#i have like three different selfship timelines
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oh to be a test subject wheatley finds after he takes over the facility
#i have like three different selfship timelines#im going fuckmg insane#THREEEEEE DIFFERENT ONESSSS#its fucked#monnie rambles
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I FIGURED OUT HOW NOT TO BREAK REBORN'S TIMELINES (MUCH)
TLDR: in my version of events, my self-insert (Adriana) now appears in all three timelines, not just the last two. The first is used for my selfship with Elena, and is reset as normal with nothing bad happening to Adriana; the second is used for my selfship with Luna, and is reset with an extra sacrifice needed due to Adriana’s fate there; the third is also used for my selfship with Luna, and ends in success thanks to the player being an additional presence. Adriana has a different outfit or appearance in each timeline, to help with differentiating them all.
Further explanation can be found under the readmore, if you'd like to know more! ..There will be some spoilers mentioned for the game, but I hope that the things I talk about are helpful for assisting your understanding if you aren’t as familiar with Reborn itself. I'm also more than happy to answer questions if anyone has any!! ^-^
The first timeline (pre-gameplay)
We don't know as much about the first timeline compared to the other two, and it also doesn't get to the same point that the other two do, but it's the one where everything technically kicks off from, so it's still important. In this timeline, Adriana is a Pokémon Trainer of some sort who travels to visit the Reborn region from her home in Kalos, and eventually ends up getting into a relationship with Elena of the Elite Four after bonding over a shared fondness for Ghost-types, gaining a greater appreciation for them in the process. (I have yet to figure out how Corey factors into this; for now, I am saying Elena has two hands.) More details will hopefully come with time.
The first timeline is eventually reset after the continued distortions and earthquakes afflicting Reborn, caused by Solaris wielding the power of Giratina, force Zina to have to fix things, sealing Giratina away in Byxbysion in the process and sacrificing her existence to facilitate the change and reset. Adriana was not a particularly prevalent character for many of the actual ongoing events here.. but this ends up changing after the timeline starts over again.
Anything I make within this timeline - so, anything to do with my selfship with Elena - can be identified by Adriana having a different outfit, and possibly also hairstyle. My first pass for this outfit, made within Pokémon Y, is this:
The second timeline (Episode 18)
This is the timeline seen by Miss Fortune, as well as being the one that has more direct relevance to in-game events, particularly in the postgame. Here, Adriana once again comes to Reborn, but at a slightly different time in her life - specifically, she decides to pick the region’s league as her first league challenge after finding some slightly misleading (in that it’s ten years out of date) marketing for it. From the moment she arrives rather explosively at Grandview Station, her journey goes completely differently to how she was expecting it to, as she ends up entangled in trying to stop Team Meteor while also collecting Gym Badges, eventually succeeding in obtaining all 18 (even if she did have to get two Poison- and Fighting-type ones due to.. extraneous circumstances). She ends up in a romantic relationship with Luna along the way as well, and even successfully rescues her from the Void.
This timeline follows the game’s events as they existed in Episode 18, with two key exceptions - Euphie still exists as Euphie, and Fern either does not join or eventually breaks away from Team Meteor. This is to fit what Miss Fortune sees. It also extends past the gym battle against Hardy, despite the game only being finished up to that point when this episode was the most recently-released one.
In this timeline, Adriana fully takes on the player character’s position as the protagonist, and experiences everything in the story as it existed in E18. The story then continues until she reaches the final battle with Lin, who drags her into the New World and removes its oxygen; Anna summons everyone’s hopes to make a wish to help her, but it turns out to not be strong enough, and she ends up unable to be saved, leaving Anna and others distraught. Fern then steps up to be the hero, working alongside Cal, Euphie, Arclight, and others to try and counter Lin and the havoc she is playing in the region - but he also doesn’t succeed. As a result, Anna ends up following in her mother’s footsteps by resetting the timeline again to fix the problems caused by Lin, with Nostra (her Jirachi) as the sacrifice; however, a second sacrifice is also deemed to be required to bring Adriana back, and this ends up being Euphie’s body, allowing Shade to exist as he is seen in-game in the next timeline.
Anything to do with my selfship with Luna that is set in the second timeline can be identified in two ways. The first is that Adriana uses a wide variety of Pokémon here, with no clear type specialty; examples include Delphox, Roserade, Ampharos, Silvally, Honchkrow, and Aegislash. The second is that Adri’s freckles are an ordinary dark brown colour; while she does become void-kissed in this timeline, I don’t know if I will say that this has any physical consequences on her here.
The third/current timeline (Episode 19)
This is the timeline that you actually are in when you play the game itself, so it arguably has the most prevalence. Here, Adriana’s first journey as a Pokémon Trainer is around her home region of Kalos, before she then decides to go and challenge the Reborn League. On the train there, she is sat next to another person (the player character), and is therefore able to be saved alongside them by Amethyst at the beginning. From there, Adriana travels across the Reborn region in a way that largely mirrors the path of the player; she appears many times throughout the story and experiences many of the same events that they do, so would arguably be counted as their rival if not for how she doesn’t actually push the dynamic in that direction. She once again ends up in a relationship with Luna, whom she is able to spend more time with here due to not having to experience every single story event, and her presence is indeed able to help make Anna’s wish succeed and save the player from suffering the same fate that she did. (I am only familiar with the Anna Route of postgame, so I tend to treat that as the default when Adri is present.)
Before the postgame begins, Adriana becomes the second person to make it through Charous Hall after the player, so she becomes their reserve (or, Shadow) Champion, having not been able to actually battle them for their title because she achieved this while they were temporarily missing. In the postgame itself, she does a small number of the in-game legendary quests, and eventually fully realises her status as the previous timeline’s hero when reunited with the original Giratina. This property turns out to be key to letting the player reach the grand finale.
My portrayals of Adriana, and/or my selfship with Luna, that are set within this timeline can be identified in two ways. The first is that Adri uses almost entirely Ghost-type Pokémon here; the only exceptions are her Shiny Silvally, her Gothitelle (whom she later gifts to Luna), and possibly some of the legendaries and mythicals she catches in the postgame (like Cresselia and Darkrai). The second way to identify third timeline events is that her freckles are white from the beginning, which was a physical consequence of having to bring her back to life and mess with the timeline to make sure she made it back (since.. Nostra ended up choosing another person, the player, to be the protagonist for this timeline - but it was vital that Adriana also came to Reborn as well as them, despite not having their role this time, because otherwise there might not be enough people to power Anna’s wish again if she needed to make it one more time. However, because Adriana is not from Reborn, it wasn’t guaranteed that she would return there after the timeline got reset. So, more meddling than usual had to happen to bring her back, mostly carried out by Shade, but this ended up having effects on Adri herself - this is how I bring in the whole anamnesis aspect). These consequences also get worse after she becomes void-kissed again, as a white star-like pattern forms all across her face and hair, and culminate in the full visibility of a pair of spectral wings on Adriana’s back, resembling the wings of a Reborn-Shiny Giratina.
Bonus: Another Time
This is the name given to the alternate/hypothetical future that you visit during the postgame while doing the Celebi quest, as the player ends up travelling ten years into the future with Celebi during this quest before returning to the present day. Due to the player disappearing from the present in this version of events, Adriana once again fills the role of Champion in their absence, just as she did before the postgame started. However, she is eventually defeated for the first time by Shelly, some time after the cast are able to figure out that the player travelled through time. She continues to hold her role as Shadow Champion when Shelly first becomes the Champion, but eventually steps down to allow her to select a new reserve. By the time of the player's return, ten years later, Adriana has taken over Shade's role as the Ghost-type Gym Leader of the Reborn League; she takes her battles in Iolia Valley, just as Luna did.
Since Another Time is explored after a ten-year timeskip, Adriana's appearance will definitely have changed in it like how everyone else's does, but I haven't quite decided how yet. However, since it is an alternate version of events within the third timeline, her physical appearance will stay the same as it does there (white freckles, etc.)
Thank you so much for taking the time to read this!! Please don’t hesitate to ask me if you have any questions, no matter how big or small!
#heart of the void#selfshipping#..sort of#info posts#this post is okay to reblog if anyone wants to#creations from the void#why not#self‑inserts#self‑insert: soul‑touched (adriana)#of a city reborn (pokémon reborn)#and I did kind of mention both of the girls so#love: soaring skyspectre (elena)#selfship: birds in the night sky (elena/adriana)#love: dark dreamer (luna)#selfship: void‑kissed (luna/adriana)#first timeline adriana#second timeline adriana#I may not actually use those differentiation tags but if I at least put them here then it means they exist#crumbs I love this game
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🏹, 🕸️, 💋, 🩸, 🥀 for any of your selfships 💕💕💕
oooh ok so i spun a wheel, and we've got kazuscarahao (aka. soldier, poet, king) & zhade !!
🏹 : what is oc’s relationship with the other canon characters?
soldier, poet, king — hmmm now zhaoyi for this dynamic is also a wanderer and doesn't stick around in one place for long. however, he does have good friendships with most from liyue! being from liyue, and also someone with a slight unknown background, it's important to keep strong connections in the case he needs a helping hand. most notably, he's on good terms with the adepti xiao; well, as good as you can get with him; zhongli, beidou, ningguang, and ganyu! his reputation with the other locals isn't too shabby either.
zhade — as an honorary member of the stellaron hunters, zhao's relationship with the gang is quite familial. him and silver wolf are like those judgmental siblings at the extended family dinner lmao. kafka and zhaoyi are blade's worst nightmare due to how they bug him, not to mention the nick names...
K: bladie~
B: ...
Z: oh c'mon, darling, say smth to us, won't you?
B: ... s-shut up.
have not looked much into firefly's character tbh besides what ive read in the story, but the calm duo !! also the deadly duo when in battle like seriously. if you thought blade and zhao were unstoppable, wait until you see firefly and zhao's team work (canon wise. idk about in-game wise)
🕸️ : any song that reminds you of your ship?
S.P.K. — obv soldier, poet, king ( the oh hellos ) but !! a different one would be maybe blood // water ( grandson ) for the sole reason that this is my "angry at the world; holding on for each other" vibes ship.
zhade — omg... pretty please ( dutch melrose, benny mayne ) is so them coded it's unbelievable... the lyrics... also maybe changgwi ( aha ye eun ) or achilles come down ( gang of youths ) !! the lore for this ship isn't fully developed, but it's like. deep-ish.
💋: what motifs/symbols do you associate with your ship?
S.P.K. — burnt sugar // bruised knuckles // the north star // broken compasses // tree roots // paper boats // old books // hands tangled in someone’s hair // convenience stores at night // instant ramen packs // undone ties & wrinkled button ups
zhade — talked about here !
🩸 : what does your oc think of canon character?
did a little thought process of first impressions for both vs now instead of a whole timeline since the spk timeline is a little… hard to map out TwT
S.P.K. — “a stowaway? hmm… if beidou’s alright with him… then i suppose i should be too. as long as he doesn’t get too close.” // “what a bitch.” // “ah… he sent a letter again today. such a poetic sap… i miss him.” // “he hasn’t contacted me in a while… should i… no, going to sumeru would only make him annoyed… but im worried.”
zhade — talked about here !
🥀: favorite thing about your ship?
S.P.K. — genuinely my most chaotic ship in terms of plot and feelings. i love being able to mess up things regarding their stories and to make things hurt. they get their ending, but is it happy? sad? i love messy stuff like that and this is really just my chance to explore it! not to mention when the three of them are together, the dynamics are just too good heh.
zhade — a more comforting ship if i’m being honest. two people who dance around each other, too afraid but not realizing they’re afraid of what could happen. i love thinking about in-game stuff too when it comes to these guys !!
#─── ⠀⠀ ⠀ ﹟𝟎𝟎𝟏 ⠀⠀ ﹕ ⠀⠀ kazuscarahao. ⠀☆ ⠀ !#─── ⠀⠀ ⠀ ﹟𝟎𝟎𝟏 ⠀⠀ ﹕ ⠀⠀ zhade. ⠀☆ ⠀ !#* ⠀ ⠀ 𝓩. ⠀ ⠀ / ⠀ ⠀ games.
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doing the self insert lore questions,, but i’m not rbing op bc they’re a pr*shitter. fuck outta here. anyways just blabbing about sacha ( genshin s/i ) tbh!
Q: is there a character from their source who isn't/wasn't originally an f/o but that has lore connections to your s/i? in other words, a (potential) f/o for lore reasons?
A: i think maybe scaramouche would fit this one? but i can’t even begin to conceive the idea of sacha liking him romantically, only ever platonically as a close friend or brother figure. i imagine that it wouldn’t be purposeful, they just happen to grow close via their connections with childe + them both being in the fatui. after sacha leaves the fatui, scaramouche ends up becoming wanderer— so he remembers sacha, but because of him wiping himself out of ( basically ) everyone’s memory, it doesn’t remember him. i never intended for them to be friends, but i genuinely can’t imagine them not being this odd pair of pals now, lol.
Q: if your s/i is used for multiple f/os, how would all the timelines look if displayed together?
A: currently i only ship sacha with childe & neuvillette, so it would be like three major periods: in fatui arc ( childe ) , post fatui arc ( neuvillette ) , fatui reunion arc ( childe ) , and then maybe a poly relationship afterwards. most of the time i think of neuvillette’s relationship with him as a short but passionate relationship that ends up being a tragic thing bc neuvillette is only an “ in between “ thing for sacha. he ends up going back to his “ true “ lover, childe in a good 80% of my thoughts.
Q: do you have several timelines in your selfship? if so, describe them. alternatively, do you imagine your selfship in different stages of the relationship?
A: i have a few different timelines! the “ main “ one or the one i operate in most of the time is a timeline where sacha leaves the fatui, becomes a famous conductor, has a short relationship with neuvillette, then goes back to childe. his backstory is consistent amongst all timelines btw, so i won’t get too much into it. secondary timeline is one where sacha stays with neuvillette. third timeline is one where sacha stays in the fatui & is actually the one to kill signora in order to prove loyalty to the tsaritsa + rise and become a harbinger. in this timeline i imagine he’d hunt after scaramouche for “ reasons unknown to even himself “ ( it misses his pal, basically ). childe still loves him but sacha is a lot more intense and freaky.. naturally. more timelines on the way, probably.
Q: what is your s/i's backstory? how does it make them meet your f/o(s)?
A: sacha lovell was found in the woods of fontaine by arlecchino & was adopted into the hearth program. he basically grows up in the fatui, being known for his beautiful voice in the chorus and his willingness to bite. also, it was found eating from a wolf’s carcass. his mother was dead in the snow nearby.
Q: any major changes in your selfship lore over time? if so, compare how it used to be with how it's now.
A: not really! no major changes because i like his wolf symbolism a lot. might play around with location ( snezhnaya instead of fontaine, maybe ) and time frames ( i imagine arlecchino to be much older than childe, so sacha’s adoption comes a little while after childe’s acception into the fatui, they grow up together ) ( sacha’s adopted FAR before lynette, lyney, & freminet in my mind ).
Q: any favorite reoccurring scenario?
A: i keep thinking of sacha going on dates to the opera with neuvillette,, like that’s their spot. they frequent it so often, they have their own personal seats practically. childe wise, i like to imagine them in the fatui as two older teenage boys who don’t understand that their “ friendship “ is like actually just a gay relationship. but it doesn’t matter! they don’t need labels yknow? there’s a playful innocence with it.
Q: are you more of a "has everything written down" self shipper or a "what happens in my daydreams STAYS in my daydreams" self shipper?
A: the first until it comes to anything suppperr personal
Q:alternatively, do you have tons of s/i lore or just wing it on the spot?
A: usually lots of s/i lore! it’s one of my fav parts of selfshipping :3
Q: au time! pick an au of your ship that you have thoughts for and talk about it. if you can't decide, pick it randomly.
A: 2000S PUNK ROCK X CLASSICAL PREP AU. childe is a punk rocker in a band called the “ fatui “ and sacha is a prep who is training / learning to become a conductor! except, childe is his teacher’s nephew, so they see each other & bicker sometimes. everyone in childe’s band knows he’s whipped btw. also i imagine they’d either be juniors - seniors in highschool or freshmen in college, and they’d go to the same school or college, whatever. so they just keep running into each other, especially now that they know the other exists. childe with piercings.. yummmm. good ol’ “ enemies “ to lovers ( they don’t actually hate each other but ew punk! vs ew prep! )
Q: free pass! tell a fun self ship lore fact or just talk about anything of it that comes to mind.
A: fun fact.. if sacha was alive modern day he’d probably be wolfkin like theriokin ( ? I think I misspelled it ) and childe wld be foxkin. predator animal coded boyfriends.
#( sacha doesn’t eat wolves anymore but he did when he was young & alone and also when he was hungry in da fatui )#^^ another fun fact#archived ♪
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void-kissed (Luna/Adriana)
A dark dreamer learning to love the life she has made for herself, and her soul-touched love brought back from a previous timeline. Together, they help to save a city reborn, living together in the grand Vanhanen Castle.
series: Pokémon Reborn romantic F/O: Luna Vanhanen self-insert: Adriana Laverre names for the selfship: void-kissed, lunadri, voidkissedshipping selfship start date: 9th May 2020 (approximately)
Content for this selfship: on this blog | on previous blogs
Some things you may wish to know about this selfship are below the readmore!
Luna's character tag is "love: dark dreamer (luna)", while Adriana's tag is "self-insert: soul-touched (adriana)". The tag for the selfship as a whole is "selfship: void-kissed (luna/adriana)".
In the story of this selfship, Adriana meets Luna upon arriving at Vanhanen Castle to battle her adopted father Radomus, and later rushes to her aid in the Subseven Sanctum. The two confess their feelings to each other after Adriana successfully obtains Luna's Gym Badge, but cannot then reunite until after Reborn City has been revitalised, because of Adri getting stranded in Carnelia for several months. After the events of the main game, Adriana moves in with Luna to live in Vanhanen Castle, becoming the Reborn League's first reserve/Shadow Champion. When Shade steps down from being the Ghost-type Gym Leader, Adriana takes his place, taking challengers in Iolia Valley just like Luna does (until she becomes one of the Elite Four, that is).
This is one of my main romantic selfships, so there is a lot of story!
I headcanon Luna to have a slightly different appearance to how she appears in the game; specifically, she dyes her hair black so that it better resembles the other Vanhanens', and wears coloured contacts (one eye is pink and the other is blue) as a reference to Serra. I still like her in-game appearance just as much, but this headcanon is one that I got quite attached to, so most of how I portray Luna will be with this appearance.
Pokémon Reborn has at least three successive timelines - one where Fern is the protagonist/player character equivalent, one where Adriana is, and one where the player is. My selfship with Luna exists in both the second and third timelines, and the story is fairly similar in both (aside from second timeline failing before postgame). To tell the difference, Adriana has dark brown freckles in the second timeline (and uses Pokémon of lots of different types), whereas she has white freckles in the third timeline (and almost exclusively uses Ghost-type Pokémon).
Thank you very much for taking the time to read this! If you have any questions, or there's anything else you think I should put on this info post, please don't hesitate to let me know by sending an ask!
#heart of the void#selfshipping#info posts#selfship: void‑kissed (luna/adriana)#love: dark dreamer (luna)#self‑insert: soul‑touched (adriana)#of a city reborn (pokémon reborn)#posts to keep track of
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How may works do you think exist in the blue lock (RPF) tag (in universe) furthermore, what do you think the social media experience is like??
Going off of Men's Hockey RPF stats on AO3, and from what I remember of the blue lock timeline, they've been in there maybe less than a month? So at three weeks there's around 150+ works, fanart maybe twice that, couple dozen fanpages not including the ones that the well-known players already have. Most of them are selfshipping, are not in English and MTLs are rampant
Reo, Nagi and Yuki's most popular pages are probably run by their old fans pre-blue lock. Bllkblr is less overt, more people spend time doing analysis on plays and interviews, the worst of them are the ones shaming people for looking into the lives of real people and accusing fans of it of atrocities. There's at least three separate twitlongers about different players. One of them gets doxxed (the person apologizes and terminates immediately after multiple court dates wrought by the almighty hand of Ego Jinpachi) It's all really terrible people on the internet are freaks but as you do with every community you join, block and move on, find a small group of tolerable weirdos and hunker down
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1, 6, 11, & 15 w/ gen!!
TY FOR THE ASK!! -`♡´- I hope you're having a great night!! :D
1. Do you & your f/o share meals often? Where do you each like to eat? Any favorite foods to eat together?
Really often! Almost every night, just because we've always been at each other's side after breaking free from petrification. It's usually whatever is avalible, but when more people are revived and the food options get better, we settle into our preferences! Gen isn't picky - his favorite foods are all literally junk food - while I am, so we end up eating my favorites a lot! Which is mostly different types of pasta/noodles and rice.
6. They gave you a gift! What is it?
Something flower related! Floriography is his specialty. So, pressed flowers or a flower crown is most likely the gift~!
11. How much fun would your f/o have at a karaoke night out of 10?
An eight or nine! I'm having a solid ten - singing is one of my passions and I am singing my HEART out at karaoke. He's also one to casually sing, so he's be having fun singing right along with me.
15. Badly describe your selfship!
A mentalist and a linguist, despite both specializing in communication, spend ten / three years (the timeline of Dr.STONE is an enigma) never saying anything to each other about their feelings.
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yo! 🗺️, 👥 and 💌 for your aot s/i or selfship with armin (for that last one)
Thank you for the ask!!! Omg I'm very excited to answer!! 🗺️ - if your s/i is used for multiple f/os, how would all the timelines look if displayed together?
Ah, so I'll do this for specifically A.oT as a whole because my s/is are just myself with canon details sprinkled in! So, myself in that canon never changes no matter the f/o, and I have 4 romantics there. The only mass differences really are what I end up doing/minor details in background. Also, for the sake of it, my canon with Yelena in particular is never actually canonical in the mainline. I only am ever with her in a modern AU! And with Erwin, my background is just a bit different and my platonics are different in that canon. Armin and Jean though have almost the same exact outcome side by side, since we're all the same age and whether or not I choose either one romantically in a canon is decided at the same point in time! But all versions of myself in ALL of my canons involving every f/o? Oh, it's a mess. But not completely impossible of a scenario to imagine given my MCU self, as I'm a user of the mystic arts and could technically jump across universes in the right time and place. So I think it'd all end up VERY interesting to say the least in terms of that!
👥 - is there a character from their source who isn’t/wasn’t originally an f/o but that has lore connections to your s/i? in other words, a (potential) f/o for lore reasons?
This is a tough question! I tend to fall in love with a lot of people, I find the good and the lovable in so many different characters, so even when they *start* that way, I end up just falling in love with them anyways! In AoT, I'm pretty sure I don't have anyone like that! Either I fell in love with them organically, or I had a huge 8 year long crush on them and never knew (COUGH Erwin COUGH). But, I'll answer with another one from a different canon! A good example of this was with my canon in dea.d by daylight, I was shipping with Laurie (from Halloween, but she's also in Db.D) and Amanda (Who is from Saw, also just in Db.D), and when writing out my stories and fics I realized how much I liked Nea, and she was important to my lore, but I ended up falling for her and having her as an f/o. But then eventually the spark wasn't quite there anymore, so I took her off the list, but recently, well, I think my feelings for her have been resurfacing! So we'll just have to see! 💌 - any major changes in your selfship lore over time? if so, compare how it used to be with how it’s now.
Back when I used to just ship with Armin, before I realized I was also in love with Jean and the others, my lore was a bit different! For the most part it's stayed the same fundamentally, but! My whole being a titan shifter in my canon is a fairly new thing in my lore (only about three or so years ago!) and it made a major change in how it went going forward and some moments in the past! It offers solidarity with Armin, and a lot of angstY moments, difficult ones. It changed his perspective about me here and there, not in a bad way but in a more of a "Oh wow she'd actually do anything for me" kind of way. And he's right! Thank you so much again!! These are so fun to answer!!
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Hi hi!! How about ⏳, 📖 & 🎫 for any S/I you'd like?
ask game link
oi!! thanks for the ask!! I ended up choosing my genshin self insert, Io, because oh lord they are a lore trap rsjabsms
buckle up because this will be very, very long
📖 - what is your s/i's backstory? how does it make them meet your f/o(s)?
ok, for the non genshin mutuals, teyvat (the world where genshin takes place) has 7 regions, each of them different from each other in every aspect, pretty much.
with that out of the way, Io is an alchemist originally from Fontaine (haha thought of this waaayyy before it got released). they worked on several research related things there and even wrote articles for a newspaper at some point.
but, to further their alchemy research endeavours, they set off to travel around the world. and that is exactly how everything ends up branching up in so many different ways for me to meet my f/os. because they're all from different regions and all.
... it's a lot of timelines, really.
⏳ - do you have several timelines in your selfship? if so, describe them. alternatively, do you imagine your selfship in different stages of the relationship?
hmmm which selfship to pick... I'll go with amber (and collei too) because it's the genshin one with the most lore goodness kdbaksn
OK, I don't really have so much so as two different timelines (that isn't really a genshin selfship thing), but I sure do imagine the ship in two different instances: webcomic era (pre-game events) and later on when the actual plot takes place.
in short, the webcomic is when amber and io (aka. moi) meet and fall in love (and I meet collei too and she becomes some sort of adopted younger sister figure).
the one when the game takes place, however, the three of us aren't that together but, since I have business both in sumeru and mondstadt, contact isn't broken in the slightest.
sure, I could say the rest here and now, but isn't this post long enough already ksgakhss
🎫 - free pass! tell a fun self ship lore fact or just talk about anything of it that comes to mind.
to this day, even with all the lore, I still can't decide the vision element and the weapon of poor Io. they have all this backstory, sure, but it's still open in that area, very much. of course I've narrowed it down, but yeah it's been a long time since I've dealt with that game mdbnsbsksb
#wow this was looooong#very smart of me to create a perfect excuse to infodump kshskah#anyway thanks so much for fueling my ramblings jdhaksb#thoughts of the wind#travel companions#asks#proselfship#selfship#amber tag#collei tag
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4, 5, 6, and 7 for that newer ask meme? :p
B, I am so sorry, but it took me so long to get around to this that I was completely lost about which ask game you meant for a moment. I think it was in relation to this one, but please correct me if you meant it to be answered for a different game! And thank you very much for sending the questions regardless!!
(source: “self-insert ask game!” by kissofthemoonrabbit (I think))
4. what is your favourite self-insert design? - Now THAT is a tricky one. Aria's is the one that has existed the longest and gone through the most changes, and I've liked adding a lot of the details to it (like her seams and her hairpin and the armour), but am still not 100% sure how happy I am with the overall thing despite this being its, like, fifth iteration. Mimi's is the most recent to be finalised in reference model form, and I was quite happy with how it came out even if it wasn't quite how I originally envisioned it. But then I also really like Adriana's.. and Calanthe's.. and Echo's because it was specifically based on my actual IRL wardrobe.. and Sapphire's fits well even if the model itself is a bit glitchy sometimes.. Lamia's and Alectra's also match their characters well, I feel.. Ah, I'm always incapable of picking specific favourites!!
5. if you have ever changed your self-inserts, what was the motivation? - I have indeed made changes, mostly as just things that I felt fit better over time (such as changing Lamia's element). Some changes have been motivated by reveals in canon; for example, Adriana wasn't the protagonist of the previous timeline until Episode 19 released and revealed scope for three possible timelines in total, letting her be the one from the second. Alectra also changed from a dove theme to a nightingale theme after the official reveal of Colombina. Adriana is also the only example I can think of where I've changed a self-insert's name, rather than just replacing her with a different self-insert, which is what I felt like I did when I replaced Mera with Citri and Kyra with Seralune.
6. do you have any inhuman F/Os? - ..Given that this is a self-insert ask game, I’m assuming that this is supposed to be for self-inserts instead. So I will answer it as such (although the basic answer remains “yes” regardless). Specifically, I would count Aria, Citri, Alectra, Lamia, Ardea, Camille, Seralune, Xiara, Echo, Alise, Carmine, Mimi, and Cat as actively "inhuman" self-inserts, while Adriana, Sapphire, Aline, and Ves are "human but with bonus extra features" self-inserts. ..This means that only Nova, Jet, Catarina, Telanthera, Emily, and my still-unnamed Scienceverse self-insert are actually completely unalteredly human, haha.
7. if you have OCs as well as self-inserts, how do they interact? - This happens with a few of my self-inserts, and the general answer is “pretty well”! Specifically, Aria is used for my romantic selfship with my KHUX OC Clio, so obviously the two are very close there. Sapphire technically interacts with my XC2 OC Avalon, but.. it's more Aline and Avalon that interact, and they get on well as well, with Avalon being quite protective over Aline. Ardea interacts with both the DQIX version of Avalon and my DQIX OC Iris, as they are all in the same party together, and although it takes her a while to grow fond of them she does do so over time. Outside of a selfshipping context, my Splatoon self-insert Cat is in a Turf War team with three other OCs of mine, and I have four other Turf War teams made up of OCs too.
I hope that all of those answers are alright! Thank you very much again for sending this in, and sorry it took me so long to actually get around to answering ;w;
#a call from the void#selfship#selfshipping#heart of the void#self-inserts#..I think I mentioned literally all of them so I will not be able to use all of the tags I don't think#everyone is here!#that'll do#out of the inbox#selfship asks#B tag!#still need to decide on a name for my scienceverse self-insert#out of the batch of names i was throwing around before i've ended up using chiara for a self-insert for another external thing#so.. maybe elisa??#i don't know this isn't the place to speculate#long post#ask to tag#if anyone wants clarification as to why the inhuman self-inserts are inhuman then just let me know#since the reasoning is different for all of them#aria's a heartless in a replica body‚ citri's half-machina‚ alectra's a reincarnated nightingale‚ lamia's a disguised pyro abyss mage..#ardea's a celestrian‚ camille's a vampire‚ seralune's an UTAUloid which I headcanon to be like an android‚ xiara's a nobody..#echo's a mutant‚ alise's a fae‚ carmine's a khajiit‚ mimi's a ''comet child'' (but really a magic ancient)‚ and cat's an inkling#then adri's got spectral shiny giratina wings‚ sapphire and aline are gormotti so they have cat ears‚ and ves has wings#..oops I just ended up explaining them all anyway
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And allow me to ask about your selfships in flowers now, iris and zinnia
Both of these have a little bit diff answers to the rest.
Iris - Does your self insert for your f/os source material have a detailed and complex story and character arc, or are they just kind of vibing?
EVENTUALLY I will need to do a self ship post I can link too, because I have a different self insert for each of my top threes. The SIMPLE answer is they all have detailed backstories. The detailed answer I'll put under a cut at the bottom of this post.
Zinnia - how often do you think about your f/o? Do they live in your head rent free, or do you not think about them for months on end before suddenly hyperfixating on them nonstop for a week?
; w ; I feel like you've seen my blog, I never stop thinking about my boys. Sanji and Corazon occupy the most of my brain, but if I see Buggy I get emotional over him too.
OKAY SO HERE I GO about my self inserts. All three are me in personality, interests, and talents. All three have pink hair and green eyes, and glasses.
My s/i Ace x Sanji is an art historian from the South Blue.
They were traveling on a ship that was transporting priceless paintings from one island to another for an exhibition, when the ship was attacked by pirates after the artwork to sell for the Beri it would get them. They were one of only a couple of survivors of this attack, getting away on a scrap of wood that was floating that they managed to scramble on top of. They were rescued by the Straw Hats. This fits in canon timeline between Little Garden and Drum. They fall for Sanji very quickly, despite his bad habits, infatuated with his flirty nature and constant compliments. Despite Nami's warnings that he was like that with "all women," after they come out as nonbinary to Sanji during a heart to heart, he still treats them with the love and affection that made them fall for him. They bond while cooking together, taste testing each other's food and experimenting with new recipes at dinner for the crew. Make quick best friends with Usopp over mutual loves for drawing, plants, bugs, and being snipers. (They are trained in archery.) Jinbei reminds them of their late father, and they quickly get very attracted to the Fishman, looking up to him and asking him for guidance often. Other best friend is Robin, they bond over art history and how it related to archeology, she helps teach them to read poneglyphs so they can help her. [[Sometimes trio ship with Usopp bc I also love Usopp and Sanuso is my otp]]
My s/i Ace x Corazon is a Selkie from the North Blue. This OC is Canon Divergent
Info on Selkies (mostly based on Real World Mythos, but some tweaking done for OP Universe)
Legends Say that a man who finds a selkie for a wife are blessed with a beautiful obedient wife. At least that’s the human version of the tale. In the selkie world, it is a warning, a cautionary tale: never be caught by a human man, lest you have your coat stolen and never return to the sea. Selkies are generally only found in the farthest north points of the North Blue, where seals are abundant. True to legends, Selkies can shift between human and seal form with the use of their coats or seal skins. Selkies are thought to be rarer than mermaids, but due to the nature of their transformation, true numbers are unknown outside the community. When a selkie has her skin stolen she has a compulsion to marry the person who stole it, usually with discomfort to the selkie. If her coat is willingly given to a man, it must be willingly given back. Selkies sometimes bare children to the man they marry, but when they find the hiding place of their coat they will abandon these children to return to the sea. Some legends say that these children are sometimes visited or saved by large seals later in their lives. When selkies first transform, their coat is the clothes they are wearing, so they are naked until clothed in the human fashion.
My self insert specifically!
In seal form, they are a harp seal, dusty grey with dark spots. In human form they have long dusty pink hair and deep dark green eyes, large like a seals. Their coat takes the form of a fluffy winter coat, with the same colors as their seal skin. When they are wearing their coat, it works similar to a zoan fruit, they can transform by choice, and can do a hybrid form (similar to a mermaid) as well. Not trained in any particular fighting style, they're not much use in a battle, but they know basic first aid and are a good support to a team. They witnessed the murder of Corazon by Doffy (and prior, saw Law being placed in the treasure chest). //Canon Divergent// When Doffy leaves the island, leaving Corazon dying in the snow, They nurse him back to health slowly, giving him their coat to keep warm so that he doesn't freeze to death, and builds a small fire to keep him alive. When he comes to, they help him move inside the partially destroyed building. He gives her coat back willingly after explaining to him what it means to her, and that and his deep caring nature made her fall for him. When he's well enough to travel she travels with him so that he can reunite with Law, and they 'adopt' him.
My self ship for Ace x Buggy is a performance Clown part of the Buggy Pirates.
Ace has been a part of the crew for as long as any of the other original members and harbored feelings for their captain for a very long time before eventually breaking down and confessing after feeling like they were going to lose him to impel down. Buggy is initially very awkward and flustered and nervous about the confession but admits that he had feelings too. He's a bit of a tsundere so sometimes it takes a lot to get hid real feelings out in the open. Buggy has huge jealousy issues and will be very very possessive. Has a huge soft spot for Ace. They fight with a comically large hammer, and with a similar style to capoeira where they are dancing as they fight. They are obnoxious after they're officially together, but it's cute.
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HI BB ITS DAVENT. Diagnose my lore, ardent. tell me who I am as a homestuck troll and kid. tell me all.
- Bloodcaste/lusus/chumhandle as if you were a Homestuck troll (+lore)
You’re a rustblood with a ferret lusus. Your chumhandle is tenaciousGearhead.
You live in a commune with a few other rustbloods who’re pissed off with working for the highbloods. It’s not much, admittedly - just a small block of half-destroyed flats that the drones have already declared empty - but it’s a small community that looks after itself, and you kind of like it that way. It’s a lot easier than living in the city, or trying to hide in the sewers whenever the drones appear, that’s for sure, and it’s actually pretty freeing, all things considered.
You and your ferret lusus like to go out and search through the ruins for things you can bring back to the commune - and for yourself, of course. There have been plenty of art supplies, craft supplies, weapons, cutlery, furniture, heck, even whole ass statues that you’ve found! You do tend to push the boundries of what you can get away with (which definitely includes breaking into a highblood house or two and stealing whatever shit you can get your hands on if you think it’ll go unnoticed and unmissed), but you enjoy the chaos. And, hey - you haven’t had to buy anything for at least three years. That’s pretty sweet.
When you let yourself rest, you like to alternate between writing and drawing. It’s fun to experiment with the supplies you’ve managed to collect together, though your favourite method (of both writing and drawing) is definitely through the husktop you managed to steal from a blueblood. It’s one of the state-of-the-art ones with all the cool art programmes unlocked for free, and at least a dozen or so different formats, fonts, and codes in the writing programme to make anything you write about ten thousand percent more exciting.
Outside of your commune, you’re pretty good friends with a few people online! You think you might have a weird sort of pale thing going on with them? Or at least definitely one of them, but then, she’s just pale sunshine all around. Oh, and maybe a blackrom thing for another, but he’s just a teasing dick who likes to steal your men. You love to make things for and with them, and have even been encouraged by them to get back into more... frivolous things. No, nobody can see the folder you’ve got on your husktop labelled “selfship”, and they DEFINITELY can’t read the fic you’ve labelled only with three sweatdrop emojis. Still, it’s fun, and you love being able to spend time with them.
Your ferret lusus is kind of an asshole. He’s bigger than a normal ferret, but still small enough to slip through pipes and through small cracks like he’s made of water; keeping an eye on him is IMPOSSIBLE. Sometimes he goes outside and comes back with things, and you’re not even sure where he got them from? But he’s the best partner in crime to have, ever, so you let it slide. Most of the time.
- Symbol/guardian/chumhandle as if you were a Homestuck kid (+lore)
Your symbol is a CD and your guardian is your older bro! Your chumhandle is temperedGallant.
You live in a pretty basic one-floor bungalow with enough space for you and your bro to move around without ever really seeing each other. There’s his room, your room, two bathrooms (for some reason), a huge kitchen, a smaller living room, and a garden that leads out into a woods you’re maybe just a little scared to explore. It’s a little lonely at times, but you love having the space to just do weird shit whenever you want.
Your room is a cluttered mess of the things you like, most of which revolves around writing and drawing. Your proudest pieces line your walls like a memory of your achievements, and remind you daily of just how much you’ve improved - a sort of timeline of your growth, if you will. You don’t exactly do the same thing with your writing, but you’ve got all your old fics saved on your laptop. It’s kind of hard to get rid of them. You also haven’t read them in a while. You don’t really intend to, either - just in case.
You have an entire section of your room dedicated to shit you collect. It’s not exactly the most impressive thing you’ve ever seem, but it’s nice; flowers that’ve bloomed in your garden, weird fungi you plucked off of the huge dead tree that drapes over your bungalow like a guardian, little stones that you thought just looked cool. It looks a little cottagecore, if you’re honest, which is pretty alright by you! You started to try making a blanket or something to tie it all together, but... yeah. The less you think about that? The better.
You have a few friends online you like to play Minecraft with and talk to almost daily. It’s pretty fun, honestly, if sometimes a little too vulnerable for your liking; every now and then you gotta rickroll a bitch to detract away from talking about your feelings for too long. You wouldn’t give it up for the world, though, and you love that there’s so much that keeps you together. You’re worried that it won’t last, but you try not to think about it too much. You’re pretty sure at least three of them wouldn’t let you think about it too long, anyway.
Sometimes, you try to edge towards the forest at the back of your house. It’s big, and dark, and extremely imposing. Past the first few rows of trees, you can’t see anything - not even a path to follow. Sometimes at night you can hear the leaves rustling and it sounds like something calling to you, and more than once you’ve stood just on the precipice between the garden and the line of the forest, goosebumps running up and down your arms. You’ve never gone in. You’re not sure if you’d ever come back if you did.
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Shattered and Mended
The F/O? XR from Buzz Lightyear of Star Command. The S/I? Rachel Sparks - fifth ranger of Team Lightyear with a big heart for justice (and no glasses in this ‘verse because I suppose Nebula would surgically augment my eyes to make sure Zurg couldn’t rip the glasses off and stomp on them, which is a Zurg tactic). The writings I did for XR are actually from a rather structured AU that runs alongside the whole show, and tell versions of episodes that are impacted by my s/i’s existence. This one goes with the ep “Eye of the Storm,” though it takes off after that ep’s timeline ends and does a whole other act that’s just basically a sickfic. This is actually probably the longest selfship piece I’ve written, but I love it because of the shenanigans.
Also, if you can guess what three works of fiction I appropriated for the bingewatch show, cookies for you.
***
It was a typical week for Team Lightyear. Answer a distress call, discover it was made by the daughter of a mad scientist (former Star Command researcher Spiro Lepton, in fact, though he now preferred to go by “von Madman,” apparently) in order to lure Team Lightyear into said mad scientist’s clutches, beat mad scientist after literally everyone on the team made him stronger by consecutively using energy-based attacks on him despite seeing the previous efforts fail, send mad scientist to jail, learn that mad scientist’s daughter isn’t so bad after all, learn that mad scientist’s daughter has a crush on your team leader, go out for group lunch at Cosmo’s.
Cosmo knew by this point that he was best served getting Booster’s order off the oven first, meaning Rachel had to try and keep the saliva of hunger from escaping her lips as she watched him devour an entire plate of squirming curly fries in one go. Hot, crispy, lightly-spiced curly fries. Maybe she should’ve ordered that, she wondered, instead of the spurfion rings. At least this time, XR hadn’t forgotten he couldn’t eat curly fries and tried to put one in his mouth.
Booster remarked that it was the perfect way to top off the day after defeating evil, and that seemed to be the cue for the reply: “Daddy wasn’t always evil. He used to be a good man.”
Rachel wondered how exactly Bonnie had tracked them all down. It was a little creepy. In the grand scheme, however, that hardly mattered, as Rachel could read the dismay on Bonnie’s face. It couldn’t have been easy, living with the burden of having a man who literally renamed himself “madman” as your parent.
Bonnie concluded her statement with “Just like Buzz” and turned to place her hands on Buzz’s shoulder and forearm.
Rachel could sense Buzz’s discomfort immediately; he’d tensed up so hard, she could feel it from across the table. They’d all been briefed on Buzz’s history with Bonnie, and Rachel could hardly blame him. Erasing the memories he had of her as a child couldn’t be easy. Rachel pictured it for a minute – looking at Bonnie’s sultry expression and overlaying a grade-schooler’s gap-toothed visage over top. This prompted a shudder. Creepy.
It got worse; as Buzz tried to convince Bonnie that her father had gone off the deep end (his black-and-white morals would be the death of him, but wasn’t that what made him lovable?), Bonnie begged him for attention, climbing into the booth, crawling toward him, attempting to pin him down. Rachel suddenly lost all sympathy for Bonnie Lepton. She now seemed almost predatory, physically positioning herself to fence Buzz against the window, making it clear what she wanted. Rachel wondered if she should step in, but found herself frozen, unsure exactly what move to make.
Mira, as usual, decided to go the direct route, pulling Buzz toward her by the collar and hissing, “Can’t you see she has a huge crush on you?”
Upon affirming this, Buzz returned to Bonnie; “It’s perfectly natural for you to have feelings for me. But they’re meaningless! It’s the classic damsel-in-distress syndrome. I rescue you, you go all moony!”
That wasn’t how Rachel would’ve described Bonnie’s demeanor.
Mira had nothing to say to this but a facepalm.
It got worse when Buzz said he’d seen this dozens of times, to which Bonnie told him “I thought I was special,” and Rachel didn’t know where she could’ve gotten that idea at all, seeing how Buzz had done nothing but brush her off and turn her down and was she physically unable to take a hint?
“Sorry, kiddo,” Buzz told her. “Just doin’ my job.”
At least Buzz had been able to stand up for himself. Rachel felt quite protective of him in that moment; Bonnie certainly wasn’t the sort who would give up the chase easily. Could she not see how uncomfortable she was making him? Did she not get the concept of how their history was complicated? Did she not –
But as Bonnie was pulling away from the table, XR tried to intercept her. “Hey, I think you’re special!” he said, pouring on the charm far too thickly as he clasped one of her hands in both of his own. “Aaaand, since you’re new to civilization and all, I should tell you – “ He whipped about to produce two mirrors from his inventory. “I am considered quite the looker!”
Now Rachel had something to be even more upset about.
Mira hissed “XR!” at him, not without a quick, pointed glance toward Rachel that informed her of the pure rage surging through the blonde.
“That’s all right,” Bonnie said, flirtily planting a kiss on XR’s helmet –
It’s that easy? Rachel thought. What makes you think you can just do that?
“At least he’s treating me like a GROWN WOMAN,” Bonnie asserted.
No, Rachel thought, he’s treating you like a piece of meat, and this should be why I’m glad we’re just friends, why I’m glad he doesn’t do this shit to me, but that still doesn’t explain why I’m the only woman in the entire galaxy he hasn’t even looked at –
“Unlike a certain STUFFED-SPACESUIT JARHEAD ROCKET JOCKEY I KNOW,” Bonnie fired off as XR whooped his joy at having been kissed.
There was nothing about this Rachel didn’t hate.
“What?” Buzz asked when Bonnie had left. “What’d I say wrong?”
“I don’t even KNOW where to begin,” Mira grunted.
“Oh, no, Buzz was fine,” Rachel growled. She leaned out over the table to point accusingly at XR; “But can YOU stop being a perv for literally TEN SECONDS? Or is that a standard function of your programming, to be a complete and total creep toward every woman you cross paths with?”
“If I can remind you, SHE was the one who kissed ME,” XR boasted proudly.
“That was a pity kiss,” Rachel snarled. “You’re lucky you didn’t get your entire head smacked right off, which is what I would’ve done if I were her and didn’t know you.”
“You’re just jealous that I’m a babe magnet,” XR teased. “You WISH you could get the attention I do.”
Of course, he didn’t know exactly how hard that hit. That didn’t make a lick of difference.
Rachel made a loud, wordless scream of frustration before forcing herself to be calm long enough to say “Mira…Booster…please let me out so I can storm away in a rage.”
Seeing Rachel’s temper flaring as hard as it was, Mira and Booster wasted no time evacuating the booth so Rachel could stomp angrily toward the women’s restroom.
Buzz watched her in confusion. “Is she…ah…is she gonna be okay?”
“I just want it on record that I did NOTHING wrong here,” XR stated, arms folded.
Mira buried her face in both hands. “Booster, you, me, and Rachel are the only three smart people left at this table.”
“But Rachel’s not at the table,” Booster pointed out. “Maybe you should go after her, since…you know…you’re the only other woman here…”
“No,” Mira sighed as she raised her face, “she needs to be alone right now – “
Buzz was already making way toward the restrooms.
“I SAID SHE NEEDS TO BE ALONE RIGHT NOW!” Mira yelled, to no avail.
“SOME people just don’t know when they’ve crossed the line,” XR commented, earning him angry glares from Mira and Booster.
Rachel paced back and forth across the women’s room for a bit, reminding herself not to examine the floor too long for fear of seeing the level of grime that was actually there and touching her boots. How dare he? No, he couldn’t know, but the fact that he was accusing her of being jealous of his ability to attract attention (which he didn’t even have; Bonnie was just as much of a shameless flirt as he and he had the luck to cross her path) when in fact, she did want to be able to attract attention, but only of one person, the worst person, the person who should have just proven she shouldn’t want to be anything more than friends with, and he was lucky to even be that –
Frustratedly, she began to sing in hopes of getting rid of some excess negative energy, hardly thinking about the song itself.
Why did she even still like him? He’s terrible, she told herself. But she couldn’t believe that anymore. Not after he’d engineered that entire scheme to get her un-fired from Team Lightyear. Not after their conversations regarding how messed up they both were in the head. Not after their deal, trading janitorial work for office work. No, they were at the very least friends now, and Rachel had to live with that, and the very act of being friends with XR kept reminding her of what was good about him, and what made her admire him, which clashed so horribly with when he did things like this – said things like that –
The sound of a flushing toilet. A woman exited the stall and fixed a rather disgruntled look upon Rachel, who was silenced sheepishly as the woman began to wash her four hands. Perhaps, Rachel realized, it would’ve been a good idea to check the restroom for occupants before pacing around it singing lyrics like “IS IT LOVE? IS IT LOVE? OR JUST THE DRUGS PULSING IN MY VEINS?”
The singing had worked a little bit, anyway. There was no reason for Rachel to be that angry. Her friend was a womanizer-wannabe, he’d managed to find someone his charms temporarily worked on by the sheer scope of trying them on everyone, they’d had a moment, she wanted someone else all along. No big deal. This was just Rachel’s problem. Pining made a person overreact.
Jealous of getting the attention he did, indeed.
There were things you just didn’t say, even if it turned out you were right about them.
Shortly after the other woman left the restroom, Rachel did the same, practically colliding with Buzz Lightyear as she did so. After both gave a “Whoa!” and backed off, Rachel was reminded of the other problem.
“I, uh…” Buzz began, “I just wanted to make sure, you know, that you were okay.”
“I’m fine,” Rachel said with a forced smile. “Who doesn’t get fed up with their teammates every once in a while?”
“Even I know that feeling,” Buzz admitted with a smile, “though don’t tell them that.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t say anything,” Rachel blurted. “When Bonnie was doing…the stuff she was doing.”
“What do you have to be sorry for?” Buzz asked. “Like I said: the damsel-in-distress syndrome. Besides, the more I think about it, the more I wonder if taking her up on the whole date thing wouldn’t actually be that bad of an idea.”
Rachel flinched. “Buzz, do you even LIKE her?”
“What’s not to like about Bonnie Lepton?” Buzz asked. “She’s a confident woman who sees the good in people. Everyone should like her!”
“No. I’m asking if you LIKE her. YOU KNOW HOW I MEAN.”
“Well, uh…” Buzz met Rachel’s piercing gaze with a rather hollow look. “Not right now, but you never know. Things can happen.”
“Are you thinking about asking her out because she PESTERED you?”
“She wasn’t pestering!” Buzz argued. “She happens to have a mild crush on me – “
“A MILD crush.”
“ – and there’s a chance we’re compatible, and this will make her happy!” Buzz insisted.
“Yeah, but…she makes you REALLY uncomfortable,” Rachel argued. “Don’t tell me I’m wrong. I SAW you two.”
“It wasn’t that bad!” Buzz argued.
“I’m just afraid that if you give in because she bothered you into it,” Rachel told him, “then you’re gonna end up even more uncomfortable. Or just hurt.”
“Listen, Rachel,” Buzz said patiently, “I’m a grown man. I can take care of myself. It’s gonna take more than a bad date to hurt me. It doesn’t even take EVIL EMPEROR ZURG to hurt me!”
“I’m just trying to look out for you, okay?” Rachel insisted. “I know you can take care of yourself, but…I get worried. It’s what I do. She shouldn’t have put that kind of pressure on you. It isn’t RIGHT. Even I…”
And here’s why it really wasn’t that easy. She’d known it since the Petra incident.
“…I had this guy I liked, once,” she said meekly. “A lot. But I knew he wasn’t interested in me at all. And I NEVER wanted to put him through what Bonnie’s putting you through. Even if it was hard having to see him and keep it all bottled up. I just…I can’t – couldn’t do that to him. Even if he was an asshole who deserved a little punishment sometimes.” She sighed. “If you wanna go out with Bonnie, that’s fine. I just don’t want this to go wrong for you.”
“I’ll be fine,” Buzz assured her. “I appreciate the concern, though. You’ve got a good heart.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Rachel made to head back to the table. “Let’s go get our food. They probably brought my spurfion rings, and I’m starving.”
“Rachel.”
She paused, her back turned to Buzz. Her head swiveled to get a good look at him.
Candidly, Buzz stated, “Any guy who wouldn’t see how amazing you are is a MORON.”
She said the only thing she could say: “That’s exactly the problem.”
He didn’t ask, so she didn’t elaborate. They returned to the booth, where their orders were in fact waiting, and it seemed that already, Rachel had missed the time-honored ritual where XR had attempted to casually steal a spurfion ring off her plate only to remember the hard way, yet again, that he wasn’t able to consume food. She gave this the barest acknowledgement, re-taking her seat by the window and making a point of not looking directly at XR for the rest of the meal.
Buzz began to spell out his ideas for the date he was planning with Bonnie: “So I was thinking I’d take her to good old Cosmic Crunchies – “
“Buzz,” XR sighed, “I thought the point was that you were treating her like a grown-up. That COMPLETELY defeats the purpose. Also, Cosmic Crunchies? Really? How old are YOU, again?”
Rachel just barely managed to disguise her inappropriately-placed laugh as a cough. Curse him. (Though now was obviously a bad time to say that she herself wouldn’t be opposed to Cosmic Crunchies, so she kept that one secret.)
Buzz laid out the rest of his plans, and Rachel couldn’t help but think that this was about to go terribly, horribly wrong.
***
Things had gone about as badly as Rachel could have predicted if not worse. Lepton (or “von Madman,” as he preferred, apparently) had somehow enlarged himself to monumental proportions, solidified his crystal shell, and carried Bonnie off into the city. By the time the majority of the squad arrived on scene, it seemed all that was left of Buzz was a Buzz-shaped imprint in the ground.
“Poor Buzz,” Booster whimpered, looking at the site of the damage, “he’s gone!”
“Life will be so empty without him,” XR moaned.
“I can’t believe – “ Rachel attempted.
“By the way,” XR interrupted, “who gets his car?”
“Wow,” Rachel huffed. “Mr. Sensitivity, aren’t you?”
Thankfully, Buzz hadn’t actually been crushed, crawling up out of where he’d been punched into the floor. Booster excitedly plucked him from the indent, crying, “YOU’RE ALIVE!”
Rachel let out a sigh of absolute relief.
Buzz wrenched himself from one of Booster’s bone-crushing hugs, barreling toward the edge of the rooftop where they had all gathered to try to intercept Lepton (or “von Madman”…apparently) as he barked, “No time for mushy stuff, rangers! Madman is loose!”
“Hey, yeah, about that?” Rachel called after Buzz as he barreled to the edge of the rooftop. “Just thought maybe we should discuss how this is related to what we talked about earlier regarding – “
“No time for that either!” Buzz called back as he made a flying leap off the building.
Rachel all but deflated as the rest of the team followed. Eventually, she mustered up the willpower to give chase. If he’d just listened to her, none of this would be happening, she thought.
A direct attack on Lepton (“von Madman,” apparently) failed thrice in a row, and the blasts of pure energy he emitted to attempt to eliminate Team Lightyear en masse ended up causing collateral damage when they missed. Buzz’s argument that he and Bonnie were on a date rolled off Lepton (“von Madman,” apparently)’s back like water off a duck.
“Seriously,” Rachel groaned, “this can NOT get any – “
“DON’T,” XR warned, “SAY IT.”
That was when Lepton (“von Madman,” apparently) commandeered the city’s main generator and erupted into titanic size.
“That had NOTHING to do with what I just said!” Rachel barked as the group landed on another nearby rooftop to assess.
“Oh, really?” XR countered. “Haven’t I warned you about what happens EVERY TIME ANYONE SAYS THOSE WORDS?”
“It’s a coincidence,” Rachel grunted.
“This and every other time?” “It has not happened every single time.”
“NINETY TIMES out of the past NINETY-FIVE that someone has said ‘this can’t get any worse,’” XR pointed out, “it has GOTTEN WORSE.”
“You kept TRA – “ Rachel shook her head. “Of course you kept track.”
“Plan?” Mira asked. “Anybody got a plan? Because we could REALLY use a plan right now.”
Buzz surveyed the generator before making his decision: “It’s up to you, XR. You’ve gotta reach the cutoff valve. We’ll stall him.”
“I’m sorry,” Rachel broke in, “XR does what?” “I agree,” XR repeated; “XR does what? One false move, and someone could be blown to bits! Maybe me!”
“That’s why it’s up to you,” Buzz insisted, giving the robot a gentle push toward the edge of the roof.
“Ummm…I don’t like this plan,” Rachel argued. “I REALLY don’t like this plan.”
“But if anything happens to XR,” Booster reminded her, “he can just be rebuilt.”
“I thought you were mad at him anyway about the Bonnie thing,” Mira whispered in Rachel’s ear.
“I am,” Rachel hissed back. “That doesn’t mean I have to like the plan where he’s required to make the suicide move.”
“Then which one of us SHOULD make that move?”
“Uh…” Rachel had no answer for that.
“It’s not ideal,” Mira reminded her, “but it’s our only play.”
“Fine,” Rachel huffed. “But I want to remind EVERYONE LISTENING HERE that we would have to go through NONE OF THIS if Buzz had just NOT CAVED TO BEING PESTERED BY A WOMAN HE DIDN’T LIKE!”
“We would have to go through none of this,” Buzz countered, “if Lepton – “
“Von Madman, apparently,” Rachel broke in.
“If Lepton hadn’t pushed the limits of his research too far,” Buzz concluded. “Now let’s MOVE!”
Four blasted off; Buzz, Mira, and Booster made a beeline for Lepton (“von Madman,” apparently)’s line of vision while XR made a break for the assigned valve. Rachel stared after them all in exasperation for a solid thirty seconds before yelling, “WHEN DID THE I-TOLD-YOU-SO SQUAD BECOME THE I-TOLD-YOU-SO RACHEL?”
Then, knowing full well what she had to do, she blasted off to join the diversion effort.
Buzz tried to appeal to Lepton’s humanity. Mira argued that Bonnie needed a normal life. Rachel knew she had to chip in her two cents, to be as loud as ever in order to draw attention, but her eyes kept darting over to the valve, where XR was suctioning his way up the generator. He’ll be fine, she told herself. If he gets smashed, we just piece him back together again. And after hitting on Bonnie, he deserves to be smashed anyway. Multiple times, in fact.
She turned back to Lepton. “BONNIE’S DOING JUST FINE!” she argued. “THERE ARE WAY WORSE GUYS SHE COULD’VE PICKED THAN BUZZ LIGHTYEAR! AND SHE LOVES YOU! WHY WON’T – “
A faint, metallic scream. Rachel was cut off midsentence. She whipped to look; XR had somehow gotten one arm wrapped up in the valve, then had that arm accidentally extended so he was dangling off the tower. Not that this is my problem, Rachel insisted to herself. Typical of him, anyway.
“DR. LEPTON!” Booster added. “YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO – “
The glow of the crystals dimmed. Perhaps, Rachel thought, Lepton (“von Madman,” apparently) had decided to take their words to heart, to give up his power grab –
Or perhaps XR falling halfway down the tower and screaming had alerted him to what the team was trying to do.
Yes. Definitely that second one.
A low growl formed in the scientist’s throat. He balled up one enormous hand into a boulder-esque fist.
I am absolutely not getting involved, Rachel told herself. This is not my problem.
The minute she finished that thought, she blasted off.
She intercepted XR before Lepton (“von Madman,” apparently) could shatter him. Seeing as Rachel hadn’t really planned this, acting more upon instinct than anything else, she didn’t exactly focus on keeping airborne, and the sudden added weight of an entire robot in her arms drove her path in a decidedly downward direction. She did, however, have the presence of mind to roll over in midair as the pavement loomed. After all, she hadn’t risked her life to stop Lepton (“von Madman,” apparently) from shattering XR only for him to get dashed on the road.
Rachel landed on her back, slamming into the pavement hard, and the subsequent shooting pain in her right shoulder informed her that this had been a very bad idea. Unbidden, a shriek escaped from her lips. As XR positioned himself to standing, she sat up agonizingly, still whimpering from the shooting pain running through her shoulder.
“Whoa, nice save!” XR told her. “If you hadn’t done that, I would NOT have come out of that in one piece aaaaaaaaand you didn’t come out of that in one piece, did you?”
So he’d finally noticed that her eyes were misting up with tears. “No SHIT, XR,” she snapped.
“Oh,” he replied, “wow. Yeah, okay, that…that doesn’t look good. You should DEFINITELY get that checked out.”
“Oh, God,” she moaned, “don’t tell me it’s broken. Is it out of place?”
“Well, it’s hard to say at this point, but – what EXACTLY are you worried is broken?”
“MY FUCKING SHOULDER,” Rachel growled, immediately regretting her harsh tone the moment it had come out – though, in her defense, the fact that her shoulder might have, in fact, been broken wasn’t doing her temperament any favors. “What did you THINK?”
“How would you expect ME to know?” XR replied. “All I know is the look on your face is NOT the look of a person who doesn’t need medical attention.”
Rachel’s gaze was diverted upward; Buzz, Mira, and Booster had tried and failed to engage Lepton (“von Madman,” apparently) in direct hand-to-hand combat, and now the crystalline villain had leapt off the generator, stalking Buzz down.
“We can’t stay here,” Rachel grunted as she used her left hand to pivot into a standing position less than gracefully.
“You’re telling me!” XR cried, seizing Rachel’s hand and making a break for it –
Her right hand.
He let go after she shrieked even more piercingly. “THAT WAS THE SHOULDER,” she yelled.
“Again,” he retorted, “HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT?”
“Just RUN, dumbass!”
They bolted, Rachel’s shoulder feeling no better as time elapsed. Once they’d reached what seemed to be a safe distance, they observed the grand finale playing out.
The entire generator was destroyed in the melee, but it was Bonnie herself who struck the final blow, dealing a hit to Lepton (“von Madman,” apparently)’s weak spot on his chest and bringing him back down to humanity. Rachel would’ve fist-pumped in Bonnie’s honor if she weren’t still distracted by the burning in her shoulder.
“You think it’s safe?” she asked after Lepton (no longer “von Madman,” apparently), Bonnie, Buzz, Mira, and Booster had been conversing for some time.
“You can NEVER be too careful,” XR told her. “Luckily, I can assess the situation by reading their lips from this distance.” After a moment of observation, he muttered, “Pretty sure he just said ‘Donut candelabra’ – “
“Okay, no, that’s not gonna work.” Rachel made her way to the others, every curse she knew firing off in her brain as a result of the shoulder. Fuck Lepton, she thought, for making me have to do that. Fuck Buzz for not listening to me. And fuck XR in particular for being the exact reason my shoulder is probably wrecked.
“How do we know we can trust you?” Buzz was asking Lepton as Rachel approached.
“I promise,” Lepton replied.
That seemed to be where it ended, prompting Rachel to say, “Oh, that’s IT? We’re going to trust him just like THAT?”
“It really wasn’t his fault,” Bonnie asserted. “The crystals were affecting his brain.”
Rachel wasn’t sure how far that explanation would fly. After all, substance abuse could make people act severely out of character, but she was under the impression Lepton had at least some control over his actions. Then again, she wasn’t the judge or the jury here. That honor fell to Buzz, so she looked at him.
“Well, uh, okay,” Buzz stated. “After the LGMs CLEAR him.”
Rachel could accept that. Whatever misgivings she had, Buzz had yet to be wrong when it came to judging character.
“And if you’ll, uh…let us finish our…y’know, ahhh…” he sputtered.
“Dinner date?” Bonnie finished.
So that was still on, Rachel thought to herself.
“Right,” Buzz confirmed. “What she said.”
Rachel might as well accept this. Maybe Buzz actually did have feelings for Bonnie that went beyond pitying her pestering. Maybe this would actually go somewhere. After all, it wasn’t like things could get –
No. She was not about to become statistic ninety-six. Not even mentally.
“YAY!” Booster cried, doing a small jump for joy. “Everything worked out PERFECT! Great job, everyone!” He gave Mira’s left shoulder and Rachel’s right shoulder a simultaneous, hearty clap.
Which got Rachel to scream again, putting all eyes on her. That jolt had hit hard, and now she was crying again, which she really resented.
“Are you okay?” Mira asked in concern.
“No,” Rachel answered softly, at least feeling a little better that Mira’s response was so caring. “I think I broke my fucking shoulder.”
“Uh, yeahhhhh,” XR confirmed (when had he gotten here? Rachel bristled at his presence). “I hate to break up the happy family reunion, but we have a ranger that needs a trip to the ER, stat.”
“And whose fault is that?” Rachel growled.
“Ranger,” Buzz reminded her, “I specifically assigned XR to that valve because he could take the risk of damage without any lasting effects.”
That, Rachel couldn’t argue with. Maybe the person she should be angry with was herself. Her eyes flicked downward to the pavement.
“Still, that was an admirable display of loyalty for your fellow ranger,” Buzz told her. “I can’t get too mad at you for wanting to protect your teammate and friend. Even if he is infinitely more durable than you are.” He took three steps to get right in front of Rachel. “We’re going to get you back to base for an examination of that shoulder.” Pivoting, he said, “Sorry, Bonnie, but – “
“No,” Rachel said quickly. “Don’t. I don’t need the whole squad to go with me. You’re on a date. Go enjoy it.”
“You, uhhhh…” Buzz regarded Rachel with confusion. “You WANT me to be on a date with Bonnie?”
“If that’s what your heart wants,” she replied, “then – no. Forget it. Just – you’re an adult too. This is your decision.”
“All right,” Buzz told her. Then: “Mira! Booster! XR! Take Rachel back to the Star Command med bay, and watch that shoulder.”
“Right!” Mira responded.
“Righty-o, Buzz!” Booster agreed.
“Consider her shoulder WATCHED,” XR concluded.
Rachel didn’t want to see him. She didn’t want to be anywhere near him. Logically, she was aware that this was completely her fault, but she wanted to pin the blame on XR for making her care, for not caring back, and for unwittingly orchestrating this entire situation without a clue.
Though, that was the thing: unwittingly. He had no way of knowing how angry it made her to see him so casually trying to pick up Bonnie. He had no way of knowing anything. It was all on her. On her, on her, on her –
“So, uh, Rach?”
They’d all begun walking back to cruiser 42, and there he was, right on cue. Rachel looked down to meet XR’s eyes, dealing him a very sour look.
“I reaaaaaaaally owe you one for this,” he told her.
She flinched, surprised. Touched, even. It was only one sentence, and she had no idea if he’d even follow up, but it went miles toward making things better.
***
“You did WHAT?”
Rachel sat on an examination bed, the LGMs crawling about to observe every part of her body they could assess. She was now clad in a loose-fitting tunic and pants rather than her suit; getting them on around her shoulder was more hassle than she’d have liked. The hurting hadn’t subsided; she’d just gotten used to it. Somewhat.
Mira, Booster, and XR were hanging back against the wall, watching the examination go down with concern plastered on all of their faces. Nebula was overseeing, and it was he who was less than happy with Rachel.
“I said,” Rachel sighed, “I hurt my shoulder in a rescue attempt.”
“WHOSE RESCUE ATTEMPT?”
“…XR’s,” she admitted. “I was trying to stop XR from getting shattered by von Madman.” It sounded even worse when she said it out loud.
“Ranger!” Nebula cried – yes, he was angered, but Rachel could still tell from his tone that it stemmed from a place of worry – “XR is literally built to be destroyed and reconstructed! His name stands for ‘Expendable Ranger’!”
“Experimental,” Rachel said without thinking. “It’s ‘Experimental Ranger.’”
She heard a mutter from the wall of “You know you’re in trouble when Dad uses your FULL name…”
“If XR gets blown to bits,” Nebula continued, “we can just build him again from the ground up! We CAN’T do that with YOU! You aren’t replaceable! What if you’d been killed pulling off that maneuver?”
“I know,” Rachel said softly. “I was being a dumbass.”
“LANGUAGE, ranger!”
“Sorry.”
Nebula sighed. “This could’ve been a lot worse. I just don’t wanna see you get hurt permanently from making any more reckless decisions!”
“I’ll play it safer,” Rachel said sheepishly. “I promise.”
“You better. I don’t wanna lose you from the ranks!”
That statement probably should’ve made Rachel feel better, warmer and fuzzier, but it ultimately didn’t do anything to reduce the size of the swirling pit in her stomach. Now she was here having to dance around the fact that she’d nearly gotten herself killed over an unrequited crush, and she was saying this to the head honcho himself. How could she possibly convey to him that she just couldn’t stand seeing XR put in what for an organic would be mortal danger – especially when Nebula was incredibly right and she’d just injured herself needlessly?
“Finished assessment!” one of the LGMs announced.
“What’s the prognosis?” Nebula asked.
“Not broken!” the LGM declared. “Sprain!”
Rachel let out a sigh of relief at that.
“Well, that could’ve been worse,” Nebula remarked. “That can be patched up with a simple enough operation. After that, you’ll have to stay off duty for two weeks.” “TWO WEEKS?” Rachel shrieked. “No. NO. I can’t be off duty for two weeks. Zurg will attack, Torque will run another prison break, NOS-4-A2 will go on a murder spree, this will probably ALL HAPPEN WITHIN THE SAME DAY, and I HAVE TO BE THERE!”
“Two weeks, ranger,” Nebula barked, “and that’s an order!”
All considered, two weeks probably wasn’t bad. Rachel thought she’d heard once that in the old days, before medical technology had advanced to this point, a sprain could have a person out for a month or two. That was unthinkable.
“Get her under,” Nebula demanded. “I want her patched on the double. The sooner she can start the recuperation period, the sooner she can finish.”
“On the double!” several of the LGMs chorused.
She was whisked away before anyone could say anything more. Though she did catch the fading sound of Booster saying, “Gosh, two whole weeks? That’s gonna be tough!” and Mira responding, “Yeah. Poor Rachel. I just can’t – “
They were out of earshot before Rachel could hear whether the one most closely tied to this little debacle had anything to say.
Maybe that was for the best.
***
Since Team Lightyear was on active duty, the four who didn’t have Grade II shoulder sprains remained at base. Rachel, however, was confined to bed in her and Mira’s shared apartment.
“You gonna be okay?” Mira had asked before leaving.
“Yeah,” Rachel sighed.
“You don’t sound convinced,” Mira pointed out.
“Mira,” Rachel reminded her, “I just sprained my fucking shoulder saving an invincible person from a non-fatal experience because of a misguided and one-sided crush. I am as fine as I’m gonna get.”
“Well…” Mira shrugged. “At least your heart was in the right place?”
“I just…hate seeing him get hurt,” Rachel replied. “But don’t tell him that. I am REALLY mad at him now.”
“Lips are zipped!” Mira promised. “Okay. I really do have to get going. Anything I can get you before I leave?”
“Nah,” Rachel replied. “I can at least get to the kitchen and back. That’s all I’m gonna need.”
“’Kay,” Mira said. “I’m heading out.”
“Have fun!” Rachel told Mira, mustering up a small show of happiness.
“As much fun as I can on Tanker Alley duty,” Mira said with a wink. “Be GLAD you’re missing this one.”
Then Rachel’s roommate was gone, and Rachel was left alone to stew. Which she did in silence for about half an hour. Then, realizing she needed to take proactive steps toward not spending two weeks in a swamp of self-pity, she picked up the remote on the bedside table, flicking on the television and opening up the streaming selection.
Her heart skipped a beat when she realized that Bulletproof Hearts: Despair Days had updated by two episodes without her even noticing. That would kill some time and put her mind on something more positive. Would today be the day that Spice Skomaru would finally figure out the mastermind behind the evil horde? Would her premonition of the future finally be given context?
Before Rachel could click the episode into playing, there was a ring at the doorbell.
Solicitors, she thought, or door-to-door religious converters asking her if she’d heard of the gospel of Narflak. So she ignored it.
Only for the doorbell to ring again. And again. And again and again and again and again –
“God dammit,” Rachel muttered as she slid out of bed. At least her pajamas were conservative; if she had to answer the door to sign for a package or anything, she wouldn’t have to worry about the delivery person seeing more than they should. Almost to the door, she had the presence of mind to test the waters by calling out, “WHO’S THERE?”
“ROOM SERVICE!”
She knew that voice. She would be able to pick that voice out of a crowd of one thousand. And there was absolutely no reason for the owner of that voice to be here, now.
In utter disbelief, Rachel opened the door –
And XR breezed into the apartment, nearly knocking her over. “Worry not!” he proclaimed. “Nurse XR is here to tend to your every need!”
Rachel could only stare at him dumbfoundedly.
He shifted from a chipper demeanor to staring her down (insofar as a person could do from a two foot height difference), hands on where hips would have been on a person. “Shouldn’t you be in bed, missy?”
She regained her ability to counter. “If I was in bed, I wouldn’t have been able to open the door, dumbass.”
“I don’t wanna hear aaaaaany more excuses! Back to bed! Go on! Scoot!”
Wondering if she was actually asleep and having a fever dream, Rachel obeyed, walking back into the bedroom and climbing back into the bed – ever more thankful that her pajamas didn’t show much off.
XR followed her into the bedroom, pausing just before the bed to pop his drawer and rummage about in it. “Let’s see here,” he muttered, “I brought one fleece blanket – don’t ask where I got it – one very fluffy pillow – don’t ask where I got it – one Jo-Adian-sized ice pack – don’t ask where I got it – and several extra-strength painkillers not on your prescription; DEFINITELY don’t ask where I got those.”
“I, uh…” Rachel realized she had to give in to the nonsense and stop trying to figure out what in the galaxy was happening. “I could use all of those things except the illegal narcotics.”
“You see, I THOUGHT you might feel that way,” XR remarked, “so I’m just gonna leave them in the drawer in case you want them later – “
“PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE ILLEGAL NARCOTICS IN MY APARTMENT WHERE THEY COULD BE FOUND ON A SWEEP,” Rachel said fiercely.
“Fine,” XR said haughtily, replacing the bag of variously sized and multicolored pills in his drawer. “I’ll keep them with ME unless you change your mind. But if you want them while I’m on mission tomorrow, that’s just too bad for you.”
It took Rachel a moment to stop thinking about how she was already on thin ice for the antidepressants hidden at the bottom of the panty drawer and realize what he’d just said. “On mission…tomorrow? Don’t you have one TODAY? Tanker Alley?”
“About that,” XR replied. “I put in a word with Commander Nebula and I just so happened to mention that I am VERY behind on my paperwork. I have literally MOUNTAINS of reports to file. So I got a free pass for the day in order to get a head start on those hours and hours’ worth of reports that need filing.”
That didn’t exactly clear things up. “So…why are you – “
“Hours and hours’ worth of reports,” XR clarified, “that I’m NOT GOING TO DO.”
“Oh,” Rachel realized. “Wait. So you lied to get a whole day off to – “
“Stop you from going insane having no one to talk to, yes.”
“You say that like talking to you doesn’t inherently make me more insane.”
“Har-dee-har.”
“Did Booster and Mira guilt you into this?” Rachel asked.
“Guilt?” XR repeated. “No! No-ho-hooooo! Not one bit! True, they MIGHT have mentioned on separate occasions that because you got that sprain trying to protect me, that means I’m INDIRECTLY responsible for your injury, in the TECHNICAL sense, but there is no GUILT here. All sincerity, this wasn’t their idea anyway. It was mine.”
“Why?” Rachel asked, dumbfounded.
“Because, like I said,” he reminded her, “I owe you one. One VERY BIG one. And I’m paying you back right now. Now hang on juuuuuuust a minute – “
He breezed around the room, throwing the blanket on top of Rachel and suddenly getting on the bed on her left side to tip her forward and settle the pillow and the absolutely enormous ice pack, and she barely had time to register how erratic her heartbeat became for that moment. Then he was back on the floor, and Rachel had to admit she was much more comfortable.
“You don’t have to do this,” she told him. “I mean, yeah, you do owe me one, but I’m fine. I’m not gonna go stir-crazy. There are new eps of Despair Days, and – “
XR shot a glance at the television. “Bulletproof Hearts?” he realized. “Now THERE’S a nostalgia trip. Are we gathering research for more fanfictions?”
“Let it die.”
“The files may be deleted, but the memories remain, Rach. Distinct memories of Vexyrian, Romyx, and oatmeal.”
“I DON’T EVEN SHIP THEM ANYMORE!” Rachel cried, a bit too loudly.
“What was this even about, anyway?” XR asked.
“Despair Days?” Rachel answered. “It’s a spinoff, actually. It focuses on Spice Skomaru, who’s Red’s half-sister. See, Spice has the ability to predict the future, and that put a bunch of hitmen on her. So when Nort figured out about her powers, he captured her and put her in isolation on an ice planet filled with robots who seem to be brainwashed to try and kill her, but she escaped, and now she’s trying to make her way through the frozen wasteland with – “ She realized she’d been infodumping. “It’s basically the same kind of drama as the main series.”
“That summary doesn’t actually help me,” XR replied. “See, when I asked, I meant what the WHOLE THING was about.”
Rachel gave him an utterly dumbfounded look. “You…don’t know what Bulletproof Hearts is about.”
“Not a clue.”
“We went through that whole incident of you trying to turn my old fanfictions into erotic fiction, and YOU DIDN’T EVEN KNOW WHAT THE SHOW WAS ABOUT.”
“I was aiming to make transformative work! Did I NEED to know what the show was about?”
“Oh my God,” Rachel sighed. “Bulletproof Hearts is – it’s simultaneously the best and worst piece of fiction of our generation. It’s my LIFE. It’s my OBSESSION. And you DON’T KNOW WHAT IT’S ABOUT.”
“Well, forgive me if the summaries of episodes of a television drama aren’t logged in Star Command’s database!”
Another heavy sigh from Rachel before she launched into another infodump: “So Bulletproof Hearts is about these kids who go to an academy to train for fighting evil. Like our academy – well, the academy Buzz, Mira, and Booster went to – but the fantasy version for younger teens who have weirder weapons. They’re divided into four teams that do assignments together, but all sixteen are best friends. The problem is the evil Nort and his flunkies want to challenge the gods and bring the light of hope and the darkness of despair into a clash that will remake the world, so they have to travel around to different planets, get wrapped up in the adventures of the locals, and put together the pieces of how to stop Nort. The problem is that Nort’s right-hand general, Monokrome, tempts them on every planet with a reason to kill each other off, and every so often, she succeeds and one of the kids ends up killing another, and they all have to work together to figure out who the murderer is. The main character, Red Kazora, is seriously my favorite. Like, he’s perfect. He’s this geeky mechanic type who starts out with major trust issues but then kinda falls in platonic love with everybody and makes friends at first sight. His best friend, Snow Hajiku, is more of the deadpan snarky type who seems cold at first, but their dynamic is just SO perfect, and they’re SO in love. Though, actually, Red’s canon love interest is Victory Chiakairi, who has a really troubled past because she – well, that’s a spoiler. But the thing is, she came from – no, that’s also a spoiler. But the whole fan treatment of Victory is complicated because – fuck. Spoiler. Wait. Why am I dancing around spoilers? You are NEVER going to watch this fucking show.”
“I wouldn’t say NEVER!” XR argued. “Now I want to know what my best-seller was going to be based on! Also, you made it sound kind of interesting just now.” He looked back to the television. “You’ve got it streaming?”
“It’s all on demand,” Rachel confirmed. “What, you want to binge it with me?”
Had she seriously just invited him to do that? In her defense, he had all but suggested it himself!
“Well, we have a whole day together, don’t we?” XR reminded her. “Fire it up.”
“XR, this show has a LOT of lore. It’s SUPER fucking complicated. There is a RUNNING FANDOM JOKE about how the plot is overcomplicated and doesn’t make sense to anyone except hardcore fans.”
“Are you saying I can’t keep up with a TV show plot?”
“That is exactly what I’m saying,” Rachel stated.
“Well,” XR replied, “CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.”
In one movement, he had hoisted himself onto the bed next to Rachel’s left side, and the ice pack was overclocking keeping her body temperature down from the proximity. He reclined back on the pillow on that side, hands tucked behind his helmet.
“Okay,” Rachel said, “but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
The problem about showing your special-interest fandom to the guy you liked, who really didn’t seem all that interested in fantasy fiction in the first place, was that if he didn’t end up liking it, you either had to doubt the integrity of your feelings for the fiction or your feelings for the guy. Both of which really deserved to be questioned, in her case, Rachel realized. This may very well have been the worst decision of her life.
Second worst, come to think of it, after getting her shoulder sprained trying to save an immortal robot from getting smashed.
If being attracted to XR was at all her decision, of course, that would be a solid first worst.
Still, she cued up the pilot episode, tense in anticipation of XR’s reaction. “Oh, by the way,” she mentioned, “I’ve seen this, like, a hundred times, so if I start saying the lines out loud along with the characters, smack me on the back of the head.”
“Duly noted. No takesies-backsies on that.”
A click of the remote and they were off.
Two hours in, there was a bowl on Rachel’s lap from which she casually ate popcorn while answering the early-season questions every Bulletproof Hearts rookie had:
“So…Noir hates Snow because…”
“Spoiler.”
“Am I picking up that Amarillo is hiding something?” “Yes.”
“What’s Snow’s specialty again?” “It was never said because you’re not supposed to know.”
“I don’t trust Castella.”
“WAIT FOR IT.”
It occurred to Rachel eventually that XR was not only miraculously following the plot of Bulletproof Hearts, but getting invested in it. That was a load off. This wasn’t going to be so bad after all.
***
“I’m starting to see what you mean about Red and Snow. Seriously, just KISS already.”
“THANK YOU.”
“Though Red and Victory aren’t bad either.”
“Just so long as you don’t ship Red with Castella Komisa.”
“People do that?” “People do that. And it is the literal worst. Besides, Reynard is right there! Why WOULDN’T you put Castella with Reynard?”
“Not seeing THAT chemistry.”
“Right. That’s not until episode seven. Just hang in there.”
***
“So THAT’S your boy toy.”
“ROMYX IS NOT MY BOY TOY.”
“You’re into mullets and eyeliner?”
“No I’m – are you going to make fun of me and Romyx or are you going to watch how actually good of a villain Romyx is?”
“I’m a robot. I’m built to multitask.”
***
“Geez, they wasted no time killing off Romyx, did they?”
“Yeah. He’s kind of an intro villain.”
“Does he come back?”
“No.”
“That’s ALL HE DOES?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you like HIM so much? He barely did anything!”
“BUT HE DID IT WITH SWAG. NOW SHUT UP.”
***
“Well, well, THERE’S a familiar name. …Wait, are you telling me Romyx and Vexyrian never meet?” “Not onscreen, but they both worked for Nort, so obviously – “
“And you wrote such PASSIONATE romance between them.”
“Is this Relive Rachel’s Most Embarrassing Hits hour? No. No it’s not.”
“Now, you see, THIS guy, I can get into as a villain. THIS guy has the chops. And unlike Romyx, he’s actually gonna stick around.”
“Uh…yeah.”
***
“Rach.”
“Yeah.”
“All the villains you love die.”
“I know.”
“Everything you touch dies.”
“Yes it does.”
“I mean, I guess this is something Romyx and Vexyrian actually have in common: they both die WAY too quickly.”
“AHA! SO NOW YOU ADMIT ROMYX WAS GONE TOO SOON!”
“GONE TOO SOON TO ACTUALLY BE A CHARACTER!”
***
The popcorn bowl was refilled.
***
“Well, here’s news for you,” Rachel muttered under her breath along with the villain of the hour. “You’re crying over Noir dying, but she isn’t dead. Because you can’t kill anything that never existed – HEY!”
She had received the lightest, most playful cuff on the back of the head from a metal hand.
“You told me to do that,” XR told her as he faced the screen, deliberately avoiding her look of playful scorn. “And you agreed to no takesies-backsies.”
***
“Sooooo…is now the wrong time to tell you that I actually do think Red is best off with Castella?”
“THAT’S IT. OUT. OUT OF MY APARTMENT NOW. RIGHT NOW. LEAVE THE ICE PACK.”
***
Sniffle. “Rach…when you tell this story later…you don’t tell anyone I cried over Victory.”
“Secret’s safe with me. I cried the first time I saw it, too.”
“She was – she had so much potential! She was so innocent!”
“I know. And it was just the most BULLSHIT death, too.”
“What kind of a HEARTLESS MONSTER is writing this stuff?”
“I might actually invite you onto my BH forum after this.”
“…You’re on a forum?”
“…Maybe.” “Do you still write – “
“NO! Also, you’re disinvited from the forum.”
“Well, THAT’S telling. Looks like I have another pen name to go looking for.”
“NO YOU DO NOT.”
***
“…WHAT?”
“Yes. YEEEEEES.”
“You’re telling me…this whole time…Braigel was…”
“YES! HE WAS! OH MY GOD, I HAVE NEVER ACTUALLY SEEN ANYONE GET BLINDSIDED BY THAT REVEAL IN REAL LIFE! DO YOU KNOW HOW SATISFYING THIS IS?”
“This…explains a few things and yet raises SO many more questions than it answers.”
“WELCOME TO BULLETPROOF HEARTS.”
***
“I never said thank you, did I?”
Rachel didn’t realize, at first, that this wasn’t a comment on the show. “I’M not the one who froze Ashe to death.”
“Not convinced she’s dead, but that’s not what I meant.”
“How could she have survived that?” Rachel said in an attempt to disguise the very obvious plot twist being set up. “And what ARE you talking about?”
“Just this whole business saving me from getting crushed by the crystal creep.”
Rachel froze, not having expected that to come back up. She took a chance to glance over at XR, and sure enough, he was looking at her, not the screen, and her eyes met his softly-glowing yellow lights. She wasn’t sure how to respond at first, but honesty got the better of her: “I just don’t like seeing you get hurt.”
“And let me tell you, does it SMART,” XR confirmed. “Sure, all it takes is a few screws tightened back in place, but it is a MAJOR inconvenience. Admittedly less of an inconvenience than a Grade II shoulder sprain. Which brings me back to my point: I never said thank you.”
She could’ve passed off some kind of reassurance and pretended it didn’t matter, or that she hadn’t noticed. But despite him having said he owed her, and owning up in a roundabout way to the fact that her injury was related to him, he hadn’t once said the specific words “thank you.” He knew that. She knew that. He knew she knew that, she knew he knew she knew that, and ad infinitum. “No,” she said. “You didn’t.”
“Well, I’m saying it now, and you can put this on the record,” XR told her. “Thank you.”
She almost said “you’re welcome” out of habit, but that would imply that he didn’t actually owe her anything for the save, and if he thought he didn’t owe her anything for the save, they wouldn’t be having as much fun as they were right now. What she ended up with was “Don’t make me do it again, dumbass.”
“If Buzz didn’t always assign me the life-threatening half of the job or insist on using me as bait, maybe I wouldn’t HAVE to.”
“Like I keep trying to argue him not to have you do?” She immediately regretted saying that; eventually he would have to figure out that she attempted to look out for him far more than anyone else on the team, and what exactly that meant.
Yet it seemed to have sailed right over XR’s head. “Next time,” he insisted, “I get the cushy job distracting the villain. HE can shut off the volatile circuit.”
“He does actually care, you know,” Rachel said quickly, worrying this would get out of hand; she didn’t want to breed a schism in the team by accident. “He just has to make tough decisions. Being team leader does that. I know I couldn’t handle it.”
“Funny: I KNOW I could handle it. Buuuuuuut I’m not going to gun for the title out of respect.” Which Rachel knew was code for a heavy trust in Buzz’s decision-making and a value of him as a friend.
“The day you become team leader,” Rachel said with a smirk, “is the day I quit.”
“The day you quit,” XR replied, “is the day I get your seat on 42. I’ve always wanted the window view.”
“If you’re at the window, who’s going to run analytics?”
“Like we NEED analytics. Whatever happened to winging it? Improvising? Making it up as we go?”
“You’re forgetting one crucial thing, XR.”
“What? Are you going to try and tell me my analytical skills are irreplaceable and we’d be nowhere without me working in that corner?”
Yes, Rachel thought. That is true. And I’m incredibly jealous of and impressed by how you’re able to crunch the numbers you do. “No,” she replied mischievously. “In this situation, I quit because you’re the captain, so why are you sitting in MY seat when Buzz’s is yours by default?”
“Wh – that wasn’t – “
“Don’t answer: it’s because you’re a dumbass.”
“Oh, you think you’re so smart,” XR huffed.
“I don’t think I’m smart,” Rachel replied. “I KNOW I’m smart.”
“Yeah, well,” XR replied, swiveling his head back to the television, “I’ve got news for you, sister – WHEN DID POSEIDON GET POSSESSED?”
“Shit,” Rachel hissed. “We’re gonna have to rewind a few scenes.”
Spitting vitriol at each other felt strangely comfortable. The insults, insincere at this point. All Rachel had really heard was “I never said thank you.” And all XR had really heard was “I just don’t like seeing you get hurt.”
***
It wasn’t until Rachel started waking up that she realized she’d fallen asleep. When had that happened? Without opening her eyes, she took stock of what had happened, trying to recall exactly when she’d wrapped up last night’s binge and kicked out her irritating if charming houseguest.
Observations: there was a constant stream of noise in the background – the sound of people talking. That was odd. Rachel’s position: propped up rather than laying down, though not as uncomfortable as one would expect, given that her back was against a very soft surface – several pillows, presumably. She’d slumped to the left a stitch, and was leaning on something quite solid.
That was when it hit. She hadn’t wrapped up the Bulletproof Hearts binge. She’d fallen asleep watching it. That was the noise: an episode still playing. Nor had she sent XR packing. He was still there, and she’d fallen asleep leaning against him.
Like the crack of a whip, adrenaline surged through Rachel’s body. Her eyes snapped open; she let out an instinct-driven, blood-curdling scream.
XR had apparently entered sleep mode around the same time she’d dozed off; the sound of the scream jolted his AI out of idling and brought him to consciousness. And when he realized, first of all, that he was being screamed at, and second of all, where he was, his immediate reaction was to let off an almost equally blood-curdling scream.
The symbiotic scream feedback continued for about a minute before both parties involved finally fell silent, staring at each other in panic.
Rachel scrambled for the words that were appropriate for this situation. True, it was completely chaste and innocent, but she’d just spent an entire night (how many hours? When, in fact, had she lost consciousness? Now the memories were becoming clearer; they’d both gone way past midnight, their commentary on the show getting increasingly more boisterous until they’d started getting tired) sleeping in the same bed as the man she had a hopeless and ridiculous crush on, and if there was a single part of her epidermis that wasn’t bright pink with a blush right now, she’d have been very surprised. The ice pack was finally spent, so that didn’t help. Her heart seemed about ready to beat itself to death and pop right out through her sternum, thundering in her veins.
As usual, however, XR had words where others would be speechless. “All right, all right,” he said in a tone that might have sounded breathless if he actually needed to breathe, “just calm down. Yes, apparently we fell asleep like that. But what matters here is that neither of us did, said, or meant anything that would make this at all what it looks like from the outside.” And he was adamant about that.
Did? Of course not. Said? Nope. Meant? Depended on your definition and whether or not you were referring to something sexual or something simply stirring to the heart. Rachel shoved that aside. “And…nobody saw,” she added. “We’re alone. It’s fine. It’s fine! This isn’t weird!” Her voice cracked, slipping into falsetto. “IT’S NOT WEIRD!” Trying to drown out that accursed heartbeat.
“No,” XR told her, now perfectly calm and cocky as per usual. “It is most certainly NOT, so you can dial it down a notch.”
She paused. Bit her lip. Said the next words in a low, semi-chilled tone: “You’re the worst pillow in existence.”
“Well, if I’d have known I was going to have an organic try and use me as one, I MIGHT have been generous enough to activate an airbag.”
“I did not TRY – “ Rachel grit her teeth. “Did I go out first or did you?”
“I don’t remember!” XR protested. “All I know is we ran out of commentary, I’m reading an episode title card, next thing you know, I’m off to dreamland with the electric sheep.”
Rachel leaned her head back against the wall. “This never happened.”
“The only thing anyone needs to think I fell asleep on is that mountain of paperwork that’s still sitting on my desk.”
Rachel flinched. “There’s actual paperwork you’re behind on, isn’t there?”
“Well, gee, I happen to be DOWN ONE COPY EDITOR, so yes, there is.”
“I forgot you’d actually have to try and write at at least a third-grade reading level for two weeks.”
“Excuse you; I’m up to a fourth-grade level at LEAST.”
Arguing pettily put them back on their usual level. The awkwardness was subsiding, at least on Rachel’s part. On XR’s? She couldn’t read him. He didn’t seem fazed, but was that really a surprise? The bigger surprise was that he hadn’t tried to make some kind of lewd comment out of this. That, once again, brought Rachel to the eternal conundrum of being glad he didn’t obviously ogle her and yet frustrated that she was the only woman he didn’t.
She glanced over to the clock. “You have to get moving, don’t you?”
“Well, not for another hour and a half,” he admitted. “If you wanted to yell at one more episode for a palate cleanser. I’m just saying.”
A cleansed palate was exactly what Rachel needed right now. “I’m down,” she stated. “Where’d you leave off?”
“Where’d YOU leave off?” “It literally does not matter,” she reminded him. “I’ve seen this show a hundred times, remember?” She took the remote in hand, barely able to hold it steady with the shaking. How had it gotten this bad again? Less than twenty-four hours ago, they were just lounging with each other on the bed like normal friends, and Rachel had felt less jittery and far more comfortable with XR than she could’ve hoped for at this point. Now that had just been erased like a chalkboard swiped with a soaking sponge. She managed to pause the running television: no mean feat.
“The last thing I saw was the title card for Funhouse of Horrors,” XR related.
So she’d gone out first, Rachel realized, but only by a few minutes. Maybe fifteen. Then the topic she should’ve been concerned with immediately sprang to her lips: “Wait. Funhouse of Horrors? THAT episode? Oh, that is NOT an episode you just watch and LEAVE.”
“I feel like you’re implying I can’t handle it.”
“IT’S A TERRIBLE CLIFFHANGER.”
“Please. I eat cliffhangers for breakfast.”
“That…literally makes no sense, XR.” She flicked through the menu. “But it’s your funeral.”
***
The ending of the episode, as Rachel had predicted, left XR staring slack-jawed (or the equivalent when one’s jaw was hinged) at the screen. She stopped the credits roll, letting him gape in silence for a moment as her smirk grew ever smugger.
At last, he managed, “Okay. Who did it?” “Spoilers,” Rachel said mischievously.
“I mean it,” XR urged. “Who killed Oregano?”
“SPOI…LERS.”
“Now you and I both know this is the time when I have to take my leave, as much as I know you’ll miss me.” (You have no idea, Rachel thought.) “Just give me the name of the murderer and I’ll be on my merry way.”
“I’m not telling you,” Rachel replied. “If you wanna know, you’re gonna have to watch it yourself. You’re IN now, so I’m not going to ruin it.”
“Okaaaay, new angle. Obviously, you’re not going to tell me who KILLED Oregano, so at least tell me how he DIED.”
“Nnnnope,” Rachel held out.
“Come on, you can at least confirm if it was the same person who unleashed the genetically modified ghost army.”
“No I can’t.” Rachel was enjoying this far too much.
“Look,” XR practically snapped, “you and I both know that without Oregano’s expertise, none of the rest of them are going to be able to get through that casino-themed torture chamber. Not to mention while they’re all starving to death. And even if they do, Ashe is waiting on the other side with Larxeo, which I have to admit was a REALLY poetic touch, giving her Romyx’s leather jacket like that, REALLY made you feel for the villains for once, but if you’re GOING to leave me on that note, at least tell me WHO…KILLED…OREGANO.”
Rachel made a motion of zipping her mouth shut and locking it with a padlock.
“You’re heartless,” XR accused.
Rachel nodded in affirmation.
“I’m going to be thinking about this all day,” XR continued as he shifted off the bed, treads hitting the floor. “And if this throws me off my game, it’s gonna be your fault.”
She dealt him the most wicked grin she could muster.
“Well, I’m on patrol,” he relented. “What are you gonna do?”
“Probably catch up on those last two eps of Despair Days,” Rachel answered, “then slip back into a coma for another twelve hours. …A NON-NARCOTIC-INDUCED COMA.”
“Well, good luck with that,” XR told her. “My work here is done.”
All she could say at first was “Um, yeah.”
“And with that,” XR declared jovially, “your doting caretaker bids you adieu.” A playful bow.
“Wait,” Rachel said before he could leave.
“Yeeees?”
This was one of those times when it was hard to drop the banter and just be honest with him. Yet it was crucial. “Thanks for visiting. I had a lot of fun.”
“The pleasure was mine,” XR replied with a wink. “You know, we should really hang out more often.”
“For the record, you don’t actually drive me insane to talk to.”
“I knew that, Rach. And, full disclosure, you’re a real pal, got that?”
That was almost more meaningful than an I-love-you. “I got it. Now get out of here before I come to my senses and stop being honest.”
“Consider me gone.”
And then he was. She heard the apartment door open, then click shut, and Rachel was alone, half wondering if she’d hallucinated the past day.
Letting herself smile because he really did like her, after all, even if it wasn’t exactly the way she could’ve asked for, and they had just spent hours upon hours together, she went back to the final two episodes she’d been meaning to watch from the beginning.
The cutoff point ended with exactly as many dangling plot threads as the rest of the show, and that gave Rachel’s mind plenty to grind on as she settled back down into the bed, ready to fall asleep in a more comfortable position and kill as much time as she could that way, now that she had no one to talk to.
A familiar scent twitched at her nostrils, and it suddenly occurred to her that she hadn’t drawn the conclusion of its presence two hours ago. It very faintly smelled like the pillow next to her was smoldering. Of course. XR had been laying on it for hours; his burned-marshmallow scent had transferred right over to it.
Rachel’s left hand grabbed at the pillow, drawing it up to her face. Up close, it definitely smelled like it had a lit match dropped onto it at some point, though the fabric was undamaged, yet again suggesting, bafflingly, that the scent was not the sign of some malfunction. Now Rachel had two choices. She could go full tsuntsun and chuck that pillow to the far end of the room, to be forgotten about until laundry day. Or she could fall asleep hugging it like some kind of perverted stalker. (A taste of his own medicine, hm?) Just putting it back in place was not an option.
Throw it, she told herself. Increase the denial.
What won was the argument was that it wasn’t that creepy, really, not when she didn’t have actual predatory intentions – just to have a sensory input that reminded her of someone she liked being around.
Sleep took her over as she cradled that pillow close, breathing in what could have been the odor of the aftermath of an arson scene.
***
Rachel was awoken by the sound of the doorbell. After the first ring, she waited a moment to see if another barrage of ringing would follow.
Instead, when she didn’t answer, it was a sharp knocking that came at the door. A slight disappointment.
She crept out of bed, calling out tentatively, once more, “WHO IS IT?”. What time was it, anyway? A glance at the clock told her it was ten at night.
“DELIVERY FOR RACHEL SPARKS!” That actually was the voice of the regular deliveryman. All hope was doused. Then again, receiving a package was a pretty rare event. Rachel couldn’t imagine what the delivery was. As covert as she’d tried to make her antidepressant acquisition, she hadn’t scheduled anything for this time.
Prying open the door, she saw the deliveryman smiling his biggest at her; did this guy seriously mean it every time he smiled like that, or was it a façade to hide an ennui with his job? She hoped it was the former. “What’s up?” she asked.
“Rachel!” the deliveryman greeted. “Special delivery just for you! It was just sent out this evening!” He extended a clipboard.
“I, uh…” Rachel gave him a sheepish look. “Can’t really use my right hand right now. Can we just do the retinal scan and call it good?”
“Sure thing!” He acquiesced; a mild laser made Rachel’s eye twitch but confirmed her identity enough for the package to be handed over. It was stuffed into a bubble-wrap-lined manila envelope, barely small enough to be contained by its manila skin. Rachel had a strong guess that it was a tape based on that. Goodness knew she’d tried to mail tapes that way before. Who hadn’t?
She told the deliveryman thank you, and he gave her a jovial “Haaaave a nice day!” before gallivanting off into the night, hopefully not to stay out too late making other deliveries.
Rachel shut and locked the door, bringing the envelope back to the bed to open it up as best she could with one hand (which turned out to be a bit of an ordeal; her teeth got involved). As she’d thought, it was a tape: unlabeled. That could mean anything from an anonymous death threat to a video will informing her she’d inherited two million unibucks from a great-uncle she’d never heard of.
She inserted it into the player, tuning the television to the proper reception signal and clicking the tape into play.
It began with a countdown of a “3…2…” on a spinning gray circle that had obviously been added in post-production. The next thing Rachel knew, she was looking at a view of Buzz Lightyear, Mira Nova, and Booster Munchapper on a desert plain, all three of them smiling in her direction.
“AAAAAAND WE ARE ROLLING!” XR’s voice declared; Rachel realized he was the one filming, probably right through his eyes. “Spotlight’s on you, people! Let’s hear it with FEELING!”
“Hi, Rachel!” Mira began, waving.
“How’re ya doing?” Booster asked before realizing, “Wait…you can’t answer. Sorry.”
“It’s just not the same without you, ranger,” Buzz added. “But thanks to XR here, today, you get to sit back, relax, and keep healing while we do the dirty work.”
“And you get a front-row seat to all the action!” Booster agreed. “And boy, is this a big one today.”
“Way, WAY bigger than Tanker Alley,” Mira added. “Sorry you have to miss it, but, then again, this also means you don’t have to have your life threatened today, so…silver lining?”
“It’s life-threatening indeed,” Buzz stated somberly. “We’re on a mission to stop Zurg from engineering a duplicate of the Motzrothian senator and using his guise to order lax labor laws – “
“Come on!” XR urged. “Can’t you make this all a little more DRAMATIC? The EVIL EMPEROR ZURG has accessed superior cyborg cloning technology that, in the wrong hands, could bring the entire galaxy to ruination, AND IT HAPPENS TO BE IN THE WRONG HANDS! Only the bravest team in all of Star Command has any hope whatsoever of stopping him! And the key to Zurg’s destruction lies with one man in particular: the bravest, most intelligent, and most ATTRACTIVE robot to ever cross his path – “
“Okay, we’re stopping there,” Mira interrupted.
That was when a hover platform bearing Zurg floated down from the sky behind the team, and the evil emperor himself pointed accusingly: “LIGHTYEAR! So you and your team of has-beens decided to show up after all! It’s about time! I was expecting you thirty minutes ago! Does punctuality mean NOTHING to you hero types? Oh, well, no matter. There’s still PLENTY of time for you to hear about how I’ve factored your demise into my newest fiendish plan!”
“Yeah, why don’t you tell us what you’re planning to do?” Mira asked innocently.
“Gladly,” Zurg told her. “For, you see, I want you to have a chance to DREAD the excruciating pain I have in store for you.”
In a low whisper that Rachel knew only she could hear, XR narrated, “A classic gambit. Our heroes trick the overly egotistical villain into bragging about exactly what he plans to do to them…” He’d begun rolling, moving gingerly away from Zurg. “…giving their secret weapon, i.e. me, a chance to find the evil device he’s planted on this planet, disable it before he notices, and then – “
“OH, NO, YOU ABSOLUTELY DON’T!” Zurg suddenly bellowed mid-monologue. The camera whirled; Zurg was pointing directly at XR. “You think you can get your ROBOT to slip away while I’m instilling dread!” Suddenly he’d zoomed right up before XR, filling the screen. “Just for that, I’m upgrading your torture to the DELUXE package. Intense pain, simultaneous psychological torment, and I get a smoothie. You’ll WISH you were going through your friends’ basic torture package.”
“Speaking of my friends,” XR said cockily, leaving it at that.
“Wait – “ Zurg spun a 180, and XR peeked around him to capture on film that while Zurg was distracted threatening XR, the other three had scattered. “WHHHHHAT?”
“Man, is this guy a moron,” XR commented.
“WHAT DID YOU JUST CALL ME?” Zurg screamed, turning back to XR.
“To put it in context,” XR explained, “I’m filming this for a friend, hence the narration.”
“Wait a minute,” Zurg realized. “Is it the blonde ranger? The one whose name I can never remember? Because I NOTICED she wasn’t here today, but I wasn’t about to SAY anything. I was rather hoping she’d perished when I wasn’t looking, though. But maybe it’s better this way. I mean, now I do get the pleasure of killing her myself. Eventually. Whenever she shows – NO. ENOUGH STALLING!”
He knocked XR into the sand before taking off to pursue the others.
Rachel watched the entire mission play out, from Zurg thinking he had the upper hand to his eventual foiling and his rocketing away, crying, “CURSE YOU, BUZZ LIGHTYEEEEAAAR!”. Rachel did in fact wish she were there to live out the magic herself, but really, this was the next best thing.
“All right, team,” Buzz directed, looking to the wreckage of Zurg’s cyborg cloning device (which admittedly did make Rachel curious as to how exactly it worked). “Time to get this evidence wrapped up and confiscated before some other miscreant comes along and – “
“Oh, you think you’re gonna pack this all up and ship it off, do ya?” a deep voice broke in. XR’s camera swiveled immediately to observe a familiar figure holding up the device’s energy core in one hand and hovering the other over his chest plate. “I got a better idea. I sell this back to Zurg for the big bucks, and whichever ones of ya I don’t finish off here, he gets to later.”
“TORQUE!” Buzz, Mira, and Booster chorused.
“Now, how’s THAT for a plot twist?” XR cried triumphantly.
Team Lightyear was soon engaged in a battle against the Torque Armada, which was at least seven strong – Rachel kept losing track of exactly how many duplicates were on the field. At one point, one of the Torques was advancing upon XR, declaring, “Now, you, baby, you’re some high-tech stuff. I could use your components.”
“Hold on,” XR replied, which halted Torque in his tracks. “Could you say that again, but a little louder, with more clarity? And try to sound a little more threatening. You’re the villain here, after all.”
“Huh?” Torque regarded XR with confusion. “Hey, wait…you filmin’ this?”
“You may have noticed we’re one short today,” XR informed him. “I’m sending this back to her so she can be here without being here, if you catch my drift.”
“Oh, this is for Blondie, ain’t it?” Torque realized. “We-he-hell…” He drew himself upright, puffed out his chest, and stood at an angle. “Be sure to get my good side.”
“Any well-wishes for our out-of-commission teammate?” XR asked.
“Yeah, I got one,” Torque affirmed. “Hey you, Blondie, you keep on keepin’ on, ya hear? Even when the chips are down and it seems hopeless, ya gotta keep fightin’ the good fight. For instance, you’re probably gonna feel real down after I STRIP YOUR LITTLE ROBOT CAMERAMAN FOR PARTS.”
That prompted XR to whirl about and head in the opposite direction as quickly as he could, crying out, “THAAAAAT’S ENOUGH OF TORQUE’S CLOSE-UP!”
Rachel couldn’t help but giggle. After all, she knew he (and the entire team, for that matter) had come out of this okay, or the tape wouldn’t have gotten edited and sent back to her.
After Torque was subdued, the camera suddenly cut to a view from atop a high plateau; down below, in the desert, four figures were battling. Rachel recognized them as Buzz, Mira, Booster, and someone she really should’ve expected at this point.
“So, it turns out that our viewing audience was one hundred percent correct,” XR narrated. “Zurg, Torque, and NOS-4-A2 did in fact all strike on the same day. Now, since NOSy is a particularly tough enemy with a sordid history with Star Command, I thought the epic showdown was best filmed from more of a wide angle bordering on bird’s-eye. After all, I don’t want to get cl – YOU don’t want to miss a second of this action! As usual, of course, our heroes are getting the upper hand, and – where’d he go? No, seriously, where is he?”
NOS-4-A2 had disappeared from the battlefield, and Rachel could see that Buzz, Mira, and Booster were all exchanging shrugs and searching for him in a panic.
All of a sudden, NOS-4-A2’s face filled the camera, a sly grin plastered across his face. “Playing a little game of hide-and-seek, are we, little one? Hm?” he chuckled. “I do so enjoy the thrill of the chase.”
The last thing Rachel heard before the visuals cut out was XR yelping “OKAYYOUFOUNDMEYOUWONNOWLEAVEMEALONE – “
The immediate next scene was of NOS-4-A2, powered down and clamped into iron bands that bound his limbs and prevented him from spreading his wings. “I never doubted for a minute we’d get him,” XR proclaimed. “Of course, it was my idea to play the sitting duck and draw him in so the others could make their move. YOU’RE WELCOME!”
“I thought it was us who saved you,” Booster said in legitimate confusion. “You were REALLY scared – “
“WAS NOT,” XR argued.
Mira chuckled. “I think we’ll leave Rachel to make that call. She probably knows EXACTLY what happened on that subject.”
Rachel did know exactly what had happened. He was a fraidy-cat moron. He was her personal favorite fraidy-cat moron.
One more shot of the team grouped up, smiling and waving. “Sorry again you had to miss that, Rachel!” Booster cried.
“I hope you’re feeling better!” Mira added. “And I hope you had fun watching XR get chased around by all the bad guys!”
“That is an INCREDIBLE oversimplification of what happened,” XR argued.
“Lookin’ forward to when you can join us on the adventure again,” Buzz concluded. “Now you get some rest, Rachel.”
“And so concludes another epic episode of The Adventures of Team Ligh – no, wait,” XR mused, “there has to be a better title for this. Star Command’s Ranger Lightyear? Buzz Lightyear and the Rangers. No, wait, BUZZ LIGHTYEAR OF ST – actually, scrap that: THE ADVENTURES OF XR, ROBOT RANGER.”
The giggle that came out of Rachel’s throat was riding on a snort.
“Aaaaand SCENE!” With that final declaration, the tape ended.
Rachel made a childishly high squeal. He’d really thought to tape the mission for her so she wouldn’t miss out. She could hardly have been happier at that point.
Way past midnight, again. Time to get back to sleep. Cuddling that burned-marshmallow-smell pillow even tighter; who was around to judge?
***
The doorbell rang.
Rachel had lost all sense of time. There was sleep, there was the state of waking, and there was the doorbell to facilitate the transition from one to the other.
The doorbell again. And again. And again –
Perhaps she was a little too eager to leap out of bed. Her shoulder twinged, reminding her that she had to take it slow. Without even asking who was there, she opened the door.
XR sped right past her once again, parking in the midst of the living room and swiveling to face her. “How’s the patient?” he asked, his seemingly chipper smile betraying a hint of hidden frustration. “Feeling better? Resting up? Getting her strength back? On the mend? WHO KILLED OREGANO?”
“So THAT’S what this is about,” Rachel laughed. “And you did SUCH a good job of not letting it show that cliffhanger was bothering you in the tape.”
“There’s a time for business and a time to resolve cliffhangers,” XR explained. “So are we going to or not?”
“I am SO looking forward to seeing your face when you see this revelation,” Rachel said with a grin.
“Ten minutes for popcorn and I’m there,” XR told her. Rachel was at first flattered again that he was concerned with supplying her with food until she remembered that he continually, bafflingly forgot that he couldn’t eat food. It always was rather humorous to watch him try.
They settled on the bed in their previous configuration. Rachel had discreetly put the pillow back where it had been, feeling almost sneaky in hiding how she’d cradled it in her good arm for the past two nights. XR had at least had the presence of mind to tote a second ice pack – or, perhaps, at this stage, it was a little more than “at least.” Rachel shoveled a fistful of the popcorn that XR was seconds away from remembering the hard way that he couldn’t eat into her own mouth, clicking the next episode of Bulletproof Hearts into play.
When the mystery was solved (“AN ELEVATOR? Also, I was SURE Castella was behind this one!”) and the action had died down a bit, Rachel asked, “What was your excuse this time?”
“Well, without you to manage the spreadsheets,” XR explained, “we have a huge backlog of spreadsheets that need to be organized. Which I took it upon myself to do. And that’s what you’re going to tell Nebula if he calls and asks where I am.”
Why would he call here to ask where you are? Rachel wondered. It’s not like anyone outside the team would draw a connection between me and you. Then, suddenly stricken with dread: “XR, these are fake spreadsheets you made up to get a day off, right? They don’t actually exist, right? WE DON’T ACTUALLY HAVE A BACKLOG OF SPREADSHEETS I’M GONNA NEED TO DO WHEN I GET BACK ON DUTY, RIGHT?”
XR was dead silent, staring ahead at the screen.
“XR. DO…THESE…SPREADSHEETS…EXIST?”
His head swiveled to face her, his eyes appearing half-lidded with emerald light (really, Rachel couldn’t be the only person in the world who noticed how many colors his eye-lights could be, could she?), and he said in the least reassuring tone possible, “SPOILERS.”
***
For the next two weeks, some days, he was there, and it was a neverending stream of snark at the television. Bulletproof Hearts was finished –
“Am I supposed to feel satisfied or disappointed about that finale? Because both of those are gunning for it.”
“I dunno what the crew intended, but that’s EVERY fan’s reaction.”
Despair Days knocked out –
“So does Spice ever, you know, join the actual main plot?”
“Not yet. But there ARE rumors of an official next season of BH in production. Nothing confirmed, of course, but – “
“And you just HAD to get me to the point where that would actually affect me, didn’t you?”
And after that, just whatever they could find that either was relatively interested in watching, or, more appropriately, interested in yelling and/or laughing at in between synchronized slurps of diet orange soda and 0W SAE J300.
Some days, he wasn’t there, but at the end of the day, there was always, always a tape chronicling whatever expedition Rachel had missed that day, complete with requests of well-wishes from whoever XR crossed paths with. So far, he’d managed to accumulate:
· A sullen “Don’t die” from Dr. Furbanna.
· A tirade from Eon about how fragile primitive lifeforms were, and how he couldn’t imagine living in a body where stressing out a single shoulder could put you out for more than an hour.
· A “Gargantia wishes its hero well!” from Ambassador Major.
· A “GARGANTIA SPITS ON YOUR NAME!” from Monumentus.
· A gruff “You better be staying in bed, ranger. Oh, and get well soon.” from Commander Nebula, with a chorus of chirps from the LGMs in the background.
· An “Isn’t that the blonde one? Okay, yeah, feel better!” from Petra.
· A “GOOD. I mean, oh, yes, of course, I have no reason to NOT want you pursuing me!” from Rentwhistle Swack.
· An “XL is destroying everything, and you want me to say WHAT?” from Savy SL-4.
· An “I’m trying to destroy everything, and you want me to say WHAT?” from XL.
· An “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?” from Warp Darkmatter while Evan Aries discreetly made a heart shape with his hands in the background, aiming it at Rachel with a sheepish expression.
The more the days progressed, Rachel thought, she really ought to lighten up on calling XR a dumbass. He’d more than made up for being the reason for her sprain in the first place. This while chastely cuddling her pillow that now smelled like it had been tossed on a barbecue grill.
***
Finally, she regained the mobility in her shoulder, with only a light tenderness to remind her of the damage, and that would fade soon. Medical cleared her for duty, and she reunited with the rest of Team Lightyear in the mess hall.
“Good to have you back, Rachel!” Buzz just about gave her a hearty clap on the right shoulder – then remembered and repositioned himself to deal the affectionate blow to her left instead. “It just isn’t the same without all five of us on the team. It’ll be good to have XR back, too.” He shot a glance toward XR. “Not that I don’t approve of you taking time off to spend with Rachel, since…you know…”
“It WAS his fault she got hurt,” Mira said coldly.
“Hey now!” XR protested. “We talked about this!”
“I was going to say because he’s a good friend,” Buzz finished. “And that’s what good friends do. Not that we’re not ALL good friends, but we couldn’t have taken the entire team off the field, and XR was the one who volunteered – “
“I getcha,” Rachel said with a nod. “Don’t worry. I’m not gonna hold up your analyst anymore. Provided he doesn’t sprain anything else on me.”
“I make no promises,” XR replied, “but I will try my DARNEDEST. Yes, I said DARNEDEST, so you know I’m serious.”
“How’d chilling out without us go, by the way?” Mira asked, and Rachel could see the question she was really asking written on her face.
“Yeah!” Booster echoed, obviously picking up the same thread. “Did anything SPECIAL happen while you two were hanging out?”
As Rachel, positioned behind XR, frantically made “please no” gestures at the gossipy pair, slicing her hands through the air, XR replied, “As a matter of fact, yes.”
Even Rachel froze, wondering what he was referring to and hoping against hope - “Rachel ruined my life by getting me addicted to her stupid show and now I can’t actually not care about what’s going to happen next season.”
Rachel’s heart restarted beating.
XR swiveled to look up to her; “You’re SURE we don’t have an airdate on that, by the way?”
“Not until they finish Despair Days,” Rachel asserted.
“Yes,” XR snarked, “because we need to focus on this side plot that has NOTHING to do with the remnants of Nort’s plan, has NO connection to Ashe and Braigel picking up the pieces with the relics, and won’t even ADDRESS the fact that Spice and Red are related and whether that means Spice has the golden eyes. I HATE that you made me actually know what I’m talking about.”
“BUT…IF SPICE AND VERTHANDI BECOME CANON …”
“Then a thousand fanfictions will be written,” XR said with a smirk, “and it will be that much easier to find your new pen name.”
God forbid. That would lead him to GEAvillain and a whole can of worms that needed to stay shut. “You’ll never find me,” she said cheekily, covering up the panic associated with the hypothetical that he might, in fact, figure out the identity of JCMotzroth. Changing the subject by force, she looked Buzz in the eye. “Sooooo. How are things with Bonnie?”
“We, uh…” Buzz rubbed the back of his neck nervously. “We kinda…sorta…didn’t work out.”
“Oh,” Rachel replied. She’d seen that one coming a mile off, but that didn’t lessen the pain for him, and she knew it. “I’m sorry.”
“No, no,” Buzz explained, “I was the one who called it off. There was just no spark there. Pun not intended. Anyway, you were right. I shouldn’t have said yes. Only reason I did was because I didn’t wanna let her down, but it just…well, it didn’t feel right after our history! I should’ve just listened to you – “
Rachel’s stomach began to stir. Being right wasn’t the victory she’d hoped it would be. First of all, it still couldn’t have been easy on Buzz to figure out the relationship was going nowhere. Second, she’d almost put stock in him and Bonnie changing her mind. If Bonnie could turn Buzz’s interest her way, certainly that meant there wasn’t any harm in Rachel putting the subject on the table regarding a certain someone else.
A certain someone else who chose that moment to say “And WHEN are you going to learn that Rachel and I are always, always, ALWAYS right?”
That broke the spell. “HEY!” Rachel yelled down at XR. “You weren’t with me on that one at ALL!”
“Yes, I was,” XR argued. “I definitely didn’t want those two to date. I believe I made that PERFECTLY clear.”
“Yeah, because you wanted Bonnie for YOURSELF,” Rachel argued. “Not because you thought she was making Buzz uncomfortable!”
“I knew she was making him uncomfortable, which is why I so GRACIOUSLY stepped in to divert her attention – “
“Bull SHIT.”
“It’s all back to normal around here, all right,” Mira said teasingly.
Heading out of the mess hall, XR told Rachel, “You know, now that you’ve made a diehard Bulletproof Hearts addict out of me, I have to pay you back.”
“What do YOU have that you could POSSIBLY get me into?” Rachel asked.
“I bet I could make a gambler out of you,” XR teased, knowing full well that had a snowball’s chance in the sun’s core of happening.
“Yeah, no,” Rachel told him. “Keep dreaming.”
“Wanna bet? Ten unibucks says you get into it.”
“I’ll take tha – OHHHH. I SEE WHAT YOU ARE TRYING TO DO. AND IT IS NOT GOING TO WORK. NO BET.”
They glared at each other, as was customary, before their expressions softened, allowing each other a smile.
Far be it from Rachel to sacrifice a good friendship over feelings she had no business even having. All the same, it felt sour within to know that she could never tell him. She wasn’t about to become his Bonnie Lepton. And she wasn’t about to be his mistake.
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hi!!! you're is super great and has helped w/ selfshipping and my own confidence a lot so i just wanted to for advice on monogamy/polyamory. i have three—techincally—main f/os from three different medias. it's like i'm dating them (actually it's exactly like i'm dating them, only i know they're fictional—which isn't a jab at anyone, just my personal feelings towards said char.)
but i’m not a polyamorous person. actually being in a polyamorous relationship makes me uncomfortable. i just wanted to know if you had any advice on how to handle the situation. i still want to date the three of them, but i don’t know what to do. i already have s/is in their own canon/media, but i kinda want them all to coexist??? i don’t even know if that makes sense sorry.
hello! i think i understand where you’re coming from. i myself have a small handful of f/os, and while i sometimes focus on more than one of them at a time, i’ve never really seen it as a poly scenario. i see my ships as being completely separate from each other, and for me, that’s all there is to it! it’s a bit like having several AUs that exist simultaneously but don’t intersect, if that makes any sense. (i apologize if this entire answer is a bit abstract; it’s hard to explain things like this.)
as for finding a way to have your ships coexist, it really just comes down to you and your own imagination. it’s all fictional, after all, so there’s no reason you can’t come up with as many scenarios as you want to explore different possibilities—again, like AUs. perhaps all your ships exist in alternate timelines within one multiverse, or perhaps your different self-inserts can communicate with each other, or perhaps you can jump between universes at will. these are just examples off the top of my head! as with everything fictional, it’s all about finding something that feels right to you. above all else, just have fun with it! i hope this helps at all!
- mod sun
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Rambling about a Geist!AU for Team Rak under the cut, I guess. . . . (it’s selfship related so it’s not going in the main tag haha).
Geist as in Geist: the Sin-Eaters, which is a line in the Chronicles of Darkness tabletop roleplaying game. It’s about people coming back from the dead with an eldritch-almost-death-god burrowed into their soul. (It’s the splat for both ghost stories and zombie stories haha)
Bam -- ( Torn / Advocate) I imagine some people try to push him onto the path of the reaper, but the y-splats for Geist are a little confusing. Still, since he came back from the dead the second time, he feels responsible for helping other dead things find peace. He’s the one who notices the haunting at the library or the weird things happening around the park or what not, and insists on investigating.
Bam actually died and came back when he was a baby; he just didn’t realize he was a certain definition of undead until Rachel “killed” him, and instead of dying, he experienced the death of someone else and woke up. He would have assumed he’d just got lucky if Hwa Ryun hadn’t had the news on when he woke up on her couch several hours later. His geist has been silent, however -- all he really ever gets from them is a sense of static. In essence, he’s been bonded with his geist for so long, and from such an early age, that the difference between him and his geist is very blurred; he’s a kid who was isolated for most of his life, but he’s also the spirit of an ancient grudge between a long dead king and a cursed woman. He’d like to know more about his geist, though, and recently has started trying to learn, though picking up the pieces after so long is difficult.
(In this AU, he might very well not actually be Arlen’s son, so much as he’d be the son of Arlen’s reincarnation, or descended from Arlen by several generations. They’re small tweaks, but the timeline in the tower and the way time works for geist don’t line up very well otherwise.)
Rachel was probably his babysitter/tutor when he was younger; he’s the “young heir” to a business that’s really a front for a criminal power play, and Rachel was the only person who treated him as a person instead of as a force of nature. Technically, Hwa Ryun has also been a part of his life for a long time, but that just serves to make Rachel stand out further in his head -- Rachel treated him like a person, Hwa Ryun expected him to act like the heir to this corporation the entire time. However, Rachel eventually tried to escape the hold the company had on her (and possibly her family), which resulted in a struggle that ultimately “killed” Bam, and got Rachel even further in debt to the company. . . .
In this AU the reason Rachel doesn’t like Bam is very clear-cut and decided. Bam also gets over her a bit more quickly because he’s able to see that he’s done her wrong from an earlier moment -- Rachel is forcefully separated from him, and given more dangerous work to do, so Bam resolves not to get involved with people for a while and takes on the burden of guilt. Rachel resents him and taunts him whenever she gets the chance, but they don’t see each other much.
Kun -- ( Silent / Bonepicker ) The son of a very successful business mogul; his father specializes in blackmail and hair products. Recently, the company has also been branching out into things like skin care and make up, but A. A. grew being a bit of an experiment for different kinds of hair dye and shampoos and conditioners and hair spray and hair oils. . . . His hair in tower of god is fantastic. In this AU it’s even more meticulously cared for and managed.
Originally, Kun’s mother managed to make a deal that would have allowed her eldest daughter to inherit a decent portion of the new make-up industry, but Kun rebelled. He was adamant that his father had “another daughter” hidden away -- a girl about his age named Maria. She would appear in the house during the night, and Kun fought with his sister about whether he was making things up regularly, and he was furious that both his parents sided with his sister all the time. He ultimately set out to prove Maria’s existence, and ended up falling into a deserted well for several nights. It’s debatable whether this was according to Maria’s plan or not -- she was there when he died, and she brought him back, and after that point he stopped talking about her. Things between his mother and father went south after that, and his sister blames him for losing their inheritance, which was ultimately divided between Hachuling and another member of their family.
His relationship with Maria is such that he’s reluctant to join a Krewe (which is basically like a supernaturally founded religious cult? It’s complicated, but basically it involves at least three geists joining their souls together in a ceremony, and then convincing people that their way is the enlightened way; the more people join their cult, the more supernatural clout they have), fearing that there would be some judgement in that regard. Maria herself claims to be both his “past life lover” and “unborn twin sister” -- she says that they died in each other’s arms, and that she followed him into this life, but the circumstances of their birth prevented her from being born. Eduan has prevented A.A. from investigating this, and A.A. takes this as evidence on it’s own -- he’s since moved out of that household (even though Eduan hasn’t been sticking around much anyway) and in with Bam & Hwa Ryun (who were rooming together for a while before Kun showed up and turned their lives upside down. Or at least turned Bam’s life upside down. Hwa Ryun’s hasn’t really changed.)
Rak -- (? ? ?) I’m never really sure what to do with Rak in these AUs, other than making him a spirit (since spirits are pretty much a Thing in all game lines, except like. . . Vampire. And I could probably make Rak pretty well in Vampire, now that I think about it! He’d probably be a gangrel and and older vampire that’s taken on more animalistic features because of his age, but I’d have to flip through the book again. Nosferatu would also be a nice option, but gangrel fits better. . . . ) And making him a spirit isn’t bad per se, but if feels shallow to have the other two be from the main splat while Rak is not ;;. However, humanized versions of Rak never really feel solid to me. . . I might try it out again soon to see if I can come up with something I like, but it just doesn’t feel like Rak if he’s not a talking alligator. . . . however, with Geist, if I could find a way to make him a Kerebos of some sort, that would be pretty interesting, and he’d still be tied up specifically to this setting. Maybe a Kerebos who Bam and Kun ended up tricking before, and now he’s followed them to the living world out of sheer tenacity. . .
I’m pretty sure Kerebos are supposed to be bound to the underworld, but I feel like making an exception for Rak could be fun. So he’s an escaped guardian of the underworld that Kun and Bam have to keep ordering clothes for so he can go out and enjoy the living world for the first time in forever. . . . he’d probably be a lot like Iskander in that regard, because I don’t know how long he’d have been dead for in order to be a Kerebos, but I imagine it would be a really long time. Hwa Ryun has the hardest time adjusting to him, though, because she’s trying to get other things done, and keeps getting pulled in to deal with a giant humanoid crocodile on the subway or whatever, and it’s pissing her off.
#ghosttown au#i'm trying to work all of this out for Reasons#there's a bit of kun/maria mentioned here though
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