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crownconstellation · 3 years ago

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so. Rune Factory 5[a] is a role-playing simulation video game developed by Hakama and published by Marvelous for the Nintendo Switch. It was the first entry in the Rune Factory series since 2012's Rune Factory 4 and was released in Japan in May 2021 and worldwide by Xseed Games in March 2022.

Unlike most of my long posts i’m actually willing to attach a readmore to this because it 1.) is going to be VERY, VERY long, probably, and I don’t want to subject anyone to having to scroll through that and 2.) will have story spoilers. Anyways.

Hi I beat Rune Factory 5 (after. nearly 250 hours of play time <3) and I wanted to write a comprehensive review of it because it’s been nearly a decade since we’ve had a new RF game and I have a lot to say!!! This is gonna be done full pro / con style for like, smaller things and then go into actual depth for what I want to say in full detail.

CONS:

I’m not the first & I won’t be the last person to say this, but Rigbarth is too big!! At least the way they set it up. It’s fun getting to roam around, but there’s so much empty space that the town feels a little empty in places, and there are so many unnecessary areas as a consequence of the size. Like we don’t NEED that beach by the festival plaza, no one uses it. We don’t NEED the lake(?) up north or its associated beach to be that huge. (Honestly, it’s so big I was expecting an underwater dungeon to be there instead of just wasted space. Man that would’ve been stellar)

Stacking is incredibly inconvenient. (This relates to a much larger criticism but I had to bring it up here) Still 9 items max... Still unable to stack food or fish...

Brawling is really badly adjusted to the console proportions and it went from being my favourite weapon style in 3 & 4 to my least-used one because of that </3 Maybe I’m doing it wrong, but you should be able to make contact with your foe 90% of the time when your combo chains into an ultimate attack instead of it constantly launching you into kicking against empty air?

Some of the festivals are really lacklustre. Also we don’t need 4 harvest festivals in a game where you can grow any crop year-round.

Dungeons are too small. Back in my day these things had 4-7 floors!! Not 1-2 floors and then a boss!

The game is a little too easy -- which I understand is a result of them wanting to make story progression more relaxed, but even on Hard Mode it’s still, like, easy.

Furniture placement is kind of frustrating and the fact you can’t put anything against the wall because you need enough space to be able to walk behind something is really annoying. In general I hate the free-roam item placement tbh but that’s just me

Fields get cluttered way too easy. I know it’s so you have a steady stream of materials but :(

This is probably a budget issue and I can’t fault them for that at all but I think that they should’ve done full voice acting for the endgame sequence instead of having some lines voiced and most others just using like, stock voice clips you could hear in any other game interaction

Slight lack of interactivity; people don’t respond if you try to sleep in their bed or if you examine their things when they’re there, which was a cute detail and I miss it. It’s nothing big, but it added a nice touch.

A lot about how Fuuka is handled quite honestly. She’s a sweet character but....

They still haven’t fired the portrait artist guy and I really need them to and replace him immediately with someone who actually knows how to draw adult women

PROS:

The cast is REALLY good. Like, it’s a very fun cast with a lot going on. Rigbarth as a community is easy to get invested in and it’s fun keeping up with characters and seeing all the events for them. Also, Randolph and Yuki invented love and that’s great

Related to that: having a DSC whose main gimmick isn’t just making them a constant food-based fat joke and having that DSC in a game people actually see and play (vs Beatrix, who is in the black sheep game in what is already a niche series) in itself makes Palmo up there as Best Member Of The De Sainte-Coquilles. Like, he’s great as a whole, but it’s nice.

The story as a whole is fun and the end of Act 1 into beginning of Act 2 is imo really strong writing. Also in general I love how they set it up with its premise involving the culmination of 4′s story and the consequences

Despite not liking it for Rigbarth itself, how big the map is is a bonus IMO for the rest of the world. It’s fun romping around in free roam & it gives me way more reason to actually take my monsters along for ride purposes

Events are actually like, easy to access. Even at the consequence of maybe accidentally activating multiple in a row, I’d take that any day over taking a literal Real Life year to get married in RF4 because of how bad my event luck was.

Fake vegetables are the best monsters this series has EVER added. Ever. (Also I love the frogs so much)

Meteor showers and starfall crops are a really cute mechanic! I wish we could do more with them (like ask someone to watch the meteors with you on the day of a shower) but they’re so cute

The music is FANTASTIC. Like this is a given for any RF game but the music is really good. Also the OST that came with the bonus edition having remixes of the tracks is great. Have you all listened to it? You should.

Cloudheim. “Is that it?” Yeah i just really like Cloudheim

The outfits are so cute!! Even outside the DLC ones the options are adorable & I love how everyone has unique PJs and swimsuits. Now in RF6 we need seasonal outfits for everyone like what Harvest Moon did in ToT & AP. Or people outside of romanceables finally also getting PJs or something. Or both

Even if they’re too short the dungeons have really great designs & the later ones have fun puzzles and / or obstacles to them. Forest of No Return i have feelings for you. Eternal Darkness i have feelings for you too i have never enjoyed being inconvenienced this much

Game has what if a really overall cozy vibe to it, it hit that great Rune Factory feel that the previous games had and it’s easy to settle into

So, with all that out of the way: let me say that as a whole I liked RF5. I really, really, really liked RF5. Like, it’s probably #2 in my top 3 RF games now (with that top 3 now being Oceans > 5 > Frontier). I like the console games, what can I say! It was a really solid game overall, with fun farming, fun combat (for the most part; despite having to give up on brawling, this is the first time I’ve ever actually enjoyed the longswords), a fun story, and a really fun cast. This is 100% my favourite RF cast now and even despite my complaints about town size, I liked Rigbarth and I love the community.

My biggest criticism, though, is what I alluded to when I complained about stacking limitations: that this game takes after RF4 a lot more than it should in several places. I’m not going to fault the developers for making it resemble RF4; it’s the first game in around a decade and RF4 is the most popular in the series, of course it’s going to take after it. But as a fan of the console games, I really do think they should’ve looked more at Frontier & Oceans for certain things (at the very least: town layout and spacing, because of how nice Trampoli & Fenith but especially Trampoli are to traverse and also especially because of how gorgeous RFF looked for a Wii game), and given RF5 a little bit more of its own identity. Like the stacking. While the 9-stack limit might’ve fit better for the DS and 3DS with smaller space limitations (or maybe those didn’t need that either considering Harvest Moon game stack sizes who knows!), Frontier & Oceans had 99 item stacks. AND you could stack food & fish. (Fish / food stacking was also, notably, in 3. 4 probably removed them to pad out artificial space necessities to get you to use more royalty points. 5 didn’t need this limit, even with the same point system. Like, at all.) Or the 2x2 fields instead of the 3x3. I hated that in 4 and I hate it here. Why do you have 2x2 fields if you’re going to implement a 9-item stack. That just makes things incredibly awkward when you’re trying to lay down seeds and instead of one stack being a patch of 9 being two patches of 4 and also one awkward leftover.

That’s just two examples, though. There’s also using the same weapons & crafting items (back in my day [the Wii games] the cat ears accessory was an actual pair of cat ears, not whatever those ugly Palm cat ears are!!!!!!), the ability to pick furniture up and move it around willy-nilly as opposed to having one set spot for things like cooking tools & the shipping bin + watering hole (which honestly makes these things look kind of bad and out of place and is enjoyed by no one based on how many complaints the furniture system across 4 + 5 has gathered), the festivals being largely the same (and lacklustre because of it).... I think they shouldn’t have leaned on RF4 so heavily even if again, I 100% understand why they did and I won’t fault them for it. Like I said it already, but we don’t NEED four entire harvest festivals in a game where you can grow any crop no matter the season (and where seasonal dungeon farms have been removed) just because RF4 had that. That’s 3 festival spaces that could’ve been taken up by something more unique. Frontier, for example, had some really good and unique festivals -- the Bianca-centric one where you have to keep getting her what she requests, the boat race that takes advantage of Frontier’s gondola system, the Coming of Age scavenger hunt, the watermelon smashing minigame on Beach Day instead of just making it a wasted festival where nothing happens except Now You Can Go To The Beach!, the Hot Pot festival (which RF5 should’ve also had instead of the Winter Harvest Festival because the guys’ convo in it is literally about Making hotpot)... then Oceans had the seasonal lotteries, the Lantern Festival (where you would set a little boat onto the ocean to honour sailors who’d fallen at sea iirc and make a wish), the warrior fest where you have to fell training dummies and you have to actually be careful with your weapon of choice because you have to avoid hitting certain ones, the fashion contest where instead of just judging a single accessory you make like the Handicraft contest your entire outfit that you’re actually like, Wearing is graded... Et cetera et cetera you get the picture I think it could’ve been improved by having its own unique festivals that cater to Rigbarth’s unique properties as a town instead of mostly using the RF4 festivals and throwing a few new minigames in. Like there’s a town mini event where Simone talks about how the local pond used to be revered as a holy place because of a legend that its waters cured a dying village of a plague, and that Rigbarth grew from that village because people kept coming to use its waters. A festival to honour that legend and the fairy that blessed the pond would’ve been a fun one! Or a mystery festival run by Terry & Cecil that works like a scavenger hunt where you have to find clues around town and try to find a prize before everyone else. Or a festival of thanks dedicated to the farm dragons. I think instead of utilizing the Directive system for this, there should’ve just like, been these festivals and you can unlock new ones by having certain things done or talking to certain people (like how having Bianca unlocks the DSC festival, or talking to Stella after beating Frontier unlocks a quest to get a new festival that honours Whale Island and the spirits it harbours.) They could’ve used this to like, on that note, create a festival about the light & shadow dragons by bringing up the legends of them without revealing just Who said dragons are...

Anyways that’s my biggest criticism and despite how much I wrote about it, I understand why they did it (it’s just a shame) and it didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the game. Which was a lot of enjoyment. Actually can I talk about the cast here for a sec on that note because I was about to comment again that I love them -- I don’t get why people are saying they’re bland or that Rigbarth doesn’t feel like a community (because I’ve seen many criticisms that match up with this and I don’t... I don’t get it.) Like, not only are they a cast full of life and personality and also everyone has something at least a little bit wrong with them in a good way, the town & character events do a very good job of making people interact outside of their typical circles like with the group playing Hide & Seek in Fuuka’s 3rd event (that being Lucy, Ryker, Reinhard, Fuuka, and Alice / Ares) being a group you wouldn’t expect to interact normally, or Reinhard and Martin having an established friendship based on Cecil’s 3rd event of all places (as well as Reinhard’s own 3rd event), or Lucas doing his magic tricks for everyone, or Livia and Yuki teasing Darroch because they pretty much watched him grow up... Even outside that, they also mention each other in dialogue, like Randolph’s comments about how everyone shops differently (his line about Cecil buying fruit sandwiches when he needs more vegetables, how Reinhard never buys the same thing twice, how Beatrice insisted he overstuff his sandwiches and they did in fact sell better that way), Elsje + Simone + Misasagi talking about each other, Palmo mentioning that Ryker got huffy because he complimented Martin and Cecil, Ryker & Martin bitching about each other, etc. I think they have a great sense of community idgi

Also on that note of having a sense of community I think it integrated itself into the story well (which is related to my earlier PRO of how I think the end of act 1 and beginning of act 2 was really strong writing). To cover that quick: it’s when the protagonist quits their work as a ranger because they find out that, while SEED does good work on an individual scale and the entirety of Norad essentially relies on it, it was created entirely with corruption in mind and created that reliability by lying to the people because the Warden & other higher ups reached out to bandits that had taken advantage of the fall of the Sechs Empire to create chaos and made under-the-table deals with them to let them still operate behind the scenes but would SEEMINGLY be caught, and anyone who didn’t comply would be caught for real or sold out by their allies. This false sense of justice on a grand scale is what led to the country trusting in SEED and nobody is happy about it after getting told by Livia about it, so Scarlett has a breakdown and Alice / Ares quits. Which, while thinking it’s just a vacation, the entire town comments on and offers their support and encouragement. When Terry invites them to work for him, everyone is supportive again (and Cecil absolutely over the moon), and when they decide to rejoin SEED for the sake of overthrowing the Warden, everyone is once again supportive. It’s a nice detail, and it starts off the act well with the protagonist’s like, legitimate moral quandary. Like they lost their memories and this ranger base took them in and they like what they do for the people of Rigbarth only to find out that my god there’s something wrong with this and it’s rotten to the core and they can’t even let anyone know because too much is reliant on it at this point. Really good storytelling imo. The story kind of slips at the end (not because of the Fathomless Dread or anything, I actually thought that was interesting as was the reveal of two extra dragon gods because they’re essentially like, forgotten gods that were lesser than the main 4 to begin with so nobody really remembers them in legends unless people that REALLY DIG for the info like Gideon), but because the way they set it up with the dread it kind of takes some responsibility away from Gideon and I hate when stories do that. Like PKMN Sun / Moon trying to make Lusamine redeemable by setting up her actions as a byproduct of her exposure to Nihilego, RF5 trying to present it as Gideon initially having good intentions and getting influenced by the Dread instead of like, seeking it out of his own volition at the very least sucked. Although they did establish that it fed only on what already existed -- his own pride and greed and desire to make the world bend to his will for the sake of his “justice,” which is what created SEED to begin with, so it doesn’t suck as bad as some other uses of this kind of thing, but it’s still a media trope I don’t like. I LOVED Calamity’s Edge, though. It really reminded me of Frontier (as did his overall plans, speech, etc. there). Reminded me a lot of Gelwein, which is fun because Gelwein is my favourite RF antagonist. Not in an I-like-him way, but like, I love when the RF series dives further into the mechanics of the runes and what you can do with them bc it’s great worldbuilding so I loved RFF establishing the rune studies and experimentation with Gelwein (and also the fun little detail of rune orbs being black if you grow crops in the Snow Ruins because of the runes there being corrupted and fucked up due to it being a former laboratory or whatever) and I loved 5 going further into that with Gideon’s fucking around with rune science.

Anyways. Like 5 separate essays later. I had my criticisms regarding it and I wish some things were handled a bit (or in Fuuka’s case a lot) differently, but overall I’m just really happy to have another RF game again, I’m not going to hold 5 to unfair expectations because I understand the situation the series is in considering Neverland went bankrupt and we thought RF just. Died out. (and also because I’m sick of people comparing it to 4 to throw it under the bus when it has plenty of its own merits, 4 was made at a series high point vs this being the revival of a dead series, and also I feel like a lot of the people making these complaints would really hate to try like, any other RF game based on the specific complaints I’ve seen people make) ((like yes I criticized how it takes after 4, but that’s not a comparison between it that’s just me saying I Get why it did things but I do wish it had more of its own unique identity. I still ended up preferring it to 4 in the end too so like. lol!)) But I really enjoyed it and I still have PLENTY of playtime left not just because I have yet to get married but also because I have plans already to do an Ares file for the sake of hearing the JPN voices and also for harassing Reinhard even more than I already do. 10/10 loved this game would play again

#bri.txt #here is my rune factory 5 review as told by someone who has played all 7 games and really likes the console ones #rune factory my favourite series. rune factory my beloved <3 #i say review but uh. this is less a review and more a very disjointed essay #sorry im a grad student i write essays for a living im too used to it at this point

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adifferentisaac · 2 years ago

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2022. a quick reflection.

i’m sitting on my friends couch, high. we’ve been watching hasanabi videos for the last 2 hours. we started bleaching my hair a little less than an hour ago and i’m beginning to wonder if we’ll be finished before the ball drop. 2 little blonde pomeranians have been pacing around the room for as long as we’ve been here. i cried on the car ride over here. i hate crying. i love crying. beth is on the couch playing rune factory 5. megan is over my right shoulder mixing bleach for my hair. charles is over my left shoulder making dinner, curry i think. came here with a backpack full of potions. the backpack is full of shaker cups and anime themed stickers. forgiveness is the last song i listened to. SZA. ODB. today is december 31st. i’m writing this. you’re reading this. we share that connection. across space and time. may we share many more. we survived this year. as a unit. as a family. as friends. as comrades. as people. as humans. we time traveled. the pandemic started and it hasn’t ended. 3 years later. suddenly. abruptly. another 365 days of love (persists), hope, beauty, heartbreak (2 this year and both devastating), hurt and ugly. another 584 million miles around the sun. another frank ocean album hopefully. that might be too optimistic. i’m grateful for the successes we’ve shared. i’m tired from the battles we had to fight. we fought many. the fights continues. for what it’s worth i am proud of you. your new experiences, new places, new people. did it frighten you like it did me? did it excite you like it did me? does it frighten you like it does me? does it excite you like it does me? 2023 all 2023. love love love. it’s all love my niggas.

here’s to us ❣️

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aerion111 · 3 years ago

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Saw someone comment on tasks requiring more steps some days than others (the one I reblogged right before making this post, I just figured I ought to make my own post rather than say this in that ‘thread’. Barely make any original content anyway, could use the excuse to do so.)

For me... It’s more a matter of ‘autocomplete’, or ‘ease of use’, as if I’m piloting a partly autonomous ‘avatar’. (And if ‘I’m’ the conscious me, then I kinda am. If ‘I’ exist at all, but that’s a different matter. Though I feel more like an ‘organic robot’ than a video game character, video-games made for easier analogies.) Like the difference between cooking in ‘cooking simulator’ and cooking in Harvest Moon (I’m actually thinking of Rune Factory, but Harvest Moon’s more well known) (I’m pretty sure I could chop better IRL than in cook-sim, and I’m not a good ‘chopper’ IRL. The human body has ‘QoL improvements’ for precision and repetitive actions, that cook-sim doesn’t.)

On a good day, I don’t even have to click ‘make coffee’ to be told I’m out, I get the popup ‘you used up the last of the coffee, do you want to add it to the shopping list?’, buy it the next time I’m at the store (if I remember, I do have a percentage chance of forgetting thanks to taking the ADHD drawback), etc. And then I do just click ‘make coffee’, and click yes on each popup as it prompts me with stuff like ‘the coffee pot is empty, fill it with water?’, ‘you have coffee in your inventory, use it to craft?’, etcetera. Maybe at most having to step in when it tries to fetch an item from the wrong container and doesn’t find it. My impression is that this is the ‘normal mode’ most people ‘play’ on. The ‘neurotypical’ mode.

On a more regular day, I click ‘make coffee’ and get a popup of ‘error: you lack the required item (Coffee Powder)’. If and when I buy more, I can click ‘make coffee’ and be presented kinda with that ‘assembly’ minigame made popular by House Flipper. Where the tasks are presented for ease of play, but you do still have to go through the tedium of doing them. And just like I sometimes go ‘no, I’m not touching the dirty windows’ in House Flipper, and other players sometimes similarly refuse to lay wall-tiles, I might decide ‘no, I’m not making coffee, I’m sick and tired of that bloody minigame’. But it’s still leagues easier than those ‘realistic’ sim-games, since I can use my intuitive human body instead of clumsy keyboard controls and janky physics.

On a bad day, I click ‘make coffee’ and get that same popup. Then I go to the store and the mission-marker is pointing to the shelf of flour (where there’s no coffee). I finally find the coffee powder manually and bring it home, but when I click ‘make coffee’ it tells me ‘error: no water’. Fill it with water, click again. ‘Error: no filter’. Try to insert filter? ‘Lack required item (Coffee Filter)’. I give up and don’t make coffee for a couple days, until next time I go to the store. I’ve now got coffee powder, filters, everything! It’s plugged in, the heating elements are dry, it should be fine. I go to click ‘make coffee’, but get a warning of ‘warning: stale water, small risk of food poisoning’ since the water’s been sitting there since I filled it. Which may or may not be accurate, as poor stress-management earlier in the playthrough has left me with enough levels of the ‘anxiety’ flaw that it sometimes exaggerates dangers. But I’d suffer painful morale penalties if I drank ‘dangerous’ water without being desperate, as if I’d slurped up puddle water. So I change the water. I click ‘make coffee’ one final time, and finally the timer starts! Later in the day, a popup says ‘Mission Failed (Make Coffee): Timed Out’, because I forgot all about the coffee and either it’s gone cold (if the coffee machine shut off automatically) or it changed to ‘old coffee’ (��small risk of food poisoning’, of course) which counted as destroying the ‘fresh coffee’ mission item. Then I go back to buying pre-made, high-sugar, ice coffee like I should have done in the first place. Normal coffee’s too bitter for me anyway. Some months later, I remember to throw out the now-moldy bag of the remaining coffee powder. Next time I’m tempted to make coffee, I might buy some ‘coffee simulator’ game instead. At least that way, I can’t leave moldy food around, and the game probably has in-game timers and hints.

This isn’t THAT different from the ‘number of steps’ view, but I feel it’s still a substantial difference in how it feels. All the steps are there, I just don’t have to expend any willpower or navigate any menus if I’m in a good mood. (Well, a ‘can do stuff’ mood. Bad moods are rarely ‘productive’ ones, but not every ‘happy’ day is a ‘productive’ day. Sometimes I’m ‘happily’ frozen in executive dysfunction.) Notably, my ‘quest log’ doesn’t update in either case. I don’t get a convenient list of tasks. If I did, maybe it’d be easier to do it the ‘hard’ way. Instead, I get the same single-step ‘make coffee’ task that at best updates with sub-tasks after the popup, but probably doesn’t even do that. And like I said, on bad days the quest marker points to the wrong place. If I even get a quest marker and we’re not back in Morrowind days of having to remember the description.

#my adhd #adhd #executive dysfunction

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puppet-limbo · 2 years ago

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While I've never particularly disliked games that makes me fight on occasion, I do see where you're coming from!

Breath of the Wild is definitely a very relaxing game, but has lots of enemies to fight, as the Zelda series is largely about combat as well as exploration, it seems.

For me, a relaxing game is one I can just run around and do what I like, that has good music, and nothing too stressful gameplay wise. Breath of the Wild and Arceus are two games I personally find fun and relaxing, but they definitely have parts that become stressful, if not by too much.

Farming Sims like Rune Factory 4 (and 5) are ones I also love, but they do have some combat to them. So the most stress to come out of that is just "Ah shit if I die it's gonna take almost all of my money to get healed at the clinic--" but that's not a terrible consequence to me (though sometimes I do reload a save if that happens, but not often)

A game I've been getting back into recently is "Cozy Grove"! Unsure if that would fit your definition of a relaxing game, but it's about helping the spirits of the dead remember their lives and come to terms with what's happened. (I'm sure Spiritfarer is similar, I just haven't played beyond the demo, yet!)

You're a Spirit Scout stuck on an island with your fire companion, Flamey. And you must help ghost bears to obtain ghost logs for your fire friend so that you may continue to uncover more parts of the island over time.

So it's fetch quests, material gathering, and real time quests that sometimes takes a few days for the required materials for a quest to appear/be available. But it's lots of fun!

You can buy outfits, change your hair and appearance, buy and build many decorations for your tent and island, and even buy cute little spirit pets! There's also fishing and bug catching! Plus the music is beautiful and charming!

It's a lovely little game on the Switch! It goes on sale fairly often of I recall correctly

"Yonder: Cloud Catcher Chronicles" is also a very chill game for the Switch! I haven't played it in a few years, but you just kinda run around a fantasy world doing whatever quests you like, farming, and exploring! No fighting last I saw, and you can customize your character somewhat!

While Cozy Grove does have the occasional quest that's timed, they usually give you 5-8 hours, and even then it's not a quest that's needed to complete; it's just something to do if you feel like it. The main story quests give you all the time in the world to complete, where ones to just help the bears out with minor tasks or get some extra funds/materials can sometimes be timed.

Anyways, that's my 2 cents for now!

hold on, i cant just only ask twitter and leave some of you out of it-

as i want to get further into game dev im super interested in hearing other peoples opinions on stuff, so if you dont mind:

what makes a game chill/relaxing to you?

if you'd like to hear my personal opinion on that question .. well im gonna try and make my answer into a game at some point to thats that, but im gonna mention some games that have aspects of what i like alot, time limits and mandatory combat are big stress factors to me, as are decisions that have a huge effect on the story/characters

stardew valley is a beloved game to me, yet i have over 400 hours put into it and never saw the credits, bc i keep making a new file and play it to usually the 3rd or 4th year and then the late game stuff annoys me too much; the fact that there is that day time limit AND the energy limit is incredibly stressful to me, plus that combat is pretty much required and even moreso later on if you want to get all quests and such even tho its so clunky (to me) without you even being able to over level yourself is just agony to me like the quest of reaching lvl 100 of the skull caverns, i did it once technically, but my heart was beating out of my chest and i reached the last lvl a second before it reached the daytime limit and i blacked out losing a ton and not getting whatever waited for me there, i believe i stopped playing it for a long time after that (another would be not being able to complete all achievements if you dont want to sacrifice a whole file to it since its non reversable to my knowledge, like the joja thing, or if you are basically being forced to be a jerk to npcs tho that doesnt apply to stardew .. i think)

botw, my as of now fav zelda game together with the original wind waker, the atmosphere and how immersed i felt playing a game has never been so strong for me as this one, aside from some story elements and general criticsm of the zelda series the world and how it functions, speaking of game mechanics, is a huge inspiration for me, i love even the ever so hated weapon breaking and rain system, what sours it a little playing it to relax is that you are constantly swarmed by enemies, theres a bokblin attacking an npc every few meters, a camp that sees you from miles away, and at night you cant go two steps without a bunch of stal- enemies popping out of the ground, the only thing to circumvent this is wearing specific armor to trick them, but i'd like to stroll around dressed however i like, i know its environmental storytelling, but a mode to play after you beat ganon with little changes such as less or no enemies would have been cool (pehaps similar to activate like the master mode thing?) another nitpick is the lack of customization for your own home, although its not the focus of the game at all it would still be cool if you could actually choose some different stuff that isnt just dont or do build this

#These were the only two I could think of off the top of my head #mainly cuz I've been playing Cozy Grove a lot lately #it has a very special place in my heart 💜#Limbo Speaks #tag later #Cozy Grove

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reduxed · 3 years ago

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WHO ARE YOU ?

NAME: ash! star’s fine too. STAR SIGN: libra! HEIGHT: ~5′4-ish! MIDDLE NAME? nah. PUT YOUR SPOTIFY ON SHUFFLE. FIRST 6 SONGS? YESSS let’s GO. 1) reaction (osu edit) - james landino, slyleaf. 2) do i wanna know? - arctic monkeys. 3) “come on petunia” - the blow. 4) lion - tsukiko amano. 5) still alive (j.c. mix) - aperture science psychoacoustic laboratories. 6) putting the dog to sleep - the antlers. (just as a fair warning, 4 and 6 might fuck you up emotionally.) EVER HAD A POEM / SONG WRITTEN ABOUT YOU? yes..... my partner makes up and sings songs about me all the time. 😭 one of my exes also wrote a really cute poem about me on a birthday card. WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU PLAYED AIR GUITAR? for a play i took part in during middle school. LMAO. i don’t think i’ve ever done it of my own volition. WHO IS YOUR CELEBRITY CRUSH? don’t really care about celebrities nowadays but when i was a kid, jesse mccartney was probably the closest thing. WHAT’S A SOUND YOU HATE & A SOUND YOU LOVE? hate - the slight screech of a fork when you set it down in a bowl the wrong way. love - classic silent hill menuing sound effects. DO YOU BELIEVE IN GHOSTS? not in the stereotypical "ooooOoooOo i’m a ghoOoOOoost” sense. but i do believe a strong will can be left behind and, for better or for worse, continue to interact with the world around it after a body perishes. which MAY have a lot of to do with personal experience and the fact that i live in one of the most haunted places on this green earth. HOW ABOUT ALIENS? similarly to the above, not in the stereotypical sense portrayed in american movies! but it’d be pretty naïve to think ours is the only planet in the entire universe with “intelligent” life, imo. DO YOU DRIVE? nope! call me paranoid, but being a pedestrian is scary enough. do not wanna get into a metal death trap and ride alongside a bunch of other folks who i may or may not be able to trust and are also piloting metal death traps. really can’t afford one anyhow, so it’s kind of a moot point. IF SO, HAVE YOU EVER CRASHED? n/a. WHAT WAS THE LAST BOOK YOU READ? loser by jerry spinelli. just for the nostalgia. DO YOU LIKE THE SMELL OF GASOLINE? sort of! but it also gives me a headache if i smell it for too long. WHAT WAS THE LAST MOVIE YOU SAW? the sound of music! it was my first time watching too. INCREDIBLE film. WHAT’S THE WORST INJURY YOU’VE EVER HAD? i’ve actually been very lucky in terms of your typical injuries. have never broken a bone, or anything like that. but one time, i tried to open a window at my mom’s house and the grip mechanism broke off, piercing my wrist in the process. which sucked as is! but the worst part was that it got infected in spite of all the water and neosporin i doused it with. was out of work and feverish for days. DO YOU HAVE ANY OBSESSIONS RIGHT NOW? no... brain very foggy and empty. 😔 hoping this weekend changes that! gonna be playing kirby, rune factory and the cookie run kingdom update as well. DO YOU TEND TO HOLD GRUDGES? not grudges, per se, but i don’t tend to forget things. i.e., if i notice that a lot of the times we speak, you’re barely acknowledging the things i say, only messaging me when you want to vent and railroading conversations, then i’ll be less likely to want to chat with you pretty much permanently. of course, if somebody’s done something trust or comfort breaking, i don’t tend to waste my energy resenting them. i just cut them off. do not got the time for that! IN A RELATIONSHIP? yup! for over eleven years now. i’m the luckiest dude around, if you ask me.

TAGGED BY: stolen from @gamenu. :3c TAGGING: @twinleafroyalty @juwul @crimsenza @aquaffensive @yokaimnida and YOU!

#✦; walking in the 90s { general ooc }#injuries cw

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thewakingcloak · 4 years ago

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April 2021

Alright, so I’m a bit late here, haha. April had a good start but ended kinda crazy. Our two-year-old got sick for a few days (just a cold, not the ol’ COVID-19), which wiped us out, and then she had a lingering “mood” for the rest of the week, lol. General exhaustion made me more interested in playing games than making ‘em (currently playing Rune Factory 4, which is a good time!). So no fancy images and stuff this time. Hope y’all don’t mind a bit of text.

Anyway, here are the news.

When playing with a gamepad, I’ve noticed the eight-directional movement feels really clunky with the stick. This clunkiness happens in a lot of older games too, for both eight- and four-directional movement. For example, on NES Online and SNES Online on the Switch, I can’t use the joystick at all. I have to use the d-pad.

In the first two ProtoDungeon episodes, I mitigated some of the issue by tinkering with some of the thresholds, but when I started testing a gamepad for Episode III again, I realized this was still not ideal.

Juju, who wrote my old input system, is working on a new open source input system. I haven’t contributed code, but I did give my input (hehe) very early on. Now after coming back to look at it, it seems to be just what I need. So I spent the first week of April swapping out input systems (which isn’t as easy as you might expect if you’ve never done it before, BUT it was way easier than I expected). Then I modified the movement code to use the new input_direction(), which gives much finer control to the stick.

But that much fine control--fully omnidirectional--was actually fairly nauseating. It was difficult to walk in a straight line. I ended up rounding the input direction to the nearest 22.5 degrees, meaning we were now at 16-directional movement. It feels really good! And as I played more over the month, I tweaked it further to lend more weight towards the ordinal directions (north, south, east, and west), in addition to scaling the speed slightly based on how far you’re pushing the stick. In my opinion, it’s now preferable over the d-pad or arrow keys (though don’t worry, I do the majority of my work with the arrows, and they are very functional and fun.)

The new input system also gave me an easy way to set gamepad axis thresholds, which is something a few people have already asked for. This is a setting in the behind-the-scenes file, but probably not an option I’ll add in game yet since that requires some rework on menus.

Then on a whim, I threw in gamepad vibration! This wasn’t related to the input change... I just wanted to do it, lol. It was a small thing that took me about 30 minutes but adds a surprising amount to the game. I can choose the intensity of the vibration based on what’s going on, and I added a setting for players to control the overall intensity (or turn it off). There’s no menu option for this yet, either. Hopefully I’ll get time for that in Episode IV.

I created a free GMS2 extension out of my vibration system called Good Vibes! It can do all kinds of fancy stuff using animation curves, and it handles some of the weirdness of GMS2's vibration functionality too.

Next, I created a Linux virtual machine to allow me to export stuff to Linux! I tested this successfully with the current version of PD3. Tried to immediately export PD1 and PD2, but those projects don’t exactly work anymore--I’ll need to do it from the current project after I go through and apply engine changes to them (current project always contains all episodes, don’t worry, nothing is lost).

Finally, I ended this month’s changes on two separate things, neither of them finished: true borderless window toggling and proper depth sorting.

Borderless window toggling in Windows isn’t something possible with vanilla GameMaker. I got a small DLL from a friend, though, that can force the toggle. The only reason this isn’t finished is because the application surface gets stretched weirdly, and I haven’t figured out how to offset it properly yet. This one isn’t required to go live at all, so not sure when I’ll get back to it.

Depth sorting IS required, though, and that’s what I’ve been wrapping up. My z-height system is pretty complicated, and the old depth system didn’t always work--and when it didn’t, there wasn’t much that could be done about it. Occasionally you’d get weird overlaps where the player was under the ground tiles and so on. I did come up with a depth method that would’ve resolved it, but unfortunately it would’ve gone past the supported min and max depth that GameMaker can handle. So I switched to a simple grid sort system, where I can basically just chuck everything into a ds_grid, sort it, and then trigger each object’s draw event in order by iterating through the grid.

There are a few kinks to iron out. First, I need to fix cliff sprite generation. Cliffs create their own sprites based on the tiles beneath them--this way they can be properly sorted so the player can either walk on top of them or behind them. Currently there are some bugs with the generation so that the sprites are too tall and they don’t properly handle animated tiles.

Second, I need to get enemy sorting working too, which will be much easier when I’ve put enemies back in the game. :) The old way was to manually set their depth based on the player position, but that won’t work anymore. That said, with the new grid sorting method, this may not be an issue at all. We shall see.

#devlog #devblog #gamedev #game development #The Waking Cloak #ProtoDungeon #gamemaker

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popculturebuffet · 4 years ago

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New X-Men Xtrospective Part 2: Germ Free Generation (Annual, #117-120)

Hello all you happy mutants! And welcome back to my look one of my faviorite runs of one of my faviorite super teams by one of my faviorite comic book writers!

For those of you just joining us.. it’s been a while. I did the first instalment of this retrospective back in early January as a present to my friend for christmas, as he had never read E is for Extinctoin and what with this run being vital to the current, utterly brilliant Krakoa era of X-Men. But with both Black History Month and Valentine’s day, February had no real room for this one and march ended up being just as crammed with me doing essentially the entire della arc of ducktales in one month. I didn’t mean for this retrospective to get pushed so far back, but since I gave up doing weekly coverage of Final Space I had some room on the schedule so this retrospective is back with a vengance with two entries this month and hopefully at least one a month afterword to keep it at a decent clip.

Last time I covered the background of this run and didn’t really find much for the issues after, so I won’t have to spend as much time on background.

So since i’ts been a few months, a refresher is probably in order

PREVIOUSLY, ON X-MEN: Our merry mutants enterted a marvelous new era. As Charles redidciated to the dream with new equipment and a new uniforms our hero encounter a new villian: The Mysterious Cassandra Nova, a powerful telepath who used an uwitting patsy from the trask family and a defucnt sentinel factory to slaughter the mutant nation of Genosha, killing 16 million mutants in the most horrific act of genocide against mutants ever known. And the fact there has been more than one genocide against mutant kind MIGHT, just MIGHT be the reason they blackmailed for peace with life saving drugs instead of helping willingly and freely in the current comics. Just maybe.

Cassandra was captured by the X-Men soon after but escaped and nearly got a hold of Cerebra only to be stopped thanks to a combination of former enemy, genoshan resident at the time of the genocide, and that bitch Emma Frost who snapped her neck and Charles himself who uncharacteristically shot Cassandra in the head. That night Charles took a bold step over that would change the X-Men forever and told the world on live tv:

While all of this was going on we got caught up on the team’s personal struggles, currently consisting of Cyclops, Jean Grey, Beast and Wolverine with Emma joining as of the issue we’re about to cover. Beast is grappling with a secondary mutation that makes him look like Aslan, the jesus of narnia and all lions. Meanwhile Scott and Jean are grappling with their non existant sex life as Cyclops possesion by Apocalypse shortly before this story has severely rattled him and caused him to close himself off emotionally.

So that’s where we pick up. Our heroes are now no longer hiden saftely in the shadows from a world that hates and fear them but are out front and center with the world watching. And we’ll see both how that helps their cause and how it puts them directly in the cross hairs under the cut. Content Warning: This review discusses Transphobia and a scene involving a school shooting. If either of these are a trigger for you or something you do not want to read about please skip this part of the retrospective for your own well being. Thank you and have a lovely day.

The Man From Room X:

We have three stories today: an annual that introduces our final team member and the main villians of our next arc, a one off that moves the main plot for the first 12 issues along, and a three part arc about said villains. Before we get into the Annual, I have to talk about it’s weird gimmick: The issue is entirely sideways. I don’t mean it’s bad though some parts are problematic I mean when bought it’d be on it’s side and in my trade I have to flip the whole thing over on it’s side to read it. It’s just a .. weird choice. Not the weirdest thing about this issue somehow but not unexpected from Grant as they like to play with the formula.

We open in said Room X, a location in China where a mutant named Xorn is kept and showed off to a mysterious group of dickweeds in suits representing “Mr. Sublime”. His jailer, General Aao Jun,, shows him off as most bad guys would : By undoing his helmet and thus disntegrating two innocent children just by looking at them. Sublime says they have a deal.

Meanwhile also in China the X-Men are there for a funeral and Emma and Scott trade insulting questions back in forth: She mocks him about his lack of sex with Jean lately and he brings up her criminal past. As for why Emma’s still with the x-men.. it’s out of pragmatisim. WIth Genosha gone, the x-men are the saftest faction to throw in with.

As for why the X-Men are in China, Charles has rapidly expanded his operations now he’s public by setting up X-Corps, a multinational humantarian aid organization dedicated to helping mutants in need wherever they sprout up. He’s set up offices in Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Mumbai and Melborne.

He’s also half assed it, at least for the Hong Kong office and only gave them two employees: Domino, who those of you not as familiar with the comics may remember from deadpool and Risque.. who I honestly had never heard of before New X-Men and frequently forget existed. I just looked her up for the first time and she’s a minor mutant who was an associate of X-Force and Warpath’s love intrest. She could compress matter causing it to implode. My assumption here is that Morrison simply picked a minor mutant at random for the job.

But yeah naturally with only two mutants charged with, according to domino “All of asia” went horribly and the x-men are there for Risque’s funeral and to find out what happened. Unsuprisingly it’s tied into our cold open: Risque had found evidence of a mutant trafficking operation and died fighting them off and Dom is naturally f eeling in over her head since said operation involves the chinese goverment, who according to her exccute most mutants at birth and John Sublime and his cult.

We soon see a press confrence from this asshole and find out what his deal is: Sublime is the head of the U-Men, a group that belivies they are a “third species” of mutants trapped in human bodies that deserve to have the surgery to make them into mutants, and thus wear weird suits until the world is pure and allows them to have surgery for it.

Yeahhhh this.. this is really fucking uncomfortable and is going to be present throughout today’s piece so let’s just go ahead and rip that band-aid off: The U-Men come off as HIGHLY transphobic. They use terms similar to trans people call themselves trans species and are trapped inside a body they don’t belong in. It’s VERY uncomfortable to read as a result and something that hadn’t really sunk into till thsi reading but once it had.. oh god does this not age well.

The one thing that keeps this from runing the run and Grant Morrison as a whole for me.. is that I do not think for one second it was intentional. Grant themself is genderqueer, nonbinary and a cross dresser. None of this means they CAN’T be prejudice, being Queer does not magically make you immune to being prejudiced. But before this Grant had the genderqueer sentient street Danny the Street over in doom patrol and a trans main character in his book the invisibles, Lord Fanny. And given New X-Men’s biggest flaw as a whole is clumsy early 2000′s unforutnate implications such as a good chunk of the things about Cyclops affair with Emma, we’ll get to that at the right time, Angel in the next arc and Dust, who was introduced as from afganastan wearing an outfit not seen in the country and speaking a language not spoken in the country. Grant didn’t make these mistakes TWICE, it’s why I still have respect for them, and this won’t be the first or last comic i’ve forgiven for being stupid for it’s time. But I will still call Grant out when I see it. Just because I respect an author just because they changed my life does not mean I won’t call them out when they fuck up. And if they prove to be truly vile, have harmed someone or what have you I will cut them the fuck out of my life. I’ve done it with JK Rowling, Warren Ellis, Brad Jones and Joss Whedon. I would do it with Grant if I truly belivied they were transphobic and instead didn’t just write something very stupid without thinking the metaphor through 20 years ago.

So anyway back to the comic book bollocks as Wolvie and Dominio prepare for an infiltration and flirt a bunch. We also find out Jun is a mutant himself with a power only Grant could dream up: his skin, hair and what have you that falls off him turns into a naked golem for a bit before expiring. And if you hadn’t read this issue before reading this review, yes that actually happened. While the first arc had a BIT of Grant’s trademark batshit insanity, the series REALLY starts to pick it up from here: This issue has a mutant with functioning star for a head, a poorly thought out bucnh of sci fi new age organ theives, and a general whose power is “makes naked clones out of his dandruff”. Oh and his fondest wish?

I just... I don’t know how to respond to that. I don’t know how you respond to an old man’s weird murder fetish that he tells a somehow even creepier cult leader while said cult leader is paying him to buy a star man, and their both surronded by the creepy old guy’s skin golems that weirdly look like mudokons. Look i’ve read Grant’s entire utterly bonkers run on doom patrol. I’ve seen a man who looks like a question mark use a bicycle that makes everyone high like their on LSD for president. And THIS is what breaks me.

So while.. THIS is going on, Dom and Wolverine plan to do it all night long on the professor’s credit card, no really he gives all his professors carte blanch to use school fun, and inflitrate, Dom through the elvator this horrorshow just took place in and Wolvie james bond style. Also I gotta say I REALLY love how Morrison writes Domino. She’s wittiy, entertaining and her power is as awesome as always, super luck if you didn’t know. It’s a real shame he didn’t add her to the team: She wasn’t on any other x-teams, with X-Force having been rebranded into X-Statix by this point. She would’ve been a fun addition to the cast.

Naturally wolverine is found out.. but that was the entire plan, for him to serve as a distraction then cut his way to domino while she steals something from the vault. As for the rest of the X-Men, Cyclops, Beast and Emma are all downstairs in the parking garage and find a secret entrance. Jean is not on this trip and that’s a major plot point for this run. This is where Risque died.. and it only get’s worse when Hank goes inside, finding a bug like child, basically htink a giant caterpillar but with tons of human arms inttead of legs with her wings cut off.

Thankfully as Logan and Dom escape above, the U-Men are dumb enough to storm down bellow.. and while they incapacitate beast with some launched tiny knives, designed to incapcicate but leave them in tact for harvest, Emma beats the shit out of them and get the info out as only she can....

Granted she could’ve just turned back to normal and used her telepathy.. but what fun would that be? Plus they have blockers and you know CUT UP A FUCKING CHILD. SO yeah fuck them, let emma have her fun.

Thanks to her they find out the U-Men are a front for illegal organ harvest, and while they can’t prove sublimes attached Emma suggests killing him. Good idea but Scott suggests the lighter approach and we find out what Dom stole, a key, something Emma can psychcially scan. She warns it might take her a bit to get something.. only to be flooded instantly and we find out who the man in the box was. Shen Xorn... i’ll let emma tell you more herself.

It’s stuff like this why, despite some serious flaws like the U-Men debacle and some stuff to come, some I mentioned above other that’s just with the plot that i love this run. Morrison just gets how to really tell an x-men story and the real tragedy of being a mutant. That just for being diffrent, you get shut out, or in this case thrown into a box when you could’ve and should’ve been something more. As emma turns herself to diamond to deal with the psychic backlash, Beast has some solemn words to share.

That night Scott rests in his bedroom while presumibly hearing some truly horrific and sexy things next door while talking to jean before clocking out.. only for Emma to head in in a sexy dress with champagne. What happened? Well we won’t know for sure for most of the run.

The next day the U-Men prepare to load and we get some scrap of what the idea was supposed to be: John talks to Ao Jun about his procedures. We see wings crudely sewen to his back and his throat implaants hurting “But one day I will fly”. THe IDEA is their supposed to be lunatics, people who envy mutantkind but don’t actually respect their culture or their sense of personhood. It’s not the worst idea and had Grant not used trans termnology for htis, it would’ve been a great one. I think he INTENDED for them to be coopting the idea of being trans and what not to maks their true intentions.. which is problematic due to debates like the ones on bathrooms where a lot of transphobic asshats make the bad faith argument a bunch of people are going to pretend to be trans to assault people.

We’re.. we;’re not even to the main storyarc yet.

But things soon go wrong as Xorn’s starhead starts to collapse into a black hole, with no solution as the x-men took the key to his helmet.. and assault the compound. Turns out the star collapse thing is Jun’s revenge on humanity for lockig him down here and he gets his neck snapped. Scott has a solution though.. and it’s stuff like this why I fucking love Scott Summers and get annoyed when people call him “boring”: He realizes Xorn is comitting sucicide.. so he’s going to talk him out of it. Not just for everyone else but he deserves to live. And while Emma points out only logan among htem knows chinese and she can’t get through to Xorns’ head due to the way his brain works, Scott has a simple workaround: Use the nearest chineses speaker to teach Scott chinese. So.. with that he talks to Xorn.

And that my friend is Scott Summers. A man who faced with powerful man whose given up, whose lost all hope... convinces him he can still go on. That living’s better than dying.. and that it does get better. The issue closes with Xorn basking in the sunlight for the first time in decades while Domino sweats having an extremley powerful unknown mutant out in the world. Scott’s already thought of that.. and signed him up with the x-men. Granted it won’t be until our next article that he actually fully joins the team, but w’ell get to that next time.

This issue is great... while the U-Men stuff is pretty bad and isn’t going to get better, the tale of xorn is excitiong, Aao Jun is an intresting antagonist and the sideways gimmick suprisingly works. So now we’ve finshed our apitizer let’s get on to the main course.

Danger Rooms:

We open in well.. the Danger Room with Beast training a new student.

This is Beak. Beak is my faviorite character Morrison came up with and one of my faviorite X-Characters. Beak is a bird like boy who can fly, it’s just a struggle and due to looking diffrent and not having the most impressive power has very low self esteem. It’s also part of something Morrison took a concerted effort to do: introduce more mutants with genuinely odd apperances and drawbacks. Like we saw with Ugly John last time and Aao Jun in the previous issue, Morriosn really likes adding weird mutants but he also uses it to give a genuine downside to being one. While this isn’t NEW to x-men, Morriosn upped the scale and number of characters like this with weird powers and apperances. We see a bunch of human passing ones too but the backgrounds just jammed with all sorts of unique designs and students. It’s also the point where the school became far more crowded like the movies, a good call on my part both to help those coming in from the movies, and to help sell the mutant baby boom going on. After all it wouldn’t make sense if the school was just about 5-7 students and a bunch of grown adults doing superhero stuff like usual would it.

But we get to see that Hank is a good teacher, as he reminds the boy that he’s getting better and won’t be an x-man overnight, and worries about him to the professor, wanting the boy not to slip through the cracks, figuratively, and not to feel like an outcast.. especaily here. But Hank dosen’t feel blue for long, metaphorically he was blue long before he became the lion minus the witch and the wardrobe, as he has a date to night.. and so does Charles.

Or rather he did.. his girlfriend trish, a long time love intrest of his and a reporter.. breaks up with him. Over voice mail. While in washington. And the reasons she gives are not great

Yes Hank’s transformation is radical.. but not only was it not his choice... she’s being a coward, sending the message it’s okay to dump someone because hteir a mutant or because they happen tobe diffrent and that efffects your career. Again it’s moments like this that make the run soar over the more awkward bits.

Meanwhile Logan’s off doing logan stuff, i.e. gazing at a deer. Wow. Jean followed him. Both notice a space ship: Despite recently outing himself as a mutant, leading to an increased number of students and a bunch of rioting morons at the gates, Charles has decided NOW’S a good time to take a vacation to the Shiar empire. As for why Jean’s really out here, her marriage to Scott isn’t doing so good and while Logan encourages her to stay it’s just not that simple: Her telekenisis is coming back, stronger than ever. She feels the most alive she’s been while he’s shutting her out and feeling his deadest. She tries to turn to logan for comfort but he shuts her down. Just wait two decades jean... he’ll open up to a threesome. In all seriousness though having Jean try and come onto Logan .. will backfire slightly on later storylines. But we’ll get to that eventually.

In the basement Hank is studying Cassandra or rather a virtual version of her since her body is naturally in storage. And he’s found out something disturbing: She’s Charles Genetic Twin.. oh and it gets way worse. The Professor’s weird behavior? Barely staffing the hong kong office, leaving suddenly with rioters t the gates, outing himself? About that...

Cassandra tourtures Hank with the possiblity he’s devovling and then tries to mind controlli him into cleaning himself with his diploma when Beak enters. The good news is this allows hank to shake off her control and tackle her, showing off why hank mccoy is fucking awesome in the process.

That is the Hank McCoy I know, love.. and miss dearly. The one we’ll probably never get back sadly after what others did and what Percy’s had to do to reconclie with all they did.

Unfortunately beak being around means cassandra can force him to beat beast into a coma with his bat. She plans to tear Charles dream down around him and make him watch.. and cryptically says he tried to kill her. She then cheerfully leaves Jean in charge.. and talks about just how much damage one could do with an entire interstellar empire in the wrong hands....

This issue is also excellent and sets up the next two arcs nicely while giving us a nice peak in hank’s head. Great stuff. The artist also hid the word sex in a lot of the images see if you can find them.

Germ Free Generation Issue 1:

So now we get into our main story for today. This story and the one before it were drawn by Ethan Van Sciver whose a talented artist.. but also highly contrversial for being a conservative. I myself.. don’t know what he’s said or did, though calling himself “Canceld Superstar’ on twitter really isn’t a good sign. So I really can’t comment on it but I also know someone would mention it if I didn’t bring it up and if you know what he did please enlighten me.

So we open with a school shooter who also scooped out a guys eyes and is part of the U-Men. He get shot by the swat team while making his speech> it’s an effective opening but one that’s become more uncomfortable to read with each passing day due to school shootings going up and up in number. And mass shootings in general and I... I need a second. I need something to relax me

Thank you Stoopy. Your doing Odd’s Work.

So the news reports on this and we soon see how Jean watches the news.. by using Cerebra to read the minds of every person on the planet. Neat. Everyone’s talking about them. We also get a hint for later as we hear on the suicide of one martha johanson who wrote the note in her own blood. She’ll be important later.... and I mean that both in the context of this retrospective and for the fact she’ll go on to be part of x-men in perpetuity.

This is also where another great concept of Morrison’s pops up: Mutant culture. After all mutants are a minority, they should have their own culture. It’s something Hickman’s era has taken and ran with, but it’s a damn good idea and one that it shoudln’t of taken almost 20 years for someone else to use given Decimation was undone way back around 2012 in Avengers Vs X-Men, aka that event half hte articles on the mcu around the fox sale used as either their image for the article or asked about happneing. And yes that is a pet peeve of mine: while I do think like Civil War AVX could use a movie version to make it better, I don’t think it’s an event that could be done right away and would have to be almost entirely redone anyway given the context for AvX is entirely couched in decimation i.e. something NO ONE wants in any x-adaptation.

So it turns out while watching the news in a next level way Jean is also talking to Logan. “Stay out of my personal fantasies”. Yeah I .. I don’t think your ready for a hairy canadian dry humping a transformer.. specifically killbison. And yes.. that is an actual transformer and why yes, I have been waiting to bring him up.

And he is , and I am not making any of this up, part of a group of decpticons known as the breastforce. Your life is better for knowing that and you are welcome.

Anyway as you’d imagine a genocidal old woman in her brothers’ body leaving the X-Men to fend for themselves after having a teenager bludgeon one into a coma after publicly outing them with a rabid bunch of bigoted morons at the gates has not gone great. Henry is still out and despite the short staffing Jean needs logan to stay where he is as he’s close to an emerging mutant and within range to go get her.

Emma of course has never been so fucking irate in her whole life and is plotting various forms of psychic tourture with the help of her proteges the Stepford Cucokoo, 5 teenage mutants who functoin best as a unit and are easily some of MOrrison’s most prominent additions to the x-cast. Unlike a lot of the x-kids, they’ve been featured prominently in every era of x-men after this including the current one.

Jean decides for a less “Make them hate us even more” approach, but no less pissed off, opening the gates and going out directly to chew out the assembled bigoted morons, pointing out the ones carrying “Mutants Go Home!” signs are especailly dumb as this IS her home. And while she dosen’t point this part out, it’ the same for all of them: most of the mutants are either adults who choose to live here, teenagers who along with their parents choose to live here, or in the majority teens who have no where else to go due to either being abandoned by their families or it being way to dangerous for said families for them to stay due to bigoted assholes like the ones holding mutants go home signs.

A member of the press asks if she’s willing to talk to the media and she refutes most of his bullshit allegations: He asks if their building an army, she and Scott respond they are not and are simply educating mutants and protecting them. When he counters with the fact their living weapons and wearing uniforms... she counters with the fact she’s wearing them to protect herself, rightfully, from people like her, and the x-men are an aid orginzation going where needed to protect the world and while asshole points out no one apointed them.. jean shuts him down by pointing out there are no mutants in goverment and a genocide just happened, so someone has to do the job. Another random asshole tries to pipe up with “Genosha declared war on us” and Emma senses this is just going to go round and round and round and simply presses the assembled mob’s “bliss buttons” in their brains to knock them out. Non violent but honestly warranted: A dangerous part of bigoted assholes is they’l bring up racist bullshit to try and couch it like an actual conversation. None of these complaints really hold water if you looked at the x-men’s history for more than 5 minutes. Yes Charles is training them to fight and yes hte ingial class was an army but every class since has only been trained for self defense: they still got into adventures and what not, but it was usually by their own choice or because they were thrust into them by circumstance. Xaviers is exactly what jean said and endudgling these morons, while good on paper, only makes them seem legit.

Jean retreats to the infirmary where she’s on the verge of breaking down from the sheer weight of everything. Cyclops proves that despite not being the best husband right now... he still loves his wife, offering to go look into Sublime with Emma and hoping Hank wakes up. Turns out his mind for now is a big blank room.

So she can’t get any info off his skull, and neither of the two think what happened with Beak adds up. Something is up here. Their also coming down with colds which will be important later. And just as important.. Magneto is becoming a symbol among people and merch sales with his image are on the rise. We then get this.

So Jean is trying to be a supportive, honest wife, and while the questions incredibly insulting.. his answer is equally so. Spoilers, as mentioned we do get an answer long after this.. and they did not. So Jean is wrong to be suspcious, at this point, but is at least trying to be polite about it and gave him the benifit of the doubt.. and Scott basically said he slept with her without actually saying it despite not having to. You could’ve said “no we did not have sex, we simply talked all night”. It’s not ENTIRELY better given the horrible state of their relationship right now, but it’s still better than HEAVILY implying he rocked her body to the break of dawn for no damn reason.

So we meet our next major addition to the cast Angel Salvador, an abused teen who is a mutant.. and whose abusive and molesting step dad beats her and throws her out over this. The scene’s a bit overdone, coming off like an after school special.. but it’s what happens AFTER that’s truly heartwrenching.

A poor scared teenager clutching herself, finding herself homeless alone and desperatly wishing she wasn’t what she was. It’s just a striking image and shows how well Grant uses the mutant metaphor. I could easily see myself in that position had my parents not been good peopl and had I come out far sooner as bi. The idea of desperatly hoping your not what you are simply becaus eof what hell it brings, despite all the joy it can bring too. . it’s heartbreaking to hear.

Naturally though things don’t get much better as the next morning the U-Men have found her, calling her a freak and successfully kidnapping her.. if only because while she uses acid spit to escape, she flies into a power line.

We then get Sublimes meeting with Emma and Scott and a BETTER use of teh u-men as while Grant made the horrible mistake of calling them “transpecies”, seriously what the fuck were you thinking, the way sublime frames it here is a MUCH better, much less accidently bigoted concept.

The idea isn’t bad: A group of humans jealous of the mutants powers, blatantly ignoring the horrible downsides and mountain of persecution that comes with being one. Grant just made the mistake of couching in in Trans metaphors, clearly trying to have the U-Men steal from Trans People too as a way to make themselves seem legit. And I say if you want superpowers.. fine.. wanting to be a superhero or a mutant is fine, the issue with the U-Men is their copoting a culture, trying to be part of mutantkind without having any of the drawbacks and by actively butchering them. It’s why the concept HAS shown up elsewhere; it’s not TERRIBLE, Grant just made a bad creative choice that’s only gotten worse as Transphobia has ramped up further and further.

Sublime denies it when our heroes bring up Hong Kong.. but naturally he’s simply just keeping them talking long enough to bring out his trump cards, an army of u-men and a brain in a jar he uses to incapacitate them.. and announces his plan to use the school as an organ farm for his third species.

Meanwhile Logan finds the U-Men in their truck preparing to rip angel apart.. and given he snikit’s soon after.. i’ts very clear whose REALLY about to get ripped apart.

Germ Free Generation Part 2:

Part two begins wth Sublime monologoging about how Mutantkind are just cattle to them and reveals the brain is martha’s, her sucicide having been faked and her brain currently being controlled to use as a weapon.

So while Johnny monlogues we find out what happened with Wolverine last issue he didn’t cut up the guys yet as they fired their little flichete guns at him... it was about as useful and effective as you’d expect and the massacre you were expecting occurs. Though in a nice bit of reality the fact wolverine’s soaked in blood and just killed a bunch of blood shockingly does not make the already frighttend teen feel he’s safe and she spits acid on him. Logan pours some stuff on the acid, figuring rightly a black ops murder farmacy would have something to counteract it and tells her she’s safe now .. and tells the guy behind him not to try it. He’s stupid and does anyway and likely gets a claw to the head off panel.

They go to a diner to eat and find a local asshole who threatens them with a shot gun to leave once angel uses her power to digest and goes on a rant about how he snapped his own son’s neck to prevent him being born a freak. Just.. fucking hell this arc is not good for my depression. We get some more angst from Angel and whiel her dialouge is not the best, i’ts a too bit mark millar flavored edgelordy for my taste and if I wanted that i’d go read Ultimates or Ultimate X-Me, her pain is real and Logan helps her through it.

Back at the Mansion the U-Men are on their way to strike, whlie Jean unaware continues to buckle under the weight of all the shit she’s had to deal with, feeling SOMETHING is making them weak with the colds and something worse is going on and thus tries going to Beak’s mind instead and gently helps talk him through it, showing her grace and empathy.. and in return finding out Charles was the one responsible. The alarms flair up and Jean tries calling the police now that’s an option.. but it goes exactly how you’d expect.

Also a second artist took over for this issue and the next Igor Kordey. He’s fine, but not nearly as good as Quitely or Van Sciver and it shows. Meanwhile Beast awakens and heads for the body drawer with Cassandra’s body, and professor’s mind in it.

However Jean’s finally had enough and got her second wind. She’s outgunned, outmanned and left to her own devices. And she’s fucking fed up with it. She steels herself and assembles the students. This is obviously a last resort.. but some of them can defend themselves and their going to need to. But today they won’t be learning.. they’ll be teaching and as the U-Men call them defensless Jeans simply asks “Are you sure about that?”

Germ Free Generation Part 3:

So we come to the finale of this arc. Angel is once again an ungreatful brat to logan and he opts to just leave her there if sh’es going to be like that pointing out being a mutant sucks, it’s going to keep sucking.. and she needs to deal with it instead of lashing out at him and herself over it.

We get back to the U-Men, one of whom is utterly flabergasted they want to him to cut of Cyclops head... only for Emma to awaken.. and take back her regular form meaning she has her telepathy back. The only reason they were able to get her ealier is she was in diamond mode which is stronger but lacks that, a nice way to check and ballance her new powers. She quickly takes them out and disables Martha.

Back at the school we get one of Jean’s definting moments for me and a true chance to show how badass she can be. Before this while Morrison wrote her well, and his version’s still my favoirite, she didn’t really get to do much and was motly in the background. This arc has been her time in the limelight, having trouble grappling with all the stress of running this place by herself.. and emerging from it stronger, more capable and ready to kick some racist weirdo ass. She tries a few diffrent tactics first, having a mutant with a voice power project it to make them think their san invisible army and having the cuckoos fuck with their heads but when both fail, Jean REALLY gets to show off. Thier blade ammo gets turned into a cool looking 3 dimensioinal shape with her telekneisis, and in a cool moment and a wise use of something gross makes the only one of them with useable powers throw up, before issuing a badass boast, wreathed in flames all while she crumples their guns into uselessness. and tears open their suits.

Bad ass.. and logan and Angel arrive just in time for the cecendo as hte u-men flee in terror

The Phoenix has been Reborn. Jean Grey has risen from the ashes and returned to full power.

Meanwhile Sublime is pankcing.. and it gets worse when Emma shows up, fully enraged after all of this and has some words for him.

Iconic. Emma prepares to drop him out of a building but Scott rightly tries to get her to back off, pointing out the pr nightmare it’d create and the fact that they have enough evidence ot shut him down. Martha however has other ideas and gets him to let go of his own accord, falling to his death.. but given he’d aranged a stunt for the press apparently this gives our heroes deniability and Martha her revenge.

So we end this three parter as Jean revels in her new power, and Beast returns with an announcment:

Final Thoughts for Germ Free Generation: This arc is pretty good if forgetable. The struggle of Jean to run the school herself and her rising from the ashes of her own pain at the end with the power of the phoenix at the end is fantastic, finally both giving her a chance to shine.. and a worrying sign for her friends given what her phoenix force copy whose memories she has a copy of, long story, did is awesome. The other parts are okay and ehhhhhhhhh though. Scott and Emma’s investigation into the u-men while having a really good climax, is pretty standard x-men stuff, and Wolverin’es trek with angel is just okay with Angel being highly intolerable during this arc, with Morrison trying a bit TOO hard to make her a “realistic” teen instead coming off as horribly unplesant. She’s supposed to just be lashing out but comes off obnxious as a result. That said this arc does furhter a lot of Morrisons best idea and introduce more, and is a great setup for our next arc, which we’ll get to in two weeks. Soooo

Next Time On X-Men: We find out just what the hell Cassandra Nova is, what her plans are, and what happened with her and charles as our heroes come down with a cold as the might of the shiar empire bears down on them. It’s IMperial in two weeks.

Next Time ON This BLog: Speaking of long Delayed Projects, I finally return to The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck as a young Scrooge starts his prospecting career, learning the ins and outs from a rich new mentor, and finding the price tag striking it rich comes with. Raid a copper hill with me tommorow.

If you liked this review, subscirbe for more, join my patreon, and if there’s a comic you’d like me to cover suggest it in the comments or outright comission a review from me via ask. See you at the next rainbow

#new x-men #grant morrison #cassandra nova #shen xorn #beast #hank mccoy #jean grey #cyclops #scott summers #wolverine #logan howlett #angel salvadore #beak #barnell bohsk #the stepford cuckoos #the u-men #john sublime #marthan johanson #ethan van sciver

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sabraeal · 4 years ago

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Rarely Pure & Never Simple, Chapter 7

Obiyukiweek 2020, Day 4: Free Day

The air still smells like freesia and vanilla as Shirayuki returns from her shower, scrubbed clean and with the thinnest pajamas she can muster. Even now the heat’s starting to settle on her skin, turning her post-shower dew into regular summer sweat, and oh, she needs to get that fan oscillating stat, before she stews in her own juices like some Shirayuki-flavored pulled pork.

She settles on the bed, flapping out a hand to turn it on and--

Ugh, it’s just...pushing hot air around, at this point. Maybe if she’s sweats through another set of pajamas tonight, she’ll be able to convince Nanna she needs an AC unit in her window.

(Her room-- back when it was her mother’s-- had a unit, but after an unfortunate incident that involved her father, a thwarted clandestine encounter, and a hole in the garage roof, the replacement instead went into the kitchen, where it’s lived every summer until it malfunctioned and froze to the sill. Grandad’s replaced it since, but still-- it’s never returned to her window. Of all the sins of her mother Shirayuki’s had to answer for, this one is hands down the worst.

“Really?” Obi laughs, wiping the sweat from his forehead with the hem of his shirt. She sees the barest hint of abdominals and suddenly, the orientation packet isn’t half as engaging as it was before. “Not the whole...’grandparents convinced their first great grandchild will pop out before graduation’ thing?”

“To be fair,” she manages, breath thin as the worn fabric drops back over her current distraction. “The point was pretty much moot until, um...”

Oh, that-- that grin is trouble. “Until you climbed on top of me and made me come hard enough to go blind?”

He really, really doesn’t need to say it like-- like that. “S-something like that.”)

She’s ready to just call it a day at this point-- and nearly does. Rolling up onto her side, she reaches for the cord to her lamp--

Buzz. Buzz.

Shirayuki blinks. That’s...that’s her phone.

She’s tempted to ignore it-- she does not need Kihal speculating about what her and Obi could get up to in the woods “all unsupervised” tomorrow, and Obi should still--

9:12, her phone reads. His shift at the club is over, and by now he’s probably--

Home. Texting her.

Shirayuki nearly drops her phone straight down the crack between her bed and nightstand, and oh jeez, it would be nice if she could just...calm down for once. Be cool.

It buzzes again. She yelps, trying to flick the screen on with a wild shake. She can save being cool for another day. One where she’s seen him more than once in two weeks.

hey, the text reads, nestled in its innocuous gray bubble, we should talk

Shirayuki experiences something that could medically be called an event. Is he upset? Has she done something--?

not a bad talk, he clarifies, just miss you

She rolls onto her back with a smile, thumbs poking at the screen to say, i miss you t--

mebbe a sexy talk tho ;3 i *rlly* miss u

is that for the sexy or the bad grammar

Both.

She catches the call on the first ring, barely having time for a breath before Obi drawls, “You weren’t complaining about sexy things two weeks ago.”

With all the dignity of a mathlete champion, Shirayuki replies, “Hnn?”

(”Eek!” She yanks the controller up, to the side, anywhere that might help move her character away from giant beetle on the screen. “How do I--? Where do I--?”

Obi’s chest makes a hollow thunk when she rams into it. He coughs; it takes her a full, frantic second to realize it’s to cover a laugh.

“You know,” he murmurs, plucking the controller out of her hands, “joycons don’t have motion sensors.”

“I don’t know,” she returns primly, folding her legs back down over the edge of the bed. “And also you told me this game was easy.”

“Rune Factory is easy.” His mouth twitches. “Half the game is farming.”

“And the other half is fighting...whatever those things are.” She waves at the screen, scowling at the RETRY? stamped across it. “Which is hard.”

“It’s not,” He leans back, setting the controller on his nightstand. “You could even say...”

His arm hooks around her waist, dragging her on top of him. “...It’s as easy as I am.”

Her breath rasps out of her, and oh god, she can feel his dick pressing up against her thigh, so hard already. “You’re not making me feel very accomplished.”

“Well,” his fingernails scrape up the back of her legs, “we can fix that.”)

“You were very enthusiastic,” he remarks casually, “from what I remember.”

“Mm, well.” Two could play at this game...maybe. “It was two weeks ago.”

She may not be able to see him, but she can feel his grimace through the wire. Or well, the air? Wifi? Shirayuki wasn’t really up on how phones worked past the Edison era. It’s not like they ask how cell phones work on the SATs.

“Sorry,” he sighs, pillow audibly whumping over the receiver. “I know I warned you, but I really thought we’d have had more time to talk.”

“It’s okay.” She squirms against her sheets, fighting a shrug he can’t see. “I...I missed you, but I know how much the hours mean to you.”

“I missed you too.” His voice is so soft, so vulnerable, so unlike the boy who made her miss auditions a year ago. “I’m glad we’ll see each other tomorrow.”

“Me too,” she breathes, and oh, it doesn’t seem soon enough. Not when she wants to wrap her arms around him, lay her head on his chest and just listen to him breathe. “You could--”

Come over. Her teeth snap down on the offer. Sure, it’d be nothing for him to hop up to the garage roof, for her to leave the window open--

But that’s how she got here, and nope, no. Not happening.

“--come pick me up tomorrow?” she squeaks out instead, cheeks burning. There’s no way he won’t know she meant something else, that she was avoiding--

“What? Don’t want to be smooshed in the backseat of Big Guy’s swagger wagon?” She can hear the smirk on his lips. “I thought you were looking forward to it.”

“I don’t think Mitsuhide would appreciate you calling his minivan that,” she informs him primly, not a laugh in sight. It’s a feat only achieved by the judicious application of her teeth to her cheeks. “And I was! I mean, I am. It’s just...”

“Big Guy gives priority seating based on height?”

Well, that’s definitely part of it. With all five of them, she’s always left in the back seat, alone, and Obi--

“Gotta say, looking forward to all that leg room,” he drawls, “and getting an airbag all to myself. You think he’ll let me at the aux cable?”

“Never.”

“Aww.” Shirayuki knows he’s pouting; a full-on, little kid lip wibble. “You’re my girlfriend, you’re supposed to be on my side.”

“You know what you did.” A two hour meme mix on the way to Laxdo. “Besides, I just thought it would be better if we, um, had some time to ourselves. Before.”

“Oh?” he hums, so curious, and-- oh, it doesn’t usually take him this long to pick up on when she’s trying to, um, tell him something. “I figured you wouldn’t mind since we’d have all day-- oh.” There it is. “You mean alone.”

“W-well, it’s been two weeks,” she hedges nervously. “And I’m not saying I couldn’t, um, behave--”

“Yeah, I’ll pick you up.” The words come out fast, pinched. Maybe she’s being too pushy; Obi likes to tease, but that doesn’t mean he’s always in the mood to-- “I’m definitely not going to be able to keep my hands to myself.”

“O-oh.” Well. That’s hitting different tonight. Maybe because it’s already over ninety, and her temp is climbing with it. Or maybe because she’s only wrapped up in the thinnest, most barely-there clothes she has; the kind he could rip like tissue paper--

Or maybe because it’s been two weeks, and despite going eighteen years without needing any sexual contact, she’s as tragically hard up as a teen comedy protagonist.

“I didn’t know you were...in a bind.” His voice drops to a rumble, and ah, that is not helping the situation. Her thighs slip against each other, trying to dull the ache. “You know I’m always happen to lend a hand when you need it, kid.”

“It not that bad,” she murmurs, but it’s starting to get there the longer he talks. The more she thinks about him showing up tomorrow, just them alone in her house-- “And you didn’t have time to come over.”

“I don’t need to come over.” He’s laughing, but there’s something in it that’s more, that’s almost a purr. “Come on, kid, I gave you those earphones for a reason. Hands free.”

“O-oh.” She’s all too aware of them now, clipped over her ears. Her hand’s only holding the screen out of habit. Hands free.

“I mean, if you’re really hard up,” he hums, “we could do something about it now. Take the edge off.”

She-- she shouldn’t. “Obi! You don’t really mean...?”

“Absolutely. I’d really like to--” his voice cracks,and oh, oh-- “it’s been so long since I made you come, babe.”

(”Well, that’s the last vote for Dreamiest Hair,” Shirayuki sighs, her flyaways dancing at the edge of her vision. “What’s the next category?”

Kihal glances down and grins. “Sexiest Voice.”

She gapes. “Is Mrs Gazalt really going to let us give out an award for that?”

“Mrs Gazalt takes her position of club supervisor very seriously,” Kihal informs her, “and by that I mean, she sits in the corner playing Words with Friends and just lets us do what we want, as long as it isn’t dangerous. Or illegal.”

“Still.” Her mouth pulls tight, a grim line across her face. If the rest of the club could see her now, her Cutest Smile win would be revoked. “That seems, I don’t know...”

“Like it wouldn’t be a contest? I know.” Kihal shrugs. “But that’s what the freshmen picked. I guess they’re just really hoping Obi will growl through his whole acceptance speech.”

“No, I-- wait, Obi?” Her mouth is dry suddenly. She crosses her legs beneath the table. “Why would--? Obi?”

Kihal rolls her eyes. “Oh come on, you’ve heard him over the headset. He’s got that whole like, gravel thing going on. And when he gets heated with someone, like that time with Raj, hoo--” she fans herself-- “I know you have a thing for Zen, but like, I still don’t know how you didn’t jump him.”

Her cheeks burn, painfully. “I-I don’t-- that’s not--”

“Come on, Shirayuki,” she clucks, rolling her eyes. “You have ears. That couldn’t have done nothing for you.”

At the time she’d been so mortified that Raj had not only followed her to the place that was supposed to be her escape, but that he’d brought up what happened, like it didn’t even bother him--

Well, sex had been the last thing on her mind. At least the actual, arousing kind. But now, now--

Listen, I’m sure you have a lot to say but I really can’t-- his voice breaks, and the phantom pressure of his fingers weighs on her lips-- I was supposed to have your back, and I fucked up. I know it doesn’t make up for what happen but I-- his breath rasps from his throat, so raw that hers hurts in sympathy-- I’m sorry.

--she gets it.

“Right, um--” it’s hard to think with her face so hot-- “we should still count the votes anyway.”)

(He wins in a landslide. His acceptance speech at the drama banquet is so suggestive that he ends up with half a dozen panties shoved into his pockets. They tumble out of his jacket when he leans over the console to kiss her, right over the stick shift and onto her lap.

What am I gonna do with a bunch of ladies underwear? he’d murmured against her lips, fingers toying at the strap of her gown, earning her own personal vote. You need any, kid?)

“O-okay.”

“Wha-what?” She winces at the loud bang over the speakers, followed by a softer, more distant “Fuck.”

“Ah, is everything--?”

“Fine,” Obi assures her, sounding like maybe some of his limbs are out of order. “Just...dropped my phone. I didn’t...are you sure?”

Her fingers clench in her sheets. “Yes. I just...don’t really know how to start.”

“Well.” His voice drops playfully low. “Are you in the position?”

“Is the position laying down?” she asks, nervous. “Because I’m laying down.”

He tries to smother it, but she would know his laugh anywhere. “Yeah, great. Good. You’re ready?”

Shirayuki squirms against her pillow, legs rubbing together so hard they should chirp, like some sort of horny cricket. “I guess...”

Obi doesn’t hide his laugh now, just lets it rumble out from his chest in a way that is...not helping. Or maybe it is, considering the whole...situation. “You guess?”

“I just--” am terrified-- “don’t understand.”

He grunts, and by the sound of rustling in her ears, gets comfortable. “What’s holding you up?”

Everything. “It’s better if we just wait isn’t it? I mean to do this, um...”

In person. With someone who knows how to touch her, instead of her fumbling around and showing just how bad at all this sexy stuff she can be.

“This involves sexy talking, doesn’t it?” If distress is a destination, then she’s already laid out a lawn chair and ordered a drink from the cabana. She’s hopeless when her speeches are planned and PG, let alone when she’s trying to improv and it’s about-- about-- “Do I have to talk about penises?”

He makes an ungodly noise. “Kid.”

“I just don’t think I have the experience to talk about them with any sort of authority,” she presses on, brain undaunted by how ridiculous she sounds. “Especially if I’m also supposed to be doing...other things. It’s really--”

“Shirayuki--” he says her name so soft, so fond, and she knows, she knows-- “you should learn how to do it yourself, too.”

--that he’s seen right through her.

“I don’t see why,” she mumbles stubbornly, fidgeting with the hem of her shorts. “You’re going to Lyrias too. Your room is in the building next door, and it’s connected to mine! I don’t really think I need to learn how to-- to--” she whines, the words sticking in her throat-- “this!”

“Kid.” He heaves a sigh, and even though she’s dying from the mortification of Being Known, it sends shivers right through her. “Just because you’re subscribed to Sexy Culinary School Weekly with Obi doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know how to cook on your own.”

“You magazine needs to work on its name.”

“Yeah, let me just go workshop it with Princess Prettymane and Calico Dog.”

“It’s duchess.”

“You know that doesn’t make it better, right?” he deadpans. “Princess Prettymane at least has alliteration. Also,” his voice lilts, playful, “you’re trying to change the subject. Which is cute, and really makes me want to kiss you until you worry that we’re going to ruin another pair of tights, but--”

“I’m not wearing tights right now.”

His jaw snaps shut.

“See,” he manages after a long moment, hoarse, “that is a very distracting thing to say.”

The gravel in his voice scrapes at an itch she didn’t know she had, heat painting a searing line down her spine. She’s already slick from sweat, but this adds another texture to it, one that’s growing more insistent by the second.

“And very confusing.” She doesn’t know what it says that even his complaints are doing it for her. “Since a few seconds ago, you weren’t sure if you could talk sexy, and now you’re telling me all sorts of things.”

“I was just...informing you. Of the situation.” Her nails pluck nervously at her waistband. “It’s summer, so, um, no tights.”

“Oh right,” he breathes, wry, “just setting the scene.”

“You know,” she tries again, too shrill, “I’m really fine with how you do it. I don’t really think-- I mean, is it really necessary that I have to--?”

“Kid, you’re the one that said okay,” he reminds her. “You don’t have to do anything. It’s just better for you if you know what you like. That way if you...”

His breath rasps from his throat. “...You should know what you like, separate from, ah, someone else.”

It’s a nice wrapping job he’s done on this baggage, but even with only a year under her belt, she knows what the tag on this one says. “I’m not going to go to college and suddenly not want you anymore, Obi.”

“I know that,” he says, but he doesn’t, not really. Obi doesn’t really talk much about before, about all the girls he’s snuck into his room or met at a party or whatever, but he thinks that all this, this whole wanting to put Tab A into Slot B thing, is the default. That you meet someone and maybe you talk a little and then bingo-bango-bongo, you know if you want to get on a horizontal surface with them.

He doesn’t get that this, for her, isn’t her normal. If Zen hadn’t been kind to her that first day, if he hadn’t helped Kihal with her Brecker problem, if the rumors surrounding them hadn’t whipped up to a fevered pitch so even she couldn’t ignore them-- well, Shirayuki wouldn’t have even been thinking about romance.

So the fact that she can look at him and feel like she’s walked into the country club’s sauna with her school clothes on-- that different. That’s special. That’s not going to just happen with someone she meets in an 8AM lecture.

If only she were as good with word things as her English grades suggested she should be, she’d be to tell him that.

“This isn’t about...” Obi lets out a disgruntled huff. “Listen, I know I definitely had some inspired ideas about what you would like from...before--”

(She’s still panting as she comes down, tremors zipping up and down her spine, “How did you...?”

Obi smiles, a wide Cheshire Cat grin. Fitting, since she definitely feels like she’s been dragged down the rabbit hole. “How did I what, kid?”

“Know to do that. With my hips,” She smooths her palms over where he’d grabbed them. They ache; it wouldn’t surprise her if she had hand-shaped bruises slapped across them tomorrow.

“Oh, I thought you’d like that.” Obi curls into her side, too pleased. He’s hard against her hip, but-- she likes it. “When I caught you coming off that ladder, you made that little hiccuppy noise, so I figured...pretty sensitive right?”

She stares.

He blinks. “What, did I say something--?”

“Obi” she manages, “that was four months ago.”)

“But if you knew what you liked...” She doesn’t need to see him to know there’s a feral smile stretching across his face. “I could do much better.”

Oh, that sounds...nice. She shifts, and she-- she leaks, thick slick coating the tops of her thighs.

“Besides, if we’re going to bring toys into the equation,” he continues, as if he hadn’t just dropped a bomb in the middle of the conversation, “you should know what makes you feel good without any electronic intervention, if you know what I mean.”

Ah, she-- she definitely does.

“Toys?” she squeaks. “I don’t-- I don’t remember any, um, toy talk.”

Obi hums, amused. “Well, I did promise you a good graduation gift.”

“You--you already gave me one!” Her hand skips up to run over the smooth plastic. “I’m using it right now!”

“Mm.” He’s too pleased with himself, like he’s caught her scent on the air from all the way across town. “But you won’t need them much at school. So...”

“I won’t need t-that at school either!” She’s glad she’s got these headphones; her cheeks would be making her phone’s screen go haywire. “I’ll have you, and I’m very, um, happy with your performance. I don’t think we need to add, um, props.”

“As chuffed as I am to have you appreciating my prowess, kid--” oh he’s going to be unlivable after this, she can just tell-- “that’s all the more reason to have something in the wings to mix it up. Especially since we’re waiting t-to--” he stumbles, voice dropping to a murmur-- “I mean, since we both want to, um...”

He’s so tortured trying to talk about it without actually talking about it that she takes pity on him. “Since I’m afraid of penises, but we both like to touch each other.”

“I mean, since we’re waiting to have sex,” he manages, pained. “Or at least, the kind that involves dicks and, ah, going places.”

She’s been around him too long, because without even missing a beat, she claps back, “Oh, I didn’t realize yours was having its own hero journey.”

“It has certainly felt a Call to Adventure,” he mumbles, “and a Woman as a Temptress.”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean, a Meeting with the Goddess,” he amends, quick enough that she grins. “And once again, you’re trying to distract me. Though I thought it would more like ‘clothes I am missing’ instead of ‘Campell’s seventeen stages thesis.’“

“I’m sticking to what I know,” she tells him primly. “But I suppose I could tell you that, um, I’m not wearing a bra?”

He grunts, gutted. “Ohh, you are really just trying to make this difficult.” He adds, a little waspish, “All this trouble better be working for you, because it’s definitely working for me.”

“Oh, are you--” she swallows, hoping he can’t hear it-- “did you really want to try that?”

“Ah, I mean...” His breath comes sharp, short. “Yeah. If you would like to.”

Her breath catches. “I haven’t really, um...”

Done this. Ever. It would be so easy to say it, but it’s just-- belaboring the point. He knows. He just...thinks she’s a much better student than she is. At least about things like this.

“Listen, I haven’t...” He hesitates, and she realizes-- he’s embarrassed. “This isn’t something I’ve done with anyone before. You know I’m not really anyone’s...long term option.”

Grandad always says that she shoots from the cuff-- a nice way of saying doesn’t think before talking-- but she doesn’t regret it, not one bit, when she blurts out, “You’re mine.”

Obi’s breath rasps into the speaker. “Y-yeah. I know.” With a swallow, he adds, “And I know you think I have a lot of experience, but there’s a lot out there to try, and I haven’t even brushed the surface of it, you know? And I just thought, knowing you, knowing how curious you are...”

She blinks. “You mean...you’ve never been with someone long enough to, um, explore?”

“Ah, plenty of people would pick up Sexy Culinary Weekly up off the rack, but um--” he huffs out a laugh, soft and self-deprecating-- “you’d be the first to pick up a subscription.”

Shirayuki doesn’t like to pry, but for a good long moment, she considers asking for a list with some names. Just to talk, of course.

She takes a deep breath instead, trying to focus. “So you want to-- to explore with me?”

“If you want to,” he’s quick to say. “I know all of this is...new. I just thought since we won’t be doing a, ah, traditional progression here--”

“Traditional?”

He sighs. “You know, the uh, porn formula. Fingering, hand job, blow job, eating--”

“OKAY,” she yelps, clapping a hand to her face. “I get it!”

“Right, well, there’s a lot between what we’re doing and PIV.” She nearly giggles at how he says it, piv, like it’s a word and not an acronym. It's almost...cute. Like an adorable monster she could get a plushie of, instead of something that involved penises and could make her pregnant.

“And since we’re not doing any of that soon,” he continues, “we could, ah...take the scenic route. And maybe that would be a little less intimidating for you, since we’d both be new at...whatever we’re doing, instead of feeling like you had to catch up.”

Her heart flutters, and the warmth in her gut spreads up to her chest. “I think you’re mixing metaphors.”

“Sorry, I can’t think of cooking puns for everything,” he deadpans. “Think of it as not having to rush to read back issues, I guess.”

She hums. “I think you’re asking me to help with recipe development.”

“Well, if we’re going to embark on culinary adventures together--” he presses, voice bubbling like he’s trying to keep down a laugh. Several, if she’s anything to go by-- “then you should be comfortable with what your body likes before we add any...additional ingredients. You have to learn to do it the right way before we do it the easy way.”

“Oh,” she breathes. Obi was definitely starting to have a point about doing all this now. “Like New Math.”

“Wow, kid,” he deadpans, “really getting right down to the dirty talk.”

She flushes. Good thing he can’t see her. “I-I thought that was your job.”

He laughs, a rumble she feels right down to her bones. “You’re right. What are you wearing?”

She coughs. “Really?”

“I’m trying to set the scene,” he informs her, far too innocent. “This is a delicate shared fantasy we’re making. Wouldn’t want you to get thrown out of it because I mention panties and you’re wearing boyshorts.”

“I’m not wearing underwear,” she blurts out. “Wearing it overnight increasing the chance of yeast infections.”

Ah, there it is: the regret. It would be nice if she could just...not be like this. If she could just think through what she says when she’s nervous, instead of talking about diseased vaginas with her boyfriend while he’s trying to...make love at her, or whatever.

Now she has to contend with this endless silence, wishing that her mortification would at least dampen her desire even a little. Heaven knows they wouldn’t doing any recipe development tonight, after that. “O-obi?”

“Sorry, I just--” his throat makes a hollow thunk that echoes over the line-- “I got distracted.”

She blinks. “By what?”

“Thinking about how much I want to be there,” he admits, “and what I’d do to you if I was.”

“O-oh.” Maybe some culinary adventure wasn’t...so off the table as she thought. “A-and what would that be?”

A strangled groan tears between them. “I want to eat you out so bad.”

That-- that was not what she’d thought he’d say. “Really?”

“Yeah.” His sigh is strained. “You make such good noises.”

“You like it?” Her thighs clench, and oh, she wishes she knew what to do about it. “I figured it would taste...weird.”

Not that she’s ever tried. But she’s tasted blood (too coppery, bad texture), and well, boogers (too salty; thanks, childhood), and she can’t imagine that can taste much better.

“No,” he hums. “You taste just right. Are you touching yourself yet?”

There’s no way to explain she’s just been rating bodily fluids on a scale of most to least appetizing, so she settles with, “N-no.”

Now that he’s mentioned it, now that he’s reminded her that her body isn’t just some inconvenient appendage for her brain, Shirayuki can’t forget that it’s there. And she certainly can’t ignore the heat between her legs, or the way her skin feels as sensitive as flash paper, ready to burn up at a moment’s notice.

“You should do that,” he tells her, just short of a command, and ah, yeah, that’s sounding like a better and better idea every second. “What are you wearing?”

She’s out of cutesy stalling tactics. Or at least, she can’t think of any, not when her vagina seems to have a pulse of its own. “A tank top. And pajama shorts.”

“Sounds cute,” he breathes. “Put your hand down them.”

He doesn’t have to ask twice. Pubic hair crinkles under the tips of her fingers, scratchy against her palm. It’s wet too, tangling when she tries to slide further down so she just..doesn’t. “What now?”

“What do you usually do?”

He’s panting just the barest bit, and the sound of him already so undone is what spurs her to admit, “I, um, usually don’t do anything.”

“But you’ve tried before.” She should have never told him that. “What did you do then?”

“I, um--” she licks her lips, nervous-- “put my fingers inside?”

“Right away?” He laughs, and it’s fond, gentle. “No wonder you’ve never gotten much of anywhere. How about you just cup yourself now.”

She does. Little hairs wrap themselves around her fingers, coming loose, and oh, those always refuse to wash off later, clinging to her with the same tenacity as glitter. It’s comforting to feel weight there, at least, even if it clearly isn’t Obi’s. Still, it’s...vaguely unpleasant.

“I don’t feel much,” she reports, trying not to let her frustration leak through. Maybe she just isn’t cut out for masturbation.

“You wouldn’t,” he confirms, “you need to part your lips first.”

She nearly does, until she thinks better of it. “What does that have to do with--?”

“Not your mouth.” He’s barely covering a laugh. “Your other lips.”

“O-oh.” Of course. That makes...more sense.

Her fingers splay, parting her flesh, and ahh, there is...a lot more of her than she remembers. She’s read about lips blooming like flowers before-- mostly in the books Nanna likes to read-- but nothing had ever...blossomed down there for her before. But it’s definitely all petals and sepals now, if things like that were made out of flesh. She saw something like that once, on one of those Syfy shows her grans liked to watch when she was a kid--

She jolts as something slaps her hard, right on the breast, and oh, she’s-- she’s forgotten she’s still holding the phone. Or at least, she was. Now her hand is boneless, empty, and her screen has belly-flopped right onto her boob.

“Oh, um, wait.” She fumbles with it, one-handed, trying to find some place to put it. “I need to--I need to put down my phone.”

He hums, bemused. “Two hands would help.”

Shirayuki’s definitely struggling with one, that’s for sure. Her bedside table is too far for her headphones to reach without tugging; the bed itself is just asking for her to squirm her way to an End Call. She’s stuck discovering all this with one hand plastered in between her thighs, dipping between her vulva in a way that can only be termed distracting.

By the time she settles it on her pillow, far enough away to avoid any mishap via cheek smooshing, she’s practically panting. Maybe she needs to take up a sport at Lyrias; Mathletes clearly isn’t cutting it.

“Okay,” she sighs, dropping back onto her bed. “Now I’m ready. I am parting my...myself. What’s next?”

“Are you wet?”

Well, if she wasn’t before, she certainly is now. “I, um, think so?”

“All right.” His bed groans, like he’s shifting on it, and oh, how she wishes she knew what he looked like now. “Just start sliding your fingers around. You know where your clit is, right?”

“Yes,” she manages, squirming as she rubs at her folds. “I’ve seen a diagram before.”

He laughs, a low rumbling chuckle that sends a shiver down her spine, and yeah, she can take a real good guess at where her clit might be. “Don’t touch it.”

Her fingers still. “Why not?”

“You’re sensitive,” he tells her, so casual. “You get squirmy when I touch it directly. I mean, feel free to try...maybe you’re a lighter touch than I am. You could like it.”

She’s about to balk-- if it doesn’t feel good when he does it, she’s not going to do any better-- when his voice drops and he adds, “Tell me if you do.”

Well, let it not be said that Shirayuki doesn’t believe in science. Which is the reason she’s doing this. Hypothesis testing. Not because her boyfriend asked in a ridiculously sexy way.

With a steeling breath, she swipes her clit with the pad of her finger and-- y i k e s.

She grits her teeth, nerves still jangling. “Um, yeah, that didn’t feel great.”

“Too bad.”

With a sigh, she stretches her neck, hoping to get that raised-hackles feel out of it and-- oh.

Rum Tum stares down at her with his glassy black eyes, mouth stitched into its permanent smile. That’s really...not helping.

“Um.” Duchess Prettymane is next to him, head tilted in question. Calico Dog is definitely just...judging her. “Give me one second.”

With her free hand, she turns each of her stuffies around, placing them in a line on her window sill. They don’t need to see any of this.

“Okay.” She settles back into her pillows. “So I definitely don’t touch that. I just...touch around it?”

“Yeah,” he huffs out, amused. “But no rubbing! Long strokes, just barely brushing it, both fingers, one on either side.” She can hear his grin when he adds, “You like to be teased.”

She wants to protest that; she nearly does, but--

Her fingers skid over her folds, tracing just around the lip of her slit, stopping just shy of her clit, and-- mm, all right, he, ah, definitely has a point. This feels much better.

Still, she’s so used to Obi’s touch; he lingers in all the right places, calluses catching on her clit in a way that makes her writhe. Her own fingers are too tiny and her movements too awkward. She’s too wet too; as much as it’s definitely helping with the, um, sensations she’s feeling, controlling her fingers makes her feel like a contestants on one of those Japanese game shows. Just when she thinks she’s gotten it, when she’s starting to build to something interesting if not good--

“How is it?”

She nearly nicks herself with a nail. “Better when you do it.”

“Ah, I see,” he hums. “A pillow princess--”

Shirayuki has absolutely no idea what that means, but she knows she’s being teased. “No--!”

A thunk stops her mid-thought. Her hand snaps away from her shorts. “Did you hear that?”

“Kid--”

She eyes the door warily. “Do you think it’s Nanna?”

Obi smothers a chuckle. “I’m pretty sure that was just your phone.”

“No, I put it behind my--” she looks down, and oh yes, there it is, right on the floor.

“Oh,” she breathes, mortified. “Oh. Right. Just, um, give me a minute.”

It’s a tricky proposition trying to fish it off the floor. For one, her bed is high and her arms are short-- oh, she was so committed to the whole fairy bower aesthetic of lofting her bed when she was twelve, but now it’s really inconvenient-- and for another, one hand is contaminated with, um, juices, and though she doesn’t want to smear any of that all over her phone--

Well, wiping it on the sheets is a bad decision. Nanna’s nose is sharp, and if there’s one conversation she doesn’t want to happen, it’s why does you bed smell like sex, Shirayuki? She’s done well not getting grounded so far, despite the number of times Obi’s been caught shirtless in her room, but she knows better than to try to test her grandmother’s patience on it.

Shirayuki drops to her belly, elbow digging into the mattress to ground her. Her finger are just long enough to brush the screen--

“Hey kid,” Obi sighs, “do you actually want to do this?”

She yelps. Only a quickly placed hand keeps her from meeting her carpet face first. She does have her phone though. “What?”

“I thought that this was going to be fun and sexy, but now...” He grunts, uneasy. “It seems like I might forcing you, and that’s really not what I wanted to happen. If you don’t want--”

“NO! I mean,” she manages, throwing herself back on her bed, “you have a point. Even though I prefer you touching me by lot--”

Obi hums, too smug.

“--we can’t always make the time to, um, do that.” It’s be nice if the bed could just swallow her whole right now, put her out of her misery, but-- she wants this. She wants him, and part of that is having terrible conversations that make her feel like a five alarm fire in a fireworks factory. “And if we’re having trouble just a few houses away, I’m sure we’ll find a way to have it when you’re only a few doors down too. Which is fine, it’s not like I have to, um...”

He makes a noise, intrigued, and oh, she really hates how badly she does want to keep this boyfriend. If only she liked him less, then she wouldn’t have to talk about any of this at all.

“I just mean, sometimes I think about you when we can’t be together--”

“Sometimes?”

“You know what I mean,” she snips, annoyed. “Sometimes I think about you in a specific way and I get a little, um, stuck. And that can be frustrating. So it’s probably better that I learn this now, than--

“Wait.” He’s breathless, unfocused. “Are you telling me you’ve been all...stuck lately?”

“N-no!” That is really not what she wants to be talking about right now. “I mean, a-a little? Kind of.”

She can hear the rush of his breath through his nose, his long thoughtful pause--

“Do you need some inspiration?” He’s eager, voice tight and nearly winded. “Purely above the waist, of course.”

It occurs to her that he means pictures; pictures of the adult variety. The yes leaps to her lips, but oh, what if Nanna saw it, and--

“Here, one sec.”

He’s not joking; barely a second later her phone buzzes, snapchat informing her that Obi has a new photo. She frowns, flicking open the app, and -- oh. Yes. That was. Definitely not there a few moments ago.

He’s naked from the waist up, lounging in a pair of gym shorts, his legs spread wide where he sits, and-- “Are you, um...?”

“Hot?” he growls playfully. “For you, yeah.”

“Hard,” she blurts out, since she never misses an opportunity to make a fool of herself. It would be nice if her curiosity could take a vacation for a day or two. Give her skin a break.

“Oh. Um. Yeah,” he grunts. “I mean, I’m trying to get you off, and I’m think about touching you. Sort of...a natural response.”

“But you aren’t touching yourself?”

“We hadn’t really talked about that,” he murmurs shyly. “This is supposed to be about you. I didn’t want to get distracted.”

“Ah...” That place between her legs throbs. She snakes a hand under her waistband, and oh, they’ve barely lost any ground at all. “You should.”

“W-what?”

“Touch yourself,” she tells him, running her fingers over her folds. “I think it would help.”

“Oh.” She might as well have hit him for the way that bursts out of him. “I didn’t--”

“I can give you inspiration too.” She whips off her tank before she can think better of it, struggling when she realizes, no, one hand will definitely not be enough to get the job done--

And then it’s nothing to take a picture, or to send it. A few taps and he’s choking, “Did-- did you mean to send this to me?”

It’s then that it strikes her: she just sent a naked picture to her boyfriend. Well, a half naked picture, but for what he could see she might as well have done the whole thing.

“Oh, is that-- is that okay?” She drags her safe hand over her face, sweat clinging to her palm. “I should have checked--”

“Yes!” he pants, half wild. “Yes, this is okay, Very, very okay. I just...you really want me to use this? For, uh, jacking off?”

“Could you?”

“Haah,” he breathes. “Yes. God, your breasts are so good, babe. And your face...”

“Then yes.” She licks her lips, nervous. “Please.”

“I don’t really need the help,” he warns, “I’m a real pro at this.”

“I want you to.” She doesn’t know how she says it without even a stutter. The thought of him touching himself like that, knowing that he’s thinking of her, just her-- “I want you to touch your-- you--”

“Really, kid, you don’t have to--”

“Cock.”

Just saying it shakes her up like a soda can, ready to burst, and she almost wishes she could take it back, that she could unsay half this conversation-- until he groans; the frantic slide of clothes loud from his end of the phone.

“What do you-- what should I--?”

He sounds so lost, his words hardly above a whine, and that’s the only reason she’s able to say, “I want you to, um, stroke it?”

“Yeah, I am-- I am already there, babe,” he assures her, voice throaty and strained. “You’re touching yourself too, right? You’re wet?”

“Y-yeah.” She slides her hand under the band, and ah, she hadn’t know it was possible to be wetter, that her thighs could be slick nearly to the edge of her shorts, but here she is. “I like hearing you. I-I mean...after graduation, when we went to the field, I--” she licks her lips, mouth so dry-- “I really wanted to hear you come again.”

“Jesus. Fuck.” His mattress creaks, distressed. “That was-- that was two months ago. You could have just--” he hisses, so sensitive-- “god, I would have come for you anytime.”

“Could you?” It comes out coyer than she expects, far too confident to sound like her, and she nearly apologizes, until he-- he--

He whimpers.

“If I asked really nice,” she hums, fingers skating along her folds, clit pulsing with how much she wants this, wants him. “Could you come for me again?”

He groans, pained. “Y-yeah. I could definitely arrange something.”

“Now?”

“Shit. Fuck.” He moans, but it trails off into a laugh. “Definitely won’t take long if you keep this up.”

“Good,” she sighs, pace quickening, her fingers daring to loop ever closer to the crux of her problem. “I want to hear you. It’s been so long...”

She hesitates. Obi is always the one to tease, and her the one that squirms away, the one that needs to be cajoled back into the scene, but now--

Well, the shoe is on the other foot isn’t it. “It’s been so long,” she says again, only this time she lets her voice go breathy, lets it linger on the cusp of whine. “Don’t make me wait, Obi...”

He doesn’t.

“Fuck,” is the only word he manages before he’s groaning, whimpering, making every sexy sound he can at once as he comes hard.

“Haah,” he moans, breath heaving. “That was-- that was definitely not how I expected this call to go.”

Shirayuki stills her fingers, mouth slanting into a smirk. She’d always wondered how Obi could watch her orgasm and not want to do it himself, not need to do it when she’s dying every time, but-- now she gets it. She may not have come, but there’s something supremely satisfying in watching-- no, listening to him fall apart instead.

“Oh?” She still sounds coy. Like Obi does every time she goes half-blind from the force of her own climax.

“You didn’t come, did you?” He’s put out, and she can tell his eyebrows are drawn, that his jaw is set. “I could--”

“No, no, don’t worry about me,” she assures him. “I’m fine. Besides, we have to get up tomorrow.”

“Ah, fuck, right. Senior Day.” He sighs. “All right, fine. But next time--”

“Next time,” she agrees. “Though I really enjoyed this time too.”

He makes a noise that sounds like dying. “Yeah, well, that’s great, but I’m not the one who needs to learn how to get off like a champ. But whatever,” he sighs, “we have all the time in the world for you to get it.”

Her chest warms, and she smiles against her pillow. “Right. I’ll see you tomorrow? Bright an early?”

He groans. “Yeah, yeah. Bright and early. Good night, kid.”

#obiyukiweek20 #obiyuki #akagami no shirayukihime #snow white with the red hair #lemon #my fic #rarely pure and never simple #listen this originally was supposed to run parallel to zen and kihal's B-side #BUT HERE WE ARE #this little opener turning into a whole fic in itself #but i promise #NEXT TIME IS SENIOR DAY

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cosmicangst · 4 years ago

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I've been following you for a /long/ time so I know this has been asked before but your tastes may have changed so I wanted to ask what are your favourite books of all time along with most meaningful ones since I guess those two aren't exactly the same, as well as other really important media that you think have helped to shape your life

oh man anon have you been with me since my doctor who days? much love from me whatever time you jumped onto my silly raft

favorite books:

they’re all kind of meaningful to me so i didn’t make a distinction between “favorite” and “meaningful” (listed in no particular order)

life of pi by yann martel

tell the wolves i’m home by carol rifka brunt

a clockwork orange by anthony burgess

les miserables by victor hugo

jane eyre by charlotte bronte

persuasion by jane austen

and the mountains echoed by khaled hosseini

war and peace by leo tolstoy

notes from underground by fyodor dostoevsky

giovanni’s room by james baldwin

deathless by catherynne m. valente

gone girl by gillian flynn

on earth we’re briefly gorgeous by ocean vuong

dictee by theresa hak kyung cha

his dark materials by philip pullman

chaos walking by patrick ness

illuminations by walter benjamin

all about love by bell hooks

patron saints of nothing by randy ribay

america is not the heart by elaine castillo

scenes of subjection by saidiya hartman

romances: bringing down the duke & a rogue of one’s own by evie dunmore, the hating game by sally thorne, a week to be wicked by tessa dare, suddenly you by lisa kleypas, the kiss quotient by helen hoang (and more listed here)

plays: king lear & much ado about nothing (favorite shakespearean tragedy and comedy), the glass menagerie by tennessee williams, antigone by sophocles, the oresteian trilogy by aeschylus, endlings by celine song, rust by nancy garcia loza, manny pacquaio punches the world but the earth doesn’t even flinch by mark galarrita, boni alvarez’s entire oeuvre

other formative media:

so formative for me doesn’t necessarily mean good or a current favorite. rather these works are things that have had a considerable impact in how i write, consume, make art, study, read, critique, appreciate, live, etc.

the essay i keep handy at all times and build my life around: washing dishes by thich nhat hanh

childhood/ya books that i seldom touch these days but i still remember random passages of word-for-word: little house series by laura ingalls wilder, the inheritance cycle by christopher paolini, bloodlines series by richelle mead, the diviners & the gemma doyle trilogy by libba bray, the fire and thorns trilogy by rae carson, hate list by jennifer brown, the hunger games series by suzanne collins

divorced, fraught media that still has considerable influence in my current interests and artistry: harry potter, twilight, the infernal devices, hamilton, a song of ice and fire, the walking dead, maximum ride (like yes i know...but also this was the start of the found family trope for me)

video games that make me continuously buy into this stupid hobby: animal crossing: wild world, final fantasy vii (crisis core), kingdom hearts (birth by sleep), persona 3 portable, persona 5, dragon age series, the last of us/part 2, harvest moon: mfomt, pokemon emerald, rune factory 4, fire emblem: awakening, red dead redemption 2, ace attorney series (and other otome/visual novels listed here)

the catwoman comics run by ed brubaker and darwyn cooke

live theatre productions that i constantly steal from as a theatre maker and/or proshots i constantly revisit: hamlet (2017 almeida theatre), natasha pierre and the great comet of 1812 (2016 broadway), much ado about nothing (2019 public theatre), othello (2015 rsc), next to normal (2017 ewp), les miserables 10th anniversary (1995), les miserables (2016 broadway revival with john owen-jones), bandstand (2017 broadway), america adjacent (2019 skylight theatre), the curious incident of the dog in the night-time (2017 national theatre), fun home (2015 broadway), legally blonde the musical (the mtv proshot! a classic), newsies (2017 proshot), rent (2008 final performance proshot), phantom of the opera (2012 royal albert hall proshot), dear evan hansen (2019 us tour), company (2007 broadway revival proshot), hadestown (2019 broadway), gypsy (2008 broadway revival), tick tick...boom! (2001 off-broadway), early starkid productions, mojada: a medea in los angeles (2015 getty villa), miss saigon (1991 broadway...for my complicated feelings about this musical i wrote an entire thinkpiece about that here)

childhood tv shows that made me start a livejournal or a fan forum: teen titans (the original cn show), avatar: the last airbender, doctor who (especially rtd era season 1-4)

my emo albums i still use for writing: welcome to the black parade by my chemical romance, bad blood by bastille, american idiot by green day, folie a deux by fall out boy, a fever you can’t sweat out by panic! at the disco, the twilight movie soundtrack and sm*yer’s custom playlists she posted on her website

all the movies listed here

all animanga listed here

#reply.#anon.#notes.

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bluegamerchick · 5 years ago

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Rune Factory 5 Wants

So, I’ve been playing Rune Factory 2 again ( never really beat in the first place, but remade a save where I accidently named my the MC Kyle with two spaces behind his name ). And replaying it, reminded me, oh yea, there’s a 5th Rune Factory coming out. There’s like no discussion on it, soo, here’s my wants for it.

This is just what I general/plot wants for, to romance wants, to character wants. So yea, let’s go.

A fair warning, some points may be repeated and or, belong in other sections. I was sleep deprived when I first started typing this and it’s now 4am as I finish this.

General/Plot Wants Returning Areas Off the bat with something that’ll probably not happen, but I can dream. Replaying Rune Factory 2, I fell in love with the game’s town. It was a little port city, and was just so visually beautiful, what was not to love? Same goes for Rune Factory 3 and 4′s areas. Personally, I have never played Rune Factory 3 ( only seen videos ), but I find the area beautiful too. Same goes for Rune Factory 4′s town too. Could we return to this areas? Probably not, but it still would be cool to at least visit them for a short while or have mention of them.

Half Human, Half Monster Speaking of Rune Factory 3, I want the monster human hyprids to return. We sorta got this with the guardians in Rune Factory 4, and the Raven cameo, but not much really. It be really cool to see the human monster hybrids to return.

Past MC’s Children

We get a taste of playing as a main character’s child in Rune Factory 2, where you play as Kyle’s kids. But, you know what would be cool? Playing as a grown-up version of the past MC’s kiddos. Sure, they would lose their memory at the start, but it would be super cool to play as grown-up version of Aaron, Aria, Leona and Lucia ( Raguna’s kids in Frontier ), Micah's kids ( the wiki says the boy’s default names are: Ray, Leaf, Horace. While the girl’s is: Lala ), or Noel and Luna! Maybe if you play as grown-up versions of Aaron and Aria, kids from RF: 2 come and end up jogging your memory! idk, just an idea.

3D? Since it’s going on the switch, I kind of want it to be 3D. And from the looks of it, it’s gonna be? But, then again, I’m not sure, it may just be like most Rune Factory games ( minus Frontier and Tides of Destiney ), appears 2D but is 3D if that makes any sense.

Returning Characters!!!! Let’s be all honest, we want to see returning characters. Even if they are just extra shop-keeps, we want to see them again.

Requests Weird hope, but, can we have the request like the ones in RE: 2, where they felt...personal? Like, they actually were tied to the character. Will explain more in the characters part, but yeaaa. Can we just not have Rune Factory 4′s requests. It’s been awhile since I played it, but from what I remember the request weren’t that personal. ( Do correct me if I’m wrong though! )

Plot Now for the main thing, the plot. Rune Factory was kind of already neatly wrapped up in RF:4. I wanna say other’s have voiced this opinion too, but what are they gonna do for the plot? Maybe this is a prequel to all the other games? Like, what would be the very first game in the RF timeline to start it all off. Or does this take place after RF:4. Are there more dragons we don’t know about? Is our goal to find baby versions of the previous 4 dragons? Does this game show the after effects of losing all 4 dragons? What is it? Personally, I would love this to be a game that is either a prequel to the very first Rune Factory game or shows off the after effects of the events in RF: 4.

Character Wants Requests Like I said before, I kind of want the request system from RF: 2. Sure we can a few some generic requests, but also, I would love to see requests based on the friendship levels of certain people. Maybe as time goes on, you get more and more personal request. Maybe this can also led to romances!

Returning Characters Pls You already stated this in-Yes, I know I put this in General/Plot, but I’m putting this here too. Yes, returning characters! Of course, I expect them to be like RF: 3 and 4, where they are shopkeeps, but also, it would be neat if certain returning characters ended up being romance choices or you could convince them to move into to town. As for character’s I actually hope return or make a cameo ( which a cameo seems for likely ) are Alicia, Ray, Giaus, and Margaret. Or maybe grown-up Cammy and Roy. Be cool to see them traveling together too ^v^.

Character Events It be cool to see character events for the townsfolk, be it a romance option or not. Really just a minor thing that I would like to see.

Befriending Divine Beings? Kind of like how you could befriend Venti in Rune Factory 4, it be cool to befriend divine beings in RF: 5. That is all.

Rivals Bring back rivals. They were really neat in Rune Factory 2. It be fun to attended your rival’s wedding, and either go “Congrats on the wedding” or steal their spouse. Right at the alter. Because you’re Mr or Mrs Steal your girl or guy.

Group Events Kind of like how in RF: 4 you got those sleep-over events and possibly more ( sleep over event is the only that comes to mind ). I want to see more of that. Image you and your friends eating lunch at the restaurant. Maybe you all have a sleepover at someone’s house. Maybe you can choose where the sleepover takes place or you all take turns on where the sleepover will be. Maybe you can a girl’s or guy’s night out. In the summer, maybe you and your closest friends go hang out at the beach. Stuff like that!

School and Kids This is probably an odd one, buuuut, can the kids go to school? Just having them sit around the house or maybe sometimes wander the town is..boring. And also makes me worry for their education. It be nice to see your child have their own schedule besides “ Wander town aimlessly”. Maybe they have dialogue based on school, and you have little events where you may have to deal with problems ( Kid got a bad grade and is upset, they got in trouble at school, they’re being picked on, etc ). Maybe they can bring friends home from school to play with! Really all I’m asking is not a repeat of Rune Factory 4′s kids. Please

Romance Wants Same-Sex Marriage It’s 2020. The newest Story of Seasons game as Same-Sex marriage in it, if I’m right. And you can kind of do it in Rune Factory 4 by changing Frey or Lest’s appearance to look like each other and then dating either a bachelor or bachelorette ( example, playing as Lest but changing into Frey, so Frey can date say Forte ). So why not? Just give us proper same-sex marriage, could open so many more possibilities for character interaction and so on. “But children chara-” There is something called adoption and after you and your romance option choice are married and want kids, you can adopt, problem solved on that.

Romance Option Events! Give us all the romance events! Pre-marriage, marriage, honeymoon, all of them! Just stuff that shows we are progressing with the romance, and then cute fluff stuff to show “Hey! There’s more to the marriage than just fluff and hugs” Although those are nice too.

Older Romance Options You know how in Rune Factory 4, everyone was kind of upset Bado wasn’t romanceable? Yea, can we not have that same mistake again? But in all seriousness, it would be nice to have older romance option, even if by older they are like late 20′s to early 30′s, it still would be nice for say players who are more in that age range and don’t want to marry 20 looking year old characters.

Returning characters and romance?! You know how in RF: 3 and 4, you could build relationships with those characters and make them your buds? How about we romance some of them! Sure, I image it would a Yuu thing, and they would have to be traveling merchant, but in this case, it would be certain days you could find them and gift them stuff to romance them. But, you know, just a thought!

Hidden Options? Hidden Romance options! Romance options you didn’t expect. Maybe after doing a line of mission or requests, a new option comes to town. Maybe crawling through dungeons scores you a new love interests. Maybe dragons return and one turns into a human and you can know smooch their face, who knows! It would just be nice to have more hidden options, that a player wouldn’t know about until they did something, rewarding with a new character you could befriend or romance.

Okay, that is all for my wants. This is long as hell, I hope you have fun reading and it’s almost 5 am as I finish this.

#rune factory #rune factory 2 #rune factory 3 #rune factory 4 #rune factory 5 #rune factory a fantast harvest moon #test post #long post #rune factory 5 wants #too many characters to tag #it's 5 am #like #right now #joy #5 am rambles #really more like 10 to 11 am rambles #that turned into 4 am #enjoy

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