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softkuna · 4 years ago

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Toji Fushiguro || Toy || Fic

The Sukuna one had me like ✨✨✨ Now I must ask, can you- a toji x fem reader and him seeing Gojo eyeing up what's his and her responding to it and then toji being like oh hell no and basically railing her as punishment (degrading kink please it makes me jello) you don't have to write it if your not comfortable btw take your time and stay safe.

Content ║ Toji Fushiguro x Fem Insert. Toji’s shoulder pressed into the wall with such a force the damn thing could’ve dented. Arms crossed tensely against the broad puff of his chest. His teeth ground together, the sound of squeaking canines reverberating in his mind. Toji was seething. For a man with the physical prowess of a god, his tolerance was about as thin as a wet napkin. A wet napkin this woman decided to poke a well-manicured finger into.

Count ║ 1,311 words.

Consider ║ NSFW. Degradation Kink. Objectification. Female Insert (she/her). Alcohol. Grammar issues. Basic degeneracy.

Creator ║ So this is the first NSFW thing I have done like this ;v;. I’m not sure if this hit the mark for ya Anon, but hopefully it’ll do until I can get some more practice. It took a little while since I wasn’t exactly sure what I was doing. Honestly this just feels subpar gomen. Enjoy jealous Toji, though -finger guns-.

The club was barely lit with black light and neon strewn about the solid concrete walls in seemingly random intervals. A particularly bright hot pink one cast across her collarbone, dowsing the tops of her breasts deliciously in contrast to the black latex dress. As much as Toji would like to shove her against that very wall, she had a job to do. For him. And he regretted it.

She was pushing her luck when she approached the table with a certain sway to her hips. Gojou peered around the tinted sunglasses, brow piqued in interest. She flashed a smile, smoothly setting a large bottle of some random high percentage alcohol onto the table. Sliding into the booth next to Satoru, the woman leaned a hand on his leg, the other moving to playfully snap the strap of a birthday hat under his chin, “I hear it’s someone’s birthday?”

His head tilted up along with the corners of his lips, “Guilty as charged. Are you my present, doll? Always heard the hostesses here were the best,” His voice purred against the thrum of the bass. She tucked hair behind her ear, eyes flickering back to the ravenette with a dangerous composition. The corner of her mouth twitched up at the obvious frustration resonating in the man. He couldn’t touch her. Couldn’t even dream of it if he wanted any semblance of information on this guy. It was the perfect opportunity to test a theory. Toji was the jealous type.

Toji’s shoulder pressed into the wall with such a force the damn thing could’ve dented. Arms crossed tensely against the broad puff of his chest. His teeth ground together, the sound of squeaking canines reverberating in his mind. Toji was seething. For a man with the physical prowess of a god, his tolerance was about as thin as a wet napkin. A wet napkin this woman decided to poke a well-manicured finger into.

He slammed down a shot, the burn at the back of his throat accompanying the burn of his own gaze. She wasn’t anything to him aside from an in. Yet somehow, the not-so-shaman made it a point to speak with her at least once a week, which usually lead into fucking her like a play thing. The lay was just as good as the information she could pry out of loose mouths. Immaculate. This go around, he needed information on someone in particular. Someone who just so happened to be here with a group. Someone who decided it would be a good idea to get a little handsy with his toy.

“Y’know,” Satoru murmured, “’s pretty sad to be alone in bed for my birthday.” Chilled pads of his fingers rested at the back of her neck. His gaze was hungry and she was a full course meal. Just his type. Perfect shape, perfect charm, perfect headrush. Her hand cupped his ear, whispering something his buzzing mind couldn’t fully piece together against the dense music.

She kept up the sweet act despite not getting a lick of information. The only dirt she dug up was that he could finish half a handle before getting buzzed. By the end of the night, Gojou’s hands squeezed at her thigh like he did her last string of patience.

The last thing Toji saw was the exchange of cards.

As the black-clad hostess passed by Toji, her hand trailed along the muscles of his chest, stiletto nails pressing just slightly into him. He followed close behind until they got to their regular spot. A private room tucked into the corner of the club. Commonly used for rich men thirsting to empty their wallets on a good lap dance. It was sound proofed, dimly lit, and somehow hot pink velvet was a prime design choice to set a steamy mood.

She crossed her arms, gaze hard as the door shut, “So, I’ve got bad new. He didn’t let a word slip-“ The sentence stopped as soon as it began.

“So doll’s got a sense of humor, huh?” His voice held an edge to match the snide smirk flashing over pointed canines. She knew exactly what was up and oh was it a dangerously delectable sight. One that made her cunt throb on nothing but adrenaline. The crease of his brow, the way his lips set into that hairpin curl, the tensing of each thick muscle along his arm – all of it leaving a sense of satisfaction in the pit of her stomach. Theory confirmed. He took a step closer; she didn’t shrink away. A lost challenge if he’d say so himself.

A large calloused hand shoved her onto cushions of the booth, catching her open mouth in his own with a bruising force. The man wasted no time with his prodding tongue, tasting the sweetness of peppermint and lapping it up while fending off her own slick muscle. A hand snaked into the roots of her perfectly done hair, white-knuckling just at the base of the skull. With a sharp yank, her head was yanked back, allowing break for air. Smug and breathless, she chimed, “Jealous?”

Toji blew air out in a single blackened laugh, “I’m not one to share my toys.” Teeth connected to her lips, rolling the flesh then moving to her throat. Purple marked his territory trailing down. The heat of his breath tickled the space directly next to her ear, “Now, you’re going to beg for me to forgive you. Make myself clear, slut?” Toji’s grip on her tightened, “Or is doll better for something getting used?” A rough tug to the back of her hair triggered a low moan from her heaving chest. After so many sessions, she knew he didn’t really want an answer. He wanted a reason go harder.

The hand once in her hair now gripped her jaw, keeping her gaze on him, “Answer me, toy. Or do I need to pull a string to make that cock-obsessed mouth move?” On que, free digits wrapped around the gusset of her thong, second knuckle just grazing the entrance of her heat before he pulled the sodden fabric taught, letting it snap back to place. The impact triggered another empty clench and gasp. Her hips writhed, a sappy pout puffing the bitten lips. More.

Toji maintained her heavy-lidded stare as he brought the knuckle to his lips. He watched as her own parted when his tongue swept up the sweetness collected at the joint. The way her hips rose to match the zipper’s height, the lock of her teeth on her finger, the desperation in her eyes – all of it made his stiffened cock twitch against her adorably hopeless grinding, “Looks like my toy is broken. Guess I’ll just fuck the apology out of it then.”

A wicked grin whipped onto his handsome face. Her mouth opened in rebuttal, only to get interrupted, “This is to teach a lesson, toy. What did you do to deserve the prep?” The gravel in his tone grew slightly dark, “Couldn’t even get the dirt I paid for.” His long digits did work past the gusset, slipping over her entrance, gathering the arousal, “Look how wet you already are for me.” A heated coil pressed in her at the words. She knew what was coming now and every inch of her craved it.

In what seemed to be a single motion, jeans and boxers were torn down. Her dress was hiked up with a satisfying peel, thong quite literally ripped off and thrown to the ground before she was flipped so that her back was pressed against his chest. Sturdy, veined arms wrapped at the backs of her thighs and under her knees. Truly, she was a doll for him to pleasure himself on and he made it a point to do so.

Toji lowered her so that the thick tip of his length pressed against her heart-beating heart. Her walls fluttered around him as he slid in. “For a broken toy, you’re pretty damn tight for me - ready to be played with. Get used- fuck.” Amusement broke through as she bit back a breathless sigh. His cock filled her easily, slick sliding down his shaft and pooling at the base. As he fully sheathed himself, he craned his neck forward, lips pressing at the shell of her ear, “Now, I want to hear you beg, bitch.” With that, the man snaked back and up, setting a relentless pace from the beginning. The sound of skin slamming into wettened skin filling the room along with the aroma of arousal.

She was stubborn. He was tireless. They’d both cum before the apology even had a chance to.

#🥩 .ask #🥩#🥩 .fic #🍺#🍺.ask #jujutsu kaisen #jjk #jujutsu kaisen x reader #jjk x reader #toji x reader #toji fushiguro #fushiguro toji #satoru gojou #gojou satoru #gojo satoru

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celestialmango · 3 years ago

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Unwilling prey, homebrew humanoid mimic pred, fear play, soft vore, safe vore, fatal implied (for your party), reader insert, DnD type setting

🥭🍡🥭🍡🥭🍡🥭🍡🥭🍡🥭🍡🥭🍡🥭

Your heart pounds in your chest and you're gasping for breath as you lean against the cave wall and collapse, breathing hard you can help but think how stupid you were to agree to follow your group members as they wandered off from the main group and from the designated trail to explore, you're lvl ones, it's bad enough you guys got literally sucked into the campaign you were playing, DM included, then they wanted to split the party, but they wouldn't listen to you when you expressed how bad of an idea it was to explore an unknown dungeon if you split the party. Unlucky for you that had them decide that nobody was gonna pair up with you and now you're in this mess.

You had bumped into one of the DM's homebrew monster races a fucking humanoid mimic based on your DM's idea of "ok how about a mimic but this type of mimic is sexy and can be born from other races though still be full mimic but they at first they look completely normal and can shapeshift only the lower half of their body and ears with only minor changes to the appearance of their torso like if they try to turn into a fully scaled mer they're successful with their ears and tail but only get a few scales on their face and chest, and like, they take the abilities of the creatures they turn into and they can be any alignment"

And then your remember what else your dm said "I'm going to use them in vore campaign as a pred" a predator species, this is the vore campaign, what the fuck do you do now?

Your palm covers your mouth as you inhale sharply, your DM still controls certain aspects, you still have to role against the DM though they're trapped with the villain of the campaign they can still tell you when to roll and you can still tell them your role with some form of dice telepathy you don't really understand.

when the party split the DM made you make stealth checks when you entered the dungeon, you failed and as a bard the DM had you playing music which you asked if you were at least going to play well, you rolled a Nat 20 for that, and the DM told you if you lost the dice and didn't roll when you needed to you may end up screwed. the mimic ate yours. How? Well.

----

You failed a perception check and sat on the random chest you found, you heard and voice tell you it sounded nice, you react by immediately jumping off it as it opens your dice bag fell to the ground with one of the mimic's hand snatching it off the ground, their crossed arms resting on the rim of the chest and propping their chin up with a mischievous grin on their face they address you," oy, why ya stop playin?" Failing to get a response out of your stunned form they push themselves up before they toss the bag in the air a few times, they dangle the bag in front of them " ya need this aye?" You nod feeling tense, the mimic grins, opens their mouth and tossing your dice bag in their gaping maw before snapping it shut as you stare in horror at the disappearing bulge of your dice as the mimic swallows them.

"Phooo,how bout ya come n get em? Go on n reach in." they place their elbows on the rim of the chest and prop their head up their maw gaping open once more while they look at you deviously, you turn tail and run.

---

You grimace, if you don't get those dice back then...., taking a deep breath you turn around and walk back into the room, they're still waiting and grinning at you while you approach, "change ya mind?" They open their mouth again, you kneel and slowly shove your hand down their throat,their throat is relaxed, it feels like you're shoving your arm into a slimy tube lined with balloons, you reach in all the way to your shoulder you should have reached the dice by now, it's then you remember what else your DM said

"they'll have like six stomachs, and like four are bigger on the inside, 2 are not connected and are just filled with treasure n shit then there's and with the other four only 2 are digestive and the digestive ones are connected to each other and vise versa with the non-digestive ones, the top ones are stretchy and durable enough to hold a god damn chimera without much trouble but their stomach would look about half the size of what they ate because bigger on the inside and the bottom ones are like hammer space, once something is in you wouldn't even see a bulge, the friendly acting ones like to trick their targets into feeding themselves to them, only-"shit, oh fuck.

Your face goes pale and your eyes widen , you jerk your arm out to your elbow before the mimic's throat captures it in a vice grip, they grab your other arm and shove it in too gulping thickly you're pulled back in up to your shoulders, you stare at their face in terror, their eyes tell you all you need to know, they're going to eat you, there's no escape.

They grab the back of your head and shove your face into their salivating maw swallowing harshly, you're cries are muffled by the slick flesh pressed against your face, they grab your belt and pull , a sharp gulp forcing you in up to your hips, the mimic shifts their shape as they heft your kicking legs in the air giving themselves legs as they stand lifting themselves up and grasping your kicking legs in the air, they swallow and as your thighs pass their lips your hands push through a ring of flesh. Squish tight by thick muscles pulling you down you try to think of anything that might help you in this moment, a few more swallow your head enters the chamber.

Shit you can't think of anything, it's only a few more rounds before you're forced to curl up inside their gut, from the outside it looks as if they had swallowed a beach ball,you feel something hard under you and you grasp it, pulling it out from under you, you discover your dice bag, you roll to while you attempt an escape, you don't meet the DC, the only thing that escapes is air as the mimic let's out a belch loud enough to echo for several seconds.

They slap their hand on their stomach,"Ur-up, oy now, ya don really think tha would work did ya? Once I swallow something it ain't comin out easy, feel free ta keep tryin tho, ya squirmin feels great." Shit, you roll to persuade them to let you go as you struggle, kicking and pushing at their stomach wall, you tell them you didn't come in here alone, that your party will no doubt come investigate where that echo came from.

You fail once more,you can't see the wild and vicious looking grin that forms on their face, "a meal an a fight, sounds great ta me"shhiiiiit they're one of those types, you feel them move around a bit, you try to remember the last thing your dm said about the humanoid mimic's race, only, only what? "Only thing that can save you at that point is making it appealing to keep you alive as one of their many items they swallow, like give them something no one else can do" something no one else can do, the homebrew spells you chosen.

'what if I told you I had the ability to summon food and drink?' you feel them stop "I'd say ya were bullshitin me." 'but what if I can prove it?' You feel a hand slam down on your back and wince "then prove it, how bout ya summon me a beer?" 'i will need you to press a waterskin against your stomach.' "oh?" 'it's not a long range spell,' you feel them press something again their stomach and cast the spell hoping it will work through flesh, the mimic looks at the waterskin sceptically as it fills, they uncork it and lift the spout to their nose, they take a sniff and don't find anything off about the liquid so they take a swig, then proceed to down it.

You tense hearing them gulp and get ready to become drenched in alcohol...but it never happens,no drink comes raining down on you, you're confused they said a meal and a fight, you, weren't you the meal? What's going on?

"Ah, tha's some good stuff." They pat their gut, "was jus gonna take ya in for yur bounty but now I changed ma mind-" 'I have a bounty?' You interrupt, the mimic scoffs "wha ya didn know?" 'no, why do I have a bounty on me?' "oh yur serious, ya know tha group uh nobles ya pranked a tha had ya run out uh towns a while back?" 'oh them......I regret nothing...but wait, you said a fight and a meal after I told you about my party, what did you mean by that?' you ask apprehensive, "what ya think I meant?"

Oh, oh no, you shift uneasy, 'you're planning to fight and eat my companions aren't you?' "maybe I am,wha ya gonna do bout it." ....well the DM did say that it appears even if you end up dying here you can always roll-up a new character and come back as long as someone from the original group is still alive but you won't remember how you died.

'I'm in your magic damage resistant stomach, I don't think there's anything I can do except offer to summon food so you won't eat them.' they pat their bulging gut, "nice try but I ain't a bout ta give up on a fight an a squirmin meal, as fur wha I'm gonna do with ya now" you hear a groan beneath you and their gut clenches pressing down on you as you begin to slip through to the stomach connect to this one you hear them say "can na have ya givin me way, so I'll have ta swallow ya deeper."

You take a small plummet before landing in something soft and wet, you quickly cast dancing lights, you see you landed in a bunch of fabrics and other soft items, you think you see a few pillows and you have a bit more room despite being shoulder deep in fabrics and pillows, the sphincter above you looks twice your size now, damn you think, they really are bigger on the inside.

You sigh feeling a bit bad knowing you accidentally sent what is most likely a very high level mimic after your party, but hey, you did warn them splitting the party was a bad idea, you can't hear much now except the groans of their organs around you, knowing your not actually in any danger now you lift your arm out of the fabric and slam a fist against one of the fleshy walls surrounding you in frustration, their stomach jostles and you clap your hands over your ears at sound of their booming laugh "still got sum fight in ya ey? An after I made ya all nice n comfy, gave ya my bes room, could a put ya with all the gol n weapons after all." They joke, and you sigh again and rub their gut wall, "tha's better. I'm gonna enjoy having ya round,"

That sounds like they're still not going to let you go....fuck maybe you shouldn't have let them know you could be a source of free food and booze, on the other hand the nobles probably would have did you in for the embarrassment you caused them, guess you're stuck with a mimic bounty hunter, by the time they get here again from the starting point you're sure the mimic will be long gone and they won't be able to find you.

#safe vore #soft vore #v*re #v0re #fatal implied #unwilling prey #fear play

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hircyon · 2 years ago

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What's Astrid's personality like? Does she have a backstory?

Astrid's personality is pragmatic and melancholic. She's prone to depression, and for about half her story, she values results above all else. She can be dearly loving, once she allows herself to be. Her drive to protect is strong. Once she sees weakness in someone she has a fondness for, she'll do anything to protect them. Anything, which makes some of her friends and lovers uncomfortable.

She's fairly witty and willing to engage in long conversations only if she gets along well with whoever she's talking with. If she doesn't vibe, she becomes withdrawn and loses interest. Other people think she's haughty and arrogant, bc of this (she is a little arrogant).

Being a droid, she can and will turn off her empathy for others, if it suits her. She wasn't designed to kill but was repurposed for it, and found hit jobs and slicing to be easy and lucrative. Showing empathy and weakness is a choice, and she has to learn to choose it over and over, even when being cold and alone is easier.

Astrid is...kind of a mary sue, if I'm being honest. I was originally working off the Legends idea of the replica droid but I wanted to make her more alien. She looks organic, but she's 100% synthetic flesh and droid circuitry. Her "brain" is a motherboard, but her personality was left unrestrained to form naturally, after certain events in her story.

Her backstory is going to get a bit long, so I'll put it under a cut.

Astrid was created by Nuvo Vindi prior to his resurrection of the Blue Shadow Virus. Her body was intended to be the perfect life form--something beyond life and death, a synthetic skin infused with living bacta, encasing a fully lifelike droid body. Her "brain" only existed to pilot the body. Vindi had no use for Astrid's personality or burgeoning sense of self. He reset her repeatedly to erase her personality, restart the learning process. To shackle her intellect would make her a mere droid; Vindi wanted perfection in all forms.

Eventually, she learned that destroying her body was the best way to get to Vindi. He gave her an emulation sequence for pain that freezes her muscles with electrical pulses when they experience pressure beyond a certain threshold. This stopped her from literally tearing herself apart for his attention. Astrid's time with Vindi, though fractured in her mind, shaped her core personality. Her desire to be enough for someone, to succeed, to be rewarded with attention, as well as her deep self-hatred and pursuit of isolation.

By the time I introduce her in my fics Dogtooth and Absence (both taking place in 20 BBY, during the Clone Wars), Astrid has been labeled a total failure. Vindi cast her out of the lab on Naboo to pursue virology in his search for "the perfect life form," but he uses her as his satellite agent to complete missions and eliminate barriers to his research that he doesn't want to risk himself. Why waste the money on a bounty hunter when you have a perfectly good droid who can simply be wiped of data afterward?

The frequent memory wipes left her personality somewhat volatile in 20 BBY. She was prone to impulse, quick to violence, but still considered herself more elegant and more logical than organic beings.

Moralo Eval was her first interpersonal relationship during a critical time after her final memory wipe. Her strong attraction to him as an individual led her to develop parts of her personality based on his own. She continued to meet Moralo periodically, and later Osi (since her story exists in my AU), further imprinting on the way they act.

Astrid was, basically, socialized in a very Phindian way. The layered personality she developed after certain story events I don't want to reveal (which result in a final end to the memory wiping) is largely a result of developing friendships and relationships with Moralo and Osi. It's why she's so magnetic to Ayo later. She communicates in a way he finds comforting and familiar.

Her personality is also a result of her trauma, the ideals ingrained in her by Vindi, and her tendency to pessimism.

#oc nonsense

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crimsonblazw · 3 years ago

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Final thoughts on Saber

While I'm a bit behind due to life I recently found the time to sit down and finish Saber just ahead of Kamen rider Revice's debut and to be completely honest I've never left a series feeling the way I do about Saber. It's VERY easy to write off the show as mediocre especially with the stigma of sharing a showrunner with Kamen rider Ghost (which wasn't a lot of people's tea to say the least) . But this post is about my thoughts and while the series was very rushed and had characters that where just a few scenes shy of being genuinely great there's an unmistakable earnest about the show I can't shake.

Normally I would've gone through the motions for completions sake but overtime the message of the show became clear;what is your resolve? Of course you can find the same message in any random shounen anime or even tokusatsu for that matter but I think the writers DID want this to be special with the way each character clearly had something they where loyal to and wanted to protect/uphold which fits well with the knight theme of the series. Going further the show also acknowledges how stories can be a definitive influence on our motivations and outlook.(which makes a weird companion piece to Ghost in that sense).

Where the show starts having issues is when it came to fully fleshing out these ideas and motivations (not helped by the massive cast) and worst of all the main character Touma is very bland compared to his peers with the most interesting thing about his obsession with the idea of keeping promises being sort of a shared trauma parallel to Kento's Atlas complex but even that gets very little focus. There's also the matter of it sharing a repetition issue with Ghost where we see a particular moment play out the exact same way several times. (For instance I swear Touma tried to convince Kento to come back to the SoL every episode in the later half).

Inspite of this the dynamic and chemistry between characters is fun and even heartwarming which I think is just due to the excellent direction and sense atmosphere which is more than likely the saving grace of the show given how the show can be carried by it's framing and music.

In terms of the aesthetics and designs/concepts of the show I think the knight idea was cool and oddly nostalgic of things like Bionicle or Digimon frontier especially the sacred swords concept ,and the designs are more armored than usual but still pretty cool ,my only real complaint is that I feel like the wonder ride books are lame and not enough was done with their concept or function,they just kind of awkwardly mesh with everything. And while Xross Saber isn't the worst final form but I'm not a fan of how it's literally a pallet swap and a not very good one at that .

Overall it's a mid season I think tried it's best to be genuine and fell short but I appreciate it's effort.

#kamen rider #tokusatsu #kamen rider saber #kamiyama touma #toku

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merryfortune · 4 years ago

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Butterfly Kisses

Fandom: Yes! PreCure 5

Ship: Karen/Rin

Word Count: 2.1k

Tags: Not Canon Compliant, Love Confessions, Fluff

Synopsis: Rin attempts to design more of her future but she needs Karen's help for a little bit of artistic inspiration.

Rin had been nervous to call Karen so late at night, but she leapt so quickly to answer the phone, seemingly thrilled that someone had rung, that enthusiasm heartened Rin only to dishearten herself within the seconds of Karen exuberantly greeting her. Rin scolded herself, calling herself an idiot for likely getting Karen’s hopes up. Karen was probably expecting her parents to be on the other end of the line but no. It was just her. Nonetheless, Karen spoke with her placidly and they arranged a means to Rin’s ends.

See, Rin had a little project in mind, but she wanted something very specific for it and thinking of Karen’s greenhouse, she thought she might find that very specific something there. Karen assured her that she would, and Rin was happy enough with that. After all, if worse came to worst, they lived in the information age and she could just go on the family computer or even to the library to find the resources that she needed. Its just. She wanted to see them in the flesh.

“Thank you for having me.” Rin awkwardly said when she arrived at the opulent golden gates of the Minazuki estate.

“Thank you for coming over, I’m glad to be of help.” Karen replied with the utter blitheness befitting of a rich girl.

Still, Rin could feel the weirdness of it. It was strange for them to be one on one at Karen’s place. Normally the rest of their crew were hanging around as well, but the stars aligned for some privacy, she guessed. Nozomi had to get ready for a publication party that her father was taking her on; Urara was on a job for some sort of iced tea commercial; Komachi was at the public library doing research for her next novel; and of course Coco and Nuts had Nuts House to look after with Milk. So, it was just Rin and Karen at Karen’s place. Even though it was maybe a bit strained and lonely without the rest of their friends around, Rin felt that she could work on her project better if it was just her and Karen. There would be more peace and quiet for knuckling down. So, she was looking forward to it as looked through the bars of the gate with her usual kind of daggy smile.

Slowly but surely, the gates began to open up via some unseen mechanisation and Rin slipped through before they could fully open. She flashed a smile at Karen who was already willing to lead the way from here to the greenhouse that she had on the estate grounds. No matter how many times Rin visited, the Minazuki gardens never failed to impress her. The immaculate, green, trimmed lawns; the various water features; the sprawling roads with nary a piece of white gravel out of place. Rich folk were truly rich folk.

It was about ten to fifteen-minute walk to get to the front gates, past front gardens, past the main body of the mansion, and past the back gardens to get to the greenhouse. That big, sprawling jungle of a greenhouse that never failed to transport Rin to another country. It was a lot different to the greenhouse at home which incubated out of season plants for customers who had no idea about the seasonality of plants.

Entering the greenhouse, Rin felt regardless of its enormity or how exotic it was. Inside, she felt as though she could breathe clearly and deeply. The oxygen that these plants produced was thick and sweet; Rin found it incredibly refreshing to step into the greenhouse and Karen followed along behind her.

“This will be perfect.” Rin said, looking around, her blood orange eyes were bright.

“That’s great to hear.” Karen replied. She bounced expectantly on the heel of her foot, hands behind her back, a little bit fidgety.

Rin beamed and she pulled one strap of her backpack off her shoulder so that she could ruffle through it. She got out an artbook and a pencil case that was orange. She then attempted to hike back her backpack onto her shoulders; Karen giggled demurely as she came over.

“Here, let me help.” Karen said.

“A’ight.” Rin murmured.

She blushed slightly as Karen adjusted the straps for her. She even went the extra mile of making sure the bag was zipped up properly, too. She patted down the squares of the backpack and smiled, satisfied, to herself.

“There we go.” she said, rather cheerful. “All done.”

“Thank you muchly.” Rin replied.

With her backpack back in place and with her supplies in tow, it was time for her to get to work, scrounging up her inspiration and she vowed to not let a single tile of this greenhouse go unturned as she was on the pursuit for every species of butterfly that Karen was fairly certain that they housed. But before she could get into the thick of her work, Rin glanced back at Karen.

“Are you, um, content to hover?” Rin asked, hugging herself a little tighter as she cradled her supplies.

“Oh, yes, definitely. I love observing artists – and writers – in their natural habitat. I consider myself quite the naturalist on the topic, if you will have me, that is.” Karen explained.

“Then I’d love to have you on board, fellow naturalist. Although, I suppose,” Rin touched her face in thought, “we’re etymologists – not just any old type of naturalist – this afternoon.”

Karen blinked as she followed the train of thought. “We are, too.” she said. “I promise to keep a look out.”

“Much obliged.” Rin replied.

Feeling confident in her craft and her companion, they started wandering the winding paths of the greenhouse’s insides. Now, officially, they were on the hunt for butterflies so that Rin could have the perfect and liveliest inspiration for the project that she had her mind on as of late. Now that she had an inkling of what she wanted to do in the future, she wanted to solidify it further, to make sure she was certain so her little pet project was to make various bits and pieces of jewellery for her friends and she already had a specific piece in mind for Karen before anyone else.

It was a shame it was a little embarrassing. Or maybe premature. But Rin wanted to make a ring for Karen. Not a matching ring or a promise ring, that was way too much but a ring was still the perfect piece that Rin could come up with for Karen. Even though rings could convey such heavy and intense emotions, it simply had to be a ring that Rin would give Karen.

As they walked around, trying to find butterflies to look at, Rin kept stealing glances at Karen’s hands and seeing them just affirmed the idea that her long, slender fingers would look truly splendid with a ring. Rin became all the more certain in her conviction. She would make a special ring for Karen with a butterfly motif.

First, she just had to find some butterflies to study up. Shouldn’t be that hard. Where there were plants, typically there were insects. And between the two of them, they had seen a nice array of insects inside the greenhouse – dragonflies, damselflies, fruit flies, all sorts – but no butterflies. But that wasn’t to say that Rin was uninspired by what she saw.

Snooping along the various leaves and petals of all the plants, Rin had managed to scratch down many ideas onto her page, just none like the one that she hungered for. It also wasn’t for lack of trying either. Karen was doing her best to help and being Karen, her best was haughty and to the bitterest end that Karen could find. Rin appreciated the efforts, above and beyond as they were, though.

Still, plopping down in front of the main water feature inside of the greenhouse, Rin had filled up plenty of her sketchpad. She was sitting, cross-legged, watching the water whilst she kept her head propped up by her knuckles, her elbows digging into her knees. Her sketch book splayed over the criss-cross of her legs. Trying to be polite and hospitable, Karen inched closer, trying to both avoid any glimpse of Rin’s prototype drawings and trying to do anything but that.

“Should I be going soon?” Rin asked and then she checked her watch. “I’ve been an hour and a half, you know.”

“If you feel the need to,” Karen replied diplomatically, “please don’t feel like you could ever overstay your welcome.”

“Ah, thank you, Karen.” Rin said with a smile, but she sounded a little flat.

Karen noticed and she grimaced, casting a glance downwards at Rin and sure enough. She looked pretty glum.

“I’m sorry that we didn’t see any-” Karen cut herself off as her eyes went wide.

Rin blinked and she tried to speak but Karen cut her off with sudden hand movements. Rin’s shoulders crackled as she was assailed by this sudden lack of Karen-ness from Karen.

“Stay. Still.” Karen breathed.

“Okaaaay.” Rin murmured under her breath.

Karen crouched down and she slowed down. Rin felt her temperature rising as Karen came in so close to her, reaching out to her. Her fingers brushed past Rin’s cheek, curling back a strand of her fluffy reddish hair and then holding still. Karen’s eyes were huge with blue wonder and Rin was entranced by them as Karen stared so intently at something just past her face.

“Can you feel it?” Karen whispered.

Rin blushed. All she could feel was how her heart thumped in her chest. “No.” she replied on the cusp of an exhale.

“There we go…” Karen murmured.

Her hand receded back, and Rin’s breath was taken away. She hadn’t even noticed but it appeared that a butterfly had landed on her head whilst she was sitting down and now, it had scuttled onto the elegant bow of Karen’s finger which made for an excellent perch for it. The butterfly glittered beyond Rin’s eyes.

Its wings shuttered at a calm pace. The scales embedded in them were blue and a magenta-like pink but so, so beautiful. Its antennae twitched and Rin could have sat there for hours whilst Karen held up this butterfly to her. It was perfect. She could already feel the cogs of creation start to turn.

Despite not wanting to spook the butterfly, Rin picked up her book and pen. She quickly started to scrawl down the basics of its anatomy and notes on its colouration. Rin was completely absorbed into the channelling of her inspiration; her determination and tenacity enchanted Karen. From the way she stuck out her tongue to the sweat dripping down her brow, Karen was in awe of the sheer energy that Rin was radiating.

“Okay. Done.” Rin said with a satisfied sigh.

Karen smiled and she had to admit, her index finger did ache with being held up. And it seemed that the butterfly was done, too. It shook out its wings before taking flight once more. When it entered the air, the beating of its wings were unsteady but it even out just fine, flitting up high, as the girls watched.

“Thank you so much, Karen.” Rin beamed.

“No worries.” Karen replied as she got up. Her thighs ached but not as badly as they could have as she did take various etiquette classes, after all.

Rin got up now as well, tucking her sketchbook under her arm, the gleam of all her big ideas still in her eyes.

“Thank you for coming around.” Karen added but she noticed Rin staring. “Is something the matter?”

“You remember our promise, right?” asked Rin.

“Yes, of course, I would never forget something as important as that.” Karen replied, she tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear.

“Good because, um, I’m pleased to announce I’m making good progress.” Rin said excitedly.

“I’m pleased to hear it.” Karen smiled.

“Not just career wise.” Rin piped up, adding on awkwardly.

“Oh?” Karen blinked owlishly.

“Yeah.” Rin said. “I want you to be apart of my future, too. Part of my dreams.”

Karen was taken aback – even flustered – by the admission from Rin but she smiled. She settled into it, all cosy like, and she leaned in.

“I’d like that very much.” Karen replied quietly.

She kissed a butterfly kiss unto Rin’s face. She was elegant as she did so. Her lips were soft to grace Rin’s gawky, angular cheeks but her eyelashes were even softer. Rin held her breath, blushing, and she gripped her sketchbook tighter. Drawings of prototype rings to promise to Karen hidden against her stomach. In the full gauntlet of admiring Karen, Rin winced, she had to force herself to close her eyes to Karen’s grace and beauty, as Karen, giggling and flirtatious, made sure to nuzzle Rin with all the edges of her eyelashes.

#karen x rin #rin x karen #karin #femslash #karen minazuki #cure aqua #cure rouge #natsuki rin #yes precure 5 #precure #writing tag #merry writes stuff

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smoljojo · 5 years ago

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Serenades and Seidr

Summary: Loki imagine - Imagine Loki singing loudly and passionately, and then blushing when he realizes that you’re listening. Also, Loki helps you siphon seidr.

Edit: I don’t know why but it didn’t occur to me when I first wrote this to say that this my little smutty AU flurry for @maiden-of-asgard ‘s wonderful Frostbite story. Go check her full fic out!

Notes: So, it has been a hot minute since I posted my last Loki drabble, but I’m back baby! I’m honestly not sure how I feel about this one but I’ve had it in my drafts for the longest time and thought I’d might as well post it before I start up my first multi-chapter fic. Hope you guys like it!

Pairing: Loki/reader

Word count: 1653

Warnings: Fluff, mild embarrassment, some semi-steamy kisses but no actual smut

Rating: T

~~~

You huff in annoyance after you finish your third failed attempt at seamlessly connecting the arms of the figure you’re drawing to it’s torso. The paper is slightly wrinkled and the faint marks of half-erased pencil strokes are visible surrounding the shoulders, both of which provoke you to crumple the paper and chuck it at the far wall. The crude ball, quite pathetically, only makes it halfway across the room before landing in the middle of the royal Asgardian rug of yours and Loki’s shared drawing room, only furthering your ire. You drag yourself out of your cushioned chair to pick up the trash, but your body stills before you can even get close to your miserable paper ball.

The faintest sound of someone singing drifts across the empty space, seeming to originate from the room separated from the one you’re currently in by large, heavy doors. The only person it could’ve been was Loki.. but you’d never heard him sing before, and he certainly never boasted about this secret talent. You silently pad over to said doors, and gently press your ear against the cool wood.

The lyrics are indecipherable but the melody is sweet and soothing. You sigh and lean more of your weight against the door as the song continues, picturing Loki mindlessly singing this tune while preparing for his meeting with the lords from the coast and various other members of the Jötun royal family. The thought of him positioning his golden, horned helmet over his raven hair as the tune slips through his throat is enough to give you the courage to crack open the door for a peak, praying the Norns will let you slip into the room undetected.

The hinges make the tiniest of groans, but Loki’s voice, of which is much clearer now, never falters, encouraging you to sneak through the opening and slowly shut the door behind you.

He’s lying fully dressed on his back on the bed when you spot him, illustrating glowing runes and symbols you recognized from one of his many spellbooks, in the air in front of him. The figures of light seem to dance along with his voice as he waves his hand half-heartedly.

“Would you like to try?”

The question shocks you, of course a part of you had suspected he was aware of your presence but you kind of hoped he’d let you watch him for a moment.

“What do you mean?” You ask, tentatively closing the distance between you both when he sits up. “Try magic? You know I’m no good.”

“You mustn't doubt your ability, most mortals only dream of being able siphon seidr, much less being able to harness it - come here.”

You fold your legs under you when you sit down next to him on the bed of furs, “also, when were you going to mention that you can sing?”

His ears tint the slightest shade of red and he runs his large hands down the sides of your arms, shoulder to elbow, as a distraction, “shh, one thing at a time.”

“You know I’m going to make you sing for me later ri-“

You’re cut off when he presses one his long, lean fingers against your lips, “How about this, I’ll sing for you only if you at least try practicing simple seidr.”

You cringe at the thought of another embarrassing, failed attempt at spell-casting, but the promise of being serenaded puts your mind at ease.

“Alright.”

He smiles brilliantly at you, adorably giddy like a child. “Do you rememberer the sigil I showed you, the aegishjalmur?”

You try visualizing the relatively simple symbol in your mind, “I believe so.”

“Good, you’re going to try to do what I was doing when you walked in,” he tells you, “all you are going to do is try to produce the sigil in the air.”

He makes it look easy when he waves his hand, demonstrating the movements required.

“Close your eyes,” he instructs you, and you obey, “first, try to harness the power.”

“Easier said than done, Lokes.”

“I was getting there,” he teases gently, chuckling, “clear your mind, you’ll sense the pull of the seidr’s power if you focus.”

You try to do as he says, and when you feel no magical “pull”, you start to get frustrated and huff.

“It’s not working,” you almost cringe at how petulant you sound, but the embarrassment of yet another failed seidr attempt makes your face burn, and you’ve no doubt your face displays your crushed emotions as well. “Don’t you have a meeting or something to get to, anyway?”

“They’ll live. Besides, a king is never late,” he rubs soothing circles into the outsides of your thighs, just firm enough to calm you, light enough to not distract you.

You focus on your breathing, searching for that ever elusive “pull”. You’re about to give up hope when you see a ball of light flash behind your eyelids. You frown and try to follow it, like a magnet, it draws you towards it.

“I see something,” you tell Loki, your voice no longer containing the disconcerted tone of before, but a newfound sense of awe and excitement. “It’s some form of light? It’s drawing me towards it.”

“Draw it towards you, darling. You need to control it, harness it yourself or it will consume you.”

The warning, despite being delivered without any apprehension, sends a bolt of fear down your spine, the idea of being consumed by an unknown magical force doesn’t exactly sound fun. You find the burning ball again, but you don’t follow or entertain it when it darts about, instead willing it to come to you. The light becomes less fleeting but is still stubborn, so you try harder. You can’t help but feel ridiculous when you frown in concentration, using every bit of your will power and feeling quite like Eleven from Stranger Things in order to rope in the ball. After what seems like forever, the light finally falls within what you can only describe as your mental grasp.

“I have it!” You exclaim, grinning and letting out a small giggle in your exhilaration.

You hear Loki chuckle along with you. “Good, good. Place the seidr’s power in your hands.”

You drag the light closer to you, close enough to feel it’s power warm your chest, you direct that power to your fingertips the best that you can, but you’re not sure if it’s working.

“Open your eyes, love”

You slowly creak your eyes open to reveal a glowing, golden mist enveloping your hands. You squeal in shock and happiness, causing Loki to bark out a laugh.

“I’m actually doing it!”

“Indeed you are, darling,” he encourages with the biggest smile adorning his beautiful face. “You’re not done yet, though. Visualize the aegishjalmur, and trace the design in front of you if it helps.”

You do as much but for a moment, nothing happens. Refusing to allow yourself to get upset again, you try again, and the slightest outline of a circular symbol appears between your hands.

You gasp in elation and bite your lip in determination to make the sigil more visible. Slowly but surely, a golden aegishjalmur begins to glow brightly and proudly between Loki and you.

“I did it, baby!” You laugh and twirl the figure with your fingers.

Loki twists his hands in order to allow his own aegishjalmur to dance with yours.

“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” Loki’s voice is low, just above a whisper.

“They are,” you reply without hesitation.

The green and gold sigils dance around each other, seeming to move to an inaudible rhythm. After a moment, you let yours fade away, a loopy grin etched onto your face.

“Thank you, Loki,” your eyes flicker up to meet his to find him watching you with a loving smile pulling at his own lips. Your breath hitches when his eyes flick down to your lips.

“You’re beautiful when you smile, you know that?” He’s already leaning towards you before he finishes complimenting you, and your lips meet before you have the chance to reply.

His mouth is warm and inviting, even in his Jotun form, he gently pushes you onto your back and moves over you. His hands make quick work with your hair, pushing it out of your face and allowing access to your neck. You feel your blush travel from your face to your chest and a low rumble erupts from his throat as he nips your jaw with his sharp teeth.

“Gorgeous,” he growls into the crevice between the corner of your jaw and the flesh just below your ear.

You sigh happily and intertwine your fingers into his hair, keeping him pressed hard against you.

“My King, your presence is requested in the throne room by her Highness Lady F��rbauti.”

The interruption takes you both by surprise and the whine of displeasure does not go unheard from the said King in your arms. His childishness would make you laugh if you weren’t frustrated from the intrusion yourself.

“Inform her Highness that the King will be down in just a moment,” he calls out in the vague direction of the door, his voice booming with an underlying tone of annoyance.

His earlier promise pops into your mind when he peels himself away from you.

“You owe me a song when you return,” the smile you give him is cheeky and his responding groan makes you cough out a laugh.

“I suppose a promise is a promise,” he reluctantly recedes as he smooths out his leather armor. “I’ll send for a servant to bring you food if you wish?”

“That sounds great,” you cross your arms behind your head, a blissed out expression adorning your features.

He leans down to place one last sweet, chaste kiss on your forehead, “In case you’ve fallen asleep before I return, rest easy my little drottning.”

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ryqoshay · 5 years ago

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How did u think of the username ryqoshay?

The tl;dr version is that I was tired of Ricochet typically being taken in the games I was playing years ago and decided to rework it into something a bit more unique. And she grew into something more.

The full story will be under the cut as my trips down nostalgia lane tend to run long.

Ricochet started off as a character I created for a story I was writing years ago based on games I played as a child. The games were not electronic, rather based around physical toys and the characters and events were made up on the spot by my friend and I.

While our games generally focused on battles and conflict between two established groups, the story I decided to write focused more on the characters of the protagonist group and their interactions. Worth mentioning here that the focus group was a crew of mercenaries as it will come into play later. I realized that the current cast was comprised mainly of front line fighters and wanted to flesh out the team with some back line and support members; medical, recon, intel, etc.

Enter Ricochet. I liked the idea of taking a stereotypical stoic and battle-hardened sniper character and turning it on its head by making a hyperactive, adorable little girl. A character whose slightly warped idea of cute included heavy weaponry and thus treated her gun like a teddy bear, even going so far as bringing it to bed with her.

The name itself had a dual meaning as it referred both to how she was always “bouncing off the walls” and an intentionally ironic reference to a typically undesirable outcome for a sniper. Her given name at the time was Rebecca; Becky is fine, but don’t call her Becca or Reba.

I don’t recall if I addressed her parents in this iteration, but Rico entered the team under the care of Tackleberry. Yes, that Tackleberry; he was my friend’s favorite character from Police Academy, though I believe what I’ve turned him into maintains only the name and obsession with weapons. I already had him as the former legal guardian of another character, so I figured giving him someone new to oversee would be fine.

Then I stopped writing that story. And it remains on indefinite hiatus to this day.

City of Heroes was released and a friend convinced me to join. I was drawing a blank in character development when I stumbled across the Assault Rifle/Devices build and Rico jumped up out of my memories. The name Ricochet was taken so I tacked on -chan to the end as I was quite addicted to anime by this point in my life. This also gave me the excuse to weeb out and insert random Japanese words into her speech patterns as her linage was now half Japanese and half U.S. born Caucasian.

I designed a diminutive, blonde girl sporting high twintails and a dark purple flak jacket outfit with black accents. Her short backstory described a her as having two heroes for parents and wanting to live up to her family legacy. And as said parents were still around, Tack dropped out of the picture.

I liked Rico so much I started translating her over to other games as well as using her name in my overall online presence, as small as it was then. Ricochet itself was pretty much always taken, so I often had to modify the name in some way, be it by adding -chan or shortening it to Rico or whatever.

Then came the game changer; City of Villains. It came as no surprise that Ricochet was taken, but I was getting tired of using -chan and my other methods, so I decided to create something new. This would be the first time I used Ryqoshay, an intentional misspelling of Ricochet for a character.

Since CoV allowed a short backstory like its predecessor, I knew I had to come up with an in-universe reason for the name change; I also still fancied myself a writer, even though I hadn’t really written much in a while. I figured a villain might do well with a more tragic backstory than a hero, so I offed her parents. The character limit didn’t allow for specifics on the where, when, why and how, but I made sure to mention that she took the first letter of their names - Yuri and Quentin - to rename herself Ryqoshay.

It was at this point, Ryqo also finally received a family name, Bouteillevoix, and with it, a change in linage to half Japanese and half French. I don’t recall the specifics of how I settled on Bouteillevoix iteself, but I do remember liking the dissonance of an outspoken character bearing a name meaning “bottle voice” as if it were to be contained in some way.

For her aestetic design, I swapped out the black for white in her outfit to use the Dark Is Not Evil and Light Is Not Good tropes; dark purple remained, however. This also meant her hair went from blonde to black. And her twintails went from high to low in an attempt to appear a bit more mature, though she maintained her high energy personality.

Also, while not mentioned in her in-game bio, Tack was able to reenter the picture as a Commando, the highest level Summon of Ryqo’s Mastermind power set.

While I wasn’t actively writing stories about her, I was certainly fleshing her out as a character with notes and whatnot. Quentin and Yuri also got some attention as I ended up designing alternate dimension versions of them for me to play. And as the alt-oholic I am in MMORPGs, I also came up with some alternate dimension versions of Ryqo herself; Ryqoshot, a lonewolf gunslinger using the Corrupter’s Assault Rifle power set and Ryqoaraignée, an Arachnos Crab Spider build who was more closely aligned with Arachnos than her other versions.

With all of the alts I was creating, I decided to use the game’s guild mechanics to pass stuff among them. Thus, Ryqo’s Roughnecks was born, named after Rico’s Roughnecks of Starship Troopers fame. Joining members included L4t3ncy_0, a mechanical Mastermind; Recipere, - Rx for short - a thug Mastermind who kept her crew alive with healing powers; Yozakura, a ninja Stalker serving as Ryqo’s bodyguard and Vivian Sexon, a dual-wielding Brute and villainous translation of a dual-wielding Scrapper from my CoH days.

Not long after, a friend invited me to join a game of D&D. The team needed a door kicker so I brought in Vivian as a brutish barbarian with a split personality, Sanguine, taking control when she raged. My intended two paragraph introduction quickly turned into two pages, which eventually turned into twenty and started translating over other Roughnecks; Ryqo included.

Ryqo dropped her sniper rifles in favor of a more theme appropriate bow and arrow. L4t3ncy_0′s call sign was changed to Nullsiver Luna and she became an artificer who struggled against the world’s tech limits. Recipere, not surprisingly, took on the role of a cleric. Yozakura kept her ninja trappings, but started playing by the Bodyguard Crush trope as I was deep into yuri shipping at that point thanks to the likes of Lucky Star and others.

Even after the game stalled out, I continued to work with the DM to build their world in which all of their games took place. The Roughnecks gained a permanent place in the timeline, extending both before and after Ryqo’s time as their leader, as well as a permanent base of operations, which eventually grows into a full fledged township later at the behest of Ryqo (spoilers should I ever get around to posting these stories.)

My online presence was growing and with it, Ryqo. She became my main when I returned to WoW, a Blood Elf Hunter running around with a giant Devilsaur as a pet; yes, she would think it was cute. (She was changed to Human when I followed by guild to another server that needed more Alliance players.) My Demon Hunter main in Diablo 3 was named Ryqoshay, as a surprise to absolutely none of my friends at the time.

Aion was a strange exception insofar as I wasn’t fond of the Ranger class for my primarily solo playstyle. I still made said ranger and of course named her Ryqoshay, but my main in that game was a Chanter known as Ameliorator, a more fanciful version of MedKit, the character for whom Tack was a legal guardian in the story mentioned above. However, I still played out the Ryqo persona on the forums because I enjoyed it and I’d long forgotten Med/Ame’s personality from that old story.

When Love Live started to take over my life and I found Sukutomo, I went with Ryqoshay as my screen name for reasons I don’t fully recall. I started this tumblr account as a way to post some “Idolsona” stuff where I translated Ryqo into a LL style idol, along with Yoza, Luna and a newer Roughneck, Flash Pyre. And when I started writing my fics, it was easy to use the account I already had here and then keep the name when I went over to AO3.

Hindsight being 20/20, I probably should have chosen Nico as my primary icon, as her appearance is closer to Ryqo’s than Maki’s, even if she wears her twintails high like Rico instead of Ryqo’s low tails. Neither Nico nor Maki have grey eyes as I’ve given Ryqo, so that wouldn’t fit, but none of the LL characters do thus far. That said, Maki prefers purple more than Nico and Ryqo isn’t much a fan of pink, so maybe that played into things? Perhaps someday I will commission one of my favorite artists to draw Ryqo as I envision her and start using her as my avatar, someday… maybe.

Also worth mentioning that NicoMaki has had a heavy influence on how I envision Ryqo and Yoza, and vice versa. Heck I’ve directly translated some NicoMaki doujin into scenes for my D&D story and sprinkled some RyqoYoza stuff into HtHaN. With HtHaM being a more D&D’ish setting, I may very well steal some stuff from my D&D story for it. Perhaps Luna or Vivian might make an appearance? I’ve already referenced Ryqo when Maki remembers hearing stories of an 11 year old girl taking over a mercenary guild. As always, I shall follow where my µ’s muse leads.

In conclusion, while Maki - with Nico very close behind - may hold a position as my favorite fictional character not created by me, Ryqo easily tops that position as my favorite overall; yes, the fact that I created her absolutely factors into this bias. There are reasons I don’t bring her up often - beyond using her as a screen name, posting through her persona on a few forums and the Idolsona thing - not the least of which include a fear of her being labeled a self-insert or Mary Sue or whatever, as I’ve seen some decidedly distasteful reactions to such characters online. But there is also the fact that the bulk of her development has been within a world not designed by me, but by one of my DMs, and I would want to ensure they would be fine with me posting stuff about said world; I’m sure they would be fine, but I haven’t gotten around to asking. Perhaps someday, I might post more about Ryqo. Perhaps writing more of HtHaM will inspire me to take my D&D story off hiatus, dust it off and have a talk with my DM about posting it. In the meantime, I will continue to use her namesake for my online and in-game presence because she is a character I hold very dear.

If you’ve read this far, thank you for joining me in my journey through nostalgia. And I hope this sufficiently addresses Anon’s question.

#Ryqo's Q&A

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that-shamrock-vibe · 5 years ago

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Disney+ What To Watch: My Top 10 Favourite Disney Live-Action Remakes

So we’ve covered the main Walt Disney Studios animated movies, and I am trying to find categories that I can slot other Disney animated movies into, but for now we are going to follow Disney’s latest trend and jump into the live-action field with my personal favourite top 10 live-action Disney remakes.

Now of course Snow White and the Huntsman will not be on this list primarily because it is not a movie released by Walt Disney Studios and also because it took me three attempts just to get through it. But I will also not be including sequels as they are not reworking animated movies but continuing the stories of the remade live-action movies, so 102 Dalmatians, Alice Through the Looking Glass and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil are also not in contention.

Also remakes of live-action movies, even if those live-action movie are in some form animation hybrids, also will not count, largely because I am only counting those under the official Walt Disney Animated Studios banner but also because there’s no real point.

As always please remember that these rankings and opinions are purely my own, I am not saying these movies are factually worse than others or better than others I am merely saying this is how I view them.

#10. The Lion King

The reasoning for this movie being at #10 despite how well it has done compared to other live-action remakes is purely because I had to check and make sure the title gif I am using for this entry was the one from the live-action remake and not the 1994 animated movie...I should not have to do that!

The problem this movie has, as many critics and fans have pointed out and I believe as I did in my review, is that this is effectively a shot-for-shot remake of said original animated movie. That doesn’t mean it’s not good because the original was a phenominal piece of cinema for the genre and the studio, but it does leave a question as to the relevance of bothering to remake something practically identical with the only USP being that this movie is completely CGI in an attempt to give it the “live-action” treatment.

That being said, I was somewhat entertained by this movie, but by different parts than how I was in the original. For instance, in the original Rafiki was my favourite character in terms of comedy and just as personal preference, here he barely gets anything to do and instead the likes of Sarabi and the Hyenas are more fleshed out.

I did enjoy how the Hyenas showed more of a pecking order in this version, with Shenzi this time being depicted more as the clan leader who is somewhat of a left-hand to Scar in the same way that Faora was to Zod in Man of Steel.

Also Sarabi, who is somewhat forgettable in the animated movie as she’s barely in it until really the end to the point where me saying she was Simba’s mother is the only real jolt some fans may have to remembering her, and the other lionesses had that one really tense scene with Nala trying to escape Pride Rock without being detected by the Hyenas and Scar in order to find help. I can imagine that being a very hard level on the game-version of this movie because I always hated stealth levels like this particularly in the earlier Harry Potter games.

Timon and Pumbaa come in and kind of steal the show half-way through and notably there is a bit more of them raising SImba even as an adult and both Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen do respectable jobs in their respective roles, in fact some have argued they are the best part of the movie because they bring some level of excitement to an otherwise bland remake.

To be fair, one of my favourite parts is when Timon begins to sing “Be Our Guest” as a way of distracting the Hyenas as live bait along with Pumbaa, this of course is reworked from the original when it was them performing a hula-inspired performance which I still love to this day, but this reworking did make me laugh.

Outside of that though, everyone really fills their roles as they did in the original, and it comes across as simply a pale imitation in comparison. It’s not like the other remakes where there was something new enough and exciting enough to differentiate the two. Yet this movie is longer than the original because the stuff that either is new or extended from the original feels like it has just been either shoehorned in because maybe the writers or Favreau himself believed they were lacking in originality or maybe they believed what they actually had was exciting.

The biggest misstep of this type is the almost three minutes spent following a piece of Simba’s mane on its journey from falling off Simba to reaching Rafiki and thus him discovering Simba is in fact alive. In the original, this wasn’t even a 30 second segment and they played up Rafiki’s shamanism a lot more to deduce this fact, but here the hair goes from river, to birds nest, to a giraffe’s digestive system, to a ball of dung, to an ant line until finally reaching him...all the while only promoting the admittedly impressive CGI.

Another example of this is at the beginning of the movie where there is more focus on the field mouse that Scar toys with before losing the opportunity to make it lunch, we spend a good 30 seconds to a minute more than the original as the mouse makes its way up to Scar’s den rather than simply starting off there. I don’t feel this is as big an offence as I do the hair scene but the time could easily be spent elsewhere.

There’s also, I feel, a disadvantage with trying to make these animals as realistic as they did. 2019 struggled with “realistic” CGI animals from The Lion King to Cats and Sonic the Hedgehog, and while Sonic fixed itself by having the titular protagonist’s design changed to a more accurate look, it is a shame that The Lion King did not also have the same idea because giving these lions more animated features may have helped show the emotional hot points of the movie, particularly Mufasa’s death and the emotion on Simba’s face.

It’s also a shame that the voice actors are underwhelming outside of Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen. I do appreciate that they cast regionally-appropriate actors for the most part, even bringing back James Earl Jones for one of his two most famous roles, but there in lies the problem, he simply performed an almost line-for-line redo of what he originally did in the animated version. It’s great hearing him again but I could have just watched the original again to hear him not do anything different.

You also have Beyoncé who fails at both scene-stealing acting and singing performances with her new original song which is hardly in the movie. However, while Beyoncé still delivers on star quality, she also outshines the movie’s main lead Donald Glover who feels like an acting school work experience placement compared to Beyoncé.

Finally the music, forget the rolling turn of mane, this movie butchers and wastes one of the best Disney Villain songs in history by having Chiwetel Ejiofor talk his way through one chorus line of “Be Prepared”...next to that having a lackluster shot-for-shot remake of “Circle of Life” didn’t seem so bad.

Overall, this live-action remake simply felt more like fan-service or even like Jon Favreau was too scared to touch what had come before and so just decided that simply having a fully CGI version of an animated classic was enough...but aside from simply looking at it, there is nothing really wondrous about this movie.

I can see why people like the movie, but I can’t really understand why people defend the movie even from a nostalgic point of view, I mean seriously just watch the original version you’ll get the same feeling out of it.

So what do you guys think? Post your comments and check out more Disney+ What to Watch Top 10s as well as more Top 10 Lists and other posts.

#the lion king #the lion king 2019 #disney #disney+#disney plus #disney+ what to watch top 10s #disney+ what to watch #my top 10 favourite disney live-action remakes #disney live-action #disney live-action remakes

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fivenightsatfreddysfanfiction · 6 years ago

Text

Body Double

tw: brief self-harm

Jeremy and Damien were in charge of Baby's upgrades and maintenance to keep her functioning for the pizzeria. Sometimes Digi would sit in on their work, watching in neutral silence as engineer and student tinkered with the feminine form on the table before them.

"I don't remember installing this system." Jeremy prodded at a series of tubes running delicately around Baby's core and up towards her neck and head. "Damien? Was this your doing?"

Damien blinked, taken out of his focus by the question as his eye color flickered from chocolate brown to rich green and back. "Oh... forgot about that. Yeah, that's the central cooling system, military grade." He shrugged at Jeremy's frown. "It's s'posed to keep her temperature under control. Those blueprints said that if the core gets too hot, any Remnant stored there will break down. It's for Digi's safety."

The two of them looked up at him at that and Digi hunched his shoulders as he pulled his legs up to hide behind. "Sorry," he mumbled, despite not knowing why he would say it and not actually feeling sorry. If anything he felt bitter that people his other self had hurt had taken consideration for his well-being; he still didn't believe he deserved it.

"No, it's actually a good idea. Not sure how you got that tech but as long as we don't have cops at the door, I'll just accept it's there," Jeremy said, looking back at Damien. He tapped his screwdriver against the palm of his hand, his gaze returning to the inactive animatronic on the table. Digi followed his eyes, looking over Baby's face with a spark of content in her appearance.

This version of her was the most recent model the two engineers had crafted. They'd taken inspiration from an amusement park attraction that featured animatronic humans that had such seamless looking skin covering that people were hard-pressed to remember they were machines. Jeremy immediately began drafting an upgraded blueprint while Damien raced to get some of the flesh-toned material from the source. The result was Circus Baby MK.IV, as human-looking a creation as the park's, with smooth peach-toned skin and the same soft hair wig as her previous model.

Meera had invited everyone to a small celebration when Digi was able to walk out of the pizzeria in the new animatronic and no one screamed in terror at the sight of Baby strolling down the street, holding up a sign to invite them to Freddy Fazbear's Pizza and Parties.

"Y'know, we do still have the stuff to make another of these," Jeremy finally said with a thoughtful tone. Damien looked up at him in confusion, then glanced at Baby's face, then up at Digi, then back at Jeremy... and grinned.

"Oh, that's gonna be fuckin' fuuun~," he crooned and Jeremy gave him a disturbed look.

"Sometimes I don't believe you have Papa's soul," he said with an eye twitch. Damien shrugged, twirling a finger in the air.

"Your Papa was fucked in the head before Freddy's; I'm showin' the truth of it, is all," he returned in a matter-of-fact tone.

The exchange had been all but forgotten by Digi until a few months later, when Meera got a call asking them both to stop by the workshop to see something that was made for Digi. The digital ghost gave the phone a distrustful look even as Meera gave him a puzzled one.

"I don't remember asking for upgrades or changes to Baby. She's working fine for you, right?" she asked him, confused by the call even as she grabbed for her purse and keys.

"Everything is functioning perfectly," Digi agreed, floating back and drifting towards the animatronic left inactive on a chair pushed into a corner of the room. He let himself fall into the form, data breaking apart and reforming in the core that held processors and storage for him to reside in as his consciousness spread out. In moments he had control of the animatronic and opened her eyes, running diagnostics in the back of his mind as she stood up from the chair and dusted off her short skirt.

"Ready?" Meera asked, opening the door to their apartment and waiting for Baby to join her.

"So far, so good," Digi replied in Baby's sultry-sweet voice, taking a quick look at a wall-mounted mirror to check over her face and make sure her makeup looked all right. The flesh covering made it easy to smudge lipstick and blush if she wasn't careful. "Let's go see what those payasos made. Maybe something to keep Helpy from falling on the floor while play-testing the ball pit?"

They stood in the workshop while Jeremy fidgeted beside something tall and draped in a white sheet, Damien peering over streams of code on a screen before nodding to himself. Meera just raised an eyebrow at them while Digi leveled a faint glare at Jeremy, memories of that long ago conversation about making another animatronic floating to the surface.

"Severo admin goto...." Jeremy began muttering under his breath out of nervousness and she glared harder.

"That doesn't work on me. I severed that connection, remember?" Digi huffed, "Nobody controls my body but me." Calming mantra or not, he didn't want any risk to his sense of control active. Every new model of Baby he was given to use had him go in and destroy the Fitzgerald control software as his first act.

He sometimes hated how his trauma wouldn't let him trust others so easily.

"So what's this thing you called us about?" Meera asked hurriedly, shifting topics to try and ease tensions more. Her smile was a bit strained but she reached out to pat Baby's shoulder and Digi felt himself relax at the contact.

"Ooh, ooh, can I?!" Damien shouted excitedly, waving an arm wildly with a wide smile. Jeremy sighed and gestured for him to go ahead. "Okay, so like, you're pretty comfortable walking around as Baby, but since we have extra supplies and all, we thought it'd be good if you could be yourself too!"

Digi felt himself tense. What?

The smaller man grabbed the white sheet and beamed at him, eyes bright with cheer. "This is for you! So you don't always have to be walking around in Circus Baby!" he declared and swept the sheet away to reveal....

Tall, male, golden tan skin and blonde hair, styled short in the way Digi had his hair done, frozen forever in digital form, silver-grey eyes lidded in a neutral expression, dressed in casual clothes of shades of blue; Digi stared at what was essentially his body from so long ago, before it was stolen by Afton.

He stepped back, eyes caught by his double's and unable to hear what was going on around him. Was it the Master File? Was it Afton? Was it going to move, to come after him?

His back hit something and he stumbled, one arm lifting to defend himself as he shrank away, desperate to leave the other figure's sight but too afraid to break his own gaze away for fear of leaving himself vulnerable.

"..cian?" He heard words again, once the sheet was thrown over the blonde animatronic to hide it away. "Lucian, it's covered, are you okay?"

"That's not my designation," he replied brokenly, and it registered faintly that his voice, not Baby's, came from his throat. He lifted a hand to his neck, raised it to his eyes, let his gaze rove over the soft red of the fingerless gloves covering a slender and delicate hand, Baby's hand.

Her hand, his hand, because this body was the only one he'd accept as a physical form aside from his hard-light one. It was all he had, all he knew.

Meera knelt beside him -when did he end up on the floor?- and gave him a concerned look. "Are you with me, Lucian? Still there?" she asked him softly.

"Yes," Digi murmured, feeling oddly disconnected from the Baby model he was possessing, as if he couldn't fit his consciousness into it fully like before. "I'm here, just... connection issues." He tried to move, get his legs under him to get up, but they didn't respond with the grace he's used to, jerking in stilted increments. In a flash, Jeremy and Damien were at his other side, tools in hand as Jeremy carefully hovered a hand over one leg.

"I want to check for damage, is that okay? May I touch your leg?" he asked cautiously and Digi almost sobbed in gratitude for that. Instead he jerked his head in a curt nod, trying desperately to regain his sense of self in Circus Baby, to feel her body as his and accept it as he always had. Jeremy's hands circled her knee, prodding and pressing carefully to feel for loose or broken parts under the surface.

Another run of diagnostics. Digi cast his attention about, half on the stream of data and half floundering as his vision tunneled, his field of view in Baby's eyes no longer as wide as before. It didn't even feel like he was in a body, more like he was the back-end software to Baby's user interface again, trapped behind glass and blind to the outside world unless he was hooked into a camera system much like he'd been hooked to the old Baby's eyes.

He couldn't breathe, crumbling in the confines of the machine holding him in its shell.

Meera's little cry of shock barely registered as Digi wrenched himself out of Baby's core and threw himself onto the floor of the workshop, once more in digital form before gathering the energy for hard-light. Jeremy and Damien looked up from the now inactive animatronic to him, concern on their faces. Digi barely spared them a glance, pushing himself to roll onto his back and stare up at the ceiling, taking in deep breaths that he didn't need to exist while Meera rushed to his side, fingers clutching at his hand like she feared he'd vanish if she let go.

He wouldn't do that to her, not now.

"What happened?" Damien asked in a small voice, so unlike him that Digi had to look again to be sure it was actually the Fright Guard that spoke up. "We thought... we made it for you, so you could have your body back... what happened?"

"It's not mine," Digi breathed out, far too honest for his own liking and too fast for him to take back. He squeezed his eyes shut, grimacing. "I mean... it doesn't belong to me. I'm a copy of the original, and he had his body stolen." The queasy feeling of disconnect didn't leave him, and he wanted nothing more than to claw at his own skin, feel something other than that strange distance between consciousness and form. Almost as if guided by that thought, Digi raised his free hand to his collar, dipping under the fabric and dragging his nails over his back, as far as he could reach, and the stings of pain grounded him, bringing relief as he recalibrated himself accordingly.

"Hey!" Jeremy said sharply, grabbing his wrist and yanking his arm away, earning him an icy glare that he managed to not shy away from. "I don't care who or what you are, you're not self-harming if I can help it!" They glared at one another until Digi broke first, looking away with an irritated huff. Only then was his hand released and Jeremy sat back. "The body's yours, made just for you, not anyone else," he said quietly, firmly.

"It's not," Digi muttered, shaking his head. They didn't understand. They didn't see what he saw, felt what he felt. The figure under that sheet... that was someone he had railed and fought against in fury and anguish and regret. That was someone who represented all of his mistakes and self-hatred.

That was someone else's body, someone with silver eyes cold and uncaring of anyone who was hurt by their choices.

"But we made it exactly like you!" Damien protested, still not comprehending anything and it was understandable. Digi ground his teeth together, angrily waving at his own face and emphasizing his right eye.

"No. You didn't," he hissed out, huffing again as the two engineers caught on and looked properly chastened. "You built a body that looks like someone we all hate. Much as I beat on myself for the shit I did, I don't need to be made your punching bag as well."

"We wouldn't-!" Damien began and snapped his mouth shut as Digi pointed at him with narrowed eyes.

<"Liar. You reincarnated for a chance to end my other self; if you hadn't kicked his ass and won, you'd be gunning for mine."> he sneered. Of course he wasn't understood in language, but the feeling was conveyed well and Damien's flicker of guilt didn't make him feel any better.

"We'll do something about that," Jeremy said with a tired sigh. "I'm sorry, this was supposed to be a nice surprise but it went badly. Will you be all right getting home? Do you need any support?" Digi waved him off as Meera helped him stand. His legs trembled a bit but he could feel them as his own and that was more than enough for him. He didn't feel like he'd be able to get control of Baby, though, and said as much to the engineer. "Give yourself some time to recover. We'll finish up diagnostics on her and you can come back to pick her up later."

"Thank you. See you later," Meera told them with a strained smile as she helped lead Digi away and he found himself ever grateful again that she existed, that she was there for him.

He looked down at her face as she looked up at him in support, and took comfort in the steel grey of her eyes, far warmer compared to the silver ones he'd looked at minutes ago. There were too many of those silver eyes he had seen in the world. Digi could live a happy life -if his digital existence counted as a life- with one less body double out there, as far as he was concerned.

END

#fnaf #fanfiction #freddy fazbear's pizzeria simulator #ultimate custom night #jeremy fitzgerald #Damien Woods #meera corbett #digital lucian #circus baby #tw: self harm

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interrogatormentors · 6 years ago

Text

Event Six: Golden Infidel

After perigees of trial and error, Eridan finally felt he’d gotten a handle on Head Admin duties. The stress never decreased, and more often than not Eridan found himself reaching for a drink at the end of the day to take the edge off, but having someone at the end of the worknight to talk to helped more than Eridan cared to admit. No matter the time, no matter what far reaches of space the Reichenbach found itself in, TA responded to each of Eridan’s various messages. Eridan had to wonder if TA actually liked talking to him, or if the capital-H-Helmsman was just bored. God, the idea that he may actually have stumbled onto the Imperial Helmsman, a veritable wiggler-tale creature, terrified Eridan to no end.

Still, he’d take support wherever he could get it, and right now he had bigger fish to fry. As Head Admin, he took responsibility for organizing any and all docking requests, maintenance queues, and inventory logging. The task weighing down his shoulders at the moment took the form of a simple email in his account which had exploded into a lurid, glittery graphic whose symbol seared itself into his eyelids.

“By decree of Her Imperial Condescension, Empress of the Alternian Empire, your ship is formally ordered to attend mandatory Fleet Inspection event. Ships of the invited will go through rigorous examination, while crews are encouraged to mingle aboard the HBC Condescension. Coordinates attached. This message designed and approved by the Department of Imperial Public Affairs.”

A computer generated tyrian-pink lipstick kiss signed the bottom of the invite or order or whatever this abomination of color actually was, along with the sign of the Empress herself. Eridan had tried to find an explanation for the sudden Fleet inspection as he scurried over the entire Reichenbach getting everything in order, and found none. Whisperings of rebellion crawled through the empire, but none of the rumors possessed any substance. They never mentioned names, and no descriptions of a certain secret heiress ever reached Eridan. Despite their tempestuous parting, Eridan couldn’t bring himself to look forward to Feferi’s inevitable culling once she finally surfaced.

Rebellions didn’t matter. Trolls didn’t matter. Only the health and safety of the Reichenbach mattered, and Eridan finally managed to get everything in its proper place by the time of the inspection. Even with the stress of the event, perhaps he could even make some connections aboard the HBC Condescension to make his life easier.

Two hours into the event, and Eridan had spoken to approximately two trolls, who spoke to him more out of a respect to his caste than to his actual position. This fact insulted him more than anything, considering how much time he’d spent taming his hair back and moisturizing. “So you weren’t expectin’ an inspection either, huh?”

The teal next to him wrinkled her nose. “You can say that. My bet’s on the Empress looking for rebellion ties. Why else would she call back an interrogatormentor ship?”

Eridan covered up his apprehension by taking a nervous sip from his drink. He’d noticed the interrogatormentors too-- a cerulean and an enormous seadweller cutting their way through the crowd in silent tandem. “Any ships in range got called back. They ain’t special.” His eyes met the cerulean’s, and his acidic digestive pouch twisted up in six different knots. “You think they’re lookin’ for rebels? In the fleet? Maybe you got a few flirtin’ with the idea in wigglerhood, but they’d be stupid to think rebels actually care about anybody past Ascension.” His lip twisted up into a half-snarl before he schooled his face back.

The teal laughed. “I like you. It’s too bad that naivety’s going to get slammed right out of you. What’d you say your name was?”

Eridan’s eyes hadn’t left the pair of interrogatormentors, who’d started to move towards them as casually as two sharks circling a baby dolphin. “I’m gonna get some air,” he said, ignoring the other troll’s derisive remark about recycled ship air.

The invitation to mingle aboard the Empress’ Imperial Battleship hadn’t explicitly forbidden wandering around, but Eridan couldn’t help but check over his shoulder every few seconds all the same. The interrogatormentors hadn’t followed him out either. Eridan tried to reassure himself that he needn’t worry about them. He had nothing to hide. Any ties to a rebellion now had severed themselves sweeps ago, and he harbored no treasonous leanings now. If they asked him anything, he could say with confidence he didn’t know what the rebellion was planning or who led the charge. Feferi’s name didn’t need to come up. So why did he feel so terrified of the prospect of investigation?

Eridan didn’t meet any other trolls as he wandered further and further, the walls losing their ornamental gilding and becoming more utilitarian as he walked on. The HBC Condescension had started out as nothing more than a personal cruiser according to legends, building itself up into elaborate palace halls around the ancient helmsman at the core.

Eridan jumped as he heard something up ahead of him, fins swiveling in an attempt to pinpoint the noise. He crept around the corner, still holding his drink glass in a shaking hand. It sounded like someone spoke off in the distance, a drone that almost held a melody in words he couldn’t quite parse. As Eridan walked onward, the sound became more distinct but no less identifiable as actual words. Eridan’s brow furrowed as he heard a word he almost understood, until it clicked.

As a devotee to history, especially military tactics, Eridan had amassed more than his fair share of old books and scrolls. At one point, Alternia had had two main languages, High and Low, with the Low comprised of dozens of lowblooded tongues all mashed together in the enslaved warm population. Over time High had become Common, with only a few dialects surviving while Low had faded away with time. Eridan had only seen Old Low Alternian written down once, in an ancient tome bound in clawbeast skin that he still hadn’t fully translated by the time he joined the Fleet. But he knew those words, written down in a column of shaky letters in a section of heretical hymns, although he’d never imagined he’d hear them sung aloud.

“He carries all our pain And one day his strife is forgotten However, we are forgiven.”

Eridan knew at this point, he’d gone too far into the ship. If someone spotted him at this point, he’d earn a trip to the interrogatormentor’s brig regardless of rebel ties, and yet he found himself entranced as he kept going. It took him time to translate the words in his head, but the process made itself easier as the disembodied singer repeated the droning mantra like a prayer, over and over. Eridan closed his eyes as he walked, picturing the words in front of his head, sounding them out and pairing them with the sounds he heard.

“Our kin are separated by color of blood. We are without love or virtue. However, we are forgiven.”

Eridan opened his eyes just in time to stop in front of a door, its frame reinforced in the characteristic manner of a helmsblock to seal moisture in to preserve biowires and living tissue. Eridan swallowed hard, grip tightening so hard on his glass he heard the glass creak. All highblood dinnerware needed reinforcement, but his apprehension definitely put the construction to the test. Despite every instinct screaming at Eridan to back away, to walk right back to the gathering of disgruntled ship captains and crew, Eridan placed his palm on the door’s scanner. The door opened.

The smell hit Eridan first, rotting flesh and damp that nearly had him retching as he looked up at the tangle of wires and remnant of troll strung up in the helming harness. The source of the song came from above, speakers connecting the Helmsman to the ship. Eridan couldn’t find a sign of life in the old psion’s face, silver-streaked hair hanging over his red and blue eyes glazed over like a corpse. Eridan wondered if the battery even had arms and legs at this point, considering the black, necrotic tissue creeping down from the forearms completely hidden in a snarl of devouring biowires.

As Eridan stood there, transfixed in horror and disgust, the speakers’ volume started to dim. The Helmsman stirred, head slowly rising from its slumped position as his lips began to sound out silent syllables. Over the next few seconds he managed to speak up, the speakers going silent as the Helmsman took over the song with a voice like shards of glass scraping up against each other. The psion blinked, first with his blue eye and then his right, and it took a few tries to blink moisture into his eyes like a normal troll. He stopped singing, and spoke.

“You took your time, Eridan.” The Helmsman took a heaving breath, and Eridan swore he could hear the creaking of his lungs. “Ah, I forgot how much I hate this meat sack.”

Eridan set down his glass on a console, swallowing back the bile rising in his throat. Despite the smell and the disgusting sight, he felt a twinge of something akin to pity in the back of his head. This really was the troll he’d played poker with and talked to for these past few perigees. “You were expectin’ me? Surprised you got two pan-cells to scrape together, lookin’ like that.”

The Helmsman laughed, a horrific grating sound that trailed off into wet coughs. “As am I,” he said, choking a bit. Yellow blood dribbled down his chin, and a biowire snaked across his face to clear it. “I asked for you. It was an idle request, but the Empress continues to surprise me in her benevolence.”

Eridan squinted at the Helmsman. “Seems like the most benevolent thin’ for you is a funeral pyre. Why’d you wanna see me?”

The Helmsman closed his eyes. “I do not want to die,” he said, and something about the strained tone to his voice didn’t ring as true. “I get to see the stars. I have been blessed with eternity and power beyond comprehension. But it is lonely, here. Speaking to someone, to you, has reminded me of this.”

Eridan felt his hand lifting outside his control, until he made contact with the decrepit troll’s cheek with a damp pap. He rotated his hand before the gesture could get misconstrued, grasping the old troll’s jaw as he looked him over. The Helmsman’s skin felt like damp sandpaper, threatening to flake off and peel away at any moment. “Eugh. I mean, I ain’t anythin’ special, but if you’re lonely I could stick around for a bit. I don’t think anyone’s gonna miss me for a bit. What was that song you were singin’ about, anyways?”

The Helmsman managed to open his eyes again, lips parting to speak. He looked behind Eridan’s shoulder, and his eyes went round just in time for someone else to announce themselves.

“Singing for your new buoy-toy already, battery?” The voice sent chills down Eridan’s spine, and he stayed frozen with his hand on the Helmsman’s face. “Hope you don’t mind bein’ an object lesson, guppy.”

A cool hand touched down on Eridan’s shoulder, and he glanced off to the side just long enough to see long, tyrian-painted nails that popped against the myriad of golden rings adorning the hand of none other than the Empress herself. He tried to come up with an explanation, a plea, anything, but gasped instead as the prongs of a golden trident pierced through him. An instinctive shriek of pain caught in his throat, his entire being paralyzed by pain he’d never experienced before.

He choked on his own blood as the trident lifted, sweeping him off his feet and tearing through his gut as the Empress lifted him with ease. As his vision went black Eridan remembered hunting freshwater shallows with Feferi, pulling crayfish from their murky dens and impaling them on his fingers. He’d watched them squirm, antennae wriggling and legs kicking as if they had any hope of surviving before popping them into his mouth and crunching through their chitinous shells with his teeth. Eridan’s right leg spasmed, kicking out once, and he saw nothing more.

#homestuck #eridan ampora #interrogatormentors #eridan #homestuck au #illustrated story #fic #the psiioniic #the helmsman #stop having two fucking titles motherglubber #her imperial condescension #the empress #you too no one is free from sin #anyways go listen to iron infidel #its good tunes #interrogatormentors event

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thelostcatpodcast · 5 years ago

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THE LOST CAT PODCAST TRANSCRIPTS: SEASON 3: EPISODE 06: DINOSAURS

SEASON 3: EPISODE 06: DINOSAURS Episode released 9th April 2017 http://thelostcat.libsyn.com/season-3-episode-6-dinosaurs

We are all just people, and no-one is perfect. We all make mistakes and no-one is blameless. But, above all things, absolutely no-one deserves to be eaten by a dinosaur.

THE LOST CAT PODCAST SEASON 3 BY A P CLARKE. EPISODE 6: DINOSAURS

The owners of the old museum were very mean people indeed. They were just horrible. Not so much that they deserved to be eaten by dinosaurs, of course, but they weren’t nice. One of the owners was a tall man who looked like he was made of matchsticks. And he was, if matchsticks were things you counted with, say, in a poker game without money. He totted up everything in terms of worth, including people, and fun, in order to cut them into little pieces to fit them into columns and rows, and he would never use money to play poker with. He had the look of being perpetually angry with the world, as its being a sphere prevented him from looking in its lower right corner. His name was Mr Gorps, and very much like a poker game with out money, he was entirely a waste of time. The other owner was a tornado of tumult which no order could survive contact with. She would loom in to a room, create crisis and disaster all about her, then move blithely on to the next, blaming everyone else for the wreckage that all now lay within. In fact the only thing separating her from highly destructive forces of nature is that tornados have a calm in their centre. Her name was Mrs Kaddaver, and she made the world in her image. They were mean to their staff, they were mean to their customers, their practices closed down other businesses around them. You’ll have worked for people like this. We’ve all worked for people like this. You know: them. They ran the old museum in a constant state of fear and panic and the only reason it remained open was that it had a dinosaur. And everybody likes dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are cool. It was the skeleton of one of those big, bipedal dinosaurs, and it loomed over you as you entered the grand hall at the front of the museum. It was posed with its jaws open and claws pointed towards the entrance for maximum impact. There were pictures and animated videos of the dinosaur in action, huge and lumbering and ponderous in its muscled solidity. And it was depicted in savage, heavy battle, or in blood-flecked roar, all teeth and flesh and eyes and scales and lizardy, leathery skin: a monster. It wasn’t subtle. And it didn’t have feathers. My friend and I had had conversations with Mrs Kaddaver about this. “Ridiculous!” she yelled. “It’s not a parakeet!” "We’re not saying that it is." "Look!" she continued, pointing at the skeleton “That’s not a bird is it! You don’t see any feathers on that!” "It’s a skeleton." “Next thing you’ll be telling me my budgie’s a ten ton savage monster!” “Well that’s kind of the point, you see dinosaurs were very social, agile animals.” “I’ll have none of this rot! I know what a dinosaur is! Ridiculous!” And so the dinosaur skeleton stayed snarling at the customers: vicious, heavy and featherless. And to be fair, I like my dinosaurs when they are savage monsters, but then I also like them when they are cute and a cartoon. You just think a museum might have more curiosity in its curation. Also, to be fair, geese are buggers, but I digress: The reason we were at the museum was because they were about to open a new dinosaur exhibition. It was a big secret that would be revealed at a very special and exclusive ceremony, for a premium ticket price of course. My friend wanted to see it and even said he would pay for it, so we went down for the grand reveal. We, the special few who had paid the premium ticket price all stood in front of the dinosaur within a special, roped off enclosure by the front doors, at the end of a cheap and poorly stuck down red carpet. A special curtain had been erected around the dinosaur’s feet, hiding whatever this new exhibit was. Mrs Kaddaver stood to its side, fussing with it. Mr Gorps stood to the side of the special enclosure, constantly looking around, checking things. "We are so proud," began Mrs Kaddaver. "To reveal a most extraordinary new exhibit. You are so honoured to be here at the unveiling." And she pulled on the string. "And here they are!" The curtain dropped, and nestled in a rather tangled thatch of twigs, were three large, mottled, eggs. The crowd were somewhat unmoved. “What?” said Mrs Kaddaver "It’s not very impressive, is it?" But Mr Gorps was looking smug. "They’re real," he said, with a worrying confidence. "Hey hold on," I said. "Where did you get those eggs from?" "Oh, a shop I found, on top of Hill Street, actually." "Oh? A curiosity shop?" "I believe it was that, yes." "What did they cost you?" "It was an acceptable transaction," was all that he would say, gruffly turning his head back to the exhibit. For one of hte eggs had started moving. And we all started looking then. The egg wobbled, and then it cracked. Then its top popped open and a baby dinosaur was inside. It squinted at the lights, yawned and then stood up. It was just under a foot tall, it was bipedal, obviously predatory, and absolutely covered in feathers – greys and blues and greens covered its body with the biggest forming a plume along its tail. It stretched, rather like a bird. "Ooooh noooo! This is no good!" cried Mrs Kaddaver. "That’s not a real dinosaur at all! Oh what am I going to do! What am I going to do!" And then she had an idea. You could tell as her whole face changed. "I know what to do!" And she grabbed the little baby dinosaur by the legs, turned it upside down, and started plucking its feathers out in great handfuls. And the little baby dinosaur squawked in distress. And then I saw Mr Gorps smile, and step away from the enclosure towards Mrs Kaddaver and the baby dinosaurs. “Keep going, girl, you’re doing a great job,” he said. More and more feathers were plucked ruthlessly out. More and more screeching came from the poor newly-born dinosaur. "Almost there," said Mr Gorps. And then a great shadow loomed over the entire hall of the museum, cast by something very big behind us. Mr Gorps looked up and the smile turned in to a grin. For walking up the steps and into the hall directly behind us in the enclosure was a massive dinosaur, huge of tooth and claw, bipedal, obviously predatory, and entirely covered in feathers. The baby dinosaur continued squawking and the adult dinosaur kept approaching. It paused as it reached the enclosure, and gave us a big sniff, perhaps wondering whether to pass up this perfectly gathered meal. "Now!" yelled Mr Gorps and he pressed a huge button on a remote control he had produced from a pocket. A huge cage made of reinforced glass fell down from the ceiling on to the enclosure, surrounding the giant dinosaur and us in transparent walls 20 feet high. It landed with a great whooom and sealed us in. “And there we have the real exhibit!” said Mr Gorps. “A fully grown, entirely alive dinosaur!” We banged on the glass with our hands as above us the dinosaur started banging on the glass with its head, testing it. “What are you doing?” we yelled at Mr Gorps. “Necessary for the plan!” he replied. “You understand!” And the dinosaur looked down at us, and then up at the roof of the museum, unobstructed as it was by any lid to the cage. Then it coiled itself down until its belly was touching the floor, and then leapt with some considerable agility on to the top of the lidless cage, where it perched, much like a bird, if a really, really big one. "You didn’t build a roof?" cried Mrs Kaddaver. "It added considerably to the cost!" replied Mr Gorps. "You said they were big lumbering creatures!" "Weellll," began Mrs Kaddaver. And then the dinosaur leapt down and landed, with some exquisite poise, on the other side of the glass, and it looked at the slowly hatching babies, it looked at Mr Gorps, holding the controller of the cage in his hand, and it looked at Mrs Kaddaver, who was holding the half plucked baby dinosaur in hers. Now no-one deserves to be eaten a dinosaur, not even people like Mr Gorps and Mrs Kaddaver. But I do not think the dinosaur was particularly thinking about what it deserved to eat, either. There was a delightful moment when all three looked at each other across the great hall, and then the dinosaur charged at them. Mrs Kaddaver dropped the baby dinosaur, and then they both ran. The dinosaur chased after them. The two museum owners ran around and around the great hall of their museum, being chased by a dinosaur. We, behind glass, could do absolutely nothing. “We really should try and do something,” said my friend. “We really, really should,” I agreed. But we couldn’t. The walls were designed to hold a very large, if not very agile, dinosaur. Bang as we might upon the walls, We were going nowhere. We could only watch. So we opened up the bottle we had brought with us, and we watched Mr Gorps and Mrs Kaddaver be chased up and down by a dinosaur, as we drank a large glass of wine.

Go down to the river, maybe she will forgive you Go down to the river, maybe she will forgive you Go down to the river, maybe she will forgive you But I can not forgive you for the things that you have done I can not forgive you for the things that you have done

Go up to the mansion, maybe your father is answering Go up to the mansion, maybe your father is answering Go up to the mansion, maybe your father is answering But I can not forgive you for the things that you have done I can not forgive you for the things that you have done

Shout it out in to the rain Whisper it in to a tree Cover it up in poetry But I can not forgive you for the things that you have done I can not forgive you for the things that you have done

Mr Gorps and Mrs Kaddaver were hiding behind a column, and the dinosaur, temporarily losing them, came to a rest. Its feathers settled down and the pattern of grey, green and blue feathers looked, for all the world, like a rain-soaked building. “Well I never,” said my friend. Then Mrs Kaddaver’s face changed. She must have had an idea. “Let’s run for the office,” she said. “We’ll never make it,” said a visibly exhausted Mr Gorps. “Every time it looks this way, just stand still. Everybody knows they can’t see you if you stand still.” “Really?” “Dinosaur vision is based on movement. Didn’t you know that?” "Yes. Yes of course I did." And, while the dinosaur was looking away from them, they ran for the office. The dinosaur turned back their way, and they froze, standing still in the centre of the hall. The dinosaur cocked its head, and looked about the area carefully. It took a step closer. Out of the corner of his mouth, Mr Gorps said “I’m not sure this is working Mrs Kaddaver... Mrs Kaddaver?” But she was already twenty feet away, scarpering off towards the back stairs, leaving him alone in the hall with the dinosaur. “Oh,” he said. He turned to run, and the dinosaur picked him up by the leg and swung him around. We, behind the glass, watched. As the dinosaur swung him around its giant jaw closed with a powerful crunch and severed Mr Gorps' leg right up near the thigh. The rest of Mr Gorps flew through the air and bounced off the inside of the glass cage, falling down in a heap near our feet. It showed impressive aim. Then the dinosaur chewed and chewed at the leg until all the meat was off and it spat the sinewy bones in to the cage too, landing on the crumpled body of Mr Gorps. Then the dinosaur turned around and headed up the back stairs. We rushed over to Mr Gorps and tried to help him. It was, after all, the right thing to do. He was conscious, and trying to get himself up. Using some of the enclosure rope, we created a tourniquet to stop the bleeding. He managed to stand up by leaning on the glass walls. We looked around for something he could use as a crutch or a walking stick. But the only suitable thing we could find in Mr Gorps’ cage, was his now-stripped leg bones. So we strapped them together into a walking stick and handed it to Mr Gorps. He took it, rather testily, and then wobbled forwards on what I guess you would describe as his legs. “Where is the beastie now?” “We think it went up the back stairs for Mrs Kaddaver.” “Well, I hope she’s tasty,” he said, a touch cruelly, I felt. “Come on.” For he was already looking over at the nest of eggs, which had all hatched out into tiny feathered dinosaurs, all finding their feet on the smooth marble flooring. He pulled out the remote from his pocket and lifted the cage. We quickly got out from under it. Then Mr Gorps approached the baby dinosaurs, hopping on his attached leg while holding out his other one, stripped bare of meat but still with plenty of stringy sinew and the like on it, towards the babies. The babies looked up, sniffing the air, and got very interested. “That’s right, that’s right,” said Mr Gorps. “Just a small change of plans, and this will still work out fine!” As the baby dinosaurs started approaching , Mr Gorps hopped backwards, luring them back under the cage. “And with less people to share the profits with, I can still come out ahead!” We stood way off to the side for this. But it was working. The babies were now underneath the cage. Mr Gorps said “A-ha!”, pressed the button on the remote and hopped back one more time. But his foot landed on the cheap and poorly attached red carpet, which slipped out from under him and he fell to the ground as the glass cage fell down around them. Now the falling cage did not crush him – that would have been awful - but the remote, sadly, was crushed, leaving himself and the baby dinosaurs inside. “Ooh dear,” he said. They approached him, as he tried to wave them away with his leg. "We really should do something," I said. "Yes, we really, really should," my friend agreed. We smashed on the glass with chairs and the like, but not even a crack appeared in the glass. So, to be absolutely clear once again, there was nothing we could do but watch as the baby dinosaurs leapt up on to the fallen Mr Gorps and began to bite. They were not very large yet and so nip, nip, nip, Mr Gorps died by a thousand tiny cuts as he was eaten by dinosaurs. “Ah good, he got them locked up,” was all Mrs Kaddaver said, as she returned to the hall, struggling to carry a huge bag of something. “Think its a bird, does it? Well I know what to do with birds.” She upended the bag and an immense pile of white effervescent tablets, usually used for indigestion relief, fell to the floor. “Birds can’t can’t evacuate their bowels the way we can, and so the released gas from the pills can’t escape and they explode!” she said, looking very smug indeed. “Everybody knows that.” My friend began to point something out, but I gently raised my hand to him, and ushered him, quietly, further in to the shadows. “There’s nothing we can do,” I said. And the great dinosaur appeared at the far side of the hall and pounded towards Mrs Kaddaver, as she lay a very large steak on top of the pile of effervescent tablets. “So you think you’re a bird, do you? Well I bet you’ve got a bird brain!” And she looked around, to see if anyone got her joke. The dinosaur slowly approached. We walked back further to the side of the hall, where we discovered the tied off ropes that held the glass cage by means of pulleys, which was interesting. Mrs Kaddaver stood, feet wide and arms defiantly wide, as the dinosaur stood in front of her. The dinosaur sniffed at the steak and, being a dinosaur, ate the whole pile, meat and effervescent pills in one. “Gotcha!” she cried. And the dinosaur wobbled on its feet. It started pacing about uncertainly, as if in some discomfort. As much as a dinosaur’s face could emote, it looked distressed. Mrs Kaddaver, for her part, looked immensely smug. Then the dinosaur's legs seemed to give out, and its head dropped low, almost to the floor, directly in front of the triumphant Mrs Kaddaver. It opened its mouth... And let out an enormous burp, right in her face, a massive belch that got rid of all the built up gas, along with a great deal of whatever was in its stomach. And she was covered in phlegm, and bits of Mr Gorps. The dinosaur stood up, shaking it out, and towering over Mrs Kaddaver. And she started flapping her arms. "Oh no!" she cried. "This isn’t right!" And the dinosaur’s mouth came down and swallowed Mrs Kaddaver, head first. Her arms continued to flap about as it held her in its mouth. And it lifted her off her feet as it reared up, so her arms and her legs flapped about. Then it slammed its jaw shut, some of her limbs fell to the floor, as the rest of her went down its throat. And Mrs Kaddaver was eaten by dinosaurs. And when she was finally gone, the dinosaur looked around for the babies, opened its mouth and honked like a bird, if a really big one, as it called their kids to them. But the babies were stuck on the other side of the glass, along with most of what was left of Mr Gorps. The dinosaurs honked at each other, like differently sized birds. We ran up to the next level of the hall and we pulled at the ropes and pulleys that controlled the cage, and slowly managed to pull the cage up high enough for the baby dinosaurs to get out. They honked quietly to each other, and then the dinosaurs walked out of the museum and off in to the night time city. And that was that, we went home.

And as we walked home, finishing off the last of our wine, my friend looked wistfully up at the stars and said: “Dinosaurs.”

THANK YOU FOR LISTENING.

Links

thelostcat.libsyn.com

twitter.com/LostCatPod

thelostcatpodcast.tumblr.com

facebook.com/lostcatpodcast

soundcloud.com/a-p-clarke/sets/the-lost-cat-podcast

apclarke.bandcamp.com/releases

#lost cat #lost cat podcast #cat #dinosaur #podcast #audio drama #audiodrama #horror #comedy #museum #the lost cat podcast

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thedeadflag · 6 years ago

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Hey, I'm creating a campaign for a couple of friends, and it's my first time DMing, so I was wondering if you have any tips for me :))) P.S.: I loved this chapter of your fic so much, I really missed your writing :)))

Yay! That sounds like a lot of fun, I’m sure you’ll have a lot of fun :D

I’ll leave some links below to some great videos/articles with advice (because there’s honestly so much to say that I could go on for ages and ages), but for now…

* Two-Way Communication is Critical

This is arguably the second most important piece of advice, and one that ties into almost every piece of advice I could theoretically offer. Pen and paper roleplaying (whether there’s actual paper or not, of course) is a form of interactive storytelling with player created narratives. It’s not a top-down hierarchy where a DM designs and plots out everything, and the players follow along all wide-eyed and obedient with no agency of their own.

You are all playing a game together, even if your roles are different. Collaboration is key. That requires communication both ways.

This is especially vital when creating a new campaign, regardless of scale, because it’s immensely important to start with the right foundation. What kind of game do your players want to play? What are they looking for in the game, what do they want to get out of it, what interests them about roleplaying, what are their expectations?

From there, you can establish a basic idea of what sort of campaign to set up, what dynamic(s) to focus on, etc., because if you’re designing a campaign purely around what you want, your players might not be able to get on the same page. At the same time, you need to make sure you’ve got what you want in there as well, because you need to have fun as well.

After that, it’s best to approach players about character creation. One major newbie GM/DM mistake is letting players completely create characters in a vacuum. This is less than ideal because without a setting/context, (A) players tend to shift focus and invest in what they can get details on, generally the mechanical aspects of the game. Not a bad thing, necessarily, but you don’t want players branching off in wildly different directions and investing in those possibilities heavily mechanically to where you can’t really find a workable middle ground. Think a character who is out to be the biggest min-max munchkin wizard or cleric, contrasting with a character who is designed to be useless in combat but excellent socially and in skills, contrasting with a character who is built virtually entirely around being one cog in a phalanx wall who is also a vampire that cannot travel during daylight, contrasting with a character who has a lot of skills and feats invested in their profession as a farmer. Lots of directions there, and not necessarily one way to get everyone what they want.

So it’s best to head them off at the pass, introduce them to the working concept of the campaigns as you’re developing it. Brainstorm collectively as a group what kind of place you all would like to have in that world, what kind of adventure seems like it could be fun, and from there, come up with an opening scene for the players to build their characters into. Again, collaboration is great, bounce ideas back and forth with them, have them bounce ideas off each other, find a way for character creation to mesh with all of your goals as a group and then you won’t get caught so easily in the traps of players getting invested in being the single star in their own show rather than an ensemble cast. Get them excited to buy into the group dynamic and the adventure ahead of them.

And when you get into having sessions, talk to players between breaks, after sessions, keep tabs. Ask them what they liked and didn’t, ask them how they felt about the session, what’s exciting to them. Understand that character behaviour and decisions are manifestations of play intrigue and excitement, so use that line of communication to your advantage

Use that feedback and shape your campaign to it. One example of my own I sometimes bring up was a World of Darkness campaign I ran set in the late 1800s. My best friend grew heavily suspicious of an NPC in town that honestly was pretty unimportant and largely a placeholder. After two and a half sessions of him keying in on the NPC and his character investigating him and all sorts of sneaky shenanigans, I decided to flesh the NPC out and work him into the narrative more. I didn’t make him the big bad villain my best friend predicted he was, but I made him worthy of my best friend’s suspicions and paranoia if with a twist or two my best friend didn’t expect. While we never got to fully get through that narrative arc due to schedules conflicting too much to keep on with that campaign, it was an enjoyable narrative turn that rewarded his efforts in-character and his excitement outside of character.

If you have a player that’s excited and invested, play on that. Make the most of that. There’s nothing better as a DM than winding down a session and players spending the next while geeking out about how much fun they’re having and where they think things are heading. An open ear and open lines of communication are more more important than any notion of sticking to a set plan.

Related video (x)

* Do Your Research, But Don’t Buy In Too hard

Not much to say here. Research what you need, but don’t over-prepare. THis is the DM’s version of “Kill your darlings” more or less, because you’re going to have to toss away cool ideas that your players just aren’t biting on. That’s okay. Don’t spend tens of hours writing all this intricate backstory for items, or NPCs, because chances are it’s not going to be as great for the players as it was for you during brainstorming that. Give yourself the tools to create your world, get the basics, have a key pieces that can be malleable and dynamic in their ability to adjust to player actions/decisions, let your player’s characters be the center of your story, and build your world around them as they go. I mean, fi you want to go all out on worldbuilding and lore, then go for it, but just understand that all fo that needs to be supplementary to the campaign. It’s used to set the stage, not steer the ship, that’s the job for the characters

It’s the same for creating characters. Have a backstory, but don’t have 6 pages of backstory. It’s not necessary, it can hamper the ability for their character to grow and experience meaningful development/experiences in your campaign, and that can hinder the group dynamic and the immersion of the group and individual player into the game.

One note-taking bit that some DMs do is create session recaps, or something similar (see here for example/breakdown, maybe watch the full video for some great advice at encouraging roleplaying and engagement, and the importance of notetaking). In one of my old ones, I photoshopped an old newspaper with a variety of stories, some involving their escapades, some involving clues about important NPCs, some providing hooks for upcoming possible narrative plots. That worked well in the campaign I ran around a single city area, but that sort of thing can help increase excitement and indulge your urges for creation without railroading players. Sometimes I’ll start a session asking players to recap collectively what they’ve done recently before providing my recap from the perspective of the world they impacted. That can help with investment, getting them to see how their characters are perceived, the impact and consequences of their decisions, etc. The latter of which is something I write up directly after each session while things are fresh in my mind. All the major involved/affected NPCs have a perspective developed on what happened, and I use that and player commentary/character behaviour to help guide the campaign forward. Cause and effect is a simple and helpful way to think about ongoing conflict in campaigns.

And a recap can help with bookkeeping, so players aren’t constantly interrupting asking if they received X item last session, who X NPC is, etc.

In which case note-taking is important (x)(x). Having a strong platform for notetaking is important too if you’re going digital. Google Docs, Scrivener, notebook.ai, liquid story binder, etc. There’s a boatload of great tools out there, so find one that works well for you whether in-session or post/pre-session

Related video on research: (x at 6:48, but the whole video is excellent)

and the most important advice of all

Have Fun

Seriously. Pen and Paper roleplaying is meant to be fun. If you’re not having fun, change things up in the direction of what IS fun, screwing the consequences and previously well crafted plans.

As said here, Fun > Story > Rules.

Past that, getting your feet wet in one-shots is probably a good way to understand how to do things and give yourself and your players a trial run before kicking off a larger campaign. That way, you can work out some kinks, develop chemistry and learn to read the players, get comfortable with improv, etc.

Those are some basics to really work on accepting and exhibiting, and it will take time so be patient with yourself and your players.

Also, check these videos for some help because they are very good and informative, and provide a lot of A+ quality information on how to run a great campaign and get started

I know that’s a lot of videos, but they all have value. Some address the same things as other videos, but sometimes slightly different perspectives on the same points can help really fill out an understanding of certain topics, issues, concepts, etc. And a lot of those videos linked have other videos on their channels that are really informative and useful, too

Anywho, feel free to hit me up with questions if you’re struggling with anything, I’d be happy to help however I can!

#d&d #pen and paper #roleplaying #dnd #DM tips #dungeon master tips #long post #artyshort

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mana-burns · 6 years ago

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You Can’t Go Home Again: An Analysis of Resident Evil VII

I'm comin' home, I've done my time Now I've got to know what is and isn't mine If you received my letter telling you I'd soon be free Then you'll know just what to do If you still want me

Introduction

Resident Evil VII is deceptive. Resident Evil, as a series, is deceptive. Numerous spinoffs and unnumbered entries turned the franchise into a tangled mess of intersecting characters, monsters, and conspiracies.

From the original trek through the Spencer mansion to the bombastic high-stakes setpiece-fest that is RE6, Resident Evil, after three console generations, had descended into itself, becoming bloated and seemingly incorrigible, impossible to nail down and define.

REVII was positioned as a return to form. Like the original Resident Evil, it is a straightforward story set in a spooky house, starring an inexperienced protagonist, Ethan, there with a simple but sympathetic and relatable mission: Rescue his girlfriend and get out. But REVII can’t help but dip into massive conspiracy as it navigates through what should be a relatively easy-to-digest story.

As Ethan searches for the missing Mia, who was away on a, get this, babysitting job, he encounters the deranged and inhuman Baker family, who have been granted a twisted immortality. There’s a pervasive black goo simply referred to as the Mold that seems to be infecting the family and their estate, spawning undead creatures and giving the Bakers supernatural powers. It’s not long before Ethan himself is infected, too.

The game then becomes a series of fetch-quests and races to various Macguffins as Ethan hurries to assemble a cure for himself, Mia, and their newfound ally, the Bakers’ daughter Zoe.

Resident Evil VII is a game running from its own past. As a linear narrative, it works fine, but it works better as a mood piece, a love letter to American horror films. It is meant to emulate a series of tropes and conventions. It's the product of two cultures—East and West— colliding head-on, and as a result it feels disjointed, dissonant, and yet wholly unique, fascinating, and, ultimately, compelling.

Resident Evil VII is an allegory for itself. It is a battle for the series’ soul.

Aesthetics

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: Resident Evil 7 is not concerned with realism. It’s about simulating a horror movie; recreating their grit, visuals, and mood. In this way, it is a simulation of a simulation, and it leans heavily on the history and conventions of the American horror film without ever fully understanding them. You see this in direct, 1-for-1 tributes, such as the chainsaw fight with Jack that evokes Evil Dead 2, or the Saw-like machinations of Lucas Baker’s deathtraps, or the body found in the basement corner in the Derelict House Footage tape, positioned just like the victim in Blair Witch Project. And practically the entire front-half of Resident Evil 7 is pulled straight from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

This is par for the course for the Resident Evil series. The first game was a pretty standard take on haunted mansion horror, with some limited ventures into ‘80s action films, casting STARS as the badass special forces team in way over their heads a la Predator or even Aliens.

Resident Evil has always been about taking American horror and action tropes and sort of sifting them through Japanese culture. It is a imitation of American conventions, and it works precisely because it is so imperfect. Its dissonance happens to work perfectly for the mood of the genre. There’s something unsettling about how the details are just off; Louisiana looks like a still frame from an episode of True Detective, but it’s still evocative of how Americans perceive the swampland. Little mistakes regarding the area’s history and culture—the strange references to football, the inaccurate Civil War uniform—make things uncomfortable and strange. It’s like taking an English sentence, running it through Google translate into Japanese, and then translating it back into English again. Some general meanings are there and you may even be able to gleam some sense out of it, but it has lost all context and syntax and turned into something that isn’t quite English and isn’t quite Japanese—something that occupies the space between, something that has become a totally unique method of communication, with its own new signifiers and meaning. That’s Resident Evil. And that may explain a bit of the franchise’s ongoing identity crisis, too.

On a more surface-level reading, the aesthetics of REVII are vastly different from those of its predecessors, an approach to horror that’s a bit brighter but no less terrifying than previous entries. Remember, VII tells us, sunlight casts deeper shadows than darkness. This approach to horror is largely possible due to the wonderful lighting and particle effects at Capcom’s disposal, and though their tech struggles with faces, the uncanny valley works in their favor for this particular title, elevating that otherworldly feeling of imperfect simulation.

The Baker mansion and its surrounding area are dirty, grimy, grotesque. It’s southern gothic. The word “squalor” comes to mind. They choose to live in filth. Is there something ableist and maybe even contempful towards poverty about this dehumanizing of the Bakers? Maybe, but any sort of prejudice that the designers might be preying on here comes from a degree of separation, in that their only knowledge of that context, as mentioned before, is through American horror films, through simulacra. It is seperated by multiple layers, and so I find it hard to condemn their visions of the impoverished American South as anything but pulpy horror. Whatever the case, the true antagonists of the story betray any idea of prejudice against the lower class.

Perspective

Resident Evil 7’s protagonist is a camera. The series shifts to a first-person perspective for the first time, placing the player behind the eyes and within the mind of the game’s lead, Ethan. Despite this, the game has no qualms separating the avatar from the controller; there’s a sense that Ethan is his own character, with his own motivations not necessarily in line with the player’s.

I’ve heard the argument that what Ethan sees within the first half hour of the game would be enough to make anyone turn back. Why does he choose to go in alone? Why doesn’t he get help, or at least arm himself before he starts literally wading through corpses? No justifiable motivation could explain that.

Ethan is ostensibly motivated to look for his lost love, Mia. We’ll talk more about Mia later, but first I want to challenge the idea that this surface motivation is all that is propelling Ethan forward. Of course, you and I, and the developers, know that Ethan’s true motivation has nothing to do with Mia, and in fact nothing to do with Ethan himself, as he has no autonomy in the story. No, the motivating action propelling Resident Evil VII forward lies in the hands of the player. In a horror movie, the sort of films REVII is explicitly invoking, we can feel smarter than the protagonists. We know not to take a shower, we know not to look behind the curtain. In a horror game, we must specifically put ourselves in dangerous situations, and we do it because it’s fun. Without doing that, we can’t participate in the game. In REVII, since there is a degree of separation between player and avatar, our attention is specifically brought to Ethan’s flimsy-seeming motivation. In fact he moves forward because we push him forward, we keep him fighting. There’s a sadistic, manipulative relationship between Ethan and the player, but it’s also more complicated than that.

We sympathize with Ethan because of his love for Mia. Still, in some of Ethan’s barks and challenges to the Bakers, he expresses confusion, true ingenuity, sincerity, and a surprising and inspiring amount of courage and mettle. These motivations are enough for us to bind with Ethan, more so than in any other game in the series. Ethan is dumb, and we love him for that.

Mechanically speaking, first-person allows for some admittedly cheap but still fun jump scares, but it more importantly creates room for and necessitates an extreme amount of detail. Players can inspect drawers, cabinets, and cracks in the floorboards, unlike ever before. Monsters have a more threatening sense of scale, and so Resident Evil VII frequently plays with perspective and height, making its signature footsoldiers, the Molded, lumbering, giant masses of black knots, while also making its primary villain surprisingly pint-sized.

The first-person perspective also gives way to an effective new move, the block, crucial on the higher difficulties. The block gives Ethan a defensive verb and sort of grants the player a satisfying “cower” button. It doesn’t always make sense (how could an arm block a chainsaw?) but it paces out the game quite well against melee enemies, and it lends a visceral clutter to an already elegantly messy game screen.

Speaking of visceral—the new perspective’s greatest strength is probably the way it facilitates body horror. In RE7, you’ll have limbs chopped off, knives driven into your ribcage, and horrible masses of crawling grubs shoved down your throat. It’s a very personal, intimate horror, one that wants to gross you out while it makes your controller shudder and vibrate in resistance. It brings the player deeper into the shell of Ethan, and it creates a atmosphere of trapped, hopeless dread.

In a way, Resident Evil has been grasping at this perspective since its inception; think of the first encounter with a zombie in the first title, how the game shifts to Jill or Chris’s eyes, how the undead slowly turns to face you, its rotted mouth stuffed with human brain. This moment of body horror was essentially our introduction to Resident Evil’s mood. The perspective in Resident Evil VII, and our mouth being stuffed full of rotten flesh as we watch on, helplessly, brings the whole thing to a complete circle.

Kinetics

The movement in Resident Evil VII is deliberately slow, almost plodding. There’s a sense of weight to Ethan and his actions, necessitating such things as the aforementioned block button as well as a dedicated turn, a verb that is becoming more and more common in triple-A games, it seems. There is a sprint button, but there’s no real way to get Ethan to break out into an actual full-on run, ironic considering the urgency of the situation he’s in.

You could hand-wave away his plodding speed by saying it has something to do with his recent infection, but the Resident Evil series has always inhibited its protagonists in order to simulate the physical ramifications that fear has on the body. Despite arming the player to their proviberial teeth, early RE games aren’t about player empowerment; they still want to be a struggle to survive. So the series balances its arsenal of weapons by inhibiting the avatar’s movement. This is of course subverted in Resident Evil 4, further dismantled in 5, and completely out the window by the time 6 rolls around, but 7 is, again, intended as a return to form, and so we see a slower pace to all of Ethan’s movement. It makes up for the increased precision in aiming that the first person perspective allows.

REVII’s movement and control schemes are nowhere near as innovative and revolutionary as RE4’s over-the-shoulder controls or even RE1’s tank controls. But they still work remarkably well, and this is largely due to how the environments are designed to accommodate them. RE7 is filled with little nooks and crannies that demand careful consideration. Most of the time, they’re empty, but they are so discomforting they feel like intrusive negative space. A quick-turn button means that you always have a way to quickly glance over your shoulder. It creates a paralyzing set of blindspots to the player’s immediate left and immediate right.

Some of the guns in RE7 feel flimsy to fire, unsatisfying and cardboard-thin. The pistol has little weight or feedback, and despite the fact that the submachine gun is one of the most effective weapon in the game, it never really feels great to pull the trigger. It’s all just a bit too high-tech and light, and it clashes with the game’s mood. The shotgun, on the other hand, is incredibly satisfying, with a wonderful kick and a beautiful cascade of gore and blood to compliment each round. Meanwhile, swipes with the knife feel weak and desperate, appropriate as the knife will be little more than a box-breaker or last-ditch effort for the player.

I want to note how well the sound design compliments the movement in Resi 7. Each creek of the floorboard that comes with each step enhances the mood. Everything works harmoniously towards a feeling and an atmosphere, even if it isn’t, by the strictest definition, realistic. Remember, Resident Evil VII doesn’t strive for realism. It strives for a different sort of immersion, one that engulfs the player in familiar iconography rather than relatable and recognizable situations.

The puzzles in Resident Evil VII include the lock-key affairs that are synonymous with the series, though some of them work in interesting or subversive ways. Take the shadow puppet puzzles, that ask the player to rotate a certain key until it casts a shadow that fits into a mold or image. It’s clever to ask the player to think about the game’s lighting; it weaves together the environment and the objective. It draws attention to light and shadow, it takes time and manipulation. What it doesn’t quite take is the lateral thinking necessary for most of what you’d call puzzles. No, the puzzles in REVII are slave to the game’s pace, not its challenge. They give you tasks to do, things to fetch, and moments of quiet discomfort to break up the sometimes bombastic noise of gameplay.

Doors

Doors play a significant role in the Resident Evil series. In the first title, they masked loading screens and acted as gateways for player progression—a lot of that game’s pacing is defined by finding and using keys. In REmake, some doors will shake and slam as you walk past them, implying that enemies are waiting for you on the other side.

But doors are also important tools for survival; each door in Resident Evil is a barrier to keep enemies at bay, because each room is treated as its own discrete environment. Zombies (mostly) can’t get through doors. If you can’t deal with an enemy or enemies, you flee towards the door and use it to place a divide between you and them. Doors are powerful mechanically and thematically in Resident Evil and REmake.

In RE7, they work in a different way. You press a button to initially crack them open, but the game makes you physically push them open as a separate action. In this way you must commit actual movement to the action of entering a room to open a door. You need to make a serious mental and physical investment in order to progress.

This is nothing short of brilliant. You can’t back away from a room after opening the door and survey it for safety before plunging in. You have to go in headfirst, and this gives the game control over moment-to-moment player progression. The doors in Resident Evil VII area synecdoche for the game’s entire design; a mindfulness in mood, movement and control that services a feeling rather than a sense of realism or accuracy.

Videotapes

Resident Evil 7’s obsession with horror films extends beyond the game’s aesthetics and into its mechanics. It is fascinated with the concept of video tapes, beyond simply using these tapes as a way to evoke the mood of found footage horror. Rather, it finds a mechanical purpose for the tapes, turning them into puzzle pieces that help Ethan escape.

When we are first introduced to the videotape mechanic, it’s in the initial shack area, part of the demo that was released before the full game. The tape belongs to an unlucky film crew, working for some imaginary (but wholly believable) reality show about plumbing the depths of abandoned houses. In what is RE7’s most obvious expression of its main purpose—placing the player in a horror movie—the player takes control of the cameraman, and indeed the camera itself, and by proxy—through the method by which Ethan diegetically experiences this scene—the tape. We are the footage, and though it supposedly happened in the past, we are now controlling it in real time.

Disturbingly, the crew goes through almost exactly the same paces that Ethan went through just moments ago, and since we see how it ended up for them, it suggests that he is probably in a great deal of danger.

But the tape shows that there is a secret passage in the fireplace, one that the player could have totally missed without its aid. This establishes a pattern; the player will encounter three more tapes during their journey, and each one will convey a little more information and context to not only the player, but to their avatar, Ethan, as well. Not all of the tapes are mandatory for progression, but they are a wonderful way to present missing pieces of the puzzle to the player, through methods that are thematically appropriate and never wrestle control away from the protagonist. The tapes are essentially keys, but they are infinitely more interesting than a simple progression lock.

The most effective and interesting tape is perhaps the most well-hidden one. “Happy Birthday” is buried in a cupboard in the attic, and it is disturbing footage kept safe and secret by the Bakers’ son, Lucas.

The footage is of an elaborate deathtrap set up by Lucas, who’s positioned as a sort of genius psychopath as an in-universe explanation for some of the game’s puzzles. Lucas has captured one of the poor erstwhile documentarians, and the player takes on this victim’s perspective. Interestingly, all semblance of artifice—a camera recording the footage—drips away in favor of this perspective. Through the magic of movies, we become this character, one-step removed from our hero Ethan, yet still somehow viewing it through his eyes. If the intro tape had us jump back in time to where Ethan has been, this tape foreshadows where he will go.

Since we already know that the victim of the trap doesn’t survive, it’s not a failure to participate in Lucas’s machinations. Instead, it’s presented as the scripted, linear path that we must follow. The lethal puzzle culminates with a task that requires the victim to uncork a barrel of oil, leading to the explosion that ultimately kills the victim in the tape. But the action that springs this trap just yields a password. If one were to go into the trap with some prior knowledge of that password, one would be fine. And that’s exactly the position the tape leaves Ethan in. Since he, by way of the player and the tape, already knows the password, he’s able to escape Lucas’s trap unharmed.

This means the tape isn’t necessary for success. If the player somehow fails to find the tape, they just have to play the death trap twice. Once they continue the game and run through the puzzle a second time, they’ll realize they can just skip over the deathtrap, since they already know the password. It’s a puzzle that is proofed against stumping a stumbling player.

It also extends the horror movie motif pulsing at the heart of Resident Evil VII. It’s an attempt at creating something that the series has sometimes dabbled with, but never fully explored–the idea of elaborate, claustrophobic death traps. You’ll see spiked walls and bottomless pits in other Resi games, but never something quite so sinister and unique, not to mention devoid of enemies or threats beyond the traps themselves. It is a quiet, challenging horror, one that pits the player against themselves, and I think it’s more than strong enough to stand on its own as a full game.

The video tapes in Resident Evil VII stand hand-in-hand with the tape recorder save points and evoke a certain era of technology, a halted progress that crystallizes the Baker mansion at a moment in time, and suggests that they’ve paused their evolution. It also subtly reminds players of a time and a place, the same crucible of factors that led to the creation of the horror films that inspired Resident Evil VII. It’s a horror born out of grime and dust rather than shadows and moonlight.

Jack

Jack is the first member of the family you encounter; you catch a glimpse of his form plodding through the woods, and he eventually kidnaps you and brings you to the centerpiece of REVII’s introduction, the family dinner, where he makes himself known as an intimidating and controlling presence.

After Jack’s pulled away by the arrival of a deputy, you escape from your binds and start to move through the mansion, but of course he quickly catches on to your plan. What follows is the most compelling, proof-of-concept sequence in all of RE7; a game of cat-and-mouse through a tightly wound series of narrow corridors, with the slow-moving but ultra-powerful Jack following you close behind.

The wing of the house that Jack chases you through is a well-thought out arena, with a few hidden escape hatches and multiple ways to double-back. It makes movement and navigation feel clever and fun, while still keeping a sense of looming dread. You’ll double-back multiple times, and you’ll always have the plan b of escaping back into the safe room on the opposite end of the hallway, as far from your objective as possible.

This scene is marked, most notably, by a few scripted scenarios designed to catch the player off-guard; one, Jack can burst through a wall and surprise the player, but only if both characters are positioned just right—some players will never even see this sequence.

It takes courage to develop entire sequences that some players will never see. It’s difficult and resource-intensive to design and place such moments in a game. But it pays off in REVII; these moments are some of the most memorable in the entire game, and you can tell a lot of care and time went into making Jack’s sequence pitch-perfect. It’s truly the highlight of the game and a Capcom more willing to take a huge gamble might have used it as the entire framework for the game. As it is, it’s the stand-out chapter in the game.

After a bit of exploration and a few confrontations, you’ll encounter the now most certainly undead Jack Baker, during an otherwise slow-paced hunt for a few statues. He catches you off-guard and the game challenges you to once again play cat-and-mouse. As a result, the entire Jack encounter sort of plays like a three-act structure in its own right; you encounter him once, run away, quiet exploration, encounter him again, more puzzles and exploration, and a final, bombastic, Evil-Dead-as-hell encounter in an enclosed space.

The fight challenges how well players have learned to navigate tight corners and small spaces while evading a slow-moving Jack. Perhaps it would have been more appropriate to present them with a cat-and-mouse challenge, one that added new wrinkles in order to act as a sort of final exam for the Jack chapter. But it’s hard to argue that this fight isn’t a trippy power fantasy for the player, and the way it flips the player’s relationship with Jack works.

Ethan has now escaped the mansion, but finds himself in the Baker grounds writ-large. The game doesn’t open up or become less linear, but it does explore some novel new locations. Unfortunately, that variance comes at the cost of some consistency. Before moving on to the next location, the player encounters a trailer belonging to Zoe, who ostensibly sets herself up as a mysterious ally. We first encountered Zoe through a phone call in the Baker house, where she warned us we were in grave danger. Zoe is not that interesting as a character, and mainly serves to complicate the game’s narrative, which starts out simply and becomes more and more complicated, to its weakness. Zoe is an element of that. She’s not well fleshed-out in the main game, and she’ll later be part of an arbitrary and superfluous player choice that feels tacked on. Here, however, she’ll play the role of mysterious sherpa for a while.

After a short break to resupply and catch their bearings, the player will soon enter the second house, the old house, and the domain of Mrs. Marguerite Baker.

Marguerite

Pacing-wise, Marguerite’s domain is when RE7 really starts to slip in its footing. It’s not exactly bad gameplay, but it does sag a bit, and a few fetch-quests lead to the previously mentioned flamethrower and a pretty frightening if rhetorically uninteresting tape starring Mia.

Marguerite’s gimmick is insects, cockroach-like bugs that swarm Ethan, fly around the damp wooden shack, and build nests that the player must flush out using the burner. The bugs create some variance in the enemies that RE7 will throw at the player, but they aren’t terribly fun to fight. What’s more, the old house doesn’t feel quite as well-thought-out as the larger Baker Mansion, and though it also follows a somewhat circular layout, its hallways and doors are less distinct, and its rooms are less geometrically interesting.

Jack is horrifying because he feels threatening and powerful. Marguerite is horrifying because she’s unpleasant to see or hear. It’s a skin-deep horror that relies on physical reactions rather than mental ones. Marguerite is repulsive, not necessarily terrifying.

Perhaps most disappointingly, we don’t learn very much about Marguerite at all, before or after her infection. Jack gets a moment of redemption later in the game, and Lucas and Zoe are fleshed out in conversation and flavor text around the Baker estate. Marguerite, on the other hand, only gets bits and pieces of story—she’s really more about an image than a fleshed-out idea. The DLC supposedly characterizes her out a little better, and gives hints to what she was like pre-infection. There are glimpses here and there that suggest she had an affinity for religious iconography; she has a habit of creating small shrines to Eve’s “gift.” This was a potentially rich vein that Capcom could have explored in more detail to make Marguerite feel like more than just a wife and mother.

The highlight of Marguerite’s section, by far, is her boss encounter. Set in a small two-story greenhouse, the boss fight begins when she startles you by popping through a window and grabbing your legs. At this point, she has mutated into a Junji Ito-style horror, with long arms mimicking spider limbs.

Her boss arena is a work of art. While Jack’s pit is somewhat simplistic, Marguerite’s stage has a layout simple enough to grok but complicated enough to provide ambush points and blind spots. There are doors that are blocked from one side, but give the player a route to double-back. There are ceilings and walls and windows for Marguerite to crawl on and climb through. There’s ammo hidden in cabinets, but there’s a risk-reward of wasting burner ammo to open these cabinets—though the burner is the most effective weapon against the matriarch. And, echoing the gameplay in her larger domain, the boss fight is dampened by moments of quiet stalking, though here the line is blurred between cat and mouse; you’re fighting back, and if you can control the tempo of the fight you’re frequently on the offense.

There is some sexual imagery to Marguerite’s final transformation, as her weak point is a hive-womb, and she crawls around on all fours while stalking you. It’s RE taking a page out of Silent Hill’s book, and it might feel a little cheap and grotesque if it wasn’t executed with the grimy style of a western grindhouse horror flick. No, REVII has little reservations about what it is by this point; it fully accepts that it is campy gross-out horror, but never to the level of shtick. It still takes its scares seriously, and this level of sincerity lends it a lot of heart. It makes no apologies for being disgusting, and in that way it’s lovable, just like the shlock it’s based on.

After a grueling fight, Marguerite calcifies and crumbles to dust, leaving behind a lantern for Ethan, who is free to move on to the next chapter of the game.

Eveline (Part 1)

But before Ethan moves on, he makes a detour to the attic and the kid’s bedroom.. Demonic children are nothing new, horror-wise, but REVII sows the seeds of its main antagonist achingly slowly, placing her quite literally right under the player’s nose while still breadcrumbing morbid story details to keep the hook. It’s not a deep story, or even all that unpredictable, but it is compelling enough to push Ethan forward.

You’ll notice I’m not paying much mind to the grand details of the plot, and that’s precisely because the story is secondary to a mood. This is why so many of its characters are so tropey. They don’t need to be real people, they need to serve a purpose.

If this is all sounding a bit harsh, let me assure you; I fully believe anything other than REVII’s broad strokes narrative would probably feel a little too fiddly and intrusive to serve what the game is trying to be. There’s just enough dressings of a compelling story to keep players interested in what’s going on, and that’s exactly the way it should be.

The Baker’s son, Lucas, plans to make you work hard to reach his lair, and as a result there’s a quick and gruesome return to the main mansion to fetch a key out of a corpse and battle some extra molded. This largely feels like filler and fluff, but it goes a long way to building Lucas up as a bit different from his parents. He’s more sinister, more cunning, more self-aware and human. You’ll also encounter Grandma a few more times, placed within the critical path, always watching and always silent.

RE has always been noteworthy for its clockwork puzzles, and the series has frequently lampshaded these puzzles in cute if unbelievable and ultimately unnecessary ways. The police station in RE2, for example, was supposedly a decommissioned art museum, as if that makes any sense.

In REVII, though, it’s the machinations of a character, the inventive, sociopathic Lucas, who, as it turns out, is a major antagonistic force behind the game’s entire plot. His reveal as the true antagonist of the game is brought on with little fanfare. It’s mostly revealed in DLC and notes. But it’s similar to Wesker’s heel-turn in RE1. It doesn’t purporte him to be the main villain of the game, but it sets him up as a possible series-wide antagonist.

Your mileage may vary out of this twist. Some might like having a face to the horror, and the stories of Lucas as a child, spying on his sister and setting traps for neighborhood bullies, are chilling in a lasting way. But the game doesn’t do a great job of selling Lucas as a planner, and the whole thing feels a bit contrived in the face of REVII’s greater narrative.

Lucas

In the Videotape section, I discussed the happy birthday tape and how it uses the conventions and structure of a video game to set up REVII’s most interesting puzzle. I briefly glossed over how the tape and Lucas as a character invokes the found footage aesthetic so important to Resident Evil VII’s style, but in the Happy Birthday puzzle—and through the rest of Lucas’s death traps—we see another piece of horror movie inspiration come to life; the complicated, convoluted deathtraps of films like Saw and Cube.

This sort of claustrophobic psycho-horror came about out of budget constraints. The first Saw was hugely influential because it allowed for an inexpensive yet wholly effective reworking of the slasher flick. It was successful commercially, and it was appealing to producers because it had the built-in simplicity of a few simple sets and some inexpensive practical effects. It was a streamlined reworking of the genre for the 21st century.

If Jack stands in for the ‘70s-era slash-fests like Texas Chainsaw, and Marguerite is a melding of ‘80s and ‘90s body horror from the West and the East, then it’s temporally appropriate that Lucas is the representative for 21st century gore flicks. In a way, REVII is a tour of the genre’s modern history, an exploration of its tropes as they evolved. It’s a love letter to three eras of horror.

Mechanically, Lucas challenges the player to stop, move slowly and deliberately, and fully assess the environment. There are tripwire bombs and spike traps littering the hallways of his home, and though you will still fight standard molded, they’re sort of a trivial threat by this point. No, Lucas demands that you think about the game’s environment as hostile and unforgiving. This is something of a change when compared to the circular, narrow hallways in the Baker Mansion and the Old house, where the game’s architecture and hidden pathways were one of your only weapons against your pursers. Here, Lucas isn’t following you, but he’s attempting to anticipate your movement. You’re not being chased, you’re being funneled.

Lucas leads you into the Baker barn, which he’s set up like a gladiatorial arena. If you needed any further evidence that the game is now fully banking on Saw homages, the hanging pig-corpses should be proof enough. This environment is incredibly quiet at first, but its architecture betrays its true nature; the intersecting, stacked hallways are layed out too perfectly for it to not be some sort of combat arena. In most games, this discord can be laughable; in Resi VII, it builds tension and suspense, and therefore works a little better than it might in, say, a pure action game or a shooter.

Depending on your difficulty, you’ll face some number of a new type of enemy, the fat Molded. These are bulky, powerful enemies who spew bile, one of the few projectile attacks in the game. Overall, they’re more intimidating than actually threatening. By this point, you’re armed to the teeth, and the barn’s layout gives you plenty of ways to obscure line of sight and take cover. But this boss encounter most vitally introduces the fat molded into the ranks of foes you’ll encounter. Resident Evil has a history of introducing powerful minions with such fanfare; they bring around a new, tough enemy type, build them up as an intimidating, powerful force, and then later seed them into the ranks once the player is more capable. It’s a way of ramping up combat challenges and creating an interesting endgame.

Next up is the happy birthday puzzle. Once you beat Lucas’s escape room, he gets angry and tosses a bomb into the room, which you can use to blast the wall and escape. By the time you make it to his control room, Lucas has already fled. There’s a short trek to the boathouse, and a fully-loaded safe room is a pretty good indicator that a big fight is about to go down. There’s a sense of finality to the proceedings, considering that you’ve now worked your way through the main Baker family. Still, there’s something like a quarter of the game left, and it’s when most people say REVII really goes off the rails. The pace and mood of the game is about to undergo a major shift. But first, it’s the final battle with Jack.

Jack’s Return

Ethan’s final encounter in the Baker residence brings his time with the family full-circle. Jack has come back from the dead yet again, and he’s mutated beyond any recognition. This is the beginning of REVII’s slide fully into the conventions of the series, away from the new-age slasher flick pastiche and into the gamey, japanese bio-horror that defines the series.

The fight with Jack is a fairly standard boss battle that asks you to shoot the glowy parts when they start getting glowy. There’s a smart sense of player-enemy placement and blocking and a clever use of levels that keep the fight from feeling dull.

The barn burns over the course of the fight, and eventually it’s all but completely destroyed. Once the fight wraps up, Jack will grab you as a final deathrattle, and you’ll be forced to inject him with one of the two cures you’ve cooked up. This means you only have enough serum to cure one other person, and the game is going to make you choose—do you fulfill your promise to Zoe, or do you stay loyal to your original mission, and rescue Mia? It’s a dull, binary, choice that simply determines the ending of the game, as well as what amounts to an optional boss fight. It’s set up to either reward or punish the player, rather than challenging their conceptions of the game’s world and Ethan’s place in it. Put simply, there’s a right answer and a wrong answer, which makes it fundamentally uninteresting.

Whoever the player chooses, the pair will then make their escape down the river.

Mia and the Tanker

The boat crashes, and REVII plays its final third-act twist; a shift in perspective, moving the action behind the eyes of Mia, who is all-too-familiar with the washed-up tanker. The twist is that Mia is much more than she seemed and was hiding a few secrets from Ethan. She’s a mercenary, hired to escort a bioweapon on a commercial tanker in a covert operation. That weapon is Eveline, the main antagonist and the driving force behind the sentient Molded force that both corrupted the Bakers and created the monsters the player has battled this entire game.

This twist is nothing short of baffling. It is unexpected, but it is not a subversion of any player expectations; it’s a twist that devalues the previous rising action rather than usurping it, and it inflates the scale of the game’s conflict beyond ‘creepy house’ and into ‘international high-stakes bioterrorism.’ It’s disingenuous and exhausting, as Ethan is now relegated to a bit player in a bigger conspiracy.

All that being said—it’s Resident Evil sinking back into its traditional mold. Wesker’s heel-turn and the Umbrella conspiracy elevated the first game’s spooky mansion into a secret megascience lab. That twist set the pace for the series as a whole; a convoluted narrative rooted in a distinctly Japanese anxiety over superweapons.

Here’s the thing; I don’t think the twist is all bad, actually. I think there’s something charming about how RE feels it is so vital to create a wide, entangling conspiracy to tell such a tight and quick narrative. It’s an impulse that the series truly cannot escape, for whatever reason. It is never content to tell a story about horror on a small-scale. It needs to dip into some kind of worldwide threat in order to tie all its narrative strings together. Would REVII be stronger without the tanker chapters and the larger ramifications of its effect on the narrative? Probably. Would it really be Resident Evil without such a grand mega-conspiracy at its heart? I’m not so sure.

It’s a complicated issue, because it begs the question; how much can you mess with a series’ DNA before you have an entirely new product? Is a mood enough to connect a series, or does there need to be an underlying thread that connects all the titles to its past? Is there simply too much baggage attached to such a massive beast of a franchise for it to ever escape its own legacy?

Ostensibly, the theme of Resident Evil VII is family. It’s the driving force that causes Eveline to throw off her controllers and drive the game’s plot forward. It’s the bond that causes Ethan to go after Mia, and it's the question that Zoe struggles with as she turns against her mutated clan.

Conversely, then, it is appropriate that Resident Evil VII struggles against its predecessors and the legacy they have created. Like Zoe, it is fighting for its own identity while still maintaining a certain loyalty to its origins.

Eveline (Part 2)

The last location in the game is the salt mines, which act as a sort of final combat dungeon, overrun with Molded. Unlike the tanker, however, the salt mines afford the player a ton of firepower and ammunition. It’s all about player empowerment now, as the scales have been tipped in Ethan’s favor. Fighting the molded is now trivial.

The mine is also set up as a sort of ground zero for the Molded. There are secret labs and documents filled with research on the molded dotting offshoots and chambers.

There’s a thrilling race up a spiraling column and a few more fights with the fat Molded between Ethan and Eveline. She’s in the guest house, and this final confrontation acts as more of a cathartic emotional highpoint than a final gameplay challenge. The mines were the real final test, and though there are some small challenges to the encounter with Eveline, it’s more in position to wrap up REVII’s mood and story.

The player is now up against Eveline’s psychic powers, and it’s about as hokey as it sounds. However, the audiovisual presentation is strong enough to suck the player in, and it still feels emotionally resonant and threatening, even when dipping into the absurd.

After the player figures out how to guard against Eve’s blasts, they reach her decaying body. Like Lisa trevor in REmake, Eve is positioned as a victim of larger, sinister forces, a capitalist war machine that took a little girl and turned her into a weapon. This sympathy for the devil ultimately induces genuine pity for Eveline, and it, again, shifts the focus of the story onto a more worldwide conspiracy and less on its play actors.

Eve’s final form is massive and grotesque, but most poignantly, it is part of the house itself. The Baker estate has been Ethan’s sometimes-ally, sometimes-enemy, and it’s only appropriate that it takes a leading role for the final moments of REVII. The final set piece is one of a massive scale, and it brings attention to the sky above, where dawn is beginning to break through what has been a seemingly endless night. Evenline mutilates Ethan one more time as choppers begin to fly in overhead, and finally, a deus ex machina in the form of a massive handcannon lands next to Ethan’s head. He fires a few rounds and Eve crumbles to dust with a final deathknell.

Ethan is rescued by a man introducing himself as Redfield and working for the series’ signature villians, the Umbrella corporation, and REVII, despite itself, insists on teasing its place in the series’ overarching, complicated mythology. A brief epilogue showcases some more lovely, True detective-esque air shots of Louisiana over narration from an exhausted Ethan, before fading to credits.

Resident Evil 7 is a revisioning of the series that coined the term survival horror. It’s an invocation of a mood and aesthetic, brought into interactivity. It is a product of its technology and time, as such a detailed and intimate horror wasn’t possible even in the last console generation.

At the same time, it’s also a troubling return to form. Resident Evil can’t seem to escape the baggage of its prequels or the conventions of massive conspiracy that provides the framework for its otherwise small-scale horror. It is an antithesis to itself, as it attempts to invoke personal intimate horror through large-scale conflicts between massive capitalistic and militaristic conglomerates. A Resident Evil game will inevitably go off the rails at some point, but its mood and method determines if the player will be along for the ride. RE4 went from moody creepout to action-packed campfest, and it never missed a step. REVII stumbles a bit more, but it promises a strong return to what made RE great, especially after a few strange forays into action in RE5 and 6.

Yet REVII didn’t enjoy the commercial success of those two titles, though it did see a fair bit more critical acclaim. It’s a bold move to shift a tentpole franchise as dramatically as capcom did between RE6 and REVII, but the game is clearly a love letter to its inspirations. REVII is a celebration of Western conventions seen through a Japanese lens, It is a product of dissonance, and that’s what makes it so compelling.

Despite its flaws, Resident Evil VII is one of the best horror games of the latest generation. It provides genuine moments of horror and a piercing, inescapable atmosphere of tension and horror. It is cathartic and wild, moody and visionary, and awe-inspiring in its execution.

Maybe the next entry will lean further into the horror aspect of survival horror, and will have the courage to shake off a messy legacy of legions of the undead.

#resident evil #resident evil vii #criticism #games writing #games criticism #capcom #horror #horror games #survival horror

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