners.

This part of the book isn’t very fun. Not that it’s badly written. It’s just not very fun.

Let’s check in on Prowl.

He’s holed up in First Aid’s office. Everyone else is either getting ready for a fight or trying to break into Rodimus’ room- it’s locked up very well, you see.

Prowl’s trying to figure out just what to do with their braindead Prime. If they let him go, the energon rations saved would assist in the recovery of a dozen troops. However, the Matrix would have to be surgically removed, and their resident medic is currently strung up in the operating theatre, making it look like a Saw franchise Christmas special.

He reflects a bit on the Matrix, and just how ridiculously mysterious it is.

I’ll do a more in-depth analysis of the religion-based critique in Eugenesis later on, in its own post, when I’ve read the entirety of this bloody thing. I feel like there’s enough of it to warrant that.

All that remains of First Aid are the messages he sent Prowl, and he briefly wonders how many other ‘bots are the same, living on through the recorded data in the comms and minds of the Cybertronian race. He doesn’t know if Ratchet and Magnus and Mirage and Bumblebee are alive or dead. We do, but it’s not like we can reach into the narrative and tell ol’ Prowler what’s going on.

Okay, to be fair, I still have no idea if Bumblebee is dead or not. I don’t even know if he’s still stabbed on that ship back on Earth, though my gut tells me he probably is. Poor Bumblebee.

Prowl muses on the nature of time for a bit, in an odd and decidedly not practical meditation on temporal planes, how every moment is continuing on forever. It’s very poetic. Prowl must be very stressed to be thinking in this fashion.

Through the glass of First Aid’s window, he can see more dead piling up in the ward that they’ve chosen to house their bodies.

I mean, yeah, that’s a little narcissistic, but I can kind of see how the stress could get to someone in his position-

Prowl, I’ve about had it with you.

In Prowl’s defense, Kup had started the screaming match I’d covered in Part Three, Scene Seven- which, since we’re on the subject, I should mention that these should really be labeled as Sections instead, but it’s a bit too late for that now. They’d thrown down in the middle of the waiting room, with everyone watching, which certainly didn’t help with Prowl’s standing with the troops. He’s in a bind here. The best option- stay and defend their little bolthole in the AMC- still sucks.

Prowl makes a decision. We aren’t told what it is, only that he makes it.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the AMC, Quark and Rev-Tone are ignoring the military drills, talking. They’re in the part of the AMC that’s still under construction, where it’s dark and dank and creepy, and oh this couldn’t possibly mean anything bad’s going to happen, right? Quark keeps throwing sand at the wall. They talk about how Prowl isn’t fit to lead, how they aren’t sure who really is, how their deaths are looming ever closer.

Quark, you’ve fallen for an idiot, and I’m so sorry for that. Ah, to be young and in love, and also a giant robot! 

Quark throws another handful of sand, and there’s no sound of impact. They go further into the tunnel to investigate.

Not a ton to analyze here, just a lot of set up for shit to go down.

[littlemisssquiggles]

Do you guys remember my RWBY Musing #71? Remember a time I shared a theory about Oscar basically becoming RWBY’s version of the Golden Cap and gaining the power to control the Winged Beringels created by Salem?

Whelp…it’s back! I’ve had this nagging idea swimming in my head for the longest while and last night, I finally got around to squiggling a little concept rough sketch of it. As I said, I’ve talked about Oscar turning Salem’s winged Beringels against her before. Now I’ve taken that idea a step further in the sense of, what if…Oscar doesn’t just relinquish control of the Winged Beringels from Salem but changes them entirely.

Imagine if…Oscar somehow purifies these Beringel Grimm, transforming them from creatures of darkness to creatures of light. For the sake of this headcanon of mine, I dub these creatures of light as the ‘Creatures of Luxx’. It’s a play on the word Lux which is Latin for ‘light’. The idea I have is that Oscar creatures the Luxx through purifying the Grimm.

We know that the God of Darkness used his powers to first create the Grimm. I find it fascinating that there is creation in darkness since the Darkness used his creations to destroy his brothers. Just as how there is destruction in light since the Silver Eyed Warriors, who are believed to possess the eyes of the God of Light, use their light to preserve life by destroying the Grimm who are creations of darkness. I just find that bit fascinating.

Anyways; since Oscar has a bit of God of Light’s power within him, what if… it was possible for him to…I dunno, make his own creations through the use of light magic? And his first test of this is by creating the Luxx from the Grimm?

Up until this point, the Grimm have mostly been treated as fodder. Their entire purpose is to destroy since that’s been in their programming from birth. But what if there is a semblance of humanity to the Grimm somehow. Somehow I’m imagining a How to Train Your Dragon moment with Oscar and one of the Winged Beringels he managed to turn to his side.

I really would love to see Oscar take control of the Winged Beringels from Salem since it’ll be such a nice call back to the Wizard of Oz. In that story, the Winged Monkeys were actually cursed creatures controlled by an artifact known as the Golden Cap. The Winged Monkeys were bound to serve whoever possessed the Cap for a period of three times.  At some point, the Wicked Witch of the West gets a hold of the Cap and used the Monkeys to take over Oz.

At some point Dorothy Gale also uses the Cap, calling upon the monkeys’ aid during her remaining adventures in Oz. Till finally the Cap is handed to Glinda the Good Witch who used to cap to free the monkeys of their curse.

I think it would be great if the CRWBY Writers take advantage of this idea from the Oz story for Oscar. In the Wizard of Oz, the Golden Cap is described as studded with real sparkling diamonds and precious blood red rubies that ran entirely around the caps 24 karat solid gold brim. The Cap is made of gold hence the name. Who in Ruby alludes to this more than Oscar? You can’t get more golden than Oscar Pine. His first name literally alludes to gold. The Golden Cap was a magical artifact. Oscar is a reincarnation of an ancient being who possessed magical powers that Oscar has yet to tap into. This is a chance for the Writers to use this to push Oscar’s character.

We’ve seen Salem use her magic to create the Grimm. So if she can do that, then what’s stopping Oscar from using his magic to change the Grimm. To use his light to cleanse the Grimm of their darkness and turn them from beasts of destruction to creatures of preservation.

Yes I know this Pinehead headcanon is a mighty big stretch however…c’mon that could be so freaking cool if turned canon. At least it’s cool to me.

Canon or not, for now this squiggle meister will stick to using the Luxx in my own RWBY art and projects. I’m sharing this concept sketch since the Creatures of Luxx will be featured in my Bouquet of Roses. To further play off my theory, the Luxx Beringel is an early concept for Oscar’s steed and animal companion. A Luxx named Al, short for Alpha (and a call back to Fullmetal Alchemist) who is the King of the Winged Beringel Luxx who serve the Golden Rose.

The idea I have with this is that in the Bouquet universe, Oscar isn’t just our handsome prince of the Golden Yellow Rose but also a powerful magi and the Luxx are his creations. For all my ole school Sakura Cardcaptors fans, remember how Clow Reed was this super powerful wizard who created the Clow Cards?

Well picture Oscar being like that where the Luxx are his pets born from his power. I’d like to think of the Luxx as a less gruesome and grotesque-looking versions of their Grimm counterparts. For this rough sketch, I mainly just wanted to test the palette for the Luxx. I based it off the God of Light’s colour scheme from the Lost Fable considering that the Luxx are made of light born through the same magic that was bestowed to Ozma (and essentially Oscar) by said brother God.

Now that I’m satisfied with the colours, I’d actually love to design the Luxx. I want them to be the same as their Grimm opposites yet still possess something about their appearance that sets them apart. The Luxx are meant to be the Yang to the Grimm just as how the God of Light contrasts his brother so perfectly; even in their dragon forms.

When I think of the Luxx, I picture them being exactly like my squiggle sketch in colour---mystical creatures made of pure light that gleams gold. While the Grimm have red eyes and red markings, for the Luxx I wanted them to have green eyes with a hint of gold at the centre and green markings; a trait they share in common with their master and creator---Oscar Pine (whose eyes are hazel) to further push the notion that they are an extension of Oscar and his magic. I initially thought it would’ve been cool to have to Luxx have black masks to contrast the Grimm but I scrapped that idea in favour of the shared white masks. Who knows? I might bring it back in the refined version, perhaps.

Another reason why I wish for the Luxx to differ from the Grimm is because I don't want them to be confused for Summons. With the Schnees, the Grimm Summons are basically the same Grimm just recoloured white with blue makings to match the Schnees. I really don’t wish for anyone to denounce this idea of mine by saying that Oscar doesn’t need to have such a power when Weiss can do that. At least I can make the argument that Oscar having such a power ties into the fairy-tale he was inspired by. I never quite understood the need to give Weiss summoning abilities when she’s already pretty powerful with her Glyphs already. Heck I think that was even one of the complaints with her character by the FNDM but…here we are.

Unlike Weiss who can only summon a Grimm after she’s killed it, the idea I have for this is that Oscar creates the Luxx himself. The Grimm are more monstrous in appearance to match their destructive nature. I wish for the Luxx to contrast this. With the Luxx, the idea is for them is to look like purified versions of the Grimm we've come to know---whimsical and majestic in nature.

How that's gonna looks. Whelp, that’s for me to play around with and decide for myself since it’s my idea. But at least for now, this is a good starting building block. The only way I can elaborate on this idea further is do designs for Luxx versions of certain Grimm. I can safely say that there will be at least three Grimm turned Luxx featured for the Bouquet of Roses; starting with the Winged Beringel.

Come to think of it, this idea is starting to give me flashbacks to Sakura’s arc where she had to be powerful enough magically to turn the original Clow Cards created by Clow Reed into Sakura Cards. Imagine Oscar needing to become stronger magically as a means of successfully taking control of the Grimm from Salem, turning them into his Luxx. That could be a cool plot point for him.

Buuut like I said, I mainly plan on using this concept for my Bouquet of Roses and any other RWBY-related fan-project I might consider doing down the line. But it’s definitely an idea I wouldn’t mind seeing canon due to its strong reference to the Wizard of Oz.

Princess Ozma was a powerful magician. She was even stronger than the Wizard of Oz as its true ruler. Since the Wizard was Ozpin’s inspiration and Ozma is Oscar’s, how can I not expect great and powerful things from this young freckled farm boy? I’ve even thought of another cool way this Luxx idea of mine could be used in the canon series.

Besides the Winged Beringels, remember the Grimm Dragon? We know that back in V3, when the Grimm Dragon appeared it brought fought hordes of Grimm in its wake. This Grimm literally oozes other Grimm and since then I have yet to see another Grimm with such an ability to spawn more Grimm. That being said, with this theory of mine, it’s given me an idea. We know that as of V3, the Grimm Dragon is still pretty much alive. We know that Ruby’s Silver Eyes didn’t kill the Grimm Dragon; only petrified it.

If Oscar is indeed destined to become the RWBY equivalent of the Golden Cap and will somehow awaken the power to transform the Creatures of Grimm into the Creatures of Luxx, then picture this Pineheads. Imagine if…Oscar turns the Grimm Dragon into a Luxx Dragon; capable of creating more Luxx for Oscar to command. Therefore Oscar will gain a full army of Luxx through taming the former Grimm Dragon as opposed to allowing Ruby to finish it off with her power. Oscar Pine can straight up Daenerys Targaryen this bitch and become the Lord of the Luxx.

My fellow Pineheads, picture our boy going from a simple farm boy to a little prince and then finally to a King of Light leading his full grown army of Luxx against the hordes of Grimm while riding on the back of a mighty Luxx Dragon.

That sounds so freaking cool and it’ll depicts another cool way Oscar can be made into the great and powerful character he is destined to become! But, as much as I’d love to see this done in the canon, the possibility of this coming to fruition in main series RWBY might not be so high. At least in the sense that I don’t want to have too many expectations for Oscar’s character from the CRWBY Writers in the event of disappointment.

For all we know, the CRWBY Writers are more likely to have Weiss finish off the Grimm Dragon and turn her into the Daenerys Targaryen of RWBY with the Grimm Dragon becoming another one for her to Summon. She even has the hair for it so I can see that being more canonical than Oscar the King of the Luxx.

I’d still love to hold onto this idea for safe keeping though just like my other Pinehead headcanon that Oscar is reincarnation of Ozma’s original form in modern Remnant making him the one true Ozma. Like that one, I love this idea too much to let it go to waste. Hence why it’ll be featured in my squiggly fan-projects. Anyways, I’ve talked enough about this. Just wanted to share this for the Bouquet.

Look forward to seeing a refined version of the Al the Winged Beringel Luxx and Oscar’s other Luxx for Bouquet of Roses Part II. Coming soon-ish!

Bouquet of Roses:

Sketches: - Rough Squiggle Sketch of the Bouquet - Rough Squiggle Sketch of Prince Oscar - Rough Squiggle Sketch of Prince Whitley and Princess Penny (Broken Machines)

The Roses:

- Ianthe Regem: The Lavender Rose - Rosalind Fox: The Orange Rose - Rosaline Hood: The Pink Rose - Ruby Rose: The Silver-White Rose - Oscar Pine: The Golden-Yellow Rose - Rosaline Fox: The Red Rose

- Bouquet of Roses Part I

~LittleMissSquiggles (2019)

[nadziejastar]

The great cylindrical hall they called the Round Room was built from the same cold white material as everything else. In the center was a huge round dais, like a stage, with thirteen tall chairs of various heights arranged in a circle around it. 

The other twelve chairs were occupied by others in black cloaks, though Roxas was unsure if he could name them all. He looked down at the strange, cross-like emblem on the dais and remembered seeing it on the headboard of his bed. He knew what it stood for. It was the symbol of the Organization and of the Nobodies. But he didn’t know who had told him that.

I know! They are SO cult-like it’s not even funny. They are literally a death cult that forces the members to add the symbol of death into their new names.

Portals from the corridors rippled and opened atop the chairs of the Round Room, like candles lighting in negative, and a few members of the Organization appeared in their black cloaks. Numbers 1 through 7 took their seats—Xemnas, Xigbar, Xaldin, Vexen, Lexaeus, Zexion, and Saïx.

“Why are we allowing a novice to attend?” Vexen complained. The aforementioned “novice”—Saïx, the lowest ranked of those present—didn’t even glance up from the dais.

When the members arrive in the chairs, it’s described like candles being lit. Notice that Saïx never looks up from the dais during the meeting. During this meeting, the apprentices talk about “fragments”.

The trio quickly assumed their fighting stances, as Saïx went on with a low monologue. “Pitiful Heartless, mindlessly collecting hearts. And yet they know not the true power of what they hold. The rage of the Keyblade releases those hearts. They gather in darkness, masterless and free…until they weave together to form Kingdom Hearts. And when that time comes at last, we can truly exist.”

He almost sounded as though he were reciting an incantation.

I'm pretty sure that Saïx WAS reciting an incantation. It’s even implied that he can hear voices that no one else can.

In his own room, Demyx was fixing his hair in front of the mirror. It didn’t mean he was especially interested in his own hairstyle. But, memories from when he was a human made him do it, thought Demyx. His sitar stood against the wall. It was a special sitar that could be a weapon, shaped from his human memories. Finishing setting his hair, Demyx picked up the sitar and strummed it.

I play and play, but I can’t make a satisfying sound. In truth, I know I won’t be satisfied in all eternity. If you don’t have a heart, there’s no such thing as satisfaction. You don’t even think you want to be satisfied.

“Keep it down.”

Suddenly, along with displeased words, Demyx sensed a presence behind him, and he turned. Xaldin was standing there.

“Is it too hard to at least knock before barging into people’s rooms?” Demyx stated, displeased, and strummed the sitar again.

“What will you do with those human memories you cling to?”

In the short stories novel, the Organization is planning to send their members to Castle Oblivion soon. And Xaldin talks to Demyx in his room, asking about his human memories. This scene is interesting because it’s similar to another scene in the KH2 novel, which I will mention later.

“Hah? What are you saying, old man?” Demyx’s hand stopped, and he turned just his face towards Xaldin. “What about you?”

“Nothing at all. But I’m interested in how you guys let your human memories influence you.”

“Hmm,” Demyx responded, disinterestedly, and plucked the sitar three times.

“Won’t you keep it in moderation? It’s loud, I can’t sleep.”

“Not being able to sleep cause of the noise is kinda, well, human-like, isn’t it?” Demyx said, smiling. His hand kept moving over the strings.

“Fool. Nobodies need rest too. A terrible force is moving this world. We gotta rest to store up power.”

Xaldin also tells Demyx that a terrible force is moving the world.

“Well, it’s a break, in a sense… Xemnas also went out, you see.”

“Hmm… it’s rare for him to go out,” Luxord said, quietly, tidying the cards.

“No, he goes here and there fairly often. Because now is a very important time for the organisation.”

“What’s very important?” Axel asked, peering into Xigbar’s face.

“The world is moving. We’ve gotta be worried about own fragment’s movement, right?”

“Fragment?” Luxord leaned his head to one side.

“The rest is a secret,” said Xigbar, teasingly, getting off the table and starting to walk. “Be really careful not to let them use you.” At Xigbar’s words, Axel and Luxord looked at each other.

Xigbar mentions it, too. Axel and Luxord were playing cards and then he started talking about fragments and not letting “them” use you.

“Don’t leave this world without a mission.”

“This place is suffocating,” Axel said, as he started walking.

“…Can’t you hear the world’s screams?”

“Screams?”

Axel finally turned around, and looked up at Saïx standing on a stairway.

“The time when we should move will come soon.”

“I dunno, whatever.” Axel turned his back on Saïx, and opened a dark portal in front of him.

But Saïx is the one who asks Axel if he can hear the world’s screams. What the heck does that even mean? And he said "we" should move soon. I don't think he was referring to the Organization. Axel was really creeped out and had to leave afterwards, even though he was just told not to. Stuff like this is why Axel could never leave the Organization. He knew that his friend was one seriously messed up dude who needed help.

In a room made of white marble, a large mirror reflected Demyx as he prepared to leave for the mission. He took particular care with his hairstyle, painstakingly manipulating the brown strands with a comb to make them stand straight up. Saïx observed him from behind with what appeared to be distaste. In stark contrast to Demyx, Saïx left his long blue hair unstyled. The X-shaped scar on his forehead was all the style he needed.

“What d’you want? I’m kinda busy.” Irritated, Demyx turned around.

Instead of responding, the other man simply disappeared.

“Excuse me?!” Demyx shouted at the space where Saïx had been standing.

And then, as if to take Saïx’s place, Xigbar appeared with his hood low over his eyes. “Ready yet?”

This is the scene from the KH2 novel. It’s like with the one where Xaldin interrupted Demyx while he was fixing his hair. In this scene Saïx’s X-shaped scar is mentioned, as well as a mirror. Also, the white marble description sounds a lot like it’s drawing an allusion to Castle Oblivion. Probably not a coincidence. This scene demonstrates that Saïx is like a robot, FAR more so than any of the other Nobodies. It’s almost like he was told to summon Demyx, but he just stared at him awkwardly. Like when the Dusks collected the photos of Roxas instead of getting the real Roxas. Then Xigbar arrives “as if to take his place” because he forgot Saïx isn’t capable of behaving like a normal person. And Xigbar had his hood up, which is a hint that there’s more to all of this that they’re not telling you. Xigbar was acting as his handler in that scene.

“…Yeah, yeah, just about,” Demyx replied apathetically. “Y’know, Xigbar, I don’t really think I’m the best suited for tailing somebody…”

“Orders are orders, and you can’t go against the big man himself. Or did you forget?”

“…Hmph.” Not the most satisfying answer. Demyx scowled and leaned on the sitar in his hand.

“Anyway, you’re going to be saying hello first,” Xigbar added.

“Huh?”

“The hero and his little entourage are out and about. Saïx heard their voices.”

“Uh-huh…,” Demyx said, more like a sigh than a response, and frowned. He couldn’t hear the voices.

He may have been assigned a number, but he knew perfectly well that he just wasn’t cut out for fighting. All he could do was control water by playing music. He didn’t think of himself as especially strong. And shadowing the Keyblade wielder—or rather, Roxas—really didn’t sound like much fun. Still, he couldn’t defy the organization. For that sole reason, he had to follow his orders.

“Time to get going,” Xigbar said.

“Okay, okay…” Demyx shouldered his sitar and vanished.

This scene happens not long after Sora arrives in Hollow Bastion for the first time. Saïx heard “their” voices, which is how Xigbar knew that Sora and friends were out and about. Demyx couldn’t hear the voices. I don’t think they’re talking about Sora, Donald, and Goofy’s voices. I think it’s the same voices he heard screaming that let Xigbar and Xaldin know that the world was on the move. Whatever the hell that even meant.

The Lich is a Pureblood Heartless that appears in Kingdom Hearts III. Unlike other Heartless, it does not consume hearts to create more Heartless. Rather, it captures hearts and ferries them to the abyss of darkness. Also uniquely, if caught in time, it can be forced to relinquish the hearts it has captured, allowing them to return to their bodies.

I have to wonder if the reason Saïx can hear these voices is because his heart has been captured. So since Isa’s heart is in that abyss, Saïx can hear things. Which is...creepy.

Young Xehanort: The Lich you've been fighting—it's not like other Heartless. It exists to usher hearts down to the depths of darkness."

In fantasy fiction, a lich (from Old English meaning "corpse") is a type of undead creature. Often such a creature is the result of a transformation, as a powerful magician skilled in necromancy or a king striving for eternal life using spells or rituals to bind his intellect and soul to his "phylactery" and thereby achieving a form of immortality. Liches are depicted as being clearly cadaverous, bodies desiccated or completely skeletal. Liches are often depicted as holding power over hordes of lesser undead creatures, using them as soldiers and servants. Unlike zombies, which are often depicted as mindless, a lich is sapient, retaining independent thought and is as intelligent as it was prior to its transformation. 

I definitely think Saïx was possessed by a lot more than just Xehanort (who himself was probably possessed). He’s possessed by something associated with the Lich. They are in control of Xehanort, and they want to complete Kingdom Heats so that they can take over the Realm of Light and exist there.

[sky-kiss]

Ghouldyn AU

A/N: Look. Just. Stick with me, okay? Or don’t. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. @morelemons and I were like. Hashing out the broad strokes of a Fallout 4 crossover AU. And like. Ghoul!Ardyn. And a whole story line. But then we needed setup to justify all that cuteness and Diamond City Adventure Boy!Noct and Vault Tech!Luna. So uh. This is that backstory. Just big old. Weird broad strokes. Of Ghoul!Ardyn’s life. I’m sorry.

_____

October 23, 2077

______

Centuries later, it will strike him as funny. Not in the traditional sense of the word. But a breed of humor purely unique to his life: macabre, grim. He’ll laugh as tears prick at his eyes.

The truth is Ardyn doesn’t remember the bombs dropping. He manages to miss the end of the world. He’s too piss drunk to make it home and too poor to call a taxi. It’s warm for October. Warm enough that he doesn’t think twice about slumping down in an alley. It was a nice neighborhood. He’d sleep off the whiskey and then stagger back to his apartment.

Yes, yes, dearies. The bombs fall and the radiation hits. Families are left clinging to one another, powerless as the fallout rolls towards them. And where is he? Alone. Slumped in a puddle of vomit, arm slung over his eyes. The curtain closes on a most ignominious scene.

When he finally awakens, the world is forever changed. Ash still drifts  lazily on the breeze. The blue sky is gone, replaced with a perpetual orange. Some days the light with filter through at a strange angle and treat him to a flash of green.  

There’s no bird song. No dogs barking. No ambient conversation to fill the emptiness. There’s only the silence and all the weight that comes with it. It’s the sound of death, he thinks. Death has come and stolen everything away.

Ardyn pulls his knees to his chest. His skin is badly burned; his body is bruised. The tears sting as they cut lazy rivulets through the dirt staining his cheeks. It’s deja vu. It’s Aera all over again, magnified to the nth power. Death sweeps into his life and steals everything away.

Only he is left behind.

____

The radiation does not kill him.

In some ways it is a far less mercyful fate. He manages to pick his way through the wreckage and find his back to what remains of the apartment complex. The silver lining of the whole situation is that he’s barely aware of his hangover. He’s too shell shocked to feel much of anything.

By some miracle, the building is still standing. Ardyn climbs those three familiar flights of stairs on instinct. He fishes inside his jacket for his keys. He locks the door behind him before stumbling over the liquor cabinet. The powers been out long enough for all the ice to have melted and so he takes four shots of whiskey neat. It helps take the edge off. Three more (simultaneously all that’s left in the bottle and the last bottle in the house) are just enough to chase him off to sleep. He never dreams when he drinks. For the first time in years, he dreads the silence.

____

His body begins to change. The radiation does not kill him, no. But it changes him.

His will not lie. He’s always taken a certain level of pride in his looks. People would stare as he passed. He was tall and strong and beautiful. And now, his skin seems to rot. His nose is gone. The bone structure remains the same but he is left an echo of his former self, monstrous.

It’s the hair he mourns the most. Strange and maroon and long enough to tickle at his shoulders. Aera had begged him never to cut it. Had delighted in running her fingers through the mass as they settled to sleep at night. The radiation takes that too. A pittance, in the grand scheme of things, but he mourns all the same.

____

Time passes.

His body continues to decay. He is...corpse-like and monstrous. The few humans he does stumble across scream at the sight of him. Some shoot.

It’s easier to lock himself away.

So he drinks. He sleeps. He forgets the world outside and it forgets him just the same.

_____

The first few decades are the most difficult. Later, he will learn the name for his condition. The people of the Commonwealth refer to him as a ghoul, an aftereffect of the freshly irradiated world. The body was capable enough of change. It’s the mind that’s more...tenuous.

Most ghouls went mad. There were a variety of causes: the radiation fried your brain. The self loathing. The suicidal thoughts. The dissociation. Truly, the mind boggled. He thinks it’s a hint of everything. He hates this new body. He hates this new world.

It’s easier to wrap himself in his memories. Aera is still there. They still live in their house outside of Salem. She’s still heavy with child and...the clouds have yet to settle over their life. He still wakes up every morning with her head pillowed on his chest and her leg hooked over his hips. He’ll listen to her soft snores (no one would believe her capable of it; he knows better) and they will chase him back to sleep. He’d rather languor in his past then resign to the present silence.

Years pass. Decades pass.

And then one century and then another.

_____

The earth...never recovers in the strictest sense of the word. It adapts. Life returns. Strange, mutated, creatures roam the streets of Boston. Some of them he recognizes. There are still humans. There are more ghouls.

He is far more comfortable with the latter.

A gentleman named John Hancock comes calling for him one evening. Despite the severity of his condition, John carries himself with all manner of aplomb. He sweeps a ridiculous tricorn hat from his head, drops into an exaggerated bow. Ardyn scoffs, inwardly delighted. It’s been decades since he was treated to such theatrics. He’s missed the levity.

“It ain’t much but it could be,” John fumbles with a tin of mentats. After a moment's consideration, he holds it out to his fellow ghoul. Ardyn waves him off. “Real uh...well, sanctuary sounds like some hippy shit. But a good place for freaks like us to get some much needed r&r.”

“You’re intending to build a town?”

“Naw. Naw. Buildings are already there. We throw up some walls. Get some people. Bingo. Got yourself a community.”

“I fail to see what I would contribute to such an endeavor.”

John shrugs. He knows the broad strokes of the ghouls life; by traditional standards, he’s not a good man. Here, in this new world, some leniencies can be made. He’s trying. He wants to help, junkie, killer, or otherwise. John fumbles around in his pockets until he finds a crumpled cigarette, “Eh, maybe ya don’t add anything. Lots of those types out there too. But c’mon, man, its gotta beat holin’ up in this dump waiting to go feral.” Which...is true.

He doesn’t give John an answer that night.

It’s another year before he finally makes the move to Goodneighbor.

_____

One of the other ghouls suggests he take up a hobby. Something to take his mind off his condition and keep him from wallowing in the past. He reclaims an old building on the outskirts of town, tucked away in one of the smaller alleys. Before the loss of his wife and the drink, he’d quite enjoyed his position at the university.

“I dunno.” It’s all John will say. Ardyn has little room to judge but the other ghoul is woefully expressive when he speaks. He swings his arms out wide, a healthy plume of smoke trailing behind his cigar. Ardyn winces. Aged papers are scattered across more than a dozen desks. It doesn’t take an active imagination to see the place going up in flames. “Library ain’t really what I had in mind. Little more...Diamond City if you catch my drift.”

“To the contrary. I dare say your goons might benefit with a little exposure to higher learning.”

“Hey. I don’t need clever trigger boys. Smart men get ideas. Ideas…”

“...get people killed. Yes, I’m aware.”

John shakes his head. Takes another drag and exhales a rasping chuckle. “Fuckin’ library. Shoulda figured.”

“Perhaps,” he says, dryly. A spark drifts on a nonexistent breeze and Ardyn lurches forward, snatching the cigar from the mayor’s hand. He snuffs it out. “But someone has to do it. Why not me?”

“Yeah. Why not you, buddy?” John grins. He tips his tricorn and saunters back out into the street, whistling to himself. It is an entirely unremarkable interaction and...somehow more thrilling for it. For the first time in too long, Ardyn feels...vaguely human.

_____

He collects books.

He helps John negotiate a few...profitable arrangements with the triggermen.

He finds bits and pieces of the old world and brings them back to his home.

Little by little, he feels more like himself.

______

The world ends on October 23, 2077. He is thirty three years old when the bombs fall. He’s barely thirty four when radiation ravages his body, transforming it forever. He drifts through the next two centuries. He begins to heal.

Life begins again two hundred and ten years later to the day. It’s a tedious cliche but he’ll commit to it regardless.  The bell above the library door chimes. He glances up from his reading and comes eye to eye with two humans. The young man is scowling, grumbling to himself as he struggles to balance an armful of books.

And the young woman is familiar enough that he might as well be staring at a ghost.

She smiles at him, soft, hesitant, clearly taken aback by his appearance but unwilling to relent.

October 23, 2287 marks the day Lunafreya Nox Fleuret and Noctis Lucius Caelum stumble into his life.

[gamearamamegathons]

Dragon Quest VI: Dark Reflections

Circe here! When we left off, we were about to explore some kind of dream-seeing cave. The dungeon itself is pretty standard for most of it, but when we get down deeper, it transitions to a rather pretty stalactite cave area. Down here, we find a demon guarding some sort of nectar. This boss's main trick is casting Upper on itself a whole bunch to boost its defense. I'm able to reverse the effect with Sap, but it ends up draining most of my MP, leading to a rather perilous trek back to the surface. Eventually, though, we make it out with the nectar, and take it back to Granmaz. She says that the nectar is "dream-seeing drops", which she uses to make us visible in this world. So that's pretty convenient. That done, Muriel joins the party proper. She's a spellcaster with a weak physical attack, but a good mix of defensive and offensive spells.

Of course, now that we're visible, the natural thing is to go back and clear that woman's name. But, apparently, while we've been busy, she's already left town with a traveling merchant. So...uh...sure, okay. I guess that sort of amounted to nothing. I dunno, maybe she'll turn up later or something. In any case, now we can take a ship to Reidock, and see what that's all about. This version of Reidock looks similar, but not quite identical, to the one we left. Chatting up the locals informs us that the king and queen here are in a coma from some sort of mysterious sickness, and the prince left a year ago to seek a cure, but never returned. Also the prince looks a lot like me and has the same name as me. Huh. Very conveniently, I can buy some fancy clothes at the armor shop, to effectively impersonate the missing prince. This lets us get into the castle, and we can poke around and learn more about the situation here. Apparently the queen is mumbling about a mirror in her sleep, so that's a convenient hint. Unfortunately, the prime minister guy who has been running things in the meantime is suspicious of me, and asks if I know the name of my sister, who apparently passed away due to illness when she was very young. Of course, I guess the name of my actual sister, buuuut it turns out that's not actually the right answer. Oops. So we get kicked out.

Oh well. Time to go find the Mirror of Ra. Some searching leads us to a very important looking tower, but the front door is locked. So that's no good. My next lead is a nearby town called Amoru, which has a waterfall with healing waters, apparently. There's a cave by Amoru, but it's caved in and can't be properly accessed. The townspeople talk a lot about these two thieves who tried to explore the cave a long time ago before it collapsed, and one of them ended up getting killed, while the other, a woman named Gina, stayed here in Amoru. Gina is an old lady now, living in the church, and apparently suffering from constant nightmares. Since the local inn is full, the church lets us sleep in her room, and that night...we enter Gina's nightmare.

When we get out of bed, things seem different. It's subtle at first, but when we go outside, the waterfall suddenly starts to run red with blood. Clearly it's time to investigate the cave, where the mouth of the river is located. Inside, we find a younger version of Gina washing her hands in the river, from which an endless stream of blood runs through the water. When we speak to her, she says that she killed her partner, and she can't wash his blood from her hands. Since we appear to have gone back in time, the cave is open, so I guess it's time to descend and find out what has happened. This dungeon has a gimmick where you can step onto logs floating in the water and they will float downward to fixed locations. This makes it a bit harder to navigate, but eventually I manage to get the hang of it and reach the bottom of the dungeon. There we see that Gina's partner Iria is not, in fact, dead, only injured, and still fighting a powerful monster. In line with Gina's account, this boss can cast confusion on party members and cause them to attack each other. Despite that difficulty, I manage to kill the creature, and return to the surface. Iria manages to meet up with Gina again, and she finds out that he's not dead after all. We learn that she took the mirror key from his body before fleeing, and so they head off to explore the tower. For us, though, it's time to wake up again.

We go back to bed, and when we wake up, older Gina is there again. Then, an old Iria walks through the door, explaining that a dream led him to look for Gina here, so that he can tell her that he didn't die in the dungeon. The two are happy to be reunited, and Gina suspects that somehow we had something to do with this. She gives us the mirror key, since she doesn't need to hold onto it in memory of Iria anymore. So, in a way, the dream led us to the mirror key after all.

It feels like something of a bittersweet ending to this story. But it already happened, after all; we could only change the present, and that's good enough. Now it's time to move on.

The mirror tower is a bit of an odd dungeon. It starts off in a big room with a reflective mirror wall. At first I get sort of lost trying to figure out where to go, but eventually I figure out that one panel of the wall is a fake reflection, and our mirror images are actually zombies, which turns into a miniboss fight. These zombies are poisonous and pretty strong, and they kick my ass the first time around. The second time I go with more aggressive debuffing, which has worked pretty consistently in these games. Continuing up the tower, it actually splits into two separate towers. One side is locked, so we travel up the other. Along the way we meet another invisible person, a woman named Barbara. She's just happy someone sees her; she came here because she'd hoped the Mirror of Ra would fix her. For now, she follows along behind the party. At the top of the tower, we find four beams holding up a floating structure that we can't reach. On this half, we can deactivate two beams, and open a door to the next tower. So back down the tower we go, then up the other tower. The random encounters are starting to get pretty tough here, including the Demon Mirror monster, which can transform into copies of party members. Kind of a neat gimmick, even if we have seen it before in previous games.

Once all four beams are broken, the structure falls down to the ground between the two towers. You'd think this would reduce it to rubble, but don't worry, it's fine. Inside the structure, we finally find the Mirror of Ra. It doesn't turn Barbara back to normal, but luckily we can just use the dream-seeing drops to turn her visible. She asks, understandably so, why we didn't just do that right away. Nobody answers her, which is a shame, because I have no idea. Anyway, she joins the party next, bringing us to a party of four. Now, at last, it's time to bring back the Mirror of Ra. Supposedly we could help the king and queen of this world's Reidock, but the guards seem kind of mad that we impersonated the prince. So, uh, we may have to go back to our world.

Along the way, I have discovered a few things of note. For one, I have a bag where I can finally offload items I don’t need in my characters’ inventories. I also found that there is an option where I can see all my characters’ HP and MP, but apparently there’s a bug in the translation patch that causes it to softlock the game. Oops. As far as the translation goes, I did some looking into it, and it looks like the whole game should be playable from start to finish. So that’s a relief. This should be the last game where we have to rely on iffy fan translation patches, fortunately.

[tf-tere]

A Fallen Star - 1

(So, since this is my transformers blog I figured I would start posting the chapters for this little fanfic I’m writing. It can also be found on AO3, TF_Tere.

The Autobots discover a secret aboard a crashed Decepticon ship. The orphaned sparkling comes with plenty of challenges, not least of which is the medical mystery left behind by her carrier.

This is set somewhere between Airachnid’s arrival and Starscream leaving the Decepticons, so pretty early in the series.

Words: ~2500)

Ratchet had locked onto the signal from the crash. Time was of the essence if the Autobots wanted to beat the Decepticons to the location. Because of the high threat level, all the bots except for Ratchet went through the ground bridge to the crash coordinates. It was late afternoon on the other side. The golden sunlight was beginning to shift to oranges and reds. Long shadows spread from the trees, mostly pines, along the steep hill. This area wasn’t quite mountainous, but the hills provided an additional challenge in reaching the crash site.

“Stay alert.” Optimus rumbled quietly as the group moved in the direction of the signal. Once they spotted the trail of destruction from the crash it was easy to get to the ship.

“Ratchet, we’ve found the crash site. The ship looks to be mostly intact.” Optimus Prime commed back to the medic.

“Be careful, Optimus. I’m standing by with the ground bridge.” Ratchet’s voice was concerned, but steady.

“Looks like it’s in pretty good shape.” Arcee murmured as she moved ahead of the others, beginning to circle the ship. It was about twice as large as the ship that Airachnid had used to get to Earth. This fact became more of a concern when Arcee spotted the decal along the left side of the ship. “Optimus, look at this.”

Optimus came around to join Arcee while Bulkhead and Bumblebee circled around the other side. “A Decepticon emblem. Be on guard.” He paused to place a hand on Arcee’s shoulder for a brief moment before continuing toward the front of the ship.

“There’s some damage on this side. Doesn’t look like it’s from the crash.” Bulkhead called out.

-Large weaponry blast. Maybe that’s why the ship crashed?- Bumblebee’s sounds were auto-translated by the rest of the team.

“I dunno, Bee. Looks like old damage.” Bulkhead and Bumblebee joined Optimus and Arcee at the front of the ship.

“We’re not going to get answers out here.” Arcee kept both of her hands in blaster mode while Bulkhead got to work on forcing the hatch open.

Optimus requested Bulkhead to remain outside on guard in case Decepticons arrived. All it took was Bumblebee mentioning the possibility of scraplets to get Bulkhead to stop complaining about missing out. Inside the ship was dark. It looked like everything was powered down, or perhaps had been powered down by lack of energy. Collapsed across the floor in front of a set of control panels was the dull grey body of a Cybertronian. Bumblebee was the one to crouch down and examine the body while Optimus looked on with a sorrowful expression. It wasn’t anyone he was familiar with, but looked like a Vosian seeker. The wings were branded with the Decepticon emblem.

Arcee moved deeper into the ship while Optimus and Bumblebee looked at the body. She was more concerned with what else might be on board. Something fell with a dull clang. Arcee lifted her blaster, scanning the area. This section of the ship looked like living quarters. There were four berths, all empty.

“Optimus, Bumblebee, I've got motion over here.” She kept her back toward the doorway as Optimus and Bumblebee left the body and came to join her.

There was a scraping sound, metal on metal, followed by an angry hiss. Arcee turned quickly, Bumblebee stepping to the side to give them more room. They were left facing a pair of faintly glowly, red optics half hidden under one of the berths. Bumblebee kept moving, circling around to the other side so Optimus could actually come into the room. He had to kneel down to try and see the small figure under the berth.

-What is it?- Bumblebee kept one optic on the berth while also trying to keep an eye on the other, unexplored doorway leading away from the living quarters.

“Some kind of Decepticon experiment?” Arcee asked dryly, optics narrowed. If that thing attacked she was going to blast it to pieces.

Optimus tilted his head a little further before speaking in quiet wonder. “I believe it is a sparkling.”

-A sparkling, really?!- Bumblebee dropped all attempts to look like he was watching for danger in favor of kneeling to peer under the berth as well.

Arcee slowly lowered her blasters, but didn’t change them back to hands. “Optimus, are you sure? How could there be a sparkling here?” She asked suspiciously.

“I do not know, but they look close to starving.” The faintness of the red glow from the sparkling’s optics meant the sparkling was either badly injured or close to offlining for some other reason.

“Go away!” The voice was high pitched, scratchy. The sparkling had crawled further back under the berth once Bumblebee joined Optimus in kneeling on the floor to try and get a look at them.

Optimus pulled an energon cube from his subspace and set it on the ground near the berth. He paused and then used one finger to push it closer. “You look hungry, little one. This is for you.” He kept his voice as soft and gentle as possible to avoid scaring the sparkling anymore than they had already.

The pale red optics and small frame didn’t budge.

Optimus looked back and sighed softly. “Arcee.” That one word carried heavy disapproval. Arcee still had her hands in blaster mode, even if they weren’t currently aimed at the berth anymore.

“It’s a ‘Con, Optimus.”

“A sparkling. An innocent.” He replied patiently.

“Slag.” Arcee muttered under her breath. She let her blasters reform to hands and took several steps back, watching warily still.

Hunger seemed to get the better of the sparkling after that. She crawled out from under the berth, every inch of her small frame tense and ready to bolt away if needed. At least it gave the three of them a clear view of what they were dealing with for the first time. The sparkling was a small femme, still quite young. Her plating, and the blue and purple coloring on it, was almost translucent in places. It was likely that her body had started cannibalizing itself to keep her alive for as long as possible. The sparkling held her wings high and wide, probably in an attempt to make herself look bigger. It was laughable for two reasons. One, she was roughly the size of their human friend Jack; and two, her left wing was bent sharply back about half way down its length.

The sparkling grabbed the edge of the cube and tried to tip it so she could drink, but she lacked the strength in her small, clawed servos. Bumblebee reached out to grab the cube. The sparkling hissed and swiped at his servo, leaving shallow claw marks when he quickly pulled away.

“Mine!”

-I was just trying to help you drink.- He ducked his head slightly, shoulders hunching.

“We are not going to take it away. Allow me to help you.” Optimus slowly moved his servo closer to the sparkling, watching as she shivered. Her wings drooped and then snapped back up as she fought not to cower or run. He gripped the sides of the cube and tipped it up for the sparkling to drink.

She wasted no time in grabbing the top edge of the cube in her clawed servos and quickly guzzling down the rich energon. The sparkling tugged at the edges when she needed it tipped further and Optimus silently obeyed the requests until the cube was emptied. She had consumed close to her own weight in energon, small midsection chubby as her body worked to process the nutrients.

The sparkling stepped back from the empty cube before sitting down with her wings in a limp, relaxed position. Her optics were brighter now. Those optics blinked slowly before she tipped her head back in a yawn.

“Optimus, what are we going to do now?” Arcee asked and returned the sparkling’s glare with one of her own while she spoke.

“We cannot leave her to fend for herself.”

“But-”

“Arcee, she is a helpless sparkling. We cannot leave her here.” Optimus stated firmly, briefly glancing over at Arcee before looking back at the drowsy sparkling. “What is your name, little one?”

The sparkling rubbed at her face and yawned again before answering him. “Starfall.”

“Starfall. We’re going to take you with us and keep you safe.” Optimus carefully scooped the sparkling into one servo, wincing when she started to dig narrow claws into the joints. He held her carefully, trying not to jostle her bent wing.

“I want my carrier.” Starfall muttered, curling up in Optimus’s servo and keeping herself in place with those claws.

The trio shared a quick, uncomfortable look. They couldn’t know for sure that the body was Starfall’s carrier, but considering that they were both seekers it seemed likely.

“I am sorry, Starfall. Your carrier is gone.” Optimus murmured in a gentle rumble.

“Carrier.” Curled up, Starfall could just fit all of her frame in Optimus’s servo. Her optics shuttered and she slipped into an exhausted recharge.

Optimus sighed and looked from the small form cradled in his servo to the other two bots. “Continue searching the ship. We need to gather any information we can. I will have Bulkhead take Starfall back to base.”

They nodded and moved to continue deeper into the ship. Optimus retreated the way they had come. He paused to look down at the body of the dead seeker. How had they died? How had they left a sparkling behind? He shook his head and went back out the hatch.

~

“He WHAT?!” Ratchet put a hand over his optics with a grimace. Of all the insane… no, honestly, this wasn’t the craziest thing Optimus had ever done. He started muttering under his breath while moving to reopen the ground bridge for Bulkhead to bring the sparkling back.

“What happened? Was it the ‘Cons? Who’d they send? What was at the crash? I knew we should have gone!” Miko leaned over the railing to eagerly interrogate Ratchet.

“Is everyone okay?” Raf asked softly, looking concerned.

Ratchet glanced over at the children and sighed again. “We’re about to have a new guest.” He growled out as he turned to watch the ground bridge fire up.

Bulkhead came walking through, body posture stiff and his pace very careful. He had both of his servos cradled up close to his chest and was staring intently down at them with a half terrified, half awed expression. He blinked and looked up when Ratchet turned off the ground bridge.

“What’da ya have, Bulk?!” Miko asked, bouncing slightly in place.

“Shhhh.” Bulkhead hissed out and looked back down at his cupped servos for a moment before sighing in relief. “She’s still out.” He tipped his servos out a bit, enough for all of them to get a look at what he held. The sparkling was curled up on her side, optics still offlined as she continued to recharge.

“Whoa. It’s so small.” Jack murmured while all three of the humans stared at the small being.

“You’re not trying to replace me, are ya, Bulk?” Miko teased with a grin.

“Nah. They found her on the crash. Optimus said her name is Starfall. They’re staying behind to gather information about what happened before the ‘Cons show up.” Bulk said softly.

Ratchet had walked away when Bulkhead showed the humans the sparkling. He came back now with a scanner, holding it over Starfall. “Huh. Looks like she was close to starvation, some of her systems are close to shut down. And that wing needs repaired. Haven’t worked too much with wings, or seeker sparklings.” He rubbed at his optics again, feeling the coming processor ache. “Lets get her onto the medical berth so I can get to work.”

“Seeker?” Jack asked, watching at Bulkhead followed after Ratchet.

“She does look like a mini Starscream.” Raf said slowly.

Miko gasped and turned on Raf. “What?! No way, she’s adorable!”

“Well, I mean, she does have wings.” Jack muttered and shrugged. He walked down the stairs to follow after Ratchet and Bulkhead. Raf was quick to follow him and Miko, still nagging Raf, brought up the rear.

“Bulk, if she’s a baby, where’s her mom?” Miko asked, jumping to try and get a better look when the sparkling was set on the medical berth.

“Optimus said her carrier was dead. Do you think he could have been a spark splitter like Soundwave?” Bulkhead addressed the second part to Ratchet.

“He? Is a carrier a mom or a dad?” Raf asked, looking back and forth between the two bots.

Ratchet sighed. “No, Bulkhead, I don’t think she came from a spark splitter.” He rubbed his face and glanced down at the three human faces looking up at him. “It’s not as simple as with you humans.”

“Whoa, are you gonna give us the birds and bees talk for robots?!” Miko demanded gleefully.

“It’s- We’re not-” Ratchet groaned.

Bulkhead was trying to back away from them. “Well, I brought her to ya, Ratchet. I think I’ll just-”

“Oh no you don’t.” The medic lashed out, grabbing Bulkhead’s arm. “This is your fault too. If I have to suffer, you can suffer with me.”

Bulkhead shuffled his pedes anxiously and stared at the ceiling.

“Most Cybertronians have a carrier and and sire. Sometimes that is a femme and a mech. Sometimes it’s two mechs or two femmes. It used to be that a pair would request a new spark from the All Spark. The carrier would keep the new spark in their own spark chamber, nurturing it while the body for the sparkling was formed within themself. The sparkling body would have… material… from both the carrier and sire.” Ratchet paused there and tried to refocus back on the recharging sparkling instead of the inquisitive humans watching him. “When the sparkling body was fully formed the new spark would separate from the carrier’s spark and settle in its new spark chamber. Then they would emerge.”

“Wait, then what is a spark splitter?” Jack asked.

Raf frowned. “I thought you said the All Spark was lost early in the war.”

“Can’t you just let me work?” Ratchet grumbled, poking at Starfall’s bent wing. “A spark splitter can split pieces of their own spark and nurture it. Then they are basically carrier and sire to the sparkling. Soundwave is a spark splitter. And yes, Raf, it was.”

“Laserbeak is one of Soundwave’s sparklings. Well, mostly grown up now.” Bulkhead shrugged.

Miko crossed her arms, glaring up at Bulkhead since Ratchet had turned his back to them. “Then how is she still a little sparkling, huh?”

“Uh…” Bulkhead rubbed his helm.

“There’s evidence of long term, enforced stasis.” Ratchet said quietly, setting aside a tool. “This sparkling may very well be from the start of the war, locked away in stasis on that ship for millenia.”

“Geez, that’s got to be rough. Waking up to find everything has changed so much.” Jack murmured, sharing a look with the other two humans.

“You have no idea.” Ratchet muttered with a sigh.

[owlways-and-forever]

Summary: The Marauders are getting older, and that means so many things. Mischief, heartbreak, and trying to figure out who they really are. They’ll face problems within their group, prove their loyalty to each other, and discover the ugliness that is brewing in the wizarding world at large. Welcome to Years 2-4 of the Marauders time at Hogwarts. **This piece is a sequel to Behind the Mango Tree, however, you do not have to have read the first installment to pick this up. It does stand alone, but there is some carry over from the last book, especially with inter-character relationships. Basically, you don’t have to have read BtMT, but it certainly helps. Word Count: (2,136) 22,361 Links: FFnet | ao3 | tumblr: Ch 1, Ch 2, Ch 3, Ch 4, Ch 5, Ch 6

A/N: The best laid plans, am I right? I sincerely apologize for the long delay here, its been a lot of one thing after another. Between moving, and traveling, my computer breaking, and some family news, things have been a little bit crazy. I finally finished the next chapter today, but I didn't want to make you guys wait any longer (it's been long enough). So looking forward... the next chapter is almost done, but I'm going to wait until next Wednesday to post it, to give myself time to edit and stuff. So next chapter on 4/10. Depending on how things look next Wednesday, I'm going to make a decision as to whether or not to keep this weekly, or switch to every other week. I hate keeping you guys waiting, but I want to make sure I have adequate time to write these chapters properly. But, like I said, we'll see how things look next week.

As always, comments are always welcome, and very much appreciated (even if it's just one word), so please let me know what you're thinking!

Now that that's settled, I don't really have any other notes for this chapter, so enjoy, and I hope you like it!

Chapter 7: Peter’s Plan

November rolled around bringing with it a plague of scorch throat, and Sirius was delighted when he came down with it right around the full moon. He might not be able to be with Remus while he transformed, but at least Sirius could be with him while he recovered in the hospital wing. He tried to make Remus laugh by exhaling flames with every word he spoke, hiding the winces each time he felt the burn tear through his throat. It was worth it to see even the most fleeting of smiles on his friend’s face.

That month, the full moon was worse than it had been before, and Remus had been sick the whole day leading up to it. He’d woken in the middle of the night vomiting from the pain, and he had rushed to the hospital wing, settling in the bed next to Sirius until sunset.

“I wish there was something we could do to make Remus feel better,” James sighed as he and Peter trudged through the chilly halls to class.

“We try to help him get better as much as we can,” Peter answered, sadness passing over his face despite his words. “And we help him with homework and notes and stuff so he doesn’t fall behind.”

“I know, I just... those transformations must be bloody awful, and I wish there was something we could do to make them easier,” James said.

“What happens if he bites an animal while he’s transformed?” Peter asked, an idea nipping at the edge of his mind.

“Nothing,” James answered with a shrug. “Well, not nothing, but they don’t get, you know, infected.”

“So animals can’t become werewolves?” Peter clarified, chewing on his cheek slightly.

“No, only humans,” James said, Peter’s line of questioning lost on him.

“What do you think would happen if he bit a person who was transfigured into an animal?” Peter continued, not entirely sure about what he was suggesting.

“Dunno,” James said, cocking his head to one side. “Why? What are you thinking?”

“Well, just that, if animals are immune to lycanthropy, and wizards take on all the traits of animals when they... morph into them or whatever... well would that mean that they couldn’t be infected while they were in animal form?”

Peter looked nervous as he asked the question, as if concerned that James would laugh and say he was being ridiculous.

“I’m not sure,” James answered. “No one really knows how much you change. But I think... I don’t think so, I mean they’re still human, right? You don’t really turn into the animal, you just take their form. But genetically, you’d still be human, so I think you could be infected.”

“But what if you can’t though?” Peter pushed, feeling a little more confident in his idea.

“Well, it’d still be pretty risky,” James said. “I mean, werewolves are still pretty lethal, you could still get mauled or eaten or something.”

“Yeah, but maybe not,” Peter proposed, a bright glint in his eye.

They had reached the door of the Charms classroom, and the two boys ducked inside, filing into their seats. Peter mulled things over in his mind as the class continued, unable to focus on their lesson about Cheering Charms.

About halfway through the class, Professor Flitwick asked a question that Peter didn’t hear. Lily’s hand shot into the air, and Peter watched as James reached up from his seat next to her and slapped her palm in a hard high-five. Lily let out an annoyed huff, but she didn’t acknowledge James’ action in any other way, her hand never wavering. James grinned happily and leaned back in his chair, pushing the front two feet up into the air slightly.

“You are a complete arse, Potter,” Lily hissed, after she had answered Professor Flitwick’s question, the satisfied smile slipping from her face.

“C’mon, Evans, you know I’m charming,” James smirked, and she rolled her eyes in response.

The rest of the class, and the day, passed in a bit of a blur. Peter felt unfocused, his mind drifting away at every opportunity, and he couldn’t have brought it back if his life depended on it. As he went through the motions of going to class, eating dinner, even visiting Sirius, Peter’s thoughts kept returning to Remus, trying to piece together a way to help him.

Once the other Gryffindor boys had all fallen asleep, a chorus of snores echoing from James, Lance, and Firmin’s beds, Peter decided he had to have an answer to the question burning in his heart. He leaned over and grabbed a pair of socks from his trunk, sliding them off his feet, and then slipped silently through the dormitory. It must have been later than he realized, as the common room was nearly empty, and the few students who were there paid no attention to Peter as he snuck through the portrait hole.

“Going somewhere?” the Fat Lady asked, as the portrait closed behind Peter.

“I need to see Professor McGonagall,” he squeaked in surprise.

“You’d better hope that no one else finds you along the way,” she answered, giving him a curious look.

Peter didn’t wait to find out what her expression meant, turning on his heel and walking quickly down the hall. He reached the door of Professor McGonagall’s office without incident, and he took a deep breath as he raised a small fist to knock on the ancient wood.

It was a long moment before the door opened, Professor McGonagall standing on the other side in a tartan dressing gown. Peter had a flurry of nerves as he saw her, suddenly wondering why he hadn’t just waited until morning to do this.

“What are you doing out of bed so late, Mr. Pettigrew?” Professor McGonagall asked, as she looked at the young boy in front of her.

“Professor, you know how on our first day of class in first year you turned into a cat and back?” Peter said, shuffling his feet nervously.

“Yes, Mr. Pettigrew, I vaguely remember,” she answered dryly.

“What’s that called again?”

“An animagus, Mr. Pettigrew, you ought to pay better attention,” she chided, although she was not surprised. First years were almost always too nervous or excited to pay much attention on the first day of school. Those with nonmagical upbringings hardly ever remembered anything about animagi until they began to cover it much later on.

“Right, well, I was wondering... if a werewolf bit an animagus while they were an animal, would they become a werewolf too?” Peter asked, trying to seem as casual as possible.

“Why do you ask?” She raised an eyebrow at him, immediately suspicious of his question.

“I was... reading about werewolves and it said only people can be affected.”

Professor McGonagall seemed surprised that he had retained this information, or indeed been reading about anything academic other than the passages that his coursework dictated.

“You were reading about werewolves?” she clarified. “A topic which is somewhat beyond your current education level?”

“Yes, Professor.”

“Mr. Pettigrew, if you think –“

“I don’t,” Peter said hurriedly. “And if I did I wouldn’t tell a soul. It wouldn’t be right. But I don’t. It’s just a... a hobby. An interest.”

“Well, Mr. Pettigrew, I must assure you that you are quite safe from werewolf attacks, and needn’t worry –“

“I’m not worried, Professor, I was just curious... it must be lonely for them...” he explained, lost in his thoughts for a moment.

“Since I see very few instances of curiosity from you, Mr. Pettigrew, I feel inclined to encourage it by answering your question, but only if you stop interrupting me,” Professor McGonagall said sternly. “I do not believe that a wizard, bitten while in his or her animagus form, would be inflicted with lycanthropy, no. They are, physically, the animal they appear to be, with its traits, including, I believe, immunity from lycanthropy. Of course, no study has ever been performed on the subject. It would be incredibly dangerous, and as such, not many would volunteer for it.”

“Thank you, Professor,” Peter said sincerely, turning to leave her office.

Professor McGonagall watched him go, his words sticking in her mind, and she considered the young Gryffindor currently alone in the Shrieking Shack. Peter had a point, Minerva couldn’t even imagine how terrifying it had to be, transforming into something so wild and uncontrollable, doing so alone. In an instant, she knew what she had to do.

Minerva left her office, pulling her warm, tartan cloak from its place on the coat rack and wrapping it around her shoulders as she moved. She swept through the halls of the empty castle, until she stepped into the night air. A gentle rain was falling, giving the autumn air an extra bite. The moon was full overhead, visible mostly as a hazy glow through the cloud cover.

“Lumos,” she whispered, the tip of her wand igniting, lighting her path.

Minerva strode through the grounds until she found the Whomping Willow. With a wave of her wand, a branch on the ground transformed into a snake and slithered to the base of the tree, pressing a knot in the trunk with its tail. Immediately, the branches of the tree stilled, and Minerva was able to step closer.

There was a small opening between the willow’s roots, which Minerva knew led to a dank passage. She closed her eyes and focused on her transformation, a moment later finding herself in feline form. Quickly, she trotted through the stilled branches and down into the tunnel. It was a long trek, particularly as a cat, but it was easier than being hunched over.

Some twenty minutes later, Minerva felt the ground slope upwards beneath her paws, and she emerged into the creaking entryway of the Shrieking Shack. She could hear snarling from above, footsteps pacing back and forth. Long nails clicked against the wood, and a loud growl accompanied a crash.

Carefully, Minerva padded across the floor and up the stairs, soft creaks issuing from beneath her paws. When she reached the landing, she could see the werewolf pacing through the gap in the doorway, his claws reaching to destroy any furniture he could find. Minerva sat in the doorway, watching for a moment.

Softly, she meowed, getting his attention. Remus. His yellow eyes fixed on her, and for a moment his lips curled up to show his teeth, a deep rumbling echoing in his chest, but then he paused. A hint of recognition seemed to cross his face, and his muscles relaxed a little.

Remus returned to pacing the room, but he seemed less frantic, less agitated. After he passed by her for the third time, Remus stopped in front of Minerva, staring at her, and growled lightly. But it was more of a conversation than a threat, like he was trying to tell her how frustrated he felt, how angry, how scared.

They spent a few hours this way, in passing conversation of sorts, before Remus curled up on the floor, huffing heavily. Minerva crept closer to him and leapt onto the sole in tact chair, curling up herself. She meowed softly once more and watched Remus close his eyes, watching over him as he drifted off.

[lechevaliermalfet]

Rise, and Escape – A Long Look at Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter

Quick note: This deep dive write-up was originally posted elsewhere in May of 2015.  I’m polishing it for reposting here.  In addition, for those interested, a while back I recorded a podcast-type thing for a project called Pause Menu Monologues, which was being done by an acquaintance of mine.  Said monologue was derived from a cut-down version of this effortpost.  For those interested, you can listen to that here. Now, on to the main event.

As I prepare to leave my current job for another with far better opportunities, it feels tremendously appropriate to talk yet again about a game premised almost entirely on the idea of escape.

I’ve written about Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter before, but it was requested that I write about it again.  It was @squeemcsquee making the request, so I listened more than usual.  I’m sure I’ll probably wind up saying a lot of the same things I said on the first go-‘round, but who knows?

Well, here’s something I didn’t say before this writing: When I first introduced her to Dragon Quarter, she got into it.  Really into it.  Given her relative inexperience with Japanese role-playing games, this was surprising to me; it’s so different from the usual run of JRPGs, especially as the genre stood in about 2003 or so when the game first came out.  Contrarian that I am (at times), that’s part of what endeared it to me.  But as she pointed out, the things that made it seem out of the ordinary to me meant very little to her.  She didn’t have much “ordinary” to compare it against.

Unfortunately, watching her play it made me want to play it also.  Part of this is the natural (and deeply unfortunate) backseat-driving instinct I have whenever I’m watching someone do something that I’m familiar with, but feel they could be doing better, and in fact, if they’d just let me have the controller for a few minutes, I could show them exactly how… But part of it was also just that seeing the game played really made me want to be playing it myself.  This presented a problem, what with us having only the one copy.  It led to arguments.  Not, like, real arguments, but not exactly cutesy fun arguments, either.  We did, at the time, have both a working PlayStation 2 and a backward-compatible PlaySation 3, so it was only owning just the one copy of the game that was really a problem.  So the solution was pretty simple.

That’s how good it is. Dragon Quarter: The game so nice, we bought it twice.

Technically, we only bought the game once.  I bought it when it first came out, back in early 2003.  I played it for a while, and while it was pretty to look at, and it had good music, and the setting was interesting, it just didn’t come together for me.  Despite this, I had no desire to trade it in.  I had the feeling I was onto something good, though I couldn’t quite grasp it at the time.

I hadn’t had much experience with the Breath of Fire series then. I owned a copy of Breath of Fire IV, which was really the first game in the series that I even tried to tackle seriously.  Having unwillingly skipped over the 16-bit generation (owning a TurboGrafx-16 and five games hardly counts), my impression of the series at that time could basically be described as “like Final Fantasy, only not quite as inventive”.  It perhaps wasn’t a fair assessment, but I was basing this on the opinions of friends and acquaintances; I was unable to draw my own conclusions.  Still, I liked Breath of Fire IV well enough, even outside of some positive personal associations, so I hung on to Dragon Quarter, feeling relatively certain that one day, I would get the itch to try it again.

As it happened, I did, a couple years down the line.  The story and the characters were calling to me, and this time, everything finally clicked.

It probably helped that, around that time, I was beginning to become aware that JRPGs as a genre were becoming (or more likely, always had been) deeply conservative in terms of design, as well as character and story archetypes.  Realistically, this has probably been the case since the days of the original Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, and Phantasy Star.  But I got into these types of games in late 1998 with Final Fantasy VII; I was new to the genre in those days, so even things that were rote and by-the-numbers were fresh and new to me then. And in fairness, I’ve enjoyed a number of these types of games.  But by this time, I found myself wanting games in the genre to branch out and do something new.  So many of the mechanical mainstays of the genre, the “traditions” of JRPG design, began life as frankly clunky workarounds for technology that wasn’t really up to giving us a less abstract simulation of the expected features of a fantasy adventure: travel, exploration, fighting monsters, finding treasure, getting new and more powerful gear, and saving the world and any number of princesses.  If you wanted to simulate all of these things on older hardware, you had to have a certain amount of abstraction.  So you had your turn-based battles, your random encounters, and so on, and so forth.

By the PS2 era, the technology was rapidly growing beyond the need to adhere to these ancient abstractions for any reason other than nostalgia’s sake.  It had been doing this for some time – Chrono Trigger jettisoned random encounters back in the mid-90s, but despite the universal acclaim that game received, no one seemed terribly interested in implementing any of its innovations elsewhere.  Developers were, by and large, unwilling to grow out of those old ways.  In part this might be down to the reluctance of their audience (or at least a very vocal portion of it) to part ways with those same traditions.  But whatever the reason, the result was the same: stagnation. Or so it felt to me.

I wanted something that was different from the JRPGs I’d played before.  Something that still offered the thought and planning that went into playing an RPG of any kind, something with a good story and interesting characters, but which went off the beaten path and did something different.

And so, in late 2004 or maybe early 2005, two years after I originally bought it, tried it, and hung it up for the foreseeable future, I started playing Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter again.

It’s an odd beast, this game, even when you look at it in the context of its own series.  All the more so, really.  The earliest Breath of Fire games got compared to the 8- and 16-bit Final Fantasy games, at least by most of the people I knew back then.  Really, a more apt comparison would be to Dragon Quest, but I hadn’t played any of those games, and I was part of a group of friends who oddly lacked much experience with that series, so maybe nobody was in a position to make that particular comparison.  With most of my friends, Dragon Quest (then known as Dragon Warrior due to trademark issues; I feel so old sometimes) was always “That game where you grind for hours and hours and then you finally say ‘fuck this!’ and go do something else, maybe play Final Fantasy or go outside or something, I dunno”.

Anyway, the whole series up to this point had been pretty standard high-fantasy fare, with the unique selling point being the main character’s ability to transform into a dragon. Most of the game mechanics beyond this were pretty straightforward.  My experience with the series at large was pretty much limited to some time spent on the fourth game, and some time spent goofing off with ROMs of the first two out of idle and quickly satisfied curiosity.

One other consistent feature of the series is that the main character, the aforementioned dragon-transforming person, is always a young blue-haired swordsman named Ryu, and there is always a blonde, winged young lady named Nina who typically focuses on magic. Additional characters tend to be of all shapes, sizes, and species.

Dragon Quarter, by contrast, occurs in a future dystopia where humankind, having pretty much destroyed the environment through the use of biologically engineered weapons called dragons, has retreated to a single subterranean dwelling called Sheldar.  There, they survive as best they can.

In this society, everyone is given a rank, called a D-ratio.  On the surface of things, this ratio is a measure of one’s current ability and future potential, and places limits on their social standing, the kinds of jobs they can hold, places they can live, and overall determining just exactly how high they can rise in the world, figuratively and literally.

“Low-Ds”, that is, people with low D-ratios, live further down in this habitat.  The air is worse, people’s lifespans are shorter, and there are occasionally monsters called genics that roam around down there.  The people with high D-ratios live closer to the surface where the air is better and things are generally less dangerous. A nice touch is that, especially in cut scenes, the game is literally more hazy and grimy, visually, the further down you are.  As you go up, the environments gradually become clearer and brighter.  It happens bit by bit, so you may not notice it the first time through, but if you finish the game and start over again, the difference stands out.

One of the few story beats to be preserved is our hero: Ryu.  Here, he’s a low-D ranger, whose job mainly seems to involve security and hunting down genics.  His D-ratio is abysmally low: 1/8,192.  His current job is the very highest he can hope to achieve.  He’s partnered with another young man named Bosch, D-ratio 1/64. While Ryu is effectively at the very limit of how far he can rise in the world, Bosch is only at the beginning.  A D-ratio as high as his means he can potentially qualify to become a Regent, one of the four rulers of this underground world. Bosch is basically just paying his dues here.  He’s friendly enough to Ryu, in a condescending sort of way, which Ryu mostly just shrugs off.  What else is he going to do?

While reporting for an assignment with Bosch, Ryu succumbs to a brief fugue, in which he has a vision. He sees the decaying remains of a giant dragon spiked to a wall.  Despite clearly being dead, the dragon seems to talk to Ryu, mind-to-mind, though what it says to him makes virtually no sense at the time.  Not long after, Ryu comes across the real thing, though it is very visibly dead and inanimate.

A terrorist attack splits up Ryu and Bosch, and shortly thereafter, Ryu runs into this game’s version of Nina, as well as a member of the resistance movement Trinity, named Lin. She seeks Nina for her own – or rather Trinity’s – purposes.  The three form an unlikely but highly effective team.  But allying himself with these two has its consequences, and by the time Ryu and Bosch reunite, circumstances have made them into enemies. Bosch is a good fighter, and he has plenty of allies with him, but Ryu refuses to betray his new comrades. Thankfully, his encounter with the dragon was no mere dream or hallucination.  Unbeknownst to him, it has bestowed him with awesome power… and a deadline.

With every passing moment, the monstrous dragon power lurking within Ryu grows more prominent, threatening to overcome him.  While Ryu is in control, he can transform into a bestial form capable of slaughtering even bosses within just a couple of rounds of combat.  But drawing on that power accelerates its progress in overtaking him.

And so, with all hands turned against him, Ryu, Lin, and Nina have ultimately just a single option: Escape.

One of the things that I like about Dragon Quarter – one of many, many things – is the way that the game’s more prominent mechanics and its story are so closely intertwined.

The dragon power bestowed upon Ryu early into the game isn’t just a narrative device or story element, coming out only when dramatically convenient.  It’s also a game mechanic, in the form of what the game calls a D-counter. This is a number, a percentage, that appears in the corner of the screen.   As you play, it slowly ticks up toward 100 in intervals of a hundredth of a percent.  Everything you do in the game causes it to increase.  Everything.  Every 24 or 25 steps will cause it to increase by one interval.  Later in the game, this happens every dozen steps or so.  Ryu’s special D-dash ability, which allows him to avoid enemy combat, causes it to tick up faster.  Transforming, all by itself, raises the counter, and any actions taken while transformed increase it by whole-number percentages.  It is literally overpowered.  What I mentioned about crushing bosses in just a couple of turns was not hyperbole.  I’ve done it.  It’s basically my end-game strategy.

There is no way to drop the counter.  Ever. There are no items, no spells, no techniques which will allow you to reset it or undo any of its progress.  It just sits up there in the corner, slowly increasing and glowing ever more furiously as the number grows.  The tension between the temptation to use it whenever you’re in a bind and the punishing consequences of that use can be exquisite.

When I first heard Dragon Quarter described as a survival-horror RPG, it didn’t make sense to me.  But that’s mainly because I associated the mechanical elements of most of the survival-horror games I’d played with the more thematic elements of horror.  And there are horrific moments and images in Dragon Quarter; the world of the game is not a happy place, and its maintenance is not easily or cleanly done.  But that horror is mainly a consequence of the world-building; it’s not the point of the game.

The key here, I think, is the word “survival”.  You might more accurately call Dragon Quarter a survival-RPG, except it’s basically the only one of its kind that I know of.  It’s kind of hard to wrangle a whole genre out of that.

At their heart, survival-horror games generally “work” based on two principles.

The first is the fragility of the player character relative to other types of games, and relative to the enemies within the game.  You are not the hero of a more action-oriented game, who can take maybe a dozen sword strokes straight to the face and just keep going, or who can withstand a hail of gunfire and duck behind cover for a few seconds while your shields recharge.  Here, the player is reduced to a much more even footing with the enemies.  Every bit of damage taken is a significant setback that needs to be planned around, either to prevent it or to deal with it when it happens.  Every attack must be calculated.  This is because of the second principle, which is resource management.

The in-game resources, both those which you use to preserve yourself and those you use to eliminate your enemies, are finite.  So they must be spent wisely, frugally.  Because of this, you are constantly required to take a measured, careful approach to any situation.  You can never just blithely wander around; to do so invites disaster twice over.  In the short term, you risk serious harm, leaving yourself vulnerable to future threats.  In the long term, if you come out of the situation relatively unscathed, it’s generally at some expense of resources, leaving you ill-prepared for future encounters.  Carelessness becomes indistinguishable from suicide.

This puts pressure on the player to play extremely well at all times by punishing mistakes immediately and brutally.  As a result, some of the typical elements of JRPGs are missing.

There are no healing spells or techniques.  All healing – whether restoring health or curing negative status effects – is accomplished by way of expendable (and frequently pricey) items.  And you have to consider how often (if at all) you’ll be using some of these items, because inventory space is limited, and multiple items of a single type don’t “stack” very much before requiring another inventory slot.  And, naturally, the usual economics of JRPGs are in full effect.  Whatever you get for selling an item is a pitiful fraction of what it costs you to buy.

The game offers you the ability to use bait and traps to lure enemies into a position of compromise and get the drop on them, but even these need to be used sparingly.  There’s hardly enough for every encounter.

Interestingly, the game knows exactly how difficult it is, and gives you something of a way around the problem.

As with most RPGs of any kind, Japanese or otherwise, you earn experience points, new equipment, and new abilities as you go through the game.  In addition, Dragon Quarter also gives you what’s called Party XP.  Basically, this is experience you can dole out to party members as you like to boost their levels.

Should you find yourself in a situation where you can’t progress without either having your party wiped or running the D-counter up to 100% (which, if it hasn’t become obvious by now, is an instant Game Over), you have the option to do what’s called a SOL Restart.  This restarts the game from the beginning, but lets you keep all the equipment and skills you’ve learned, as well as any Party XP you still have.  This gives you get a fresh start while retaining your improved gear, and the Party XP lets you give yourself a boost in the early stretches.

There’s also an option to restore a previous hard save along these same lines.  Dragon Quarter allows “soft” saves anywhere, but these are temporary by design.  Once loaded, these saves disappear.  There are only a few “hard” save points, from which you can restore at will, and to which you will be returned with a SOL Restore.

If this sounds ridiculous for what is typically a long-form type of game, it may help to understand that Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter is only about eight to ten hours long from start to finish on a single play through, once you know what you’re doing.  Even with a couple of full-blown restarts, you’ll be spending no more time on Dragon Quarter than any other game from the same time period.  Less, probably.

Writing this now, I just about want to say that Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter was Dark Souls before Dark Souls really existed. There’s a certain similarity in that both games are more difficult than usual while still being relatively fair, and in the expectation that you will die, probably more than once, and that rather than being a tragedy, it’s simply an instructive part of the experience. Or in the case of Dragon Quarter, you’ll experience (probably more than once) a situation in which death is basically a given should you continue, and the smart thing would be to cut your losses and restart.

Dragon Quarter’s infliction of pressure extends even to the representation of the game’s characters and world.

Most characters have a skinny, almost emaciated appearance.  Part of this is simple stylization, of course, but it still contributes to the overall effect.  These people live a thin and narrow existence, it says, devoid of the expansive pleasures humankind was meant to enjoy.  There is a grimness and a quiet desperation underlying it all.

The world itself is a fucking hole.  Corridors in the lower areas are littered with random junk and debris; it’s best not to think what it might all actually be.  The air is hazy and grimy, and things have a sort of cobbled-together look that just makes the whole place look cramped and dingy and uncomfortable. In these lower areas, everything looks like it’s about one stern look away from falling right apart.  The upper areas are cleaner, more solid, but can seem so sterile and strictly designed as to be hostile.  Dragon Quarter does a wonderful job of creating a world you want to get the hell out of as soon as you can.

It’s ironic, really. Most games, I play to escape from the troubles and stresses in my life.  And most games oblige this desire.  Even the ones that take place in barren wastelands tend to take place in gorgeously rendered barren wastelands that encourage you to examine every carefully tailored nook and cranny.  They’re an invitation to exploration and adventure, and are “barren” or “waste” only as a matter of aesthetics.

But limitation and escape are the central themes in this game, and a world in which such themes are explored must be more than a background or a prop.  

The world is limited in its size; an RPG with little to no detectable exploration, comprised mainly of tunnels and rooms, and a single clear direction and objective at all times.  The player's inventory of supplies is likewise limited, in keeping with the surival horror influence.  The player is frequently required to prioritize, and ditch whatever they aren't likely to use based on their play style.  Care must be taken by the player to work within these limits.

Narratively speaking, the story also explores the idea of limitations.  Ryu himself embodies these limits.  His D-ratio is among the lowest of the low.  His place in society, the ways in which he can define and express himself, how he can live – all of these things have strict limits placed on them. And this dragon entity, Odjn…  As much as it much as it appears to be the key to his salvation, as much as it empowers him to break all barriers and overcome or destroy all opposition, it limits him as well.  It puts a countdown on his life, ticking down the hours he has left until... well, until whatever horrific thing might happen when Odjn gains total control and breaks free.  

And in the end, the characters decide to break free of these limits placed on them by the world by breaking free of the world itself, to smash through the ceiling of it and see once and for all what lies beyond its narrow, choking confines.

Dragon Quarter is a game about escape.

Ultimately, this is a large part of what interests me about the story of Dragon Quarter, what keeps me coming back.  Rather than a big, trampling save-the-world epic, it’s about a group of characters who just want out.  This is a smaller story, a “tiny tale of time”, as the game itself tells us in its opening narration. It’s huge in its implications for its world and its characters.  It’s great in the scope of the ideas it asks its characters to contemplate.  (It flirts with Gnosticism, which immediately grabs my interest).  It that sense, at least, it does involve the end of the world, in one way or another.  But the scale is smaller, and the characters strike me as being more real because of it.

Ryu, Lin, and Nina don’t want to fight anybody.  There’s at least one memorable occasion where Ryu, surrounded by enemies, asks why they can’t just let him and his friends go.  The character animations in Dragon Quarter aren’t spectacular, but they get the job done here.  There’s something about the way that Ryu asks his question that seems to have layers.  On one layer, he seems mentally, psychologically exhausted from the strain of all the fighting, and the toll all the deaths he’s dealt out has taken on him.  On yet a deeper layer, he seems equally exhausted from fighting the thing inside him that threatens to take over and destroy him.

They aren’t trying to harm anybody.  And it seems reasonable just to let them go, on the one hand.  But on the other, there is the major problem that letting Ryu and company out of this subterranean pit will completely upend the social order – will end this idea of the world – purely as a side-effect of his escape.  Because the underlying problem with Ryu’s world is a variant on the same problem that keeps people in dead-end jobs and abusive relationships long beyond the point when, logically, they should be getting out.

Fear.

The world of Dragon Quarter is, as previously stated, an absolute, utter shithole in purely objective terms.  Even the people in charge don’t seem to be enjoying themselves much.  And it’s because everyone seems to be in unspoken agreement that even if the current circumstances are awful, at least they’re familiar awful circumstances.  It’s possible that things are better on the surface, but it’s just as possible that they aren’t.  It’s just as possible that they’re far worse.  This, at least, is the devil we know.

Even one of the main villains, the ruler of this subterranean nightmare, is ruled by fear. A thousand years before the story proper, he was given the opportunity to open this world to the surface.  But he backed down.  In his fear that the world above might still be the barren wasteland people left ages ago, he turned back at the final moment, sentencing himself and everyone in the underground to remain in it indefinitely.

There’s an anime I like quite a bit – it’s probably my favorite, really – called Revolutionary Girl Utena, and in it there is a bit of dialogue that is recited so often it’s practically a ritual.  It goes like this:

“If it cannot break out of its shell, the chick will die without ever being born.  We are the chick.  The world is our egg.  If we don’t crack the world’s shell, we will die without ever truly being born.  Smash the shell, for the world revolution.”

This is actually a paraphrase from the Hermann Hesse novel Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair’s Youth (usually just known as Demian), in which it’s put this way:

“The bird struggles out of the egg.  The egg is a world.  Who would be born must first destroy a world.  The bird then flies to God.  That god’s name is Abraxas.”

To go up, to go out, to rise, to escape: This is an act of tremendous faith.

[azariaspace]

My RA Application Essays

Nobody wants to read these?  Good.  Here they are anyway.  It’s been at least two months since I first thought about this and I can’t let the idea go.  It’s been two weeks since word of my continued-resident status, and I’m still thinking about it.  I’ve accepted my fate but my life now is geared towards being one as a junior.  So I’m flinging these into the void for...  I dunno why.

Why do you want to be a Resident Assistant? (200-400 words) Calvin has grown to become home for me, and I want to give that to others.

I love authentic community.  It's something I've cherished my whole life, and I want to instill that love in others.  I define authenticity as honesty coupled with vulnerability, and genuinely believe it's the greatest gift we can give to each other as people.  Authenticity allows us to see who we truly are as people by being honest with ourselves and others, and allows us to form true, genuine relationships with each other.  In addition, people are complex.  They're funny, weird, and ridiculous, especially young adults who are learning to be independent, and nobody gets to see that transformation and that funny, weird, ridiculous reality more than an R.A.

In addition, my R.A. in particular has helped me a lot.  She's walked with me through some difficult situations and supported me through some really cool things that I've been fortunate enough to experience.  [She] is such a strong support for individual members of our floor and the community at large, and I'd love to be able to offer that support for a floor myself one day.

Finally, I want to bring a new look at inclusion to the way a lot of floors operate.  Inclusion is often pictured as simply physically bringing members together and making sure everyone shows up to a certain number of events.  But I think inclusion relates back to authentic community.  It's not enough to personally invite people to floor events instead of just sending mass emails, though the personal connection is definitely a part of it.  I think inclusion involves really knowing who each resident is and what makes them unique, embracing their similarities and differences, and celebrating them as individuals and as a community.  Inclusion is often a joyous time, and can look like having international students teach the floor how to cook dinners from their home countries or celebrating residents’ first snows, but it also can involve difficult conversations about race, gender and sexuality, and disability, among other things.  Inclusion can be hard, but it's worth it, because it's part of truly knowing and being known.  It's part of community.  It's part of living wholeheartedly, and it excites me.

Please describe 2-3 personal traits do you possess that will help you be successful as a Resident Assistant. (200-400 words) The first trait I possess that would help me be a successful R.A. is my flexibility.  I’ve always been able to adapt to changing circumstances fairly easily, but working on the set construction crew in Calvin Theatre Company this past semester really helped me hone this skill.  In the scene shop, you have to do different things each day, from cutting wood with power saws to rigging lights to designing a lighter version of a certain prop, and everything in between.  While I imagine being an R.A. would involve a lot less sawdust, no two days in Residence Life are the same.  An R.A. has to be ready for any circumstance, from an impromptu floor event to a crisis, and a good R.A. would be able to navigate the dynamic landscape of a floor, and the dorm at large, with a cool head and grace.

The second and third traits I possess that would help me be a successful R.A. are intertwined.  They're the traits of being passionate and being committed.  I believe passion and commitment are two sides of the same coin.  If I'm passionate about something, then I'm committed to seeing it through, from its conception to its fruition.  If I'm committed to something, then the passion — if it didn't exist at the beginning — will develop as I work on it.  Basically, if I want to see something happen, then I will make sure it happens or it gets to the people who will make it happen.  If I've been tasked with making something happen, then I will grow to love it as if it was my own idea while still recognizing the unique qualities that whoever thought of it brought to the table.  This passion and commitment extends to coursework, to ideas for floor events, and to finding ways to make Calvin a more welcoming place for all of its students.

What practical strategies do you implement to keep your life organized and follow through on tasks? (100-250 words) I use three tools to keep myself organized and ensure I follow through on tasks.  The first is a Google calendar, my primary method to track time commitments — like classes.  Whenever I find out about an event, I'll place here.  If it just happens once, I'll indicate that, but I can also plug in recurring events.  I also indicate time for studying and free time, so I have a full understanding of what my day looks like.  Finally, it’s color-coded, so I can easily see what I have going on at a glance.

Secondly, I use a physical calendar.  While I use the Google calendar to only see one week at a time, this calendar shows me a whole month.  On this calendar, I write down all my big assignments, such as papers, as well as things like sporting events.  This calendar helps me get an overview of what my month looks like and helps me budget my studying and free time wisely.

Finally, I have a to-do list on my phone.  There’s a section to keep track of things I need to do throughout the week, like working on a paper, and a breakdown of everything — both tasks and events — that I need to do on each day.  It’s a very specific combination of the two calendars that takes the items from both and combines them in one space.

Taken as a whole, this system helps me stay organized and on top of all my commitments.

In addition to dorm or KE [apartment] worship times and Bible studies, please explain how your personal Christian faith would be demonstrated in your work as an RA. (200-400 words) I hope that my faith is demonstrated in everything I do, even now.  I imagine many of the ways my faith would be demonstrated as an R.A. would be the same as now.  I attend chapel and LOFT [the weekly not-church service put on by Campus ministries], and invite people from my floor to come with me, go to church on Sundays and talk with my floor-mates about our different church experiences each week, pray for people when they ask and sometimes volunteer that service, and maintain my own personal relationship with God through prayer and devotions.

In addition, there are some things that I would do for my floor as an R.A.  Not all of these ideas are mine, so I’ll try to credit their authors.  The first comes from [my brother] R.A.  He noticed that, Biblically, people made great sacrifices for and highly prioritized prayer.  As such, he gets up at three in the morning and wanders up and down his hall, praying for his residents.  He sacrifices some of his sleep for his residents, and even if none of them are aware, it’s still strengthening his floor.  I want to do that.

The second idea is a collaboration between my R.A. and myself.  [My R.A.] started a Community Development Team.  After our first meeting, she told me her ideas for praying for the floor.  She mentioned [our brother R.A.’s] prayer walks, and her attempts to do the same every week but doesn’t always succeed.  I mentioned that we as a team could take turns doing it each week, and she threw out the idea that we could have one night of praying for the dorm, where we each have an hour-long shift with a partner.  If I take the idea of the Community Development Team with me (which I plan on), I’d want them to do something similar.  If I don’t, I’d still want to bring the night of prayer in some capacity.

The final idea comes from a previous [dorm] Barnabas [the spiritual leader of a floor].  It’s the idea of having a time to de-stress and plug into the Word in the basement.  The way they did it last year was by, on Saturdays, having coloring pages with Scripture passages on them and worship music, and anyone from the dorm could come and color.  I think that’s a really cool way to build community throughout the whole dorm and strengthen people’s faith in subtle ways.

In both challenging ways and fun ways, what do you believe is the role of an RA in bringing about Calvin's vision for community in the residence halls? Calvin’s mission is to equip students to think deeply, act justly, and live wholeheartedly as Christ’s agents of renewal in the world.  All staff are charged with facilitating this goal, and R.A.s are in the unique position of being both students — the people being equipped — and staff — the people equipping others.

Calvin wants its students to thrive, and it wants its students to thrive together.  An R.A.’s job is to create an environment on their floor where community can happen.

On the one hand, that involves challenges.  An R.A. has to enforce policy, because a community needs rules and boundaries in order to function.  From gently reminding residents to keep it quiet to calling out and dealing with far more serious breaches of the Calvin Student Conduct Code, an R.A. has to be capable of and willing to deal with every violation.  In addition, an R.A. must abide by all the standards — they must hold themselves to an even higher standard than their residents.

On the other hand, bringing about community is a fun task.  It involves eating with people, planning and executing events with people, having planned and spontaneous conversations about everything from music to life stories.  Community can involve going to your residents’ events, showing up when one of your residents has desk duty, and singing “Happy Birthday” to your residents as loudly and as obnoxiously as possible in the dining hall.

Community involves living life together, and life is often messy, but it’s also so much fun.  Life is like a painting — the palette sometimes looks like a wreck, but the final product is beautiful.

Do you have any reservations or concerns about being placed in a particular hall or with another particular RA candidate?   Also, list any RA candidates you are dating or have dated. I’m nonbinary.  That means that I’m not a guy or a girl.  I’m a little hesitant about being placed in a traditional residence hall, or really anywhere that is divided by the gender binary, because I have no place in that system.  I’m outside of it completely.  But I know I’ll only be a sophomore next year, so if I am chosen to be an R.A., it’s extraordinarily unlikely that I’d be chosen to be an R.A. for [upperclass housing] (and, in fact, I wouldn’t want to be an R.A. for [the apartments] if I had other options, and I would be the first to admit that it would be weird for me to be an R.A. in [upperclass-only dorms]).  I spoke to my R.D. about what it would look like to be a nonbinary R.A., and she said that it would probably be the best fit for me to be somewhere in [the living-learning communities where the wings are connected by a shared lobby space on each floor, unlike other halls], as gender is de-emphasized.  But honestly, I just really need a staff that is not only supportive in general, but actively supportive of the LGBTQ+ community and affirming of my legitimacy as a leader and a resident wherever I live.  It’s going to be a little weird no matter where I wind up, assuming I wind up an R.A.  But weird isn’t necessarily bad.  I’m excited for the opportunity to grow with my (as of now theoretical, but hopefully real) staff and my residents, just as I’ve grown with my floor this semester and will continue to do so throughout this year.  In addition, I have some health complications that might make being on [a specific living-learning floor] challenging, with the emphasis on outdoor activities.  (These would in no way impact my work as an R.A. on any floor; rather, they would impact my ability to be a participant of [that floor] under any circumstances, R.A. or resident.) I have not dated any potential R.A. candidates in the past and am not doing so now.

That’s that. That’s what they saw on the essay front.  I only edited this to take away names and locations, and to clarify what some terms meant for people who don’t go to Calvin.  The grammar is as-is, meaning that there’s something I picked up on that I should’ve changed.  But we’ll see.  We’ll see if anybody else wants to edit and has any thoughts.  Because I’ll be damned if it slips away from me again.

[thelastspeecher]

For your freeform prompts, how about the Mergucket au we suggested where Stan gets turned into a five year old? Maybe when he first gets out of the cocoon and has become a kid?

Background for people: this is a version of the MerGucket AU sort of like the Banjomin Stanley McGucket AU.  While on the ship, the Mystery Trio fights this sea monster, which sprays the Stans with a venom that turns them mer.  Stan, however, grows a cocoon around his body, and well...here’s what happens next.

               Thunk.  

               Ford looked up.  He sighed.

               “Stanley, sometimes I wonder ifit is your life’s purpose to make things difficult,” Ford said in agood-natured tone as he got up to adjust Stan’s cocoon.  Again. “I don’t know why this keeps getting lighter.  If it stayed the same weight, it wouldn’tfall over all the time.”  Ford strokedthe rough surface of the cocoon.  “Andneither I nor the MerGuckets know why you cocooned, instead of transforming theway adults typically do.”  He had justpicked up the cocoon when he heard a small crack.  Startled, Ford dropped the cocoon.  He peered closely.  At one end, the cocoon was beginning toopen.  Ford’s tail flicked excitedly.

               Finally!  Ford poked his headout of his room.

               “Um, MerGuckets?  Stan’s cocoon is hatching!” he called.  

               “Really?” a voice said.  Fiddleford appeared in the hallway.  “Well, let’s go give yer brother a warmwelcome to mer society then!” Fiddleford chirped.  Ford nodded and ducked back into theroom.  The cocoon was now rocking fromside to side, its cracks getting larger. After a few minutes, a webbed hand pried its way through the largecracks, breaking more of the cocoon. Ford’s heart stopped.

               Wait… Stan finished fightinghis way out of the cocoon.  He yawned andidly swam over to a corner of the room, where he promptly curled up.  Is- ishe going to sleep?  

               “Stanley?” Ford asked.  Stan sat up.

               “Yeah?”

               “You- you’re-” Fordstammered.  Stan cocked his head.  

               “Why are you a mermaid?  And Fiddlesticks, you’re a mermaid too?”

               “Merman, yes,” Fiddlefordsaid.  

               “So we’re underwater.”

               “Yes,” Ford confirmed.  Stan grinned.

               “Aw, sweet.  It’ll be way easier to get mermaids like this.  I’m merman now too, right?”  

               “The mer part, yes.  The man part, I’m not completely sure about,”Ford said hesitantly.  Stan frowned.

               “Whattaya-”  Stan looked down at himself.  He saw clearly the stubby, drab green tail guppieshad, and the small, thin arms and hands of his childhood.  “No,” Stan said firmly, shaking his head,dislodging pieces of cocoon from his thick brown curls.  “No, this- what the hell, Sixer!” Stan shouted.  

               “Stanley, please.”

               “You turned me into a fuckingkid!”

               “Stanley!” Ford saiddesperately.  He took a calmingbreath.  “Stan, I had no clue that thiswould happen when you emerged from the cocoon. I assumed you would be an adult, like me.”

               “He was hit with extra of that critter’s venom,” Fiddlefordremarked.  Stan squinted at him.  

               “That’s what did this?” Stanasked.  Fiddleford nodded.  “Well, you didn’t get hit by any of it.  So why are you a merman, huh?”

               “I was born one,” Fiddlefordsaid proudly.  “Or rather, hatched.  I just pretended to be human to work on yership.”

               “We’re actually at Fiddleford’sfamily’s home,” Ford said.  Stan crossedhis arms.

               “I heard voices,” a youngmermaid said, suddenly popping into Ford’s room.  “Did the cocoon hatch?”

               “Yes, Angie, it did,” Fiddlefordsaid quietly.  Angie looked around theroom.  Upon catching sight of Stan, shegasped and swam up to him.

               “Aw, ya didn’t mention yerbrother was a guppy!” Angie cooed, peering closely at Stan.  “Howdy there, cutie.”  Stan glowered.  “Ya should’ve told us, Ford.  That way we could’ve gotten the nurseryready.”

               “Nursery!” Stan squeaked.

               “Why, sure!  We have to dust off the guppy basket, and fixthe lights and everything.”

               “I think his objection was tobeing in the nursery,” Ford said.  Angieblinked.

               “It’s the safest place in thehouse!  That’s where guppies need tobe!  And anyways, guppies can’t get aproper night’s sleep without a guppy basket, and the nursery is where we keepit.”

               “Look, lady, I don’t know whoyou think you are, but I’m not a fucking kid, okay?” Stan burst out.  “I’m not gonna sleep in a nursery.”

               “You- why are ya sayin’ yer nota guppy?” Angie asked, clearly befuddled. “Yer tiny.  Ya got the lil guppytail and scales.  Ya hatched from acocoon, and only guppies hatch from cocoons.”

               “I’m not gonna- hey!” Stanyelped.  Angie was running her fingersthrough his hair to remove the clumps of cocoon still stuck.  

               “Angie, please, leave him be,”Fiddleford said, swimming forward and grabbing Angie’s arm to pull heraway.  “I know yer just followin’ guppynurturin’ instincts, but Stan’s only been mer fer five minutes.  He don’t understand anything that’s going on.”

               “Oh.  Right.” Angie inclined her head.  “Sorry,Stan.”

               “What did you say earlier abouta guppy basket?” Ford asked her.  

               “Hmm?  Oh, it’s what guppies sleep in ‘til they’retoo big fer it.  Biologically speakin’,guppies can’t get a proper night’s sleep outside a guppy basket.”  Angie looked over at Stan.  “And, even though I ain’t quite sure what’sgoin’ on, I know yer brother ‘ll need that basket.  A bed won’t work right fer him.  Not yet.”

               “I’m not a-” Stan started.

               “Mentally speaking?  No, perhaps you are not a child.  Biologically speaking?  You certainly are,” Ford said.  Stan puffed up.

               “I’m not gonna sleep in anursery!”

               “No, but it might be best tohave this basket available,” Ford said. Stan gaped.  “Angie, would you-”

               “On it,” Angie said, alreadydarting out of the room.  

               “Stanford!” Stan shouted.  

               “It’s a precautionary measure.”

               “You can’t make me use a basketas a bed,” Stan spat.  

               “We won’t have to,” Fiddlefordremarked.  “It’s instinctive.”

               “…So?”

               “Guppies are ruled by theirinstincts.  I ain’t quite sure how it’llwork out fer ya, since ya used to be a human adult.  But there’s no way to ignore millennia of evolutionarybehavior.”

               “Instincts?  Like what?” Ford asked Fiddleford.

               “Well, guppies instinctivelycurl up in their basket when they get tired. They also automatically hide from anything that might be a predator.  Which, fer a guppy, means spendin’ most of thetime hidin’.  Guppies ‘re really jumpy.”

               “Pfft,” Stan snorted.  “As if.”

               “Guppies also fall asleep if yasing to ‘em,” Fiddleford continued, ignoring Stan.

               “Really?” Ford asked, intrigued.

               “Yes.  It’s a method of keepin’ a firm sleepschedule, since clutches typically have about ten guppies.  Another way that it’s easier to take care ofguppies is that they tend to fall in line with each other in large groups.  Y’know, mimic each other and act almost likea hive mind.”

               “Fascinating,” Ford said.

               “I’m not gonna do any of that,”Stan said flatly.  Fiddleford smiledweakly at him.

               “Until we get ya into an adultagain, Stanley, I don’t think yer goin’ to have much of a choice.”

               “Yeah, right.  I think I can control my ‘instincts’ orwhatever,” Stan retorted, rolling his eyes. His stomach rumbled.  “But I couldreally go for a sandwich.  Mac ‘ncheese.  I dunno how long I was in that,what did you call it, cocoon?”  Ford andFiddleford nodded silently.  “Yeah.  I need some grub.”

               “Species transformations and agetransformations separately can be rather taxing, energy-wise,” Ford said.  “Together, yes, I’d imagine you have quitethe appetite.”

               “I could eat a whole cow,” Stanquipped.

               “Actually, ya couldn’t,”Fiddleford interjected.  

               “It’s a saying, Fiddlesticks.”

               “Yes, but ya can’t eat beef.”

               “What?  Why not?” Stan whined.  

               “Part of bein’ mer.  No grains, no dairy, no red meat.”

               “Aw,” Stan said, starting topout.

               “We have plenty of jellied eels,though,” Fiddleford suggested.  “Aspecial guppy treat.”

               “Ew,” Stan said.  He wrinkled his nose.  “Jellied eels?  Those things are gross.”

               “Yes, well, you may find youlike them now,” Ford said.  Stan shookhis head.  “I did.  I despised them as a human, but as a mer, Ifind them quite delicious.”

               “…Whatever.  I’ll eat it, since it’s technically food,” Stan muttered. His stomach growled again.  “Whichway’s the kitchen?”

[minijenn]

🐺, UF Dipper with him slowly turning into a werewolf please

(Painful transformation)

(So I do indeed have the idea in mind to do a chapterabout this in the sequel, but hey, that’s a long way off, so I figured why notdo a little drabble for it now. So remember how the other night I said that, atleast in UF, vampires in Gravity Falls are rather… different? Well same forwerewolfs, only they’re a little more direct visually to how they usually are.Instead, the transformation and duration is what’s different. So when you getbitten by a Gravity Falls werewolf, it’s a gradual, slow (hey you asked forslow, so I figured that’s what I’d roll with) and indeed painful process thatspreads across the course of several days until bam: you’re full werewolf. Andinstead of only being in that form during the full moon or whatever, you’re awerewolf all the time, except for the full moon when you turn back intoa human and that’s pretty much the only time you get to be a human, so yeah…the entire process… kinda sucks a lot. But hey, ya’ll a bunch of sadisticfucks who like it when I systematically torture my favorite son, so… here wego, I guess)

(NOTE: This isn’t done. I kinda got burnt out on writingit halfway through and its already fucking LONG as shit, but I really do likethe concept, so I’ll probably revisit it someday if somebody asks. Chances areI’ll use this as the base for the werewolf chapter in the sequel, but I’llprobably take it in a little different of a direction than this… I dunno we’llsee, but again to clarify, this ain’t done. So… yeah. Enjoy!)

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold everything!” Mabelexclaimed, looking between Steven and Dipper in apt disbelief. “What didyou just say?”

“I said,” Steven began, just as anxious andworried as he had been when the boys had arrived at the shack. “Dipperjust got bit by a werewolf!”

“Steven, for the last time,” Dipper interjected,rolling his eyes as he cut off Mabel’s awestruck gasp. “It wasn’t awerewolf. It was just a regular wolf.”

“Oh yeah? Then how come my spit wasn’t able to healit?” Steven asked dubiously.

“B-because…” Dipper said, glancing to the fairlysizable, still-bleeding bitemarks on his upper arm, ones that still hurt agreat deal, even despite his meager attempts to staunch the wound with hisother hand. “I… I don’t know. Maybe it was just like, a fluke orsomething.”

“But I tried to heal you three times and itnever worked!” The young Gem protested fretfully. “Plus, that ‘wolf’sure didn’t look any wolf I’ve ever seen before. It was huge and hadthese eyes that looked almost… human… It was creepy.”

“Well, whatever it was, it wasn’t a-”

“Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh!” Mabel cutin, practically squealing with excitement as she hopped out of her seat andgrabbed her brother’s hands, not even hearing his pained gasp as she jerked hisinjured arm forward. “Dipper! Do you realize what’s happening?! You’regonna turn into a super-cool, super-buff werewolf, just like in the movies!You’re finally gonna have chest hair, and plenty of it, just like you alwayswanted! Isn’t it exciting?”

“No, because it isn’t happening,” Dipper scoffed,pulling himself away from Mabel. “Like I said, I wasn’t bitten by any 'werewolf’or anything like that, so I’m definitely not going to turn into one,ok?”

“Pfft, sounds to me like somebody’s just in denialabout all of the totally awesome werewolf powers he’s about to get,” Mabelpouted as she crossed her arms.

“Dipper, are you sure?” Steven asked, still quiteconcerned. “I mean, if it really was a werewolf, then maybe the Gems orMr. Ford could-”

“No,” Dipper staunchly refused, covering up hiswound a bit more as he turned to leave the room. “We’re not tellingany of them about this. If we do, they’ll just think I was being recklessagain. So as far as I’m concerned, none of them need to know. After all, it’snot like this is even a real problem or anything.”

“Yeah, but what if-” Steven found himself abruptlycut off as Dipper suddenly spun around again, apparently snarling as he glaredat the young Gem fiercely, his teeth bared and his hands clenched into tightfists. For a moment, all Steven and Mabel could do was exchange a glance ofsurprise at this, before both of them looked back to Dipper with shared,newfound concern. “Uh… are you… growling at me?” Steven asked,raising a confused, wary eyebrow.

Of course, upon being called out, Dipper instantly silencedhimself, regaining his composure as he looked away from the pair, clearlyembarrassed and also suddenly quite unnerved. “I, uh… I wasn’t… I-I…I gotta go!” Without sparing another word, he rushed out, leaving Stevenand Mabel behind, both of them rather disconcerted by what had just happened.

“Well, there’s no doubt about it,” Mabelconcluded, her hands on her hips as she met Steven’s worried frown evenly.“He’s totally turning into a werewolf.”

Dipper let out an uneven breath as he finished cleaning anddressing the bite wound on his arm, surprised that it still hurt just as muchas much as it did when the wolf that had attacked him and Steven in the woodsfirst bit him. As much as he didn’t think Steven and Mabel’s simultaneousconcern and excitement had any real merit, he still couldn’t deny that he was justthe slightest bit on edge after how he had actually growled at them earlier, animpulse he had never, ever had before now. Still, he knew that wasn’t anywherenear enough to actually confirm that he had indeed been bitten by a werewolf asthey thought. It wasn’t as if he didn’t believe that werewolves existed inGravity Falls, of all places; after all, he had seen Ford’s notes about them injournal 1 himself. But what he didn’t want to believe was that he had fallenvictim to one, and he especially didn’t want to believe was eventually going toturn into one himself.

Still, even if Dipper wasn’t convinced such a thing wasgoing to happen, he figured that there really wouldn’t be any way of knowinguntil the next full moon, which was several days away at best. Chances werethat by then, all of this werewolf business would be forgotten about anyway,largely since he knew it to be nothing more than just Steven and Mabel’s wildspeculation, something that usually held little weight in reality. Certainly,in a few days’ time, his bite wound would heal and be just another scar to addto the admittedly impressive collection or them he had accumulated over thecourse of the summer.

However, just as Dipper was about to head downstairs toprofess his confidence on the matter to Mabel and Steven, a very sudden, verysharp pain erupted near the base of his spine, one that enough to elicit a loudcry of agony as it only grew more and more intense. Of course, Steven and Mabelclearly heard this from the den downstairs, and, with both of them alreadyquite concerned for Dipper, they didn’t hesitate to hurry upstairs and burstinto the bathroom without any delay. They were, however, quick to stop at thedoor in unified shock at what the saw.

Dipper was in the midst of picking himself off the floor,his pained cry now replaced with shallow, exhausted breathing as he tried torecover from what he had just gone through. But what was even more alarming wasthe large, long, furry tail that now curled up behind him. “Uh…guys?” He began weakly, glancing to his new tail with apt fear. “I-Ithink this might be a problem after all…”

“No way…” Steven breathed, completely stunned asMabel hurried to help Dipper stand up. “Dipper! You have a tail!”

“Oh gee, I didn’t know that, Steven,” Dipperdeadpanned crossly, his tail flickering in annoyance. “It’s not like Ifelt it grow out of my spine or anything. Oh wait, I did. And it hurt, a ton.”

“Well if it’s any consolation, bro-bro, your tail is sosoft and so pretty!” Mabel gushed, stroking the light brown furhappily before Dipper abruptly pulled it away from her.

“Mabel, cut that out!” He exclaimed, holding hisnew appendage protectively as he blushed in embarrassment over it.

“W-well I think it’s safe to say that wolf really was awerewolf after all, huh?” Steven spoke up worriedly. “But uh… Ithought that if you were bit by one, you only transform during the full moon,like in the all the movies…”

“That’s what I thought too…” Dipper mused,frowning as he looked to his tail again. “Maybe werewolves in GravityFalls are different somehow?”

“Well I’m sure Grunkle Ford would know about all thiswerewolf biz,” Mabel suggested. “Why don’t we go ask him?”

“W-we can’t!” Dipper protested, flustered.“Like I said, I don’t want him to think I was being dumb and reckless byletting something like this happen to me. He’ll probably say I’m tooirresponsible to handle paranormal stuff anymore, and t-then he won’t let me goon investigations or anything else with him ever again! And I can’t let thathappen!”

“Seriously, Dipper?” Mabel raised an eyebrow.“That’s what you’re worried about right now? In case you haven’tnoticed, you kinda grew a tail. And chances are you’re probably gonna growpaws, and teeth, and fur, and who knows what else. And as cool I think as allthat is, your silly pride should probably come second to all that.”

“It’s not about pride!” Dipper argued, even if heknew that was exactly what it was about. “Look, we don’t need Great UncleFord’s help with this. We can figure out a cure all by ourselves.”

“Wait, we can?” Steven asked, uncertain.

“Of course we can,” Dipper assured, trying toconvince himself of this as well. “After all, how hard can curingwerewolfism be?”

“Probably about as hard as its gonna be for you to hidethis adorable tail from everyone,” Mabel smirked sardonically asshe started playfully petting it once more.

“Ok, seriously, Mabel,” Dipper scowled, yankinghis tail out of her hands once again. “Stop doing that.”

As it turned out, finding a cure for warewolfism was goingto be a lot harder than any of them could have anticipated. While Dipper wasn’ttoo keen on telling Ford about the situation, or anyone else for that matter,he did manage to slip journal 1 out of the author’s study while Mabel andSteven kept him distracted. Unfortunately, as was the case throughout manyentries across all three of the journals, Ford’s research on werewolves wasapparently incomplete, with no known cure or reversal for the condition to befound, something that Dipper apprehensively reported to Steven and Mabel asthey all congregated in the attic.

“So… there’s no way to fix this?” Steven askedwith concern as he glanced over what the journal had to say for himself.

“N-no, no, there’s gotta be something we can do,”Dipper shook his head as he paced around the attic almost frantically, his longtail dragging behind him. “There has to be some kind of cure GreatUncle Ford didn’t know about. We have to find it, no matter what!”

“Geez, bro-bro, calm down a sec,” Mabel remarkedrather casually. “So you’ll turn into a cute, fluffy werewolf every fullmoon. What’s really so bad about that?”

“Mabel, did you even read what the journal saidabout werewolves?!” Dipper asked hotly, his entire manner tense and deeplyfrightened. “Werewolves here in Gravity Falls really are different! I-it’salmost like they’re backwards or something! They transform slowly, over thecourse of several days, and then, once they’re full werewolf, they stay likethat, pretty much all the time, except for during full moons!”

“Wait…” Mabel sat up on her bed with growingfear. “So… so if we don’t find a way to reverse this…”

“Then the only time Dipper will get to be human isduring full moons…” Steven finished grimly, having just read over thesame information in the journal and reeling at its implications.

“And that’s not all…” Dipper practically muttered, ignoringthe looks of deep worry and sympathy the pair was giving him as he looked tohis feet instead. “If we can’t find a cure before I… I fully transform… then…then there won’t be any fixing this at all… I’ll be a werewolf… f-forever…”

“Oh, Dipper…” Mabel gasped softly, already on her feet andrunning over to pull him into a tight embrace. The thought that he might onlyget to be himself as opposed to a vicious, wild monster few weeks was nearlyenough to drive Dipper to the same tears that Mabel had already started toshed, but he refused to let them come, especially in front of her. So instead,he decided to put his own crippling fear and dread for now, if only to keep herat ease over what was, by all accounts, an incredibly terrifying, heartbreakingsituation.

“I-its ok,” Dipper said, taking in a deep breath as hegently pulled away from Mabel. “Like I said, we’re going to find a cure, nomatter how hard it might be. And besides,” his reassuring smile faltered a bitas he felt the tip of his tail absently curl around his ankle. “W-we still havea few days before… y-you know. That’s plenty of time to figure something out.”

“You know what? You’re right, Dipper!” Steven chimed in withnewfound enthusiasm. “After all, we’ve made it through stuff just as bad asthis before, so we’re bound to find a way through this!”

“B-but what if we don’t?”Mabel asked, still rather distraught as she looked to Dipper fretfully. “Whatif we aren’t fast enough and you… you really do…?” she trailed off, unable toeven finish the thought.

“I won’t,” Dipper assured, putting a hand on his sister’sshoulder. “I promise, we’ll-” He abruptly cut himself off with a loud, painedgasp, his hands flying to his ears, almost as if he was hearing somethingincredibly loud and he was trying to shield them from it. In reality though, itwas as though his hearing had been stolen from him entirely, replaced withnothing more than a shrill ringing that blocked out Steven and Mabel’s sharedcalls of concern.

“Dipper!” Mabel shouted, grabbing him by his shoulderstightly as he began to stumble backwards, though she didn’t let him fall. “Dipper,what’s wrong?!”

Of course, Dipper wasn’t able to hear her at all, and evenif he had heard her, he would have paid her no mind amidst unbearable burningsensation his ears were currently enduring. But that wasn’t all; a splittingpain had also emerged near the crown of his head, one that felt very similar towhat he had felt when his tail first appeared. Mabel still held him upright,with Steven rushing to help, as he a sharp scream of agony, one that almostsounded a bit like a howl, tore from his throat, one that died out just asgradually as the pain did. The pair noticed that he was visibly panting, muchlike a dog would, tongue stuck out and all as he shuddered into silence, hisclosed eyes finally opening as looked to them, clearly distressed. He noticedthat Steven was saying something to him, saw his mouth move, but all he couldhear was muffled, undiscernible mumblings, almost as if something was stillcovering his ears, even though his hands weren’t anymore.

“W-what?” Dipper asked, still shaken as he found he wasbarely even able to hear his own voice. “Steven, what did you-”

“Ohhhhh!” Mabel exclaimed in understanding, and it was loudenough for him to mostly hear it. He didn’t catch what she said next, but shedid make sure to clarify it for him as she pointed to his ears. Or at least,where they had been. As Dipper reached up to touch them, he let out a gasp ofalarm, finding that he couldn’t feel them out at all; instead, the only thinghis fingers were skimming was hair, or rather fur, short, coarse, and rough, and thankfully just the right shadeof brown to blend in with his hair, but still fur nonetheless. Frighteninglyenough, the fur seemed to spread down past where his ears used to be, all theway down to his neck, which it had covered the back of completely. And whilethere would be plenty of time for him to panic over that later, Dipper had another,much more prominent concern at the moment.

“M-my ears!” he exclaimed, distraught as he still tried tofeel them beyond the layer of fur. “What happened to-”

He cut himself off as Mabel suddenly took his hat off,looking up at the top of his head in surprise for a moment before giving him aknowing look. “You’re turning into a werewolf, dummy,” she remarked, and thistime he was able to hear her completely clearly. “What do you think happened tothem?”

“No…” Dipper gasped once more, not even needing to feel hisnew ears as they flatten themselves against his head in tune with his emotions.All the same, he rushed over to the mirror to confirm that, sure enough, thathis now wolf-like ears were now positioned at the sides of his scalp, standingupright, fur-covered, and pointed amidst the rest of his hair. Steven and Mabeljoined him over at the mirror a moment later, both of them putting a hand onhis shoulder as a sign of what little comfort they were really able to give,something that Dipper quickly shook off as he remembered his earlier resolve. “O-ok,so… that was kind of unexpected, but its fine! We still have plenty of timeleft to find a cure.”

“How can you be so sure?” Mabel asked anxiously as sheglanced between his ears and his tail. “At this rate, by the end of today youcould have a muzzle and be walking on all fours! Look,” she paused, looking tothe ground apprehensively as she tried her best to keep calm. “I know you don’twant to, but… maybe it’s time we talk to Grunkle Ford about this, or the Gems.This… doesn’t seem like the sorta thing we should be taking our chances with,especially if you could end up staying a-a werewolf for… forever…”

“Mabel, I already told you,” Dipper began, exasperated. “Wecan figure this out on our own. Besides, if there’s nothing about a curewritten in the journal, then chances are Great Uncle Ford still doesn’t knowhow to fix this.”

“But maybe he could at least help somehow?” Steven suggestedearnestly.

“We don’t need help!”Dipper protested, his ears and tail both twitching in frustration as he turnedaway bitterly.

“But Dipper, you could-” Mabel’s attempt at reasoning withher brother was cut off as he let out a low, angry growl, his shoulders hitchedand his ears pinned all the way back. She froze, startled as he snapped a glareover his shoulder at her, his eyes strangely distant and his pupils much too largeas he continued snarling, not even stopping as he turned around to face herfully. “D-Dipper?” Mabel asked nervously, her eyes wide as she took a smallstep back, one that he countered by stepping forward aggressively until he wasessentially right up in her face, his teeth still bared as he glared at herrelentlessly. “Dipper!” she shouted, more boldly this time as she forced herfear away. “Back off!”

Without any warning, she shoved him, pushing him away fromher and landing him on the ground hard. Mabel and Steven both were still onedge as they kept their distance from Dipper, who was seemingly in the midst ofreturning to his right mind after his bout of instinctual aggression. “M-Mabel?”he asked with concern as he met her still quite frightened gaze. “What just…?”he trailed off as he put the pieces of what he had just missed together tocreate a picture that filled him with both terror and regret. “Oh no…” Heslowly stood, his tail and ears drooping as he took a small, apologetic step towardshis sister. “Mabel, I’m sorry. I-I didn’t-”

“You know what? Fine,” Mabel sighed in acceptance, hurriedlybrushing her approaching tears away as she met his gaze squarely and almostcoldly. “If you don’t want any help, then that’s ok with me. I’m totally finewith not helping you at all if you’re gonna just growl at me for nothing!”

“Mabel, n-no, I-”

“You know, I bet you’ll be wishing you just let someone helpyou when you’re a wolf basically all the time!” Mabel finished as she stormedout of the attic, visibly upset and clearly not willing to listen to anything herbrother had to say. Steven hurried after her, thinking that Dipper wasn’t toofar behind, but instead he simply remained where he was, stunned and ashamed bywhat he had unknowingly done. Absently, he reached up and gently touched theside of one of his new wolfish ears, his heart sinking as he realized that thiswas only going to get worse before it got better, on all levels. The physicaltransformation would continue, and in time, he’d likely gain, among other newfeatures, sharp claws deadly teeth, both things that could do so much harm ifhe wasn’t careful. But how could he really be careful when his mental stabilityand human tendencies already seemed to be wavering into a feral, animalistic attitudethat he had no control over whatsoever? Growling at Mabel was one thing, butwhat it he actually did end up hurting her somehow, on more than just anemotional level? What if, once he turned full werewolf, he lost all sanity to awild lust for blood and, not having the slightest clue about what he was doing,actually ended up-

Dipper was quick to shake such a dark thought out of hismind. Of course he wasn’t going to end up hurting Mabel, he never would, atleast not intentionally. All he really had to do was make sure he could findthat elusive, unknown cure to his condition long before such a thing could evenhappen. However, with his transformation already steadily progressing and hishumanity already starting to fade from the inside out, he knew that findingthat cure would be a race against time if there ever was one.

 (So yeah, like I said this one isn’t done but eh I capped it off at a place that would want you leaving more, which is cool. Still, I’m a huge sucker for slow transformation stories, so writing this got me back to my roots (I used to write a LOT of slow/painful transformation scenarios in my Zelda stories) So now that its done I only have like one more of these angst prompts to top off and then its time for The Return! Woo!)