#i might mess around w colors and stuff but a lot of my editing will still be in PS

[polarmoon]

have some unedited screenshots while i mess around with reshade

[hatterstan-shameblog]

Nobody asked for this but I'm gonna do it anyways...

🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸

Fluff Alphabet: Takeru/Aguni Edition

🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸

A = Attractive what do they find attractive about the other?

Takeru: only reason he let Aguni wear regular clothes and not swimwear is because he saw ARM in that tank top and was like "oh damn okay 😳." So, y'know, that. (And he'll never admit it but he kinda likes how Aguni is a little bit taller than he is....) Also likes that Aguni has a really dry, deadpan sense of humor—he ways finds a way to make Takeru laugh, even when he's not really trying.

Aguni: I think the physical aspect of things wasn't really a make-or-break for him at first—like, yeah, Takeru's a good-looking guy, but that's secondary. He liked how Takeru is such a live-wire, very loud and colorful and seemingly fearless, no matter what kind of trouble they got into. (But also...he likes the hair. That's a thing for him.)

B = Baby do they want a family? why/why not?

Takeru: If they end up with one somehow, then, sure. But, like. He's not going out of his was to make it a thing. (But also, he has his cat, Ziggy, who he calls his baby, so...)

Aguni: Would secretly love to be a dad but is too worried he might mess the kid up or something. Is more than happy to be 'unofficial parent' to the neighborhood kids, though. Handing out ice pops to the kids that show up at the shop, keeping an eye out and telling them to get home before dark, maybe even showing one or two of them how to throw a better curveball...you know. Real Hallmark channel shit. (And yes, for those who were wondering: Ziggy the cat loves him and often curls up on his lap while he watches TV)

C = Cuddle how do they cuddle?

They don't really "cuddle" outside of bed. Just kinda sit next to each other, shoulder to shoulder, no big deal. But in bed, Aguni lies on his back with his arm sorta outstretched while Takeru...well, my man is worm on a string but OFF the string, he just flops all sorts of ways and a lot of them don't look comfortable but he falls asleep in minutes so whatever.

D = Dates what are dates with them like?

I don't think they do "dates"—they've got a long-term thing going on, so they often end up on the couch eating takeout and watching movies. I think they'd go to the movie theater sometimes (and talk shit for the entire film lol) and every once in a while grab dinner somewhere nice...but, usually because they have some cool limited-time-only dessert item that Takeru insists they try. (And Aguni pretends to be upset about having to get dressed up and go out, but is actually rather pleased to have a little romance...and get something to satisfy his sweet tooth.)

E = Everything you are my ____ (e.g my life, my world…)

Aguni: Emergency Medical Contact

Takeru: Co-Signer On The Apartment Lease

F = Feelings when did they know they were falling in love?

Takeru: About a week after Aguni (drunkenly) confessed his crush. Literally spent a whole week like, "Wow, it's a shame I don't love him back. He's so kind and handsome and smart and funny...too bad, I guess..." until one night he sat up straight in bed and said "Hold up." He then immediately called Aguni and began demanding why Aguni didn't tell him he was in love with him this whole time.

Aguni: They had been friends since they were kids, so it's hard to say when his feelings went from "you're my best friend" to something different. But, once he figured it out, he swore never to mention it because that could complicate their friendship.

G = Gentle are they gentle? If so, how?

Takeru: Yes and no. He's got a bad case of "grabby hands" and often yanks Aguni to and fro to look at something or whatever. Just zero respect for the man's personal space. But otherwise...I imagine he's not particularly rough or gentle, just kind of normal. EXCEPT when it comes to the emotional stuff—like, the real heavy things. I think he's very gentle with that, not asking too many questions and just sort of taking care of him where he can.

Aguni: Generally gentle—physically, emotionally, whatever. But I do think that he's confrontational, like when there's an issue, he comes straight out and asks Takeru what's going on. Even corners him, sometimes. He seems like a "no bullshit" guy, and since Takeru is "Mr. 99% Bullshit" he's gotta deal with it as best he can.

H = Hand/Hold how do they like to hold hands?

The only time they "hold hands" is when Takeru is grabbing Aguni's wrist to drag him somewhere (or run away lol) and when Aguni is pulling Takeru's hand back to stop him from touching something...

I = Impression first impression/s

I headcanon that they met very young, like grade school age. After school, in the park, where Takeru was chilling in a tree and Aguni walked by and he was like "Hey, there's a spider up here, wanna see?" and Aguni is like "Not really, I don't like bugs..." Now, Takeru, being "weird bug kid extraordinaire" can't believe his strange little ears and hops down from the tree and starts explaining why bugs are so cool and that Aguni is wrong...and Aguni listens as this funky, tiny firecracker just talks his damn ear off. Aguni liked how excited Takeru got about things, and Takeru liked how Aguni actually listened to him. And they were fast friends after that!

J = Joker are they into pulling pranks?

Takeru fucks around all the time...and doesn't often find out, because Aguni tolerates all his antics. (To a certain point, but still.) Every once in a while, Aguni will tell some harmless little lie just to watch Takeru freak out—he told him once that Lady Gaga was leaving the music scene forever, and Takeru screamed so loud the neighbors filed a noise complaint.

K = Kisses how do they kiss?

I think they most often do quick pecks—at the breakfast table, when they get home from work. You know. Domestic stuff. But when it's not like that...I think 9/10 times it's Takeru initiating, and Aguni reciprocates by wrapping his arms around him in a big hug (because he likes it but also to keep that skinny little weirdo from wiggling so damn much, he's always moving, he can't just be still—)

L = Love who says I love you first?

Neither! I don't think they really say it at all! Why say something that doesn't need to be said? (At least, that's how they see it...)

M = Memory their favorite moment together

Aguni: It's not really a memory, but...just how they have breakfast together some mornings. Sipping coffee, discussing whatever's going on in the world, the general "togetherness" that comes with it is one of his favorite feelings.

Takeru: The time they spent a full 24 hours in a karaoke booth singing 80's hits and knocking back tequila shots and ordering way too much food.

N = Nickel do they spoil? do they buy the person they love everything?

Takeru: Absolutely buys stuff for Aguni all the time. Mostly random snacks, or little knick-knacks that catch his eye. And also clothes, but...Aguni doesn't always approve.

Aguni: Doesn't buy Takeru stuff BUT leaves vases of flowers he grew on the table for Takeru to find.

O = Orange what color reminds them of their other half

Anything bright and obnoxious reminds Aguni of Takeru—red in particular, which also happens to be Takeru's favorite. And Takeru thinks Aguni has calm and soothing blue-green vibes. Like the ocean, beautiful and serene, but also dark and capable of incredible destruction.

P = Petnames what pet names do they use?

Takeru: All of them. Darling, babe, sweetheart (but he calls everyone those lol). Aguni-specific ones are always over-the-top and ridiculous like "brightest star in all of the heavens..." and he always gets an eye-roll for his efforts.

Aguni: Absolutely does not use pet names. Just says "hey you" or something. Once called Takeru "babe" and Takeru had to stop washing dishes and sit down because he was laughing so hard.

Q = Quaint what is their favorite non-modern thing?

Takeru: I feel like he would collect a ton of vintage stuff—clothes, records, just random little bits and bobs he comes across. But his favorite is definitely his record player—it belonged to his dad, and he keeps it in a place of honor in the hat shop.

Aguni: A set of very old and well-cared-for gardening tools. Takeru got them for him for his birthday, and he legit treasures them.

R = Rainy Day what do they like to do on a rainy day?

Lay on the couch and do literally nothing. Takeru gets the left end, Aguni takes the right, and they binge trash TV shows all day. (And also they make box-mix brownies and eat them straight out of the pan. It's "their thing.")

S = Sad how do they cheer themselves/each other up

Takeru: Aside from all his self-destrictive behaviors (binge-drinking, dangerous situations, etc.) he just really needs a good laugh. And Aguni somehow always manages to make him laugh with an unexpected, deadpan comment. Also, he makes Takeru actually talk through his problems instead of ignoring them...

Aguni: if he's in a bad mood, you just need to let him work through it on his own. He hates being "talked down to" and feels that most attempts at cheering up are cheap, so most people don't attempt. Buf...Takeru is not "most people" and breaks out his most ridiculous jokes to try to get Aguni to crack a smile.

T = Talking what do they love to talk about?

Other people! You know Takeru is the "XOXO Gossip Girl" of the neighborhood, but Aguni...he's like a little old church lady and ADORES hearing all the latest drama.

U = Unencumbered What helps them relax?

Both of them have the same method of relaxation and it's...bubble baths! Aguni does a basic, skin soothing soak and just hangs out in the warm water with a book or maybe just his thoughts to keep him company. But Takeru? He's got some fancy bath soaps, and he takes in a glass of wine and lights a few candles and does a face mask and it's a whole EVENT.

V - Very thoughts about each other

Takeru: Thinks Aguni needs to loosen up and take more risks...but also just loves the guy to pieces.

Aguni: Kinda wishes Takeru would calm tf down sometimes...but also knows that it's just how the guy is and wouldn't dare change him.

W = Wedding when, how, where do they propose?

They're not really the marrying type! They just have a mutual understanding of commitment and that's that.

(But if they did have a wedding... I think it would be a relatively small affair with all their closest friends and family. Like a dinner party, but somewhere extra nice and with lots of good food and alcohol. Intimate and meaningful, with just enough "extra" to satisfy Takeru.)

X = Xylophone What’s their song?

"Total Eclipse of the Heart" because they hid out in a karaoke booth (different from the 24-hour event that Takeru cherishes so much) to es ape the Yakuza and Takeru sang it over and over to pass the time.

Y = You the ___ to my ___ (e.g the cookies to my milk, the macaroni to my cheese)

"Breaking" to my "Entering." The "Assault" to my "Battery." (They both hate this sort of thing and try to come up with the worst answers possible lol)

Z = Zebra if they wanted a pet, what pet would they get?

They already have the cat, Ziggy, who is their perfect little angel.

[lightning-and-lavender-fire]

So I only learned about HLVRAI, like, today, but I came across @black-mesa-slut-voice’s Sweet Voice fanon dictionary and the conlanger in me went !!!!

I guess that’s be pink-magenta lol

Part of me thought this would be really cool to use as a supplement to note-taking or journaling, to make personal comments or write about emotional experiences. But since always carrying around 22 colored pens and switching between them is a bit of a hassle, I decided to create...

The Sweet Voice Notation System.

Each of the main symbols above maps to one of the 22 colors listed in black-mesa-slut-voice’s doc, with both color and emotional symbolism kept in mind.

Dark red - looks like a slash mark or cut

Red - similar-ish to dark red, kinda looks like an exclamation point

Orange - looks flamelike

Gold - it’s the “o” in “ouros,” and also vaguely depicts a stomach turning

Yellow - the shape looks thornlike, and also precariously balanced on one point (and thus easily agitatable)

Neon yellow - shaped like a lightning bolt

Bright green - sorta looks like a small leaf

Dark green - sorta looks like a tree trunk

Teal - originally meant to look like outreaching arms, coincidentally also kinda looks like a baby bird’s open beak

Cyan - two connected and intertwined circles

Blue - opposite of red (ik ik red and blue aren’t opposites but come on), looks like a drop of water (elongated to avoid confusion w/ loop in orange)

Navy - looks like an ocean wave

Indigo - represents the back and forth of greetings and goodbyes

Purple - described in the doc as a “spring evening,” this symbol represent a sunset

Mauve - looks like an m, but also symbolically shows someone covering their face with their hands

Pink - loops form a heart shape

Magenta - shaped somewhat like a firework or explosion

White - shaped like clouds/fog, overall a drowsy sorta line

Grey - similar to 1 or I

Black - shaped both like a snake and like a question mark

Clear - flat line, nothing happening

Brown - just scribbles, a total mess

The notation system is cursive, so movements from one color to another can all be written in one stroke, turning those combinations into distinct words. This definitely meets my goal of a notation system that’s easy to write, has distinct letters so it can be written fast and at small sizes while still being understandable, and can be used for journaling or on-the-side notetaking.

Once I started thinking of these color combos as words, of course, I got to thinking about sentences...

The stuff below the dotted line in that picture is optional and still in the works, but lets you do two basic things. 1: Placement in time. The greater-than/less-than symbols denote emotions that occurred in the past or future. That dot is optional, since no market implies a present-tense statement, but it can be used to create additional contrast with the past or future. I might decide to have it serve some other function, like stacking with the past/future markers to denote specific events rather than general states (like Spanish’s preterite vs. imperfect past). But for right now, it just emphasizes that something is in the present.

2: The arrows show causality. The word the arrow is pointing from is the cause, and the word it’s pointing to is the effect. So a forwards arrow works like “therefore” and a backwards arrow like “because.” This is already handled by the color combinations themselves in a lot of cases, so it should only be used if there isn’t a sensible two- or three-color word that can convey the idea at hand already. The sentences on that sheet of paper are good examples.

@black-mesa-slut-voice I hope you enjoy this! Now if you’ll excuse me I need to figure out who Benrey is lol

Edit: Wrote “maybe” instead of “mauve” aasdjkhsd

[literaphobe]

the whole shebang of gifs, if you don't mind :)

would like to start of by saying. that i am by no means an expert. and that easily someone could come on this post and tell me i am doing something wrong/stupid/pointless. but y’all wanted this. so let’s go. here’s how i gif (using she-ra as an example, so u can say this is a bit of a tutorial on how to gif an animated show? lmao)

first off ur gonna need adobe photoshop. if u don’t have it and don’t plan on getting a version of it then idk how to help u. u will have to find some other tutorial. anyway let’s start w the basics. to make a gif, you either need pictures or a video. we are doing a video —> gif tutorial here. so for me, i use quicktime player to take a screen recording. i tend to edit the clip to get almost exactly only the part i need on imovie so i don’t have to further crop the video clip on photoshop. once you’ve got ur video, go to photoshop, click file —> import —> video frames to layers. then click the video u want to gif, then open. something will pop up. click the box that says limit to every 2 frames, then select OK. ur gif frames will be created. then u gotta do 3 things:

group your frames. do this by selecting all frames (command + option + a) and grouping them (command + g) u should get a folder that says group 1

crop and resize your gif. now this depends on what kind of gif you want to make. you should adjust your crop ratios. click on the crop tool, a ratio thing will pop up with two numbers. number on the left is your length, number on the right is your breadth. for big gifs, i do 540 x 268. for square gifs, 268 x 268. for rectangular gifs that are meant to be two by two (lets say ur making 8 gifs w like text of a scene or whatever) i do 266 x 177. so once u have set ur ratios and adjusted the crop thing to select whichever part of the image u want in the gif, click enter. ur gif will get cropped. THEN, u need to actually adjust the size of ur gif. click on image —> image size. a thing will open up. enter the length number and the width number should be adjusted accordingly

change the gif speed. click on the triple line thing on the top right hand corner of your timeline. you should click on select all frames. when you’ve done that all the frames will be highlighted. click on one of the little numbers. see the 0.02 thing? yea. make sure not to accidentally deselect ur frames. when u click, you’ll get a pop up with some speeds. click on ‘others’. currently, the speed of ur gif will be 0.02. for me, that’s too fast. i almost always do 0.06. u don’t want ur gif to move too fast tbh. i think it makes it look weird and unnatural. we wanna either match the speed of what its like in the show or go a TAD bit slower. so like. if u wanna follow me just set it to 0.06 <3

anyway. that’s the basic stuff. after all that, your gif should look like this:

u can stop here if you want, but if u wanna make it like. different. u can continue on. 

now it’s time to color!

for me i do mostly 3 things. curves, levels, selective color. u can find these by clicking layer —> new adjustment layer —> the thing u want

let’s start with curves. disclaimer: i’m doing it wrong <3 i mean it’s not WRONG but i could probably be using this function a lot better than i have. when u click on curves, it comes out as a straight line. there will be a dot in the centre. what i do is i move the centre dot slightly to the top left hand corner. so it looks like this for this gif i made:

isn’t that so fucking stupid. i let a BIT of light into the picture. like that’s it lmao. i won’t even show u the difference between the initial gif and this. it’s too stupid

levels. ok this one has a bit more function. u have a number on the left that says 0 and a number on the right that says 250. by reducing the number on the right, the gif gets brighter. by increasing the number on the left..... i won’t say the gif gets darker but the dark parts of the picture will. get darker? more pronounced? it’s all about finding a good balance. here’s what I did for this gif:

now we move onto selective color. this is a… whole thing. sigh. ok. so in selective coloring, you have 9 ‘colors’ or sections. they are red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, magenta, white, neutrals, and black. depending on what colors there are in the picture, we will. mess w it accordingly. and in each ‘color’, there are four…. scales. ranging from -100% to 100%. and they are cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. i suggest u play around with these to see what they do on ur own. this is what i did for the reds in this gif:

what i do is i try to make the reds stand out. in this gif there’s only those 2 stripes but usually in adora gifs she’s wearing that fucking red jacket <3 and since she’s gonna do that we might as well make that red pop! make it sexy! so as u can see i made the cyans negative, while magenta and yellow are in the positives. i’m taking away the blues in the red essentially. and making the red have a more… yellowish hue? because the bluish hues for red are. ugly. in my opinion. all these things depend on the gif btw. seriously this is just an example. i might do something completely different for another gif. 

for yellows this is what i did:

as u can see i… made the yellows negative for the color yellow. i made the cyans negative too to like. take away the blue? but i made the yellows negative because i don’t want the yellows to be…. too yellow. i know this doesn’t make much sense. but when i make the yellows positive for the red section, the yellows in the yellow parts of the gif might get Too Much. so i gotta undo the Damage caused in the red section. i could do like a video tutorial to make this more clear but since this is not a video tutorial u will just have to take my word for it. basically when u color what ur trying to do is copy the colors in the source material but also… make it different. it makes no sense I know <3

anyway! adora’s wearing white in this gif. so i changed the whites too. it looks like this:

i essentially tried to make the whites…. Whiter? lmaooooo

and now i will show u my shameful cyan and blue sections. here is the cyan section. i don’t have to show u the blue section because i did the exact same thing:

yes i went 100% on the cyan and -100% on the yellow okay. what about it. what. fucking shut up. i also did something similar in the magenta section. wanted to make the purples blue... i guess

also as u can see from above the original color of the background is purple. i’m that fucking extra so for this gif i did an ‘extra step’. i added a hues and saturation layer. and I basically adjusted the hues so the purples became blue

see? also yeah the hue and saturation section is also separated into different colors. i adjusted only the blue section this time. after ur done, ur gif should look... hopefully nice <3 but i always sharpen my gifs. so i will show u how to do that, also

going back to the triple line button in ur timeline, click select all frames —> convert to video timeline. then go to the top of the page where there’s this thing called filter. click filter —> convert for smart filters. click it again. filter —> sharpen —> smart sharpen. this will pop up:

follow these settings. then click ok. u are done. u can save ur gif now. but if u are paranoid like me, u will click on the spacebar and play ur sharpened gif to make sure it looks ok. the first time u play it it will be very slow. wait. then click ur spacebar again n it will load faster aka the speed it is supposed to be. and there u have it. to save ur gif go to file —> export —> save for web. u will see how big ur gif is. hopefully its not too big. if ur gif has more than 100 frames that would not be great. if it has something like 200 frames or something that’s way too big probably <3 i try not to have more than 100 frames for this reason. gotta be safe <3 ur gif will look something like this if u do what i did:

idk how well i explained this. probably not super well. oh well. hit me up if u need a video tutorial

[pcprminibigbang]

PCPR Mini Big Bang Fic Claiming Time!

Today’s the daaaaay!

Under the cut, you will find the summaries of the fanfics our Writers have been working on. They have been posted anonymously, labeled only by number.

Artists, go through the summaries carefully and figure out which ones you’d like to work on the most! Please pick three choices and then hop on over to your email to send your fic claiming email to pcprminibigbang@gmail.com! If you are confused as to how this process goes, please check your email inbox for emails Mod has sent concerning the full details on how to claim a fic.

For those not participating in this event, please feel free to read through the summaries as well to get a sneak peek of what our Writers have been working on!

Okay, that’s enough talking from Mod. Here are this event’s fics!!!

FIC #1 : CLAIMED!!!

He shuffles to the door, reaching for his gun just in case before he pulls it open, startling the short man who was waiting on the other side.

"Goddammit, Burger!" Vang0 hisses, leaning a little closer, eyes darting to the sides. "Can I come in?" He asks bluntly, as if they had been talking just a couple minutes ago and this wasn't their first chat in about a week. We're not that codependent.

"Wh- why are you out this late? And with a bag?" He frowns when he sees the uncharacteristic plain green duffle bag hanging from Vang0's shoulder, completely contrasting with the man's clothes, even if this time he went for more subdued colors.

"Let me in and I'll tell you," the blonde retorts as he puts a foot in the corner, ready to push himself inside as soon as Burger gives him room for it.

And Burger can't say no, has never been able to say no to Vang0, so he just rolls to the side and lets Vang0 in before slamming the door closed again.

"Why are you here? Not that I don't appreciate ya visiting, just... it's late and yer carrying a bag," he points out, tilting his head a little. "Y’know you can talk to me, Vang0, right?"

"Y-yeah, that's why I'm here, I-" he pauses, taking a deep breath "I got in trouble, I hacked into something I shouldn't have and I need to lay low for a while"

-

Vang0 Bang0 messed up, big time, he needs help to get off the radar for a while, and of course that his best friend Burger Chainz would help him, and a road trip seems to be the best way to make him drop from the face of earth until things have quieted down. But the empty roads bring nostalgia and an unearths feelings both of them thought deeply buried. They say that road trips change you, why should that be different in the cyberpunk future?

-

Vang0 Bang0/Burger Chainz, getting together fic, Teen rating, no ao3 warnings needed, maybe some minor canon violence. It's a slightly introspective fic, more focused on how Burger realizes some stuff and how he deals with it.

CLAIMING RESTRICTIONS: None

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FIC #2 : CLAIMED!!!

Turtleneck Heathen Today at 8:15 PM …… did u just ping me to ask if i wore heals

Badass Business Bitch Today at 8:16 PM *heels yes i did and do you?

Turtleneck Heathen Today at 8:17 PM not usually?? ill wear em if its like a big thing or w e i guess (Edited) i mean i havnet really had the oprotuntiy to wear em

Badass Business Bitch Today at 8:19 PM are you intentionally misspelling words to make yourself seem cooler to me?? Vang0 I watched you lick a stranger’s nose

-

Vang0 doesn't remember his birthday. Or his age. Or his interests, his likes, his dislikes, the password to his CollegeBoard account.

(Well, one of those is less important than the others.)

That being said, Burger wants to throw him a birthday party. Dasha is interested, despite herself. A series of assumptions are made, some feelings are hurt, and some lessons are learned.

-

Ships: Vang0/Dasha/Burger if you squint but pretty much a gen fic

Rating: Probably G, bordering maybe on T for swearing

Sensitive content: Canon-typical amnesia, a little bit of angst, some oblique canon-typical gun mentions, maybe a panic attack later in the fic- I haven't quite decided if that's gonna happen or not yet?

Other info: It's a pretty lighthearted fic focusing on the relationship between the three of them! No AU, pretty much just comedy and fun all the way through. I haven't ironed out all the details of what's going to happen yet, but that's gonna stay pretty consistent- there'll be some angstier/less funny bits here and there, of course, though.

CLAIMING RESTRICTIONS: None

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FIC #3 : CLAIMED!!!

Vang0 chewed his lip, feeling uneasy.

“What’s up, friend? You’ve got a big ol’ frown on your face.”

Vang0 blushed. “I’m not- I’m just- thinking. I mean, Joltik usually travel with their mother Galvantula, and it’s unusual for them to be seen without one, so these ones might have been separated from their mother.”

Burger frowned. “Well, that ain’t good.”

Vang0 nodded. “And Galvantula can get very angry when separated from their young.”

Burger opened his mouth to speak, but was cut off by someone yelling loudly.

“BURGER! Burger, where the fuck are you!?”

Vang0 watched as Burger spun around and started towards the basement door.

“Burger!? Are you down here? There’s a huge fucking-”

“No, don’t come down-”

Burger was cut off as the door flew open, and someone catapulted into the basement.

Vang0 stared, eyes wide.

“Burger,” he said, “why the hell is Dapper Dasha in your house?”

-

Seven months ago, Vang0 woke up in a half-destroyed laboratory with no memories of his life before that. He's made something of a life for himself fixing people's technology, because he somehow knows how to do that really well.

And Burger Chainz is just another one of his clients. That is, until it turns out Burger's hiding ex-Pokemon Contest star Dapper Dasha in his house - who hasn't been seen in two years and just so happens to be Vang0's role model.

Vang0 definitely isn't freaking the fuck out. And he definitely isn't falling in love with Burger, either.

-

Vang0 Bang0/Burger Chainz. A Pokémon AU where Burger owns a farm, Dasha is an ex-contest star in hiding, and Vang0 has no clue what's going on. Rating: Teen. Warnings: mentions of blood and violence, nothing explicit

CLAIMING RESTRICTIONS: None

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FIC #4 : CLAIMED!!!

clink!

clink!

clink!

Vang0 Bang0 jumped in his seat as the van hit a bump in the road, speeding upon the old, graying highway. The trinkets they had collected over their various traveled crashed and banged, one almost hitting the window. The loud trinkets and music blaring from the car stereo didn’t phase Vang0. They weren’t sure where he was going, but it sure wasn’t home.

Vang0 wasn’t focused on the road, he was focused on something...else. It wasn’t the other cars; there weren’t any. Most people stayed in Night City, so the roads weren’t full a lot, he knew that. But this road doesn't have anything, anything that would ever prove that anyone had ever existed near here. Not even a bottle.

-    

After an eventful drive, Vang0 Bang0 finds themself on a beach with no discernable exits. No stairs, no ladders, not even a boat. Confused, Vang0 comes to terms with what he’s found in Night City, and what they’ve lost along the way. (Also they/he pronoun Vang0 rights)

-

There are no ships in this fic. I am likely to rate it Teen and Up audiences, since while there is no explicit or intentionally upsetting content, it might get a little sad at times. I’m not 100% sure about the exact direction my fic is going to go, there might be a car crash (not to graphically described, Vang0 is not hurt very badly, since this is [spoilers] a dream or metaphor about Vang0 coming to terms with memory loss). And since it is a dream sequence with no clear exit, this may be an unreality situation.

CLAIMING RESTRICTIONS: Only minor Artists can claim this fic.

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FIC # 5 : CLAIMED!!!

Upon Burger barging into Dasha’s bedroom and announcing that he got tick- stop screaming Vang0, it’s just me, got tickets to a film festival tonight, are you guys in, Vang0 informed him that they had “a job tonight, Burger, did you even check the zoogle calendar, we’ll go tomorrow or something,” and no, of course Burger hadn’t checked the calendar, that’s Dasha’s job, and sure we can get tickets for tomorrow too but the Winston Rider film is only showing tonight and I thought you guys might be interested -- “Winst- do you mean Winona Ryder?” -- and after about five minutes of schedule comparisons Dasha simply shoved Vang0 out of the bed and declared that she was going to the movie with Burger, Vang0 was finishing their job, and Burger was going to make her some coffee because “it’s too fucking early for this” even though personally, Burger thought 11:00am was a perfectly reasonable time to be awake -- he was probably missing something, or maybe Dasha had just been up late, Vang0 was definitely a blanket hog and Burger knew from experience that sharing a bed with them would be more likely to result in a semi-conscious tug of war than a decent night’s sleep -- so Vang0 got up to do their job and Burger went and made some coffee and Dasha relocated to the couch, where she downed the coffee and some eggs and promptly fell back asleep for another three hours.

-

Burger loved Dasha, of course he did, he loved spending time with her and he thought she was beautiful and the idea that they might be dating -- might have been dating for a while -- sat warm and comfortable in his chest, but, except, it just was that, he hadn’t realized that how they interacted might be how two people that were dating behaved, he was just hanging out with his friend, he did stuff like this with Vang0 all the ti- -- now wait, wait a second, now hang on just a second --

a.k.a. 5 times Burger missed the point +1 time he caught a clue

-

Dapper Dasha/Vang0 Bang0/Burger Chainz, Rating: Teen, content warnings for implied violence, drinking, implied sexual content

CLAIMING RESTRICTIONS: Only adult Artists can claim this fic.

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FIC # 6 : CLAIMED!!!

“What is this? What’s going on? Why am I dressed like I’m straight?” Vang0 hisses, gesturing to everything around him and the wrongness of it all.

“Seriously?” Candella rolls her eyes, unimpressed. “You couldn’t have scheduled your existential work breakdown until after our shift? You don’t see my lesbian ass complaining while I’m on the clock, do you?”

“I—What? Am I speaking another fucking language? You answered none of my questions!”

“Yeah because it’s 9am and the morning rush just ended so I do not have enough energy to indulge just,” Candella gestures at all of Vang0. “whatever is going on with you right now.”

“What’s going on with me right now is that I’ve found myself in a bougie caffeine establishment fever dream that just so happens to have the shittiest store playlist in the history of ever.” Vang0 says, bordering on manic as he looks up at the ancient speaker up in the corner of the shop. “Seriously, what is this terrible song?”

“Hey, Soul Sister by Train.” Candella still, amazingly, does not look alarmed or worried.

-

Or the one where Vang0 is a barista at Zero and One’s Cafe...except he’s not.

This isn’t his fucking job, this isn’t his fucking life, and it takes a quick look around the horrifyingly low tech coffee shop he’s in and the fact that he’s missing a USB port on his neck to be painfully aware that this isn’t his fucking universe. This is a 2010s over idealistic portrayal of adult mundanity that he and his friends are stuck in and Vang0 has to get them all out of this nightmare before he commits customer service acts of violence.

Bring it on, Coffee Shop AU. Bring. It. On

-

Dapper Dasha/Vang0 Bang0/Burger Chainz. An absurd existential romantic comedy where the trio somehow get transported into a Coffee Shop AU against their wills. Rating: Teen. Content warnings for slight absurd horror and canon typical violence.

CLAIMING RESTRICTIONS: None

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FIC # 7 : CLAIMED!!!

“That guy in my english class,” Dasha could hear through the speakers the distinct sound of combat boots stepping on cement. What was Vang0 doing outside at this time, alone? “The one I told you about! Burger-” “The one you’ve been crushing on for months and you’re too much of a coward to ask out?” Dasha already knew everything about this guy, Vang0 saw him on the first day of senior year in his english class and he hadn’t shut up about him ever since. 5’10, large and muscular shoulders, nice to everyone and just dense enough that everytime he said something you would automatically think “wow… thank fuck you’re attractive,” but not in an irritating way, you know? Vang0 exhaled, which Dasha interpreted as a yes. “Well I couldn’t ask him out even if i wanted to,” “Huh?” Dasha could hear the cogs in her own brain turning, trying to process what was being said to her. “Because he’s dating a blonde g-” she heard Vang0 stop on his steps and his tone becoming more dry, “are you even listening to what I’m saying?” Dasha yawned audibly and tried sitting up again. This time she succeeded, “yeah, yeah, I’m listenin’. How did you find out about this and why did you decide to call me at nearly 2 am instead of just waiting until tomorrow?” “I followed them and I saw them talking.” “You’ve lost it.” - Dasha received a call from Vang0 at 1:47 am one saturday night, and everything went downhill from there. They were not friends, she couldn’t understand why Vang0 acted like they were, but they weren’t, because Dasha didn’t have any friends. Except that, when she sees Vang0 struggling, for the first time in 18 years of life she decides that maybe this one idiot is worth getting soft over. And so she helps him bleach his hair over a cup of coffee and a can of Spunky Monkey. Because why the fuck not. - Main pairing is platonic Vang0/Dasha, background ship is Vang0/Burger. The whole story is from Dasha’s POV. Genre is just a very typical teen romance story except that it’s focused more on platonic bonding rather than the actual romance. Vang0 calls Dasha late at night, tells her he wants to bleach his long dark curly hair and cut his bangs after seeing Burger with a blonde girl, and he goes to her place. She helps him do the deed in her bathroom (she’s still elite) as they realize how much they care about each other. Initially inspired by that one scene in Scott Pilgrim where Knives Chau dyes her hair. Rating: general audiences, content warnings: lots of swearing, implied addiction/addiction enabling, shoplifting mention. CLAIMING RESTRICTIONS: None

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FIC # 8 : CLAIMED!!!

vang0 officially disappears on march 23rd, 2040. exact time unknown, but whatever conspires that morning takes place before burger wakes up.

if he’s being honest with himself; he’s seen it coming for a little while now. vang0 isn’t the routine type, he’s young and whip smart and drinks so much redbull that the stuff must pump through his veins.

burger’s an old dog. older than vang0 by at least 2 years, he’s sure. he doesn’t have much, and god doesn’t that sound cliche, but he’s stupid and optimistic- and really. he must’ve known somewhere that the kid wouldn’t stay. he’s got a nasty drug habit that burger cant support and a look in his eyes like he wants the world- burger cant even buy him a fake ID.

this happens sometimes, the coming and going. vang0’ll disappear for a week if he’s lucky, a month if he’s not, but never longer than that.

no use crying over spilled milk.

-

vang0 goes missing, burger velmently pretends nothing is wrong until he doesnt, and dasha has to pick up the pieces.

-

missing person fic, burger/dasha/vang0 implied, but nothing explicitly mentioned or talked about, drug use mentioned, mature, canon typical violence, kidnapping, and other canon typical shit- it is night city after all lmao, kind of introspective, alot of burger just thinking back on his relationship w vang0 and shit, but there is some plot as well ig

CLAIMING RESTRICTIONS: None

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FIC # 9: CLAIMED!!!

“Anyway, dude, what’s up? Or did you just come over for a cola because you ran out of your own?”

“Oh, right,” Vang0 says. He is still thinking about the man, and Dasha, and Dasha and that man, and Dasha’s long fingers and Dasha’s hair falling over her face as she purses her lips and blows upwards, her breath scattering strands of brown hair around her sharp cheekbones. “Um, there was something on the forum, I think - I think there’s a thing. For us. Should we call Burger?”

“Oh, Burger’s here,” Dasha says. “Somewhere. Burger!” she yells.

“Burger - but he spent the night?” Vang0 says, brain processing too slow somehow.

Dasha doesn’t respond.

“Did you -”

“Have a threesome?” Dasha asks, in her usual blunt way. Her face is pretty expressionless, eyes severe under the liner and blinking less than a person should, but Vang0 knows her pretty well, he can see the corners of her mouth turning up. That means she thinks something is funny. “I don’t think so. Burg!” she calls over her shoulder. “Did we?”

-

When Vang0 sees a JumpTrash post about vandalism at a club down town, he figures it will be an easy job for the trio - find out who did it, have Burger intimidate them, done. But things are more complicated than they seem, and the gang ends up drawn into a complex scheme involving the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, conspiracies and hit men, and people from their past they thought were long gone. Along the way, they'll have to decide what they want out of this job - and what they want from each other....

-

This is basically an elaborate CAPER, with a bunch of feelings and shit thrown in. It's a job and then it's a crime story! Its kind of a noir? Can I write a noir? WE"LL FIND OUT. It's gonna be fairly long assuming I can get my act together and put in all i want to put in. Like every good story, it's got plot and whatnot but the plot is just a fulcrum around which to wrap some found family polyamory shit, baby. It's Vang0/Dasha/Burger, duh and it takes them a minute to get there but they'll get there! Its gonna have canon-typical violence, basically - none of the trio die or anything, but other people do, and there's blood. There's gonna be a sex scene because I'm not an AMATEUR. Drug use, too, but mostly in happy fun ways. I haven't fully sussed out some of the flashbacks, but probably some oblique references to past traumas, probably Vang0. Nothing explicit, no reliving events or anything. Also i'm 1000 years old, be warned!

CLAIMING RESTRICTIONS: Only adult Artists can claim this fic.

[ommsims]

story process challenge

i was tagged  by @xldkx​​ to do this challenge, created by @herpixels​​​ , like a month? a month and a half? ago and it’s been sitting half finished in my drafts for nearly as long. *sigh* (regardless, i love stuff like this so even if it takes me forever to get to it, i appreciate the tags! 💕). 

i decided to answer all the qs because it took me damn long enough to get to this, so i might as well put some extra elbow grease into it (plus it was fun!). btw it’s all going under a cut b/c it is long. i apologize in advance.

1. My Writing Process - used to be a hot damn mess. literally word docs strewn throughout my pc. However, I recently switched to using Onenote (it’s what i use to organize my d&d campaign notes) and hoo-boy is it so much nicer. this is how it’s set up and it’s honestly night and day. i can have a page with outlines, a page to organize & order screenshots, and a separate page for drafting text, and i can easily toggle though them without having to switch windows? a big thumbs up from me.

When it comes to actual writing- I used to write my drafts in novel format, which i enjoyed but it made “converting” them into tumblr posts time consuming and frustrating. I ended up scrapping most of the text in the process, retaining pretty much only the dialogue. 

Anyway, nowadays I write in more of a screenplay format: dialogue only + key scene information with the occasional note to self. 

I do keep a master “arcs” page with key events and each individual character’s arc from beginning to end and secondary “outline” pages with slightly more detailed outline for each leg of the project. No screencaps b/c spoilers galore! 

My typical work flow process for a scene goes: (1) brainstorm scene ideas, (2) take screenshots, (3) organize screenshots into a rough storyboard, (4) add 1st draft of text, (5) edit photos, (6) edit text, (7) upload to "drafts” here on tumblr, (8) let sit for a bit (9) take a final look at things/proofread and edit as needed. It may sound counterintuitive, but i find it much easier to write dialogue for a set of images rather than attempt to take images based on prewritten text. I feel more comfortable editing and tweaking tone and content in the text this way. Otherwise, I get frustrated when I “can’t” shoot a scene exactly as it appeared in my head.

2. How I build my scenes - A lot of what i do is rooted in gameplay, therefore my sets are usually (a) play-tested and (b) not super pretty. I’ve certainly improved at decorating & building over the years but more often than not I download lots off tumblr and the gallery because I don’t have the patience, aptitude, or time to build all of my own sets. That being said, I frequently gut builds only to build a number of completely unrelated mini sets inside to reduce the number of times i have to replace lots. I also keep a list of “important locations” and where certain characters live / will move to, to help keep this all straight as there aren’t nearly enough lots per neighborhood or even per world in this damn game...

my least favorite part of scene building is actually decorating. lol. Don’t get me wrong, I love clutter. I honestly do. but fuck me if i expect myself to spend hours meticulously decorating a set, spend another 3 hours toggling back and forth b/w BB & live modes adjusting things to get rid of the damn routing errors. (yeah, yeah, i know i could ignore them, they’re not important, especially in those scenarios where i’m using a set for screenshots and nothing else, but idk. it really grinds my gears.) and then have to replace the lot like a week later because there aren’t enough lots in the game. *sigh*

3. CC/Pose Making - i do not consider myself to be a cc creator nor a pose maker but i do dabble occasionally. And to be completely honest i’d much rather spend my time doing other stuff, so it’s not high on my list of priorities atm. plus there are so many talented cc creators in this community; i can usually get by with what’s already out there.

4. Getting in the zone - Honestly, I do a lot of brainstorming for plot & dialogue in the shower. I don’t have any particular playlists to get me “in the writing mood” but I do enjoy listening to music as I work. Either instrumental stuff or simply artists/songs I like. If something just so happens to “fit” a scene I’m working on, one i’ve got planned, or even just gives me vibes for a certain character or group, I add a quick note to the top of said scene’s draft. Most of the time I stick it in the recesses of my brain and add a quick link when I finally get to the point of posting the draft to tumblr. For whatever reason, when I have one of those “oh this song is perfect for X” moments it’s essentially ingrained in my mind for the rest of eternity. 

5. The screenshot folder - this will most likely give some of you out there major anxiety. but i swear it’s an organized chaos. :)

yep. 32.9gb of screenshots & related things... 

So with the raws from a single random scene selected, you can see i take roughly 10 screenshots per image posted. not terrible i guess but i’m working on it. Typically I take screenshots and once I’m done editing a scene I’ll move them from the general folder to a more specific project folder.

6. Captions - I’ll answer this in three parts:

for my townie story. not really. I prefer using the text box. I tend to write (& re-write) the dialogue for each one of these scenes several times over as I add more “scenes” into my drafts. It would be incredibly inefficient, time consuming, and would waste a lot more space on my pc to have to save .psds of each image just so i could edit dialogue when I decide: “oh hey maybe so and so needs to bring up X in this scene” and then change my mind an hour later.

for niko, noor, & co. I’m a text on image type gal here. don’t really know why, but it gives the project a different energy. ironically it makes it feel more laid-back to me. which i guess makes sense, it’s a much more light-hearted “story” than my townie project. which is, imo, very soapy haha.

for legacy stuff. all text goes below the images in the text box. reasoning: it’s gameplay, I don’t brainstorm, outline, or pre-write for this. I play the game, take screenshots, plug ‘em into my drafts and write some commentary / dialogue to go along with it.

7. Editing - i am a creature of habit and have not majorly changed my editing process in probably a year and a half (when I began using reshade and had to adjust my color correcting psd). it’s a super basic system:

drag & drop my “color correction” psd.

run actions in ps. (i made my own “all-in-one” actions to really streamline the process; i have different “actions sets” for my premades’ story and for other things that get posted to tumblr. even if no one else notices it, i like the little details that keep my projects separate and “identifiable”. 

voila. all set to upload.

sometimes i crop images, add “text effects”, or do more in depth editing (i.e. editing a phone screen or adding rain etc.) but overall i try and keep it simple for myself. 

8. Throwback - i posted an image of one of the first (but never posted) scenes I’d written for my townie project up above. but as for how would i redo a scene i’d already posted. well i’m currently re-doing my townie story so i guess i’ll just say you’ll see how it’s redone when i get to part 1! ���

anyway, no tags because i’m so embarrassingly late to this party but if you hadn’t gotten around to this tag, wanted to do it but didn’t get a tag, or started it and left it to sit and now you’re thinking “oh god that was months ago should i even post this anymore?!?” consider yourself tagged by me and go ahead and post it for all to see!

[snarkandsarcasmftw]

2020

Uh oh, it’s time for the cranky smol one to get sappy af. Prepare yourselves. Because yeah, I’m gonna get sappy.

This past year has been… To put it bluntly, it was one hell of a ride. I moved from state to state after spending the past two years taking care of my mother, I lost important people in my life (some through my own stupidity, others simply because they showed their true colors) and I lost a pet that for 13 years roughly, was a huge part of my life. I rescued a cat. I feel like this past year taught me a lot but the most important thing that it taught me was to be thankful for who/what I have in my life, because I might not always have these things/people.

Since there’s a loooot, holy shit so much.. I’ll put a read more.

REGRETS:

First of all, to the one person I’m no longer speaking to/following on here. I just know that you were a blessing in my life while you were around. I know we couldn’t ever really be close friends like we were before everything played out, but I truly hope the best things in life happen to you. You’re a good person, always know that. I hope you’re happier now and I hope that you eventually find and embrace your own inner truth without anxiety or fear. 

Secondly, there were a few people who I misjudged/let go of this past year that maybe I wish I hadn’t. If any of you are reading this, I’m so so so so sorry. I don’t know what made me do it, but I know that I just… Felt like I wasn’t as good as any of you and like I never really fit in, so rather than make you all keep dealing with me, I did what I thought was best and cut the cord. I really wish I hadn’t and I know it’s probably way too late, but I really am sorry. You were great people and I really do miss our talks and stuff. I just felt like I was in the way, so I took myself out. Anxiety is a real bitch and while that’s not an excuse for me just going silent / blocking you guys, it’s the simplest truth. I was in a bad place for a while there and in my own head too much. I’m better now, but I’m fairly sure that it’s too little & too late. So, once again, I’m so so so sorry. 

NEW FRIENDS:

Oh god, where to start? I made so many new friends this year on this blue hell-site. So many. And I’m thankful for every single one of you even if I somehow miss your name. On that note,I’m sorry in advance if I do and I mean nothing by it. Also, these are in absolutely no certain order. If I tried to go alphabetically, I’d probably wind up messing it up.

@xladyxfatex I am so, so, so, so glad you sent me that meme and we started to talk. It has been so much fun rp’ing again, and I’m really enjoying getting to know you better. I love our rp and you’re such a sweet person. I can’t wait to see where this year takes us.

@writtingrose you are an amazing writer and you’re a down to earth and sweet person. I was moved by your Beautiful To Me series (it’s plus size reader, you guys MUST go read it.) and I’m so glad I reached out. I can’t wait to start our rp, if you’re still down for it. I love reading your writing and I can’t wait to get to know you better.

@komaniac I absolutely love your love for Kevin. I really don’t get to talk to you often, but I’ll see your Kevin posts and I’m like sitting on my side of the computer screen silently nodding. Your Kevin content is always making me smile. I love you for that, never change.

@rampagewriting… I can’t remember which of us reached out first, but girl. I am so so glad we’re friends. You’re an amazing and strong person and I love all your fics. I love opening our DM and yelling about things with you, whether it’s Zak Bagans ( we deffo need to go ghost hunting one day, tbh) or any of our other favorites. I’m so glad we’re friends and I hope that we get to be even better friends during 2020.

@the-ville-idiot Wren, I love you. Seriously, I love you. You’re always so bubbly and happy and like… I legit enjoy our random conversations. We have a lot in common.

@doedreamss Ashley, I mean Doe. You’re such a sweetheart and I wish I had half the life experiences you have. I love you. I enjoy talking to you about certain cowboys and certain bad boys. I love your writing, I wish I wrote more like you did, tbh. I hope you never change and I hope we stay friends. If you ever need to talk or want to talk, you’re always welcome in my DM’s.

@robwiethoff I LOVE LOVE YOUR LOVE FOR HANGMAN. I aspire to love something/someone as much, tbh. I know I’m probably annoying af, but honestly, I enjoy talking to you. I hope to get to know you better, you’re a sweetheart. I love reading your writing / hearing your ideas and honestly, just.. I send you hugs.

@adamcolesteeth I’ve really enjoyed talking to you and I genuinely thank you for the random fake fic title prompts, because I’ve really had a blast doing them. I loved your Christmas Luchasaurus fic, it was so much fun to read.

@hardcorewwetrash we may not like the same football teams, ( roll damn tide, lol) but I honestly love to read your posts. You’re a real person and the world needs more of those. You speak your mind. I honestly wish I could just do that sometimes. It’s been so fun talking to you / seeing your posts on the dash. 

@country-believethat-gallowaywwe AHHHH. I LOVE THE TALKS WE HAVE ABOUT DREW. Also, thanks for all the picture inspiration you send me that one time I really, really, really needed it. I think you’re a sweetheart and I hope to get to know you better / have more talks in the future.

@twdeadfanfic I love your fics, first of all. You’re an amazing writer and you blow me away with each new one you post. I know we don’t get to talk often, but I enjoy talking to you. 

@heel-rollins you are a sweetheart. I love talking to you and I wish we got to talk more, tbh. 

@hamstxr I love your posts, they always make me smile. I wish we get to talk more and you seem like a really sweet person. 

@kittysilver86 Kitty, I love you. You’re a positive and sweet person and your writing is so good and so fluffy yet dirty, I love it. I love Ava as a character and I love these little universes you make up. Your posts always make me smile and honestly, I just wanna hug you. I really enjoy being friends with you even though we don’t get to talk often.

@schizoauthoress You’re a really kind person. I really enjoy your posts on my dash and I love the talks we’ve had there. If you ever wanna talk my DM’s are always open. You seem really down to earth and really open and I love that. I hope to get to know you better this year.

@vonschweetz Von, I am so proud of you. You’ve been through a lot and you went above and beyond to rise out of it all and you’re thriving now. You’re a huge inspiration and you’re so freaking sweet that like.. If anyone ever tried to hurt you, I’d probably give them these hands. I love talking to you, I love looking at your edits and I really, really, really love your fics. You always make me smile.

OLD FRIENDS:

@helluvawriter you’re a kind person and I love you so much. You’re a really amazing writer and you’re always so down to earth. You were the first friend I made in the wrestling fandom way back when and even though we don’t get to talk much anymore, I love you and I love our talks when we do. You’re an amazing mother. I hope if I ever get to be a mom, I’m like you. I’m so glad we’re friends.

@andie01  holy shit.. You’re so much fun to talk to. I love that you’re as blunt as me and that we can just DM back and forth about total randomness. I love Beasts, it’s one of my favorite fanfictions of all time. I love you so much. Like.. you’re an inspiration to me and i don’t think you realize that. I’m so glad we’re friends.

@wrestlingismyguiltypleasure First of all, you’re an amazing mother. And I am so happy for you and your little family! I love talking to you, even if we don’t get to talk that much anymore, I enjoy our talks when we do. You’re going to get me to write Alpha!Ethan Carter III yet, I promise. It’s coming. You inspire me and I love the random things you send me to look at. I’m so glad we’re friends.

@kayah16 I wish I was half as creative as you. I love reading your one shots and I love you. You’re a really amazing and kind person and honestly, the world could use more of that. There are so many times I’m having an absolute shit day and I log on and you’ve sent me a recipe or tagged me in something that makes me smile. I wish I could hug you. I hope I can help you as much as you’ve helped me. If you ever need me, I’m here. I’m so glad we’re friends.

@missjenniferb I love the random thirst tags and the dm’s at 1 am, they always make me smile. I love that you tag me in Bucky things now, because that’s kinda how I got so deep into him. I blame you for that. I really have so much fun talking to you because it’s like… the lengths of our dirty minds combined, and i live for that. You always make me smile, I just hope I make you smile too. I’m so glad we’re friends.

@heelsamizayn you’re also another person I started to talk to way back when and honestly, I really, really, really love you. You’re a sweet and blunt person who isn’t afraid to say what she thinks. I love talking to you, whether it be about any of our thirsts or whatever we’re writing or random stuff that irritates us both during the day. I’m so glad we’re friends.

@bo0kitten I really love our talks. We like a lot of the same bands, and you always have these well thought out opinions / facts on things. I love seeing you on my dash and I really wish we got to talk more often. I’m so glad we’re friends.

@chasingeverybreakingwave BB you really didn’t think I was going to forget you.. Noooo. Never. I love talking to you and I love your posts / live blogs. You dragged me kicking and screaming into Jimmy Havoc and I love you for it. You’ve also gotten me into music that I hadn’t ever heard before too. Never change, bb! I’m so glad we’re friends.

@calwitch MOM HI! I love you. And I will totally let you adopt me. You’re kinda stuck with me now. I love your posts and you never fail to encourage me when I need it most. You’re a sweet person and totally down to earth and open. Some of your comments on my fic posts have given me that little nudge when I needed it most and I can’t thank you enough for that. You’re an awesome and fun person and I love that you don’t hold back on anything. I’m so glad we’re friends.

@markostuntthesehoes I absolutely adore you and I love your writing. I love our talks, the things we’ve bounced back and forth over DM’s. You’ve gotten me to really appreciate people that I wasn’t sure about before talking to you. Your posts always make me smile and you’re an absolute gem. I’m so glad we’re friends.

[bladekindeyewear]

HS^2 bloggin’ upd8 2020-01-17

Alright, morningblogging yesterday’s 2020-01-17 upd8 to Homestuck^2 let’s go!  Spoiler-free again.  I kinda don’t want even the next chapter names image-spoiled above the cut anymore so I’m going to have to figure out WHAT to put above the cut in these liveblog posts for visual reinforcement... a unique silly icon?  Going back once I’m done with the upd8 and posting something non-spoilery but weird-looking out of context?

Eh, can’t be assed.  Just know that after this I’m going to pony up for the Patreon commentary and skim it for anything plot-useful to y’all (in a separate post).  Let’s get started.

Okay, what’s next:  Any bonuses?  Oh, none!  Phew.  Unless those are coming faster too and just staggered differently, which would mean I gotta overcome my irrational pre-Homestuck-reading anxiety even MORE often.  :T

No Homestuck you don’t GET to ask how my-- ah, right.  :P

(FYI, HS^2 has been good to my emotions so far, quite a balm for the epilogues, so once I START reading I’m usually fine; but after being hurt so badly how could I possibly convince my lizard brain to trust it until it’s right in front of me?  Seriously, just hearing that the upd8 has landed messes me up a bit until I come fix it by reading w/ y’all here.)

Okay, so whose feelings?  As much as I’ve been waiting for Jade, I hope this isn’t about Jade.

> ==>

Ah fuck, we’re finally with the Pursuit Crew.  Bracing myself.  That means we get to see probably sleeping Jade ( :C ), full-swing DaveKat (approving nod), the first canon onscreen look at masculine-mode Roxy (<3), a probably pretty pissed off Kanaya (possibly either the feelings target, the one Saying How Are Your Feelings, or both), and uh... did they drag Callie along?  Or leave her back there with her meta freakout?  Probably left her back there, but... hm.

Let me turn up the brightness on this screen to sear these next pages into my retinas.  (Also, it feels odd to still be using a four-person “==>” for these, although if Jade is still asleep the numbers might fit on both ends... :c )

> ==>

I don’t think Dad is in the spacefaring business, so this is probably one of Jake’s shittier spaceship designs.

> ==>

...well that’s a touch disturbing.  Is that a Jade-occupied bed or are those just pillows?

Oh what the fresh fanfic’y heck is this command.

> i enter.

Okay that’s great.  I got a kick out of that.

JADE [in calliope red]: the prince’s power grows.

--but that’s not.  That explains the narrative command text, it’s alt!callie talking through a still conked-out Jade.  Please let her wake up between speak-throughs, please tell me you’ve learned that trick??  I already know you’re gonna pull an “oh she was asleep pretty much all of those THREE YEARS OF TRAVEL” thing on me and that’s hard fucking enough to deal with.

KARKAT: JESUS CHRIST!

He’s actually using the full curse correctly, huh?

...These commands.  Guess part of the puzzle is how much alt!Callie is being typically morbid and how much she might actually be wising up enough to get a kick out of this.

> the knight of blood falls.

DAVE: dude can you chill for like even a single fucking second DAVE: also are you ok

Has CallieJade chilled for even a single second this entire trip??  Is he asking just if Karkat’s okay or Jade too???

--yeah I’m overblowing things out of nervousness.  Just wait and see a bit, boots.

Alt!Callie has at least learned to be more of a smartass:

> karkat is characteristically appreciative of the alarm call.

Shirt trade Karkat, nice.  And uh, Jade’s dress sure is a... dress.  Hm.

(Did alt!Callie alchemize adjustments to did she just luck out to have a red-symbol’d Bec belt and accent leggings?  I’d prefer the former, because as much as it would be acceptable within Homestuck proper, using the transition between the epilogues and this new-author’d work to just HAPPEN to give her a fitting outfit without an excuse via providence is kind of lazy.)

KARKAT: OH, PARDON THE FUCK OUT OF ME FOR OVERREACTING A LITTLE WHEN MY GOOD FRIEND "POSSESSED JADE" BUSTS INTO MY RESPITEBLOCK AT 5 AM! KARKAT: NEXT TIME I’LL JUST PULL THE COVERS BACK AND LET HER CLIMB IN! JADE: i am uninterested in that scenario. KARKAT: GREAT! POSSESSED JADE ISN’T EVEN HORNY! HOW FUCKED UP IS THAT?

...please let that mean he’s not used to her being possessed all the time and she wakes up sometimes.  PLEASE.

DAVE: but im pretty sure i locked that door JADE: i unlocked it with my mind. DAVE: fuck KARKAT: FANTASTIC. JADE: the prince’s powers are growing, but so are mine.

Dave, I’m pretty sure regular-ass no-Green-Sun Space powers can flip a few lock tumblers too.  (--though, I guess from context this was a Jakeship technolock.  Confirmation on the ship’s bad taste in design.  --I think I’m foggily remembering it said in the Epilogues that they took one of Jake’s ships just like Dirk did, too... man, being depressed so much by the Epilogues sure took a lot out of my ability to recall them decently.)

KARKAT: LIKE YOU DON’T FLOAT AROUND LIKE A CREEPY PIECE OF SHIT ALL DAY AS IT IS?

God DAMN IT she’s been asleep and possessed the whole fucking time.

> sleep is abandoned, coffee sought.

More obligatory DaveKat being cute, somehow only emphasized by the embarrassing glowing-with-power observer who doesn’t really get any of it.

Ah, here we go:

> the rogue is also awake.

Oh huh.  Cool!

Hero outfit, understated...  her his choice of heart-shades color-coded to stand out from Dave more to avoid further mistaken identity cases.  Works well!  (Holy shit I only JUST remembered at the end to go back and correctly gender Roxy as him, that was close. I blame the epilogues for a lack of visual reinforcement; I shouldn’t have as much trouble soon enough.  Seriously, I don’t remember ANYTHING without visual reinforcement, I think that’s why I remember so much of Homestuck proper so clearly.)

KARKAT: OH SHIT, THERE SHE IS! I DIDN’T EVEN HEAR HER FOLLOW US! ROXY: sometimes a girls just got to get her drift on i guess ROXY: it be like that

ilu roxy.

I missed Roxy so much, you guys.  I need more of him remarking on all this crazy shit if I’m gonna stay sane though all this.  (And I need more of him and AWAKE JADE kicking ass independently or together if I’m going to continue to believe there’s justice in the world.)

> ==>

We rarely saw Rose drinking anything but the rare coffee in canon, but I think Kanaya would have gotten her plenty into tea, yes.  Or at the very least, wanting the aesthetic of drinking tea with Kanaya would have gotten Rose into tea even if it never crossed Kanaya’s mind to try the stuff.

ROXY: well i mean who knows what she drinks now ROXY: dirk probs tossed the coffee machine out the space window right away ROXY: dude doesnt "believe" in "substances" > the prince is contemplated for a moment in silence.

FUCK, Dirk can see the narrative all the way out here???  No wonder alt!Callie’s forced to have possession turned on 24/7.  That’s fucking disappointing.  How the hell are we going to get any proper Jade time with THAT hanging over our heads?  She’d only be able to do anything when Dirk’s knocked out, and maybe not even THEN!

I was virtually promised more of actual non-asleep Jade getting shit done in HS^2.  Now there’s an even longer wait on it than I expected.  This sucks.

(EDIT: BOY did I misread that link line. Thinking “is contemplated” meant is sitting contemplating, when it meant "is being contemplated by everyone here". That was dumb of me.)

*clicks that next link*

Oh my goodness, Roxy joined the Bird Hair Crew.  It makes him look like a fucking asshole but I kind of love it.

KARKAT: IS THERE MILK?

I can’t believe Karkat is okay with drinking milk.  --yes, culturally Trolls are more comfortable with animal excretions than we are, but you would’ve thought years of railing against Equius would have purged any tolerance the idea of milk from his psyche.

I guess Dave introduced him to cereal, and it was all over from there.

DAVE: this is more like a castle DAVE: a castle of idk DAVE: twenty something ennui

Sounds like a relatable mood.  Especially considering Dirk probably decided to conquer reality out of almost nothing but twenty-something ennui.

Alright.  You aren’t going to turn Kanaya into an alcoholic or anything on us are you?

> the knight of time seeks a sylph...

--this is the shittiest shipboard starship aesthetic.

> ...and finds her, momentarily.

WOW that looks fucking depressed.  :(

> ==>

...okay you know what?  Never mind.  That outfit has wrapped straight back around into Trying Too Hard and is now hilarious.

DAVE: you ever feel like our whole lives are eventually gonna end up like this DAVE: just blasting through space on a sweeps long journey to ""somewhere"" chasing after or running from some vague enemy thats sometimes a god modded pet dog and sometimes your dad DAVE: without the faintest fucking idea of whats going to happen when we get there DAVE: thats a little specific but you know what i mean

Why do you think the epilogues upset us so much?  We thought we’d won free of that bullshit.

> ==>

Oh jesus christ that’s the most depressingly sad I’ve ever seen Kanaya drawn.  :C

--Karkat got you to watch Serendipity?  That’s amazing, Dave.

KANAYA: You Arent Reminding Me Of Her As I Rarely Think Of Anything Else KANAYA: I Close My Eyes And I See Her KANAYA: I Keep Them Open And I See Her

Fuck.

Y’know how little showing these two in love and actually HAPPY together we’ve seen in this entire comic and its subworks?  Despite them having spent at least a few happy years together we only saw in tiny screenclips?  And how Candy alluded super hard that they most likely couldn’t get that in this real timeline where shit’s going down?

Seriously, FUCK.  You could at least pretend to give us some hope, here.

Oh no, don’t ask for the nursery story, Dave.  Unless it turns out to be a funny one or a Rose twist on an old story or something.  Which it probably is, I should stop worrying.

> ==>

KANAYA: Oh Its A Wriggler Story About A Young Prince And The Beloved Flower He Loved And Lost DAVE: flower DAVE: like a plant KANAYA: Its A Fairytale Dave DAVE: right KANAYA: A Singular Wild Rose He Failed To Cherish When He Had Her KANAYA: And His Journey Of Discovering What She Meant To Him All Along KANAYA: Culminating In A New Quest To Find Her And Win Her Back

Dirk you PIECE OF SHIT did you rewrite the narrative of the fucking STORIES SHE TOLD CHILDREN?!??  Does the fact that alt!Callie is only in the present mean he can rewrite ANY past event we didn’t literally SEE???  FUCK you.  Seriously fuck all of this.

Please tell me she was kidding just then, or realizes there’s fucking something wrong with what she’s saying and getting angry or.

(EDIT: shoutyourporpoise replied: "Hey, idk If you picked up on this, but the 'nursery story' Rose told to the wigglers is just The Little Prince, which is maybe a BIT early for them to read, but I don't think that's a case of Dirk changing the narrative; its just Rose being Too Adult as usual." Oh, damn, I didn't even CATCH that it was that story. That makes all of this a lot more forgivable, even if pretty unforgivably leaning into the fiction that Dirk used to brainwash and kidnap her. Maybe that's exactly why it worked -- fiction, a story so blazed into the public consciousness? Hm. Thanks, shoutyourporpoise.)

KANAYA: But In A Way I Feel As If It Is the Greater Universe Trying To Tell Me Something

Mother fuck I’m even going to have to see our protagonists warped by Dirk when they’re ostensibly FULLY SHIELDED aren’t I.  There’s only so much of that I would be able to take, you know.

KANAYA: It May Simply Stem From My Longing To See Her Again And How Much Is Indicative Of Something More Sinister KANAYA: She Is A Goddess Of Light And The Only Of Her Kind We Know Is Alive After All KANAYA: Maybe Shes Wrested Dominion Of The Entire Concept In All Its Appearances Within This Frame Of Reference

Hm.  Well, it being a product of Rose’s ascension instead of Dirk’s is possibly a more charitable take, with Ultimate Rose projecting the delusion enforced on her backward, visible to past Rose’s Sight when she isn’t paying attention and thus paving the way for Dirk to paradoxically exploit that “ideal” as something Lighty and Important and “Perfect”.  I still don’t fucking like it though.

> ==>

DAVE: sorry i know you say you got your badass monster powers but kanaya you look tired as hell DAVE: not that im tryna psyche you or whatever but youre waxing poetic in the dark which i guess is maybe on brand but still

Yyyep.

DAVE: unless terezi is lurking in the vents somewhere and now that i bring that up its actually not out of the question so im kind of gonna be thinking about that one for a while

Pffff.

DAVE: youre the only person i know whos still basically the same as when i met you

--Which is kind of going to have to change, right?  She’s got some other cosmic purpose ready to change her a little more than she changed pre-human-troll-meetup, you’d think.

> ==>

Cute as hell.

> ==>

KANAYA: How Are Your Feelings

There’s the title drop.  I’d think Dave’s doing pretty well, considering?  Still fucked over by Dirk betraying and tricking Rose away who he’s been close with all his life, but.

> ==>

DAVE: except sometimes your best friend disappears and your other best friend goes into a ghost coma and your third best friend fucks off to space with your dad DAVE: the dude youve spent the last 7 years convincing yourself isnt an egomaniacal anime villain DAVE: and who isnt actually lying in wait to completely decimate your life and your emotions and shit

Ah... yeah.  A little worse than my casual list, huh?  Forgot that Jade vanishing into a possession-coma for THREE FUCKING YEARS is going to be hard on people inside the comic too, fuck.

DAVE: maybe it was naive to think that a bunch of twenty something trauma victims could run a society

I was honestly surprised they TRIED to run society at all.  Jasp even just highlighted a big reason why not in the bonuses.

DAVE: cool how earth c existed for centuries then we show up and manage to ruin society in seven fucking years

:(

Well, the trolls got THEIR lesson on why they didn’t deserve to rule over their new universe like gods; I guess some of y’all needed that lesson too?

DAVE: every serious conversation i have inevitably falls apart into riffing on a casual acquaintances ass

True.

Dammit, Dave didn’t feel like he could just be Some Guy even on Earth C.  :(

> ==>

...don’t think I’ve forgotten that nursery story, though.  I don’t want to think that it was something that ACTUALLY past happened, especially not without manipulation.  Like maybe past Rose was foreseeing the false purpose that Dirk wrote for her or the like, a cooperative misunderstanding between the two instead of Dirk or Rose literally reaching back in time.

> meanwhile...

KARKAT: WAIT, WHY THE FUCK AM I EVEN ASKING? HE’S OBVIOUSLY NOT FINE. KARKAT: ARE ANY OF US? ARE YOU? ROXY: not rly KARKAT: EXACTLY.

:(

--Oh right.  I remember that Callie and Roxy were going reasonably steady in Meat even though it was only alluded to, she didn’t freak out and stay awol or what have you.  That’s good to remember.  But it means Roxy deliberately left her behind to go on this dangerous quest, for years.  :C

KARKAT: KANAYA BARELY EVEN TALKS, CALLIOPE WON’T LEAVE THEIR CABIN, JADE JUST FLOATS AROUND LIKE A CREEPY BALLOON THAT’S MOSTLY MADE OF HAIR.

Oh, SHIT.  I should have read one line further.  They DID bring her.  Alt!Callie being here too must really FUCK with her.  ...maybe she can actually learn to accept that alternate way her life might’ve played out, though?

KARKAT: THE REALLY FUCKED UP THING IS I MIGHT BE THE MOST OKAY OUT OF ALL OF US, WHICH IS HOW YOU KNOW SHIT HAS REALLY GONE GLOBES UP.

Quite true.

ROXY: ur kinda an intense dude anybody ever tell u that KARKAT: NO.

Pff.

> ==>

KARKAT: AGAINST PRETTY MUCH ALL ODDS, AND DESPITE ME NOT DESERVING ANY OF IT, I ENDED UP GETTING PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING I WANTED. KARKAT: OVER AND OVER AGAIN. KARKAT: SOMETIMES IT ALMOST FEELS LIKE WHATEVER SLATHERING MONSTROSITY OF A COSMIC HELLBEAST THAT PUT ALL THIS SHIT INTO MOTION...ACTUALLY LIKES ME?

Well, if you want to blame Lord English for instance... we never saw Caliborn and Karkat interact much, but the parallels between the two were drawn so severely that Caliborn was basically the idealized, multiverse-threatening Ultimate Kismesis that he’d always dreamed of.  And operated against him without him even ever quite realizing it.

If a level of “respect” went from Caliborn to Karkat, too, from his Lord-Englishy vision nigh-omnipresent, then this outcome isn’t very surprising at all.

> ==>

(I don’t quite feel I get why Roxy shifted to this exasperated-Dave expression, but I get logically that he’d been waiting for Karkat to make a breakfast choice... Homestuck proper rarely pulled a “last line said corresponds to next-panel’s expression” without either leaving the conversation blank or having the NEXT lines of the conversation reinforce it, to prevent this inelegant misunderstanding.  Andrew was really damned talented in getting his point across visually, in that regard.  Just like, that careful visual intent delivery.)

Alright, I guess that’s it for this short upd8!  Meeting the pursuit crew was both more and less difficult than I expected.  Hopefully I get desensitized a bit as the characters continue to feel semi-almost-sorta-fine.

I have NO idea how this group is gonna work as a proper crew when we get to whatever weird other-players’ session this shit is going down in, though.

[annepanman]

gif tutorial for anon!

hi everyone! an anon asked me about how i sharpen my gifs and i got a bit carried away in my answer so i decided to just turn it into a tutorial oop. 

disclaimer: i’m still a beginner, so some of the stuff i do might be a bit weird! also, two of the “tricks” i use i did not come up with/figure out on my own, i linked to the posts of the original creator’s in the step. 

so my settings do vary for each gif, but in this tutorial i just go through all the general steps i use for each gif i make, so hopefully it’s at least a bit helpful to someone!!! there’s a lot of images bc i’m a visual leaner so sorry if you’re not!!!🥺

for this tutorial you will need: 

- photoshop + basic photoshop understanding. - a way to download videos.  - patience with my ramblings. - i think that’s it?

ok here we go!!! so.

step one: the first thing you do is find the video you want to gif. i’m gonna do this one:

i use clipgrab to download videos of the youtube, which i downloaded for free from right here.  i haven’t gotten a virus yet, so it seems safe. it works for youtube videos and instagram videos, but not twitter videos or vlives. 

there’s also Y2Mate which is online and does the same thing, but i think for only youtube videos - i also can’t completely vouch for it because i’ve never used it, but i think it should work just fine! you can find it right here.

IMPORTANT - make sure that your video is as high quality as possible. you can either change that on youtube by clicking on the gear in the play bar (right next to cc box). usually videos are automatically set to 720p, which is pretty good, but i like to bump it up to 1080p when there’s the option to! note: clipgrab usually does this automatically for you, i’m not positive about Y2Mate and other online converters. 

step two: copy the link into your converter. make sure that the quality is where you want it, then hit “grab this clip” or “convert” or whatever the prompt is and it will download onto your computer. save it wherever you want to that you’ll find it, i usually just save it to my desktop so that it’s right there for me. 

step three (optional): i like to crop the video down and do a primary editing on imovie just so it’s easier to manage when making the gifs. this step isn’t necessary, but if you have imovie or another video editing app, i would suggest it!! (you can also slow down the video here if it’s too fast to make a good gif!)

here’s a before and after shot!

for me, i literally just click the “magic wand” or “auto-adjust” tool. but you can already see it makes a big difference! 

so now i also use iMovie to crop down to the gifs i think i want to use. it makes things easier to be precise when using photoshop. 

step three and a half: export your new mph. once again, make sure the quality and resolution is bumped up to your liking!

step four: so now it is time to use photoshop! open up a new document. you can set it to whatever dimensions you like, i typically prefer 500x281, but it doesn’t actually matter because it will automatically resize to the size of your video lol. anyways, once you have your canvas open, go to file -> import -> video frames to layers. 

depending on if you have more than one gif in the movie file, you can either crop it down or just import the whole thing. since i have to gifs in this file, i’m going to crop it. 

step five: okay, full credit to this life saving post for the next step!!!! i was stumped on how to edit all layers of a gif at once for quite a bit of time, which is why some of my earlier gifs are a much crustier looking. anyways, op explains it much better than i ever could, so i would suggest just reading their tutorial for this step!!!

step six: so now that you’ve combined all your gif layers into a smart object, it’s time to edit them!! the adjustments i typically mess around with are image -> adjustments. i almost always adjust the brightness/contrast, vibrance, hue/saturation, and selective color. i don’t have specific settings for these (sorry if that’s not helpful!) because it really does depend on each individual gif! sometimes my adjustments are drastically different for gifs from the same video!! i’m perfectly happy to help troubleshoot for specific issues if you need help, but it’s hard for me to give a blanket tutorial for this part :)

also remember to not whitewash poc when adjusting the settings. please don’t do this!!!! it’s also possible to correct whitewash w/photoshop, so just fool around on the settings until the subject’s skin tone is what it should be. 

step seven: after adjusting your gif to your liking, now it’s time to actually sharpen. for steps 7 through 10, i use a trick from this amazing post to sharpen! so now that you’ve adjusted all your layers, do control/command click on the layer and choose duplicate layer. this will make a copy of the edited gif. 

step eight: on the original layer, go to filter -> sharpen -> smart sharpen. once again, every gif is different so depending on the size and quality of your gif, the sharpen settings will be different. the larger the gif is, the more you can sharpen it, which is why i like to wait until the end to resize it!

step nine: on the copied layer go to filter -> blur -> gaussian blur. again, the amount of blur will depend on your gif. this step just smooths it out. don’t worry if it looks blurry, because it’s supposed to! after this, still on the copied layer, go to filter -> sharpers -> smart sharpen once more. 

step ten: cool! now you’re going to lower the opacity of the copied layer! i usually put it at about 30 percent!

step eleven: go to file -> export -> safe for web (legacy). this is were the resizing goes! so for this particular gif, i didn’t have to crop it or anything. so the only think i do to resize it is make it 500x281. this size usually ensures it will be small enough to upload to tumblr, and it is a ratio of most standard sized videos so it works perfectly!! 

and voila! 

i’m so sorry if that was very long and/or hard to understand!!! please feel free to ask any clarifying questions!!

[turning-the-kaleidoscope]

10 with whoever youd like ;w; i only ask that serizawa be in there somewhere

OKAY I KNOW THIS TOOK ME FOREVER TO GET AROUND TO BUT YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MY FACE LIT UP WHEN I SAW THIS BECAUSE I IMMEDIATELY KNEW EXACTLY WHAT I WAS GOING TO WRITE.

HERE WE GO–

Edit: YOU CAN LISTEN TO IT NOW TOO OH MY GOODNESS

PHOENIX I’M STILL SCREAMING OVER THIS A A A A A A A your reading voice is so freaking gOOD JDKLSDF A A A A A,,,

im just gonna,,, listen to this like 10 more times,,, dont mind m e ,,,,

Reigen lived with the belief that everyone held an equal measurement of potential, psychic powers be damned. He believed that psychics were not above humanity; that they were not some “better form” of human, and rather, humans with only somewhat different capabilities. In fact, Reigen seemed to envy runners more than he envied psychics. 

They come from entirely different worlds, Serizawa and Reigen. Serizawa doesn’t believe he could ever truly understand him.

Except it’s Reigen’s belief—the belief that all people are equal, that no one is more special than anyone else, that everyone is unique in their own way but in no way more important—that leads him to a perilous downfall. 

And, in hindsight, Serizawa should have known. 

Because Reigen sees everyone the same, but one. He sees everyone as having worth, as having importance, as being special, with one exception. 

Serizawa is not used to exorcising spirits. In fact, Reigen probably has more experience than him. But with Shigeo so swamped with entrance exams right around the corner, it had to be Serizawa. Reigen told him he’d be fine. He’d even gone so far as to jokingly ask “What’s the worst that could happen?” 

He has an answer now. An answer and clarity he wishes he didn’t have.

The spirits aren’t very strong, but there are a lot of them. Enough to have Serizawa overwhelmed within the moment they stepped down into the canyon. Spirits with varying strengths and weaknesses, with varying skillsets and tricks up their metaphorical sleeves. 

Reigen has literal salt up his sleeves, which doesn’t do much of anything at all. But it does distract some of them while Serizawa takes them out, two by two, unable to exorcise more than that at a time. And a part of that is his fault. Or, rather, his nature. Because he wants to be careful. Because he isn’t used to this at all. Because he wants to make sure the spirits are thoroughly taken care of and can’t hurt anyone again. 

There are too many spirits. Too many spirits and not enough exorcists to deal with them. 

“Katsuya, there’s–!”

It was bound to happen. But Serizawa still couldn’t have predicted it actually would. 

He’s just exorcised spirit number who’s-keeping-count, and is turning to look over his shoulder towards the shout of his name, but he’s bodyslammed before he can see anything.

His shoulder collides with the dirt and the air is knocked from his lungs. His throat closes in on him, but so do the spirits, and he forces himself into gear and swings an arm, exorcising the two nearest ones. 

“Arataka,” he gasps, struggling to get his feet underneath him, “why did you–”

That was the worst case scenario. 

That was the worst that could happen. 

Because while Reigen was just as human as the rest of them, he was no psychic. 

The rest of it happens in a blur, for a time. Not nearly for long enough, but for a time. Serizawa didn’t mean to, but his aura took the reins of the situation and tore through every spirit like a knife through butter. 

And it somehow overrides his panic and knows what to do, too, because he presses hands over the gaping wound in Reigen’s side and his aura, trembling and scared, winds tendrils around it and seals it. Temporarily seals it, but seals it nonetheless. 

The outburst upsets the sides of the canyon. He barely gets his barrier around them in time before it comes crumbling down, burying them beneath rocks and dirt and dust until no trace can be found. 

And now they’re huddled together, occupying as little space as they can beneath the dome of the barrier. Serizawa has an arm wound tight around Reigen’s shoulders and lets him lean into his side and rest his head on his shoulder, because he’d been struggling to hold it up on his own. The front of his shirt is bloodied, with a giant tear in the side of it where the spirit caught him. If the spirit had been aiming for him, he’d probably be dead. 

“I wish I could take you to a hospital,” Serizawa says quietly, a pit in his gut. “I don’t know how much blood you lost.” 

“Prob’ly shouldn’t mess with it,” Reigen slurs, eyes barely open. His head is a dead weight against Serizawa’s shoulder, and his hands lay loosely threaded in his lap. “I dunno how… precarious it is up there. Don’t wanna risk… bringing down the rest…”

“What else do you suggest we do, then? We aren’t going to have oxygen forever, you don’t have service on your phone–” 

“Someone’ll find us,” Reigen answers shortly, and something tells Serizawa that the promise is more than desperate delirium. Even if he is struggling to keep his eyes open. “Someone’ll find us, I know it…” 

Serizawa bites his lip, but Reigen doesn’t have the strength for an argument and he doesn’t have the heart to push one. 

So they sit, and Reigen breathes. He isn’t very awake, but he’s awake enough to know falling asleep is the last thing he should do. Just before Serizawa shakes him, Reigen has snapped himself awake all on his own, usually with a barely-audible reminder to himself not to fall asleep. 

Time passes, and with each painstaking second, the gnawing hole in Serizawa’s stomach grows and continues growing. Reigen’s skin is a shade it shouldn’t be, a pasty color like old white paint. His breaths are measured, but never steady, nor even. He’s never looked more exhausted. Or drained. 

The arm around him doesn’t feel like enough, and with minimal hesitation, Serizawa brings his opposite hand to settle over both of Reigen’s. His fingers are cold, and that’s not a good sign.

“… Are your hands really warm or did I just lose a lot of blood.” 

Serizawa’s chest is tight. “You lost a lot of blood.”

“Ahhn, makes sense.” 

Serizawa nods, but as Reigen’s head becomes more and more of a weight on his shoulder, his mind wanders elsewhere. Relives the previous hour once, then twice, before he squeezes his eyes shut in a sorry attempt to block it from his mind. 

It doesn’t work. 

He inhales, then swallows, then draws Reigen just a little closer. “You didn’t have to do that.” 

Reigen doesn’t ask what he means. “Mmn, yeah,” he slurs, nodding weakly. “That is true.” 

He doesn’t seem to get it. Serizawa struggles onward. “You should’ve just let it happen,” he says, voice somewhat sharper than he would have liked it to be. “The spirit wouldn’t have been able to do much of anything, definitely not something like—like this.” 

“I knew that,” Reigen says, and his voice is sharp, too, out of nowhere, “but my body reacted on the off-chance that I’d be wrong. I didn’t really… have the chance to… think about it. Y’know. Before it happened.” 

And Serizawa should have known, because that’s just how he is. He thinks things through, he can talk himself around just about anything, but when it comes to other people, he often acts before he thinks. Usually he gets away with it. Usually his impromptu plans work to his advantage. 

But not always. 

Serizawa decides to fight him on it later and instead asks, “How’s the pain?” 

“Not as bad as it should be,” Reigen says. A pause. “… That… might not be a good thing.” 

“It might be my aura,” Serizawa muses aloud. “I’ve never been good at healing wounds completely, but I’ve learned enough. You still need a hospital as soon as we’re out of here, though.” 

“Mm, yeah.” Reigen cracks a weak smile, then smiles and leans into him again. “M’not sure home remedies are gonna be nearly enough this time.” 

“Yeah, I don’t think so either.” 

“But I’ll be fine.” Reigen shuts his eyes, not to sleep, but to rest. “Thanks for the… aura, stuff. 

Serizawa manages a feeble but genuine smile in return. “Don’t mention it,” he says, and lets himself rest his cheek on the top of his head. “It’s the least I could do. Thank you.” 

“Mm, for what?” 

So much, really. So much Reigen doesn’t know. So much that it’d be hard to pin it down with words of any sort, of any magnitude. So much. Everything. 

But that can be saved for later, too. When he has time to express it. For now, he shakes his head and murmurs, “Y’know, stuff,” and somehow, Reigen understands. 

It’s Shigeo who finds them not too long after, calling their names and finally lifting the fallen rocks and debris with barely a flick of his wrist. He’s clearly distressed, and Serizawa only realizes now that it’d been the outburst of his aura that led him here, but he can explain that later too, now that he knows “later” will indeed come. 

For now, they bring Reigen to the hospital.

[blatherkatt]

i just started reading your blumenthal kids reunionfic and i LOVE IT! Its so good and so full of potential and angst and I LOVE IT!!!💞💞💞 The way you write Eodwulf is soooo good hes such a mess and so gay help him. and Astrid Omg... I cant wait for more of her i checked out some of your posts on here and shes just great??? You've clearly put a lot of thought into them with the child designs and stuff, did you have any major inspo for the two of them like songs or other characters and stuff???

hey tumblr dont…delete part of my answer what the heck

anyway!!! THANK YOU SO MUCH,,, ed ( @tactfulgrimalkin ) is the one doing the actual writing but we plan everything together and i edit and do artwork so he deserves lots of love for the great writing…i dont remember what else i had here before tumblr deleted it so i hope thats the gist of it 

eodwulf is a gay disaster of a bastard man and astrid is SO fun and im SO GLAD UR EXCITED TOO BECAUSE WE SURE ARE

anyway you just opened pandora’s box and i’m very sorry for the length of the rest of this answer but here we go prepare for some cursed content necessary to answer that question ( | ) w ( | ) it was a Wild Ride getting these two characters to where they are boy howdy 

so the thing is in order to explain how we created these characters i actually have to get into the origins of the fic on the whole because the two are inextricably linked, and also, the origins of this fic are incredibly cursed and you can send all ur hatemail right here go on blast us we’re ready 

but we were talking about caleb and how we’re both excited for whenever astrid and eodwulf turn up, and the thought came up for basically the rough skeleton of that scene in chapter 2: 

“hey how messed up would it be if instead of them both hunting him down like we’re expecting…one of them comes in with a huge savior complex and sincerely thinks he’s delusional and should still be in the asylum, how MESSED UP would that be” 

…and then shortly after that, this happened 

thats the cursed part dont say i didnt warn u but listen you know we’re right

also that pic of caduceus didnt exist back then i went back and got this screenshot just to share the curse with you all

ANYWAY

in classic us format we got carried away and eodwulf got slotted into the role of that scene in chapter two and his character was largely developed around that scene, like, what kind of person would still be clinging to caleb after all this time to that degree to make that happen? and what was come up with was an extremely avoidant person clinging to a fantasy version of things wherein they don’t have to fight

(eodwulf was developed into a Person before astrid, i should note at this point, and ed did most of that developing; i took point on astrid later on)

but around this time i went “screw it im gonna do some concept art we’re both in too deep now” so here’s some of that for u guys 

started with them all as teens and did a couple sketches as well as one of baby (well. teen. so baby) caleb/bren/we were calling him felix at the time as some of u probably already know 

first draft had astrid with longer hair than eodwulf lmao check this out 

flipped the hair length on those two which was for the best because at the time we were imagining eodwulf as a bit more mischevious which is another thing that got reversed over time now astrids the prankster and eodwulfs the overworked mom friend because bren takes astrid’s ideas and makes them SO MUCH WORSE but he still looks better with longer hair and then i played around w/ colors for a while and wound up w/ this

voila, the initial kid concepts, to which subtle yet vital changes were  made after time. if any of you are curious about if im frustrated that that’s still the best i’ve ever drawn eodwulf’s nose the answer is yes. yes i am. 

astrid’s hair is not messy enough, theres not enough freckles, and she does not look ready to fight the entire world for a dare. 0/10. 

anyway then i did adult versions which look WAY OFF NOW LMAO 

eodwulf with way too much beard, looking far too messy when he ought to look very clean so that he can hide how much of a disaster he actually is, and also a glimpse into the very boring Ice Queen/Heartless Bitch we vaguely had astrid as to start with. even more out of character tho is the earring, astrid as she is today would absolutely never tolerate an earring unless she absolutely had to, girl’s got sensory issues but she didn’t back then. ALSO STILL NOT ENOUGH FRECKLE 

anyWHO a while after this it was decided that eodwulf has ADHD, something both the authors have a whole lot of lmao, and that was the point where ed REALLY took off and developing eodwulf went out of control and we both went Well I Guess We’re Gonna Have To Write This At Some Point Now

and with that happening is when developing astrid took more priority i think, because man, at that point in the game she came way too close to that really  annoying trope that shows up in fanfic a lot wherein The Girl is A Bitch who is Getting In The Way Of ~*The Yaois*~ and thats like, thats bad. we knew from the outset we were absolutely not setting this up as a love triangle because we both hate those but even w/ her having no romantic relationship to either of the two, like…she was kind of just There and the one who was most loyal to trent (the only thing of her original characterization that really stuck, honestly) and sooo boring???? 

so like, and i say this honestly, i managed to COMPLETELY FORGET that “reverse sasuke” cursed comment from the beginning of all this and STILL go “well what if we made her more like caleb’s rival that’d be fun” 

and that’s how astrid sorta wound up accidentally morphing into the Scrappy Underdog of this anime trio and calling her a naruto analogue is extremely cursed but also not inaccurate tbh 

started out with the concept of her popping into bren’s window because she heard they were doing magic and wanted to learn it too and evolved from there; we decided that she was gonna be neurodivergent too but, hilariously, initially that she was “the best at pretending to be neurotypical” (WE COMPLETELY REVERSED THAT AND IT IS FOR THE BETTER. SHE’S SO MUCH MORE FUN NOW) and made her also autistic because it one meant she could be like SAME HAT at bren really hard which’d make her feel more like part of the group instead of just the odd one out, and two because it fits with the whole rivals thing

branching off of that we made her just. INCREDIBLY direct. like. astrid’s thought process is “how can i accomplish what i want accomplished with the smallest number of steps? what are the consequences of doing it this way? do i give a shit? no? im gonna do that.” 

(which is why she climbed a tree to get into bren’s attic instead of using the door because that way she just completely skipped having to convince his mom to let her in)

i cant get into it much here because so many spoilers and we’re gonna explore it all, but like, astrid’s backstory turned into this exploration of the intersection of sexism and ableism especially as applied to a medieval-esque society in which the word “autism” doesn’t even EXIST and in which a convenient double standard exists Right There in the form of bren and like,, its gonna be good guys im excited for it 

as far as characters tho she does also have just a touch of Vimes from discworld to her, albeit like, she’s lawful evil to his lawful good, but she’s got the same tendency to stick REALLY FIERCELY to the rules that she thinks are important, even when they inconvenience her, even if it’d be so much easier to bend them just this once 

and for songs i cannot link like any astrid songs because they all might accidentally give away so much BUT I CAN LINK AN EODWULF SONG 

this one was HUGE for him 

uhhhh i think that’s everything i can think of that we can say right now unfortunately so i’ll end this with a comparison to the current teen designs we have now that are being used in the actual fic, even tho im not fond of how bren came out in this picture, but like, for the sake of comparison 

lets see how far we’ve come 

I N C R E A S E    F R E C K L E 

[lady-divine-writes]

Kurtbastian fic - “A Dalton Boy Heartbroken” (Rated NC17)

After Kurt gets Sebastian home, it's time to start helping him heal.

But that's a difficult thing to do when you're kind of a mess yourself. (6830 words)

Warning for mention of assault, bruises pertaining to non-consensual violence, and thoughts of self-harm. Also warning for mention of Blaine and some Blaine wank - particularly what happened between Kurt and Blaine back when they were dating. If you can stomach it, please read it, as it's pertinent to Kurt's backstory. Otherwise, just stop reading at the bolded words and pick up again at the bolded words, and remember for later installments - Blaine bad xD

Follows A Dalton Boy Intervention

Read on AO3.

Kurt has wanted to drive a Porsche ever since he was introduced to one working part time at his father’s auto shop. Flat 6, manual transmission, 300 horsepower, all-wheel drive, and in his all-time favorite car color.

Ink black.

Because of liability issues, sixteen-year-old and newly licensed Kurt Hummel wasn’t allowed to even back it out of the bay.

But he could sit in the driver’s seat while he polished the leather interior and daydream.

He did get another potential opportunity to drive one as an adult. The first time his club turned a profit, he took himself down to the closest Porsche dealership to celebrate its success. He was going to go for a test drive and finally get the feel of one. He’d wanted to give himself a goal to strive for, wanted to prove to himself that everything was going to be alright.

That he hadn’t just survived, but that he could thrive.

Kurt Hummel belonged in the driver’s seat of a Porsche. He knew that for a fact.

But he backed out at the last minute, old doubts cropping up to spoil his fun: What if his success was temporary? What if his club was only bringing in business because it was new and edgy? What if, when the thrill wore off, everything went belly up?

So he put his test drive on the back burner and let it simmer there, on hold until he knew for sure.

He didn’t want to risk falling in love with something he might not be able to keep.

Sebastian has a gorgeous car – a truly exceptional piece of machinery. And it’s not factory, either. It’s a special edition, which makes it a little more painful that it’s being driven around Ohio by a boy who can’t legally drink yet. But the more time Kurt spends with Sebastian, the less he sees that as a travesty, and the more he’s begun to equate that handsome car with its owner. They’re one in the same – sleek, classy, powerful … and out of Kurt’s league.

Kurt has been fiending to drive Sebastian’s car for months, and now he is. Sitting in the driver’s seat (which fits him like a glove), flying down the highway, with that phenomenal engine purring seductively in his ears, should feel like a dream come true.

But it doesn’t. Not when he gets to drive it like this.

When Kurt and Sebastian left the dorms, the jackals converged. Knowing that following them out into the parking lot would be asking for trouble from the assistant dean, the boys stopped at the main threshold. Others chose to look down from the windows like kings on high watching the commoners flee. Kurt ignored them. It was easy.

He’s had a fair amount of practice treating losers like they don’t exist.

But as Kurt started loading Sebastian’s stuff into his Navigator, with Elliott already behind the wheel, Sebastian turned to look at his Porsche sitting alone beneath its cover in the parking lot. That car, more than anything he owned, symbolizes him. It’s like an extension of him. He isn’t the only boy on campus who drives a Porsche, but his is still a part of his identity. Everyone knows that car.

Everyone knows its owner.

“M-master?” Sebastian said softly so as not to bring attention to the title.

“Yes, preppy?”

“Would it be alright if we took my car with us? If I leave it behind, I’m afraid …”

Kurt looked from his sub’s eyes up and around to those watching them, some with the gall to smirk. If these assholes could tie a living human being to a chair against his will with a pillowcase over his head and a gag stuffed in his mouth, then they were definitely capable of destroying Sebastian’s car.

And of finding some way of getting away with it.

It was just a car, an object, not equal to Sebastian’s health or his life, but that wasn’t the point. The goal of tonight’s little escapade was to tear Sebastian down. Kurt knew that. And he wasn’t about to give these assholes any more ammunition.

“Of course, preppy,” Kurt said with a vindictive smile. “I catch your drift. You have the keys?”

Sebastian felt his pockets, fear creeping into his eyes at the thought that he may have left them behind and would have to go back for them.

He could do it with Kurt by his side, but he really didn’t want to.

But, luckily, he ended up finding them. He pulled them out and held them up.

“Well, let’s get to it, preppy,” Kurt said, pointing the way. “I’m getting sick of the stench of bullshit that permeates this place.”

“W-would you drive, Master?” Sebastian asked suddenly. “I---I don’t think I can.”

Kurt stared at the keys in Sebastian’s hands, salivating like they were an expertly prepared prime rib. He was fully prepared to leap on that grenade; his whole body had been ready for this moment for a while. But those keys held out to him, jingling slightly as Sebastian trembled, clawed through him. Sebastian had once joked that Kurt could beat him within an inch of his life, but no one drove his baby. When it came down to it, it wasn’t Kurt who’d beaten Sebastian into submission, and that made Kurt’s blood boil. Not because he felt cheated, but because this boy he cared for, whom he had taken responsibility for, had been abused non-consensually, and Kurt hadn’t been able to stop it.

Kurt hadn’t been able, by his name or his claim, to protect him.

Kurt checks the rear view for Elliott following behind them in his Navigator, then looks at Sebastian, sitting in the seat beside him, arms wrapped around himself, eyes closed. Kurt isn’t sure whether or not Sebastian is actually asleep. He wouldn’t be surprised if Sebastian did fall asleep after the night he had, but he seems too at peace. He’s probably just sorting things out in his head, Kurt thinks. Or maybe he’s taking advantage of the dark in the car and the lull of the engine to think of nothing, feel nothing. Either way, Kurt decides not to bother him. There’ll be time for talking later on.

Sebastian has earned the right to disappear for a while.

It’s not a long drive from Dalton to Kurt’s house; it only seems to take longer. Along the way, Kurt occupies his mind putting together lists – things he needs to buy since he’ll be feeding the two of them (even though he’s already taken to stocking his cabinets double since Sebastian is over at his house all the good God dammed time), phone calls he has to make, appointments he’ll need to re-arrange, events he’ll need to postpone.

And he should ask Elliott to slide him a little extra green bud. He has a feeling he and Sebastian are going to burn through what’s left of his stash before the weekend’s out.

Kurt pulls Sebastian’s Porsche into his driveway while Elliott parks the SUV behind it, shielding the car from view and trapping it in. Kurt doesn’t know if Sebastian’s friends have any other plans, or if they know where he lives, but he’s not putting anything past the little fuckers. With the amount of money and resources among them, who knows what they think they can accomplish.

Better safe than sorry.

“Alright, preppy.” Kurt cuts the engine, but Sebastian doesn’t turn around, which leaves Kurt talking to his back. “We’re here.”

Sebastian nods. “Yes, Master. Thank you, Master.” His voice sounds lifeless, monotone, but beneath the lack of emotion, it shakes ever so slightly.

Kurt puts a hand on Sebastian’s shoulder and squeezes. “It’s gonna be alright, preppy. I promise. I’m gonna get you through this.”

“I know, Master,” Sebastian says, trying to sound chipper. “I trust you.”

Kurt doesn’t know what to say to that. Hopefully, he’ll find a way to be more brilliant once he gets Sebastian inside. He still blames himself, still thinks that if he was better at his fucking job, this would have never happened. But how? How was he supposed to know? How could he have anticipated this?

He couldn’t have. Kurt got his intel second-hand, and nothing Sebastian has ever said about those assholes led Kurt to believe that they were capable of something like this. But teachers? Coaches? Adult-type authority figures who see these kids day in and day out? They should have been savvy. By all accounts, Kurt didn’t drop the ball. Dalton Academy did.

Which makes Sebastian another poor soul that Dalton promised to protect, and then failed to deliver.

“Take your time, preppy,” Kurt says, opening the car door. “I’m just gonna go send Elliott on his way.”

“Yes, Master.”

Kurt climbs out of the car. Elliott, striding over, tosses Kurt the keys to his Navigator.

“Thanks for this, Ells.” Kurt catches his keys and goes in for a hug. “I owe you one.”

“It’s cool.” Elliott hugs Kurt hard while he has the chance. He gets the feeling he’s not going to see him again for a few days. “It’s not like I had much going on tonight anyway.”

“Really? I cut short your first scene in weeks, and you’re giving me that dismissive shit?”

Elliott shrugs one shoulder. “This was more important.”

Kurt raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t want to screw up this moment by saying something too sentimental or teasing. All he’s wanted since that stupid Christmas party was for Elliott and Sebastian to get along. Kurt knows Sebastian is willing. Sebastian will do whatever it takes to please Kurt. It’s Elliott who’s been acting like a mule.

Maybe this is the start of Kurt watching that tide turn. Elliott did tell Sebastian that what happened to him tonight officially makes him one of them.

Does Elliott actually believe that?

Elliott glances over at the car with Kurt’s sub sitting inside. They watch him silently, waiting for him to move. When he doesn’t, the weight of what happened that evening settles heavily between them, bringing with it stomach-turning memories of past bullying, past violence.

“Take care of your boy, Kurt,” Elliott says, a thickness in his voice that Kurt has only heard a handful of times before. It’s as much empathy as it is sympathy. “Give him a few swats on the ass for me.”

“Will do.” Kurt watches Elliott stroll over to his motorcycle parked against the garage door, concealed by the shadows the roof throws beneath the light of the moon. He climbs on, puts on his helmet, throws the kickstand up, and backs down the driveway. He fires the engine, shifts it into gear, pulls a slow turn toward the street, and drives away. Kurt watches him go, as perplexed as he is relieved by his friend’s behavior tonight. He could chalk it up to the fact that Elliott loves him, and despite his and Sebastian’s differences, Elliott made a promise to always be there for Kurt.

But there’s something else. Not an acquiescence because that’s not in Elliott’s nature.

Kurt can’t put his finger on it, but whatever it is, he isn’t looking any gift horses in the mouth.

Kurt walks back to Sebastian’s Porsche and opens the passenger door. Sebastian hasn’t moved, but his eyes are open, staring at the ground beneath Kurt’s shoes. Kurt waits for any sign of acknowledgment, but not once does he look up at Kurt’s face.

That could be conditioning, Kurt reasons. Or it could be Sebastian attempting to find subspace and escape to it.

Kurt can understand that. He can help him with that.

“Come on, baby. Let’s get you inside.” Kurt gives Sebastian a hand, but Sebastian doesn’t rush to get out of the car. He seems content to sit where he is for the rest of the night. But he takes his Master’s hand and holds it as if it’s a buoy on the water in the midst of a terrible storm.

As if he’s going to drown without Kurt’s hand holding his.

Kurt is torn between the next thing he needs to do and letting go of Sebastian’s hand, but he has to. Because caring for a broken heart is as much in the details as it is the big displays. Kurt wants Sebastian to know that he hears him - he knows the things that are important to him, and nothing he cares about is inconsequential or silly. So he stands his sub off to the side and, without Sebastian asking, puts the cover on his car. He tucks every last gleaming inch of Sebastian’s Porsche beneath its protective shield and thinks, God, I love this car.

He may actually mean something more complicated than that, but it’s what he’s willing to admit to right now.

He leaves Sebastian’s things in his Navigator and leads his boy to the house. He unlocks the door and steps inside with Sebastian following solemnly at his heels. Sebastian obediently takes of his shoes, preparing to go to Kurt’s room and kneel in his spot, but Kurt stops him before he goes.

“Take a seat at the kitchen table,” he says, locking the front door. “There are a few things we have to do before you turn in.”

“Yes, Master,” Sebastian says, the disappointment in his voice bred from not being allowed to serve. Kurt knows that Sebastian serving him the way they have designed would probably take his mind off of things, but Sebastian can’t hide from this. He can’t run away from it. He has to face it head on and put it behind him, or else it’ll just be waiting for him later on when he thinks he’s in the clear. The one thing that Kurt has always strived to be with Sebastian is honest, and Kurt knows for a fact that tackling problems and putting them to rest always ends better than burying your head in the sand, even if it’s for the sake of your sanity.

Kurt watches his sub walk, the way he moves when he sits at the table. He’s sluggish, his cocky swagger gone, as if the essence of who he was before has been sucked out of him. If Kurt had seen this boy in his club from behind, he wouldn’t know him from Adam.

He needs to fix this.

“Here.” Kurt puts a pad of writing paper on the table in front of him. “I know you probably don’t want to think about it, but I need you to write down everything that happened to you, every detail you remember. Don’t leave anything out, no matter how small. I’d let you do it later, but it’s best to do it while it’s fresh in your mind.”

“I understand, Master.”

“Then, we’ll take some photographs, and I’ll … I’ll put you to bed. I promise. No session for tonight. You need your sleep.”

“Yes, Master.” Sebastian doesn’t even try to smile. He takes the pen that Kurt left for him and starts writing while Kurt puts a kettle on the stove. As Kurt gets tea cups and saucers from the cabinet, he glances over at Sebastian writing furiously on the pad of paper. Kurt thought he’d need a grace period, a few seconds to get his thoughts together, but he hits the top sheet of paper with the point of the pen and doesn’t stop. Once or twice the pen trips over a word, but he crosses out and continues on. The pen trembles in his hand, but he doesn’t stop. He’s still writing when the whistle on the kettle blows. Kurt pours hot water into two cups, adding a drop of honey and a touch of milk to one, the way he knows Sebastian likes his best.

“Here.” Kurt puts the cup of tea down in front of his sub, assuming he’ll stop to take a sip, but he doesn’t. It’s as if he can’t. Now that the flood gates are open, he has to get it all out, put it down on paper so he doesn’t forget a minute of how it felt. Kurt sips his tea quietly, watching Sebastian flip the page and keep going. Sebastian’s tea cools, but he keeps writing. He wants to condemn those boys with these words – Thad and Jamie and all the rest. Especially Hunter. Fucking Hunter! He almost ruined everything!

Except no, he hadn’t. Because Hunter never had the power, just like Sebastian had said. Hunter can’t touch him. Not really. He can’t derail Sebastian’s life.

The worst thing that happened in that room - even worse than Sebastian being tied up, unable to breathe - was that Sebastian didn’t give Kurt enough credit.

He didn’t give what they have together the credit it deserves.

He gets to the part in his statement when Kurt showed up to save the day and that’s when his pen slows. He pauses to take a sip of his tea, his hand shaking the cup so much that it spills, but Kurt’s hand is there, steadying it so Sebastian can bring his lips to it and drink. It’s neither hot nor cold. It’s just right, the way everything feels now that he’s with Kurt. Sebastian empties half the cup, the liquid soothing his turbulent stomach, unwinding the cramps that had begun to twist as he recounted his time in that chair.

When he starts to yawn, Kurt helps him finish, then guides the cup down to its saucer.

“It looks like you might be crashing,” Kurt says, wrapping his fingers around Sebastian’s hand and holding it, lending him his strength.

“I think … I might be … Master,” Sebastian says through a barrage of stifled yawns.

“Let’s take those pictures before you fall asleep in your seat,” Kurt suggests. “Here.” He moves his sub away from the table, setting him up in a chair underneath the brightest light in the room. “Remove your shirt. We’re going to take a couple now, and a couple more in the morning when your bruises get a little bit darker.”

“I understand, Master,” is all Sebastian says, and Kurt sighs. He wishes Sebastian would just fucking unload, even if that means ugly crying, screaming and cursing.

Give him time. He just needs a little more time.  

Kurt takes out his iPhone as Sebastian removes his shirt. Kurt had seen some of Sebastian’s bruises when he’d helped his sub change. They weren’t too bad then – the angry red outlines of rope marks and clustered, purpling masses that could be finger prints. But given time to develop, they’ve become grisly. The ropes bit into Sebastian’s skin harder than he’d let on, or maybe his time with Kurt has desensitized him. Either way, indents mar his arms and legs, clearly enough so that anyone can tell what made them. Above those are definite finger marks. They vary in thickness, different hands having grabbed hold of Sebastian to keep him still. Kurt can tell that a few twisted as they held, indicating that Sebastian fought hard and they had to work to restrain him.

Well, good for fucking Sebastian!

But the one that pisses Kurt off the most is a solid round mark between Sebastian’s pecs where someone held him with both hands compressing his chest. Kurt is careful when he bruises his sub, each mark he makes placed for maximum impact with minimal permanent injury. And every one means something. It carries a message, either to Sebastian or somebody else. He’s never left marks like these on Sebastian’s body – senseless, meaningless, violent trash littering his sub’s gorgeous skin.

Kurt said it once, and he’ll say it again - someone’s going to pay for this.

Kurt focuses his iPhone camera on the bruise on Sebastian’s chest and snaps off a few pics. The way these look, he’s surprised that Sebastian doesn’t have any broken ribs or internal bleeding.

“You know,” Kurt says to break the silence that’s starting to drown him, “I’ve done so many of these that, after a while, it becomes old hat.”

“When was the first time, Master?” Sebastian asks to take his mind off what Kurt’s doing and why. He has a hunch it might have been Elliott, considering how close the two of them are, how protective of one another. But aside from confirming his suspicions, he’s just plain curious. There’s still so much about Kurt’s past that he doesn’t know.

“Well, to be honest, preppy …” Kurt takes a step forward and starts photographing the rope marks on Sebastian’s arms “… it was me. After I left Blaine.”

Sebastian, whose gaze had been trained on his hands this whole time, raises his eyes to look at Kurt, but Kurt shifts his gaze away. He comes closer, puts a hand to Sebastian’s chin, and takes a picture of the fabric burns around his mouth.

“I joined the scene for Blaine,” Kurt admits, tilting Sebastian’s head back further to take a picture of his neck. “I didn’t need it. I would have been more than happy without it, I’ll tell you what.” It’s such a determined statement, Sebastian knows Kurt had to have thought about it more than once, what his life would have been like if he’d avoided the scene. “Some guy at Dalton who had the hots for Blaine while we were dating introduced him to it, apparently behind my back via text messages and emails. He gave Blaine tips, and told him about places that catered to the BDSM scene in New York.” Kurt’s eyes meet Sebastian’s momentarily as Kurt moves Sebastian’s head the opposite way. Sebastian sees the regret in them, the sorrow. “He was grooming Blaine, you see, for the two of them to be together once we moved, but Blaine didn’t pick up on that. He could be a bit dense when it came to guys flirting with him. Blaine was so damned excited about it, and that excitement had been building within him without my knowledge. When he finally brought it up to me, and introduced me to his friend, I agreed to give it a shot because I was sure that if I didn’t, I was going to lose him.” He laughs. It’s dry, bitter, and steeped with hate. But hatred for Blaine? Hatred for Blaine’s friend? Hatred for himself? Probably all three. “What did I know? The only stuff I knew about BDSM came from cheesy, second-rate pornos. Pornos I didn’t even want to watch! I thought D/s was about handcuffs, spanking, whips, and gaudy, leather outfits. People calling other people Sir and Master …” Kurt shakes his head. “I didn’t take it seriously. It was a joke to me, the way it was for you.” He stops his picture taking to run his fingers through Sebastian’s hair, finding comfort for himself in the silky strands and the fluttering of Sebastian’s eyelids in response. “I didn’t know it could consume you,” he whispers. “I didn’t know how badly it could fuck with your head. I got all of my information from Blaine because I was too scared to look it up for myself. I didn’t want that shit on my Google search history.” He chuckles, returning to the photographs. “I wasn’t all that comfortable with sex, not the way Blaine was. And I was stupidly naïve. I trusted him too much. I mean, he loved me, right? Plus, he was a natural leader. He was charismatic. People gravitated toward him. I thought that those leadership skills would translate over. But that isn’t enough in our world. It’s not about acting the part. It’s about being it. Blaine isn’t a Dom. All Blaine is is an actor.” Kurt puts down his phone. He looks tired all of a sudden. Done. “Take off your pants, preppy. We need to get the rest of them.”

Sebastian doesn’t register the command right away, and when he does, he can’t move. He’s numb from the story that Kurt has told him so far, and since they have yet to get to the part when Kurt leaves Blaine and photographs the bruises on his body, Sebastian can only assume it gets worse. Admittedly, Sebastian entered the BDSM scene because of Kurt, but he did it of his own free will. Kurt never forced him, tricked him, or manipulated him. On the contrary. He gave Sebastian every opportunity to back out if he wanted. And Kurt bending over backwards to hold on to Blaine? Sebastian has seen pictures of both men during their time at Dalton; found them in old yearbooks in the Dalton Academy library. Even though Kurt has done a complete one-eighty as he’s gotten older, Sebastian can no more imagine him as insecure and vulnerable, scared of losing the man he loves and agreeing to this life, any more than he could picture himself traveling to Mars on a purple unicorn.

But here they are.

And if not for that, if not for Blaine, Sebastian would have never met Kurt.

Sebastian doesn’t know if he should be pissed about that or grateful.

“We talked about it, but not enough. Not as much as we should have,” Kurt continues, helping Sebastian with the fly to his jeans when he doesn’t undo them. “We decided to start as switches, but it always seemed like me on my knees for him more than he ever was for me.” Kurt tugs down Sebastian’s waistband, and Sebastian lifts up to help him. “We kept it to ourselves, in the bedroom. I thought we were together on that. But he had other plans.” Kurt pulls Sebastian’s jeans to his ankles. He spots a particularly nasty bruise, and stops to take a picture. “Not only did Blaine want to be more public with that part of our relationship, he didn’t want to necessarily stay exclusive.” Kurt runs a gentle finger over the raised, purple mark, then leans forward and kisses it. The touch of Kurt’s lips to Sebastian’s leg startles him, but it’s an anesthetic for what Kurt says next. “He started sharing me without my permission, humiliating me in ways we’d never discussed. He ignored my safewords, trying to make himself look tough, powerful. The kind of Dominant he thought other Dominants would respect, especially since we were in New York.”

Kurt moves to the other leg, not looking into Sebastian’s devastated face. “One night, I found myself doped up, in the middle of an orgy, and I had no idea how I got there.” Kurt pauses when he hears Sebastian catch his breath, taking longer than necessary fussing over his next pic. “One of Elliott’s partners at the time found me. He was a pay-for-play Dom and a gay-for-pay submissive, but he was cool. That’s how I met Elliott, which is funny considering we’d been going to the same college the whole time and had never once run into each other. Ells and his friend took care of me. I moved in with them that night, pretty much left everything I owned behind at mine and Blaine’s apartment. Never did get a lot of it back. They tried to get me to press charges, file a restraining order, but law enforcement doesn’t traditionally look too kindly on people of our deviation.” Kurt rests his head on Sebastian’s knee and looks off into nothing, watching the events scroll by in his mind. “And I was right. When I finally got up the nerve to go down there, the police twisted my words around. They said I wanted it, that I had consented because I was there in the first place, that I knew what I was getting into because I had ordered drinks, because I had taken off my own clothes ...” Sebastian feels what he swears is a tear roll down his skin as Kurt returns mentally from wherever. He pockets his phone and dabs at his eyes so slyly, Sebastian barely notices. “After that, I did a little online research about the legal system and how it pertained to me. It wasn’t all that helpful, to be honest, but I got the gist. I had Elliott take pictures of what was left of my bruises from that night, and I kept them, just in case.” Kurt pulls Sebastian’s jeans the rest of the way off his legs so his sub can walk. “I dropped out of school and I quit my job because those were two places I knew Blaine could find me, but I couldn’t avoid him forever. I needed to put some distance between me and him, and Ells said he needed a change of pace, so the two of us packed up, moved back to Ohio, and opened our club. I didn’t know what I wanted at the time, but I knew I needed to take back control of my life, so I became a professional Dominant. We made our club into the dungeon of our dreams, and found people from all over who weren’t just good people, but responsible Dominants and submissives - supportive, mentoring, knowledgeable, all of the things that I could have used back in New York with Blaine. I was determined that I wasn’t going to let another person end up like me. The more people I met in the scene, the more I came across people like me – people who had gone in wide-eyed and ignorant, usually for someone they loved, and ended up on the bad end of an ego trip. Without knowing it, we started catering to not only the kinky subset of Ohio, but to a large group of abused submissives. We became sort of a safe-house. The people who come to our club have been coming there for years. It’s like a second home … to all of us.”

Kurt helps Sebastian to his feet, but when Kurt tries to get him to walk, he’s unable to take that first step. Kurt turns to look at him, gets a good look at his face.

Sebastian looks positively heartbroken - his eyes red, his cheeks wet with tears, his chin quivering but his jaw locked, as if he’s been holding back the inevitable.

“Oh, Sebastian. I take it my story didn’t make you feel better.”

Sebastian snuffles in unattractively, but he’s stopped caring how he looks. He’s naked, physically and emotionally. He’s never felt so naked in front of anyone, especially not in front of Kurt, with these new, foreign bruises on display. He hates them. He hates that he has them. Kurt’s bruises are a work of art to Sebastian. A badge of honor. When he has them, they fill him with a feeling of strength and belonging. These bruises he has now are disgusting. They make him feel like an outcast. But mostly, they’re embarrassing.

They make him feel violated and weak.

They make him feel worthless.

“W-was it supposed to, Master?”

“Yes. But maybe not the way you think.”

“Then h-how?”

Kurt’s arms circle Sebastian’s waist. He rests his head on Sebastian’s chest, on that circular black-and-blue that he loathes so much. And there Kurt is - there Sebastian’s Dom is - covering those marks with his body, filling in the cracks and crevices, and making Sebastian feel complete again.

“It’s supposed to make you feel a little less alone. There’s a lot of us out there, baby. A lot of people who were dicked over by someone they trusted. If you ever think you have no one in the world you can turn to, just remember, Pavarotti’s Prison is your home now, too.”

And that’s one more hole filled. A huge one. When Sebastian left Dalton with Kurt and Elliott, he’d felt cheated, the way Kurt said he had back when he was in high school. That place Sebastian felt was his second home was a lie, and losing it threatened to destroy him. But he’d already had another home, even if he didn’t realize it. It was Kurt’s club.

It was Kurt.

That’s when Sebastian finally lets go and the tears begin to fall.

Kurt leads Sebastian down the hallway towards his bedroom, bringing the pad of paper and pen with them in case Sebastian remembers something later on that he wants to add. He drops both on his bedside table and, with his heart in his throat, starts the task of freeing Sebastian from tonight.

It’s not that Sebastian hasn’t spent days on end at Kurt’s place before, but for the first time, Kurt is taking care of not just his needs as a submissive. His deeply emotional ones, too. This is something that should annoy the shit out of Kurt. He’s not a big fan of people relying on him for emotional stability.

So why does this excite him so much?

Kurt starts with a shower, turning the water to hot, then stripping down in front of Sebastian with his sub’s eyes on him. Kurt demanded it, to root Sebastian in the here and now so that, should he find his way to subspace, he’ll remember he’s with Kurt and that he’s safe, that the person touching his body and commanding his mind is Kurt, and not those sick motherfuckers from his school.

And while they shower, Kurt gives Sebastian permission to kiss, permission to touch, permission to cry, which he does out of anger and frustration. With other submissives, this would be the time for Kurt to exercise strict control, but that’s not what Sebastian needs. He’s still a teenager, and sometimes he needs that young, carefree, puppy-dog type of affection.

So Dom and sub put everything else on hold while Kurt lets Sebastian kiss him; lets Sebastian push him up against the wall and pin him there, hands roaming freely up and down his body; while he lets Sebastian mark him with hickeys on his neck and shoulders, one bite hard enough to draw blood, and Kurt, with his eyes rolled back in his head, cums. Kurt returns the favor by sinking to his knees and blowing him, letting Sebastian cum down his throat, fill him with his pain. And like that evening in December when Sebastian dropped, Kurt washes him with his own body wash, dries him off and slathers him with his signature lotions, marking him with his scent along with his kisses and his teeth.

More than anything, Kurt wants to cover those bruises with new ones, blot out the petty hate with his own brand of caring and ownership. And he knows Sebastian wants it, too. But he can’t. Not yet. Not until these have been completely documented, and that will happen in the morning.

Kurt will start early so that they can get to work obliterating them – possibly for the entire day.

Kurt puts Sebastian to bed unbound and tucks him in. They don’t speak. There’s nothing left to say. So they kiss instead, Sebastian wrapping his arms around Kurt’s body and taking while he can with Kurt lying back and enjoying it because, hey – Sebastian’s an awesome kisser. But there comes a point when those kisses become sloppy and soft, with Sebastian sinking more into the mattress than he does into Kurt until eventually his lips stop moving altogether and he begins to snore.

Kurt holds his sub while Sebastian drifts off to sleep, kissing his forehead and his damp hair. Kurt tries to sleep, too, wound around Sebastian, so comfortable with his sub in his arms, so warm sharing his body heat. But he can’t. He’s riled up, his instinct not to reach for unconsciousness, which is only a shut eye away, but to get out of bed, drive back to Dalton, and start wailing on whomever he can find. It would serve those bastards right to wake up in the morning, tied to their beds with their dicks wrapped in razor wire, the words, “Hands off my fucking property until the end of time! Signed KH” carved into their chests.

Legally, however, that could prove problematic.

He does everything he can to put a kibosh on the vindictive thoughts popping up in his head and black out the way Sebastian has, but he can actually hear the gears whirring in his brain as he subconsciously contemplates a plan of revenge. He decides to try blocking it out with music, or maybe some ocean sounds – meditative shit that Elliott turned him on to shortly after his father’s last heart attack. Kurt peeks over at his bedside table, but the only thing he spots is Sebastian’s statement, resting haphazardly on top of everything, where Kurt left it.

Kurt stares at it, undecided as to what he wants to do about it. He wants to read it, but on the other hand, he doesn’t want to read it. He should read it so he knows how to proceed tomorrow when they drop by the police station. Kurt doesn’t know the whole story, and he doesn’t want to be caught off guard.

But he also wants to be able to sleep peacefully tonight.

Seeing as he can’t find his iPod, he left his phone in the bathroom in the pocket of his pants, and he doesn’t want to leave his bed (or Sebastian) to find a magazine to read, he reaches over and behind, slowly so as not to wake up his sub, and grabs the pad of paper.

The first few words leap immediately off the page and slap Kurt in the face, Sebastian’s handwriting surprisingly neat considering the condition he was in when he wrote this.

Kurt sighs. There’s going to be no easing into this one.

He tries to read it from top to bottom, step away from it, remove emotion from it and ingest the information like he would the news (though, to be honest, he stopped reading the news a while ago for similar reasons). But he can’t. After the first paragraph detailing how Hunter had baited him, giving the other boys time to jump him; how he felt trapped, couldn’t breathe; how he thought he had lost something important to him; Kurt has to put it down. He’s so fucking angry, and if he can’t go to Dalton and break a few kneecaps, he might explode.

He needs some sort of release, something to work out his aggression. He searches his room, goes over his options. He could smoke, mellow the fuck out, but he doesn’t want to disturb Sebastian. He could masturbate, but, that again, might wake his sub up, and besides, it would be a pity to go at it solo when there’s a gorgeous man lying beside him in bed.

Kurt peruses the contents of his bedside table, the removal of the pad of paper revealing the contents underneath – lotions, lubes, and cuffs, his lighter, a bong, his last bag of weed, an empty beer bottle, a razor blade ...

Kurt stops on the blade. It’s a fresh one, the sharp edge wrapped in cardboard. It’s been waiting there for Kurt’s next session with Sebastian, but he could turn it on himself, indulge in self-pity and slice up his legs, tear up his chest. It would help him relax, feel in control – a feeling he’d lost somewhere in between getting Jeff’s text and finding Sebastian tied up. Of course, that’s a feeling he could regain with his sub cuffed to his bed, a gag in his mouth, and a hook up his ass, but Kurt can’t wake Sebastian for that. The only option he has is to damage himself – either by doing this, or going down to the club, finding a willing slave, and whipping them for all they’re worth.

But he can’t do that either. He made a promise. Sebastian is his one and only for as long as they’re together. Kurt said so himself.

He can’t call on anyone else. Not even Elliott.

Kurt isn’t going to cheat.

God! Kurt rolls his head on his neck. Cheat! As if they’re an item! As if they’re a thing!

Kurt lets out a sigh in retaliation of himself. He’s so fucking pathetic. He has to stop fighting against it and man up, stop playing as if Sebastian doesn’t matter as much as he does. He has to come to terms with the fact that that’s what they are. And Kurt has himself to blame more than anyone. He’s the man in charge. He’s the one who let it get this far.

And worst of all, he has no regrets.

Sebastian begins to whimper, and all of Kurt’s thoughts go to him. He turns his back on the blade and wraps his arms around Sebastian again. The second he does, Sebastian stops, and Kurt knows he can’t let go of him – not tonight.

“It’s all right, preppy,” Kurt says into his hair. “It’s going to be all right, I promise … Sebastian.”

Pulling him close, Kurt closes his eyes, and falls asleep.

[gansbeee-archive]

I was tagged by @medjedofficial !! Rules: Answer these statements and tag 20 people

i tag: @the-dreamers-boy @for-the-life-ofme @colorcodedplant @deathdippedinroses (none of you have to do this if you don’t want to! Any of my mutuals are free to do this, just put me as the person who tagged you! <3)

THE LAST:

1. Drink: water probably

2. Phone call: My mom

3. Text message: ‘HOLY SHIT’ to adam about some hamilton meta

4. Song you listened to: Probably no one else performed by philippa soo from the great comet

5. Time you cried: listening to the aforementioned song

HAVE YOU:

6. Dated someone twice: never dated.

7. Kissed someone and regretted it: never kissed anyone.

8. Been cheated on: N/A

9. Lost someone special: hahaha i dont think theyre special anymore :^)

10. Been depressed: Ive been depressed for at least the past 6 years.

11. Gotten drunk and thrown up: never.

LIST 3 FAVORITE COLORS:

12. Green

13. Turquoise

14. Indigo

IN THE LAST YEAR HAVE YOU:

15. Made new friends: a few!

16. Fallen out of love: i have never been in love. At least, not in the traditional sense.

17. Laughed until you cried: just the other day. I was in a voice chat w some of my pals and my friend tobi laughed for about 5 minutes at a picture of a melted rubber ducky. Obviously i had to join.

18. Found out someone was talking about you: lmao more than once!!!

19. Met someone who changed you: i’ve changed a lot over the years, and i find it difficult to attribute that change to a single person or even a group of people.

20. Found out who your friends are: Yes. I think i finally have.

21. Kissed a mutual? Nope.

GENERAL

22. How many mutuals do you know in real life: @for-the-life-ofme (my best friend!) @the-dreamers-boy (my qpp!) @morriha (a good old pal) @medjedofficial (a new pal!) @colorcodedplant (another new pal!!!)

23. Do you have any pets: yep! Two cats: luke, a fat tabby, and ruby, a beautiful and sweet tortoiseshell calico

24. Do you want to change your name: I haven’t really thought about it yet.

25. What did you do for your last birthday: i think i had a party at a pizza place and then had a sleepover after? It was kinda small

26. What time did you wake up: this morning i woke up at 8:30 b/c of aikido practice

27. What were you doing at midnight last night: i was sleepy peepy

28. Name something you can’t wait to get: i’m not really looking forward to anything short term. But long term- an apartment w my qpp @the-dreamers-boy , a drawing tablet, and top surgery/testosterone

29. When was the last time you saw your Mom: sometime last night

30. What is one thing you wish you could change in your life: besides the obvious (gender and money), i want a drive. I want something to look forward to, something to research, something to fall in love with.

31. What are you listening to right now: as i type this, i’m in the car and giving up the gun by vampire weekend is playing. If i could pick, i would probably be listening to the great comet rn

32. Have you ever talked to a person named Tom: um? That is likely, yes.

33. Something that is getting on your nerves: not feelin this whole societal concept of gender

34. Most visited website: youtube and tungle.hell

35. Mole/s: they are. Everwhere. Most noticeably my face, arms, back, and legs- however they are on p much all my body parts.

36. Mark/s: faint thin scars on my hip, old scabs on my knees and elbows, a small crescent shaped scar on my knee. Also a surgery scar on my right wrist.

37. Childhood dream: I think i wanted to be a vet or a nurse. Jokes on you, past self, i can barely take care of my own health let alone other people’s

38. Hair color: light brown. Lowkey copper highlights? Blonde parts from previous dyeing

39. Long or short hair: reeeally long. Like, to my mid-back.

40. Do you have a crush on someone?: besides celebrities and unattainable characters? No one.

41. What do you like about yourself: ???

42. Piercings: I have pierced ears that have long since closed and that’s it

43. Blood type: i have no clue

44. Nicknames: gansey or kat

45. Relationship status: no romantic partner. I dunno if my qpp @the-dreamers-boy counts?

46. Zodiac: virgo sun and scorpio moon

47. Pronouns: they/them.

48. Favorite TV show(s): fma, pmmm, vld, probably other various anime i cant think of rn

49. Tattoos: none right now

50. Right or left hand: i’m right handed

51. Surgery: i had a gross abscess on my right wrist (probably from writing too much). In the future i’ll want top surgery and i might need hip surgery

52. Hair dyed a different color: as an experiment i dyed some strands magenta. They washed out to pink, and i kind of hated it, so i let it fade out.

53. Sports: I don’t play any.

54. Vacation: i’ve gone to niagara falls, canada, and various places out west in the states. I’d really like to go to spain, japan, and Mexico someday.

55. Shoes: for depression and summer’s sake, I’m often wearing either slippers, just socks, or flip-flops. When i have to go outside, i have a few pairs of converse, sneakers, and boots that get me by

56. Eating: i’m going to get food after i finish this, but the last thing i ate was ice cream last night (FUTURE ME REGRETS THIS BC IVE HAD TO FORMAT THIS THREE DAMN TIMES)

57. Drinking: i may end up drinking because it’s really big in my family, but i refuse to do it often.

58. I’m about to: get some fuckin food after 50 minutes of editing this format!!! Tumblr mobile doesn’t have an html editor :^)

59. Waiting for: marching band camp

60. Want: perhaps a love interest at some point? I mean i already mentioned other stuff (apartment, tablet, top surgery)

61. Get married: not sure. I think if i loved someone enough, i’d consider it.

62. Career: i don’t know. I want to do so many things. I think i will become either an architect or computer programmer, with my art on the side. Ideally, i’d want to be an editor, museum curator, physicist, or even an animator.

WHICH IS BETTER:

63. Hugs or kisses: hugs for me

64. Lips or eyes: Both are good

65. Shorter or taller: i’m in the middle (5'6"), but my qpp still loves to tease me abt it

66. Older or younger: um? Dating wise, in high school my partner shouldn’t be more than about a year older or younger b/c puberty is different every year. When i’m older i may have different standards. Friend wise? Ironically, i’m the youngest most of the time, yet i’m the wisest.

67. Nice arms or nice stomach: i’m kinda a tummy person, but both are good

68. Sensitive or loud: im more sensitive. I can be loud when i’m comfortable around people, yet often I’m embarrassed after my outbursts.

69. Hook up or relationship: Relationship

70. Troublemaker or hesitant: I’m usually the voice of reason here.

HAVE YOU EVER:

71. Kissed a stranger: never.

72. Drank hard liquor: No.

73. Lost glasses/contact lenses: I haven’t lost my glasses yet, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if i did. I’m a mess.

74. Turned someone down: i was asked out by two different straight dudes in middle school. I turned them both down

75. Sex on first date: i’m ace, so?

76. Broken someone’s heart: i’m unsure if i have or not

77. Had your heart broken: yes.

78. Been arrested: No

79. Cried when someone died: yes

80. Fallen for a friend: years ago, i thought i did.

DO YOU BELIEVE IN:

81. Yourself: depends

82. Miracles: I believe they can happen but are very rare

83. Love at first sight: I don’t think love works that way, but who am i to tell others they’re wrong?

84. Santa claus: unfortunately no

85. Kiss on the first date: i’m not ready for that

OTHER:

86. Current best friend: jane!! (Her name’s actually sophia) @for-the-life-ofme

87. Eye color: light blue

88. Favorite movie: howl’s moving castle, coraline, kubo and the two strings

[sundrenched-smilez]

odd numbers for the lesbian asks! (if it's too many just do every 4th one maybe?)

1. Femme or butch? 

for type, im vry easily wooed by butches tbh

as for myself, im genderfluid + heavily lean towards butch-ish for one gender + have been gettin more comf w that term for myself. the 3 genders i switch between, ive described as sharp, dainty and tired, for reason of not really being comf w gender labels aside from nonbinary. sharp/tired r kinda butchish, moreso sharp. like leather jackets, ripped jeans, dress pants/shirts, defs flannels (which r a given for any mood im in tbh) while tired is like mb softer, more focused on flannels + loose tank tops/shirts, shorts + certain skirts, comfy clothes, and the like   

ive found that i’m leaning more towards butch lately too, like i’ve been a lot more comfortable with pants and a nice top than i have w dresses or most skirts + im wondering if i was just hanging on to femininity for sake of society, so those r things 2 think abt. i still feel comf in them sometimes, but it’s getting much less often. gender’s weird, i still cant cling to one bc of how pressuring that is so genderfluidity is still smth for me + it shifting to different percentages is okay (im thinking out loud @ this point, but its helping so i hope its interesting to read)

3. Plaid button-ups or leather jackets?

both, but primarily flannels/plaid buttion-ups

5. Describe your aesthetic

aaahh theres a lot of diff aesthetics i could go into, but i have a tag if ur interested in a visual representation? basically, cosy homes, forests, wooden steps and bridges, cats, girls/nbs, water, plants, and old video game stuff, and clouds/skies. i’m sure there’s more in there, but for a good rule of thumb !! as for like dressing aesthetic, i like to look rly gay + attractive and a lil showy? like my shorts r Short and i love crop tops + a lot of my shirts show my bra thru them, + i like showing it when i can, like sports bra + a tank top is a fav look of mine bc i can make it look like my bra is a trim on the shirt + it’s cute. i’ve been wearing dresses less often, but occasionally, i like to rock one. id love a pair of combat boots but i have like size 11/12 feet + most stores dont carry that size + im hesitant to buy some online. 

7. Favorite pair of shoes?

its rly hard to find any, i have like walmart converse knockoffs atm + theyre a beige/grey color im not that huge on, it kinda reminds me of sandalwood but depressed

9. Any haircut goals for the future? 

there was the undercut!! and i have that down now c: next step is to dye it blue and mb some purple. i wanna bleach it if i’m gonna dye it, but im hesitant to do that bc of how damaging it is, but since my hair’s been cut a cpl time almost all the color is out now, so i think itll b ok if i take good care of it. 

11. Describe the worst date you’ve been on

i went to a cafe w someone (i think they were nb but i cant remember, it was like 2 yrs ago about ) and they were impossible to talk to bc they just kept saying “im awkward sorry” @ everything and like any conversations i tried to maintain were all one-shot responses, and like that was a lil frustrating. like i dont hold it against them or anything, more in a sense of i was rly tryin 2 carry it and just couldnt 

13. If taken, talk about your girlfriend/wife!

whooh i wish i was taken, i need affection + to b cute w someone 

15. Describe your dream wedding

hmmmm i havent thought much about it !! i know when i was younger i wanted to wear a black wedding dress but now im thinkin mb a suit that switches to dress @ the bottom?? that could b cool. I’d be happy w anything tbh, if im getting married, i’d just b happy to be w my wife/spouse. mb somewhere in a forest or on a boat would b cool, defs lots of good food and colorful flowers. I’d like a lot of color, most weddings ive been to are just b/w and bland for my taste (they’ve also all been straight tho so theres that.) it’s kind of wild to think that i might b married someday, but it’d b rly nice. i just haven’t thought much abt the planning of one. it’d b rly gay tho, probs give out tiny gay flags at each seat, and the cake could b lesbian flag colors. im rly drawing a blank on this, but i know id want all my friends around the country + world to be there. 

17. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you live?

i definitely want to live in a port town at some point !! idk where i’d like to settle down, ideally somewhere that doesnt get much hotter than 90 degrees + has lots of parks + is big enough for some events, like pride stuff, little festivals, a farmer’s market, and places to do things, such as a movie theater, bowling alley, mb an aquarium, if not one in a nearby town. hiking trails r also good. 

19. Favorite lesbian novel/story?

on a sunbeam!!! its a huge inspiration for me, and i love it so much. it always puts me in such a good mindset when i read it, and the artist is my age, so it makes me feel like I can also accomplish great things if i rly put my heart into it!! which is such a good feeling, and it has great representation + characters that i love, and its rly gay, and in space and theres ships shaped like fish + its gorgeous : D i could go on for hrs abt it + how important it is to me. theres an nb character too, and like the aspect of found families is one that rly hits home and it helped me get thru a rough time of my life + better accept myself as queer/gay. 

21. Favorite lesbian musician?

adult mom (tho i think they’re bi but still gay), or hayley kiyoko

23. Ever been assumed to be nothing more than a gal pal?

i think so, but i can’t place when, it’s been a bit. 

25. Be positive! What do you like most about being a lesbian?

talking abt being gay w other girls/nbs is lovely and cathartic, i never got to growing up bc i lived in a homophobic town + i was like dealing heavily with internalized homophobia and body/gender dysphoria so i was ace for a bit. talking more abt like sexual attraction + aesthetic attraction is new to me, and that’s been a process to get to, but it’s nice that I can now do so w/o being belittled or barraged by insult. i also just love the thought of being w someone, and daydreaming abt when that happens is really nice. also,, girls + nbs r a blessing and brighten my day and im so glad im attracted 2 them 

27. Turn ons?

absolutely communication, that’s a need. i had a bad experience w someone bc she wasn’t communicative at all, and failed to tell me that we weren’t dating despite us going on several dates + kissing??? like i wont go too into it, but hatchi matchi it was a mess. so yeah, communication, affection, and like reassurance that they actually want to be with me, and that my presence is wanted and enjoyed. I got a lot of “i dont care”s for answers last sort-of relationship, and that was rly discouraging. another turn on is for them to initiate talking and things, like holding hands or planning to hang out + such. consent is another big one. 

29. Do you usually ask other women out or do you wait for them to ask you?

i usually tend to ask them out, but im still dealing w internalized junk, so its difficult. i also havent any situations in which they liked me back, which is frustrating. like i got lead on earlier summer for abt a month until i asked what we were doing + didnt rly get an answer, and it was this whole mess. i generally try to make the first move tho, bc i know firsthand how difficult it is, but that being said, it’s still hard for me to know for sure if theyre interested + i dont wanna make things uncomf w them, so i’ll wait until i think there might b attraction. that being said, once that’s all out of the way, i like to consider myself a good flirt when im trying. 

31. Talk about your interests or hobbies!

i have lots of interests!! im obsessed w steven universe, its my fav show (and if u ever have time, we should totally watch it together sometime, i rly think you’d love it, it’s super gay + heartwarming.) i really love playing music and learning new songs, which im rly great at memorizing. talking to friends + gettin 2 know them better is always nice and fun. i like to draw new things + see the different ways ppl draw, so seeing art on here is always fun for me. i’m also rly into polygon videos (it’s a youtube channel, not like videos abt polygon haha) and this podcast called the adventure zone. season one just ended, so i might start listening to another one called friends at the table. i rly wanna start a podcast w someone, but can never find anyone to start it with. idk what I’d talk abt but if i could find a partner for it, i think it’d be a lot of fun. mb smth abt games or books/queer representation in media. doing a dnd podcast would also b rly fun, but a lot of work + editing so mb later down the road !! im blanking on other interests atm, but animations and cartoons r lovely and i aim to make something in that field one day, if not just a comic.

my hobbies r mostlyyyy drawing, dnd things now every thursday, hanging w my friends, playing video games, sometimes writing (i rly wanna start a comic, and im tryin to get my butt into gear on it), goin to parks, listening to music, and goin 2 events w roe + cesar, two of my friends. sometimes ill play music!! i need to get more than the keyboard i’m lending, but i love performing. ill also watch leg birds on youtube, theyre a lesbian couple that plays gams + theyre rly sweet. 

33. Do you love easily or does it take time for you to warm up to someone?

its easy for me to love friends, doesnt usu take me more than a few months of knowing them if were talking a lot. as for falling in love, that takes me a lot longer. ive never rly been in love w someone. i thought i was once, but rly it was just my first gay experience w someone and i wanted it to be perfect so i projected a lot of things + made it better than it seemed to myself for the duration of it, which wasn’t healthy, so i wanna avoid doing that again, + take things slower next time. or at least for what they are. 

35. Ever fallen for a straight girl?

a few times, they were just crushes tho, so it wasnt too too bad

37. Favorite comfort food?

hot cocoa or tea. as for food food, i dont think i have one. mb french toast or cinnamon rolls. 

39. Vegetarian? Vegan? None of the above?

i used to be a vegetarian!! for like a yr, but it was difficult for me to eat and feel full, and i was pretty underweight, so i stopped. 

41. Early-riser or night-owl?

both, i tend to stay up, but getting up early can be nice if i dont have to do anything. like just gently waking + making some tea and a nice breakfast + sittin around for a bit. 

43. What is your Myers-Briggs type?

enfp-a 

45. At what age did you know you were a lesbian?

i think like 16-17? it took me a bit to get words for identity, like lesbian/nonbinary and the like, but i always knew, like id call myself an individual as opposed to gendered terms that i was referred to, and always felt rly yucky w deadname + the wrong pronouns

47. Are you crushing on anyone at the moment (celebrity or otherwise)?

ive got one crush atm !! and another person who seems nice, but i wanna hang out w before like thinking abt a crush (im poly, which perhaps goes w/o saying, but i always like to state it when talking abt these things, jic )

49. Talk about your dreams/aspirations for the future

i’d like a partner or two, to get some bongos- i got to play some a couple weeks ago, and it was the most fun i’ve had playing anything!! having smth with an instant response that i could make up rhythms with was really rewarding and so much fun. i know i want a cat at some point, to go on cute dates + cuddle and kiss a lot w someone, to visit my friends in other places, dye my hair, get a better job, to travel a bit, make a comic, go to college for animation and storyboarding, mb go to camp at some point, and I’d like to make some more friends here, i’m already making some, which i’m super happy about, but it’s always nice meeting new ppl 

thank u for asking!! this was relaxing + fun, and a lot of the topics were cathartic to talk about, and i needed it. so thanks for listening too kinda

also im queen of commas, i’ve discovered while typing this

[comicteaparty]

March 14th, 2019 CTP Archive

The archive for the Comic Tea Party chat that occurred on March 14th, 2019, from 5PM - 7PM PDT.  The chat focused on Sketch Dump by Aleks Stock.

Featured Comment:

Chat:

RebelVampire

COMIC TEA PARTY- THURSDAY BOOK CLUB START!

Good evening, everyone~! This week’s Thursday Book Club is officially beginning! Today we are discussing Sketch Dump by Aleks Stock~! (https://sketchdump.org/)

Remember that Thursday discussions are completely freeform! However, every 30 minutes I will drop in OPTIONAL discussion questions in case you’d like a bit of a prompt. If you miss out on one of these prompts, you can find them pinned for the chat’s duration. Additionally, remember that while constructive criticism is allowed, our focus is fun and respectfully appreciating the comic. All that said, let’s begin!

QUESTION 1. What is your favorite scene in the comic so far and why?

one scene i particularly enjoyed was the scene where its revealed clear as day, no holds bar that Iladyl is a slave. https://sketchdump.org/post/179755402309/sketch-dump-c02p06-i-wanna-hug-iladyl-qaq the way its revealed is so straight forward but so simple really works i think. cause its just treated as a fact of life and that is indeed how it would be for the world.

i also loved the animated shattered screen effect because its both grounded in familiarity yet the way its illustrated kind of gives it that scifi fantasy tech feel that lets you know that nope, definitely not from earth

i also find the scene where Brogod meets Jen to be kind of fascinating. mostly cause i think Brogod is an interesting character since his first inclination is to make contact and help. meanwhile in the "real" world, cause i get the impression of simulation, his brain seems to be kind of exploding. but mostly i like it for the interactions cause its not the first reaction you really expect when meeting some crazy alien entity in a weirdo simulation world of sorts.

khkddn

im not done reading through the archive but i really like the scene in the beginning where the lights are flickering, it looks so cool

RebelVampire

yes i think the lighting effects are pretty cool. especially cause of how its animated because the animation kind of feels like the world is glitching. which fits with the whole world we see jenna in later

ezzy

i also like the beginning scene with the séance. just nice to see the characters fucking around. it really gives you the sense that they've known each other for a while

khkddn

it's a great artstyle overall, love it

ezzy

same!

khkddn

yeah i liked seeing the characters interacting too during the seance, some good moments there(edited)

ezzy

i love any sort of multimedia webcomic but the use of animations is rly good

it makes the world a little more vibrant

RebelVampire

yeah i agree it is really great to see the characters kind of just being them. no life threatening quest. no world to save. just a silly seance thing as an excuse to get together, hang out, maybe get some food later. i think it was a good way to introduce them since it gave more breather time to get to know them.

ezzy

i like the little hints that there's more to the characters, like that dudes scar

RebelVampire

yes or some of the subtle looks passed between certain individuals. it was interesting to see a little back history at play that we dont get to know about yet

ezzy

it really makes you want to read more

khkddn

all caught up now! definitely agree w @RebelVampire about the scene revealing Iladyl is a slave. a few pages prior to that i think lyral says something to the effect of "i stole you" which i didn't understand at first but once it got to that page i was like ohhhh

RebelVampire

haha i kind of suspected from that line but it was one of those lines that makes you go "hmm maybe not"

and then the story said nope, it was the worst thing you could expect

khkddn

harsh, harsh reality

RebelVampire

although im really curious about what gave it away. like i assume the horns or something, but im not sure what about them announced "slave over here everybody"

khkddn

i think it was the horns, since there is a panel focusing on them when those people say to leave the slave alone

maybe the hair color too but idk

RebelVampire

QUESTION 2. At the start of the comic, we’re introduced to a slew of colorful characters. Which of the characters shown so far caught your eye the most? What about that character in particular interests you? Further, which of the character dynamics intrigued you the most? From what has been shown so far, especially of the human cast, what do you make of everyone’s relationship with each other? How do you think this devil summoning ritual began, and why is everyone simultaneously showing up and being grumpy about showing up? What do you make of every character’s choice of sins, and in what ways do you think that might come into play later?

ezzy

i like jake and jen a lot, mostly based off their designs

RebelVampire

while brogod definitely interests me, i think the character who caught my eye the most was Jake. Of all the humans he seemed the most down to earth and cool. that and of all the characters jack couldve called at the beginning, he calls jake. and that really makes me want to know their past relationship history cause who you choose ot call first is pretty revealing.

ezzy

i think there's a lot of things being set up for the future and i'm rly interested in seeing where it's going

obviously these are characters who've known each other for a good while and have their own rituals and inter-relationships

the devil summoning is being done for the sake of ritual rather than anyone (besides jackson) caring about the results

so i guess it will be interesting to see why it worked this time and how it will shake up their relationships now that its worked

RebelVampire

yes, definitely. cause if this doesnt test their friendships, nothing will XD

there definitely is a lot of character stuff being set up though

i think from the opening scene the character im most worried about sin wise is allen. cause allen chose sloth and life and while jake played it off as him just being a millenial, umm, yeah. i mean you dont pick life as a sin for nothing

which since allen is the one with the scar

maybe hes got a serious case of survivors guilt

and survived something horrific

khkddn

im really curious about that scar, since it seems like he makes a bigger deal of it than anyone else

RebelVampire

yeah especially when it really isnt that bad of a scar

so theres gotta be emotional ties to it

and not just vanity

since vanity is a sin and was not the one he picked

ezzy

oooh i didn't make the connection between the scar and the sin he picked

khkddn

if there is a connection, it could go multiple ways. maybe it was a situation where he got the scar through inaction, or maybe something happened to him that made him a more passive person

RebelVampire

that could be too

that would combine it well with sloth

the character dynamic i think i want to know most about is blake and ana. cause of this page https://sketchdump.org/tagged/comic/chrono/page/13

there are so many ways to read that conversation and that look

khkddn

oh that's true, i didn't notice that the first time reading through

ezzy

(can i just say i really like the composition of that page)

RebelVampire

yes, i love the visual flow on this page, the slight animation, and all the shot choices. it was a really good build up for that look

ill also point out blake wrote love as his sin

so that is a blush

khkddn

the was blake is in the second panel vs the last panel are super different. if it's related to why he picked love, then i wonder why he and ana haven't haven't seen each other in a while (based on the "long time no see")

RebelVampire

ok wait. im rereading this and the papers are sin and sacrifice. so love isnt the implied sin but what blake wants to sacrifice

so is it like...ana is his ex hes still in love with but he wants to move on?

khkddn

hm that would explain them not seeing each other

RebelVampire

yes and the awkward response from blake

ezzy

oooh

RebelVampire

if life is allen's sacrifice, then thats even worse tho and stands to reason that hes probably guilty of inaction

QUESTION 3. Within the comic, an “innocent” devil summoning seems to go horrifically wrong. What do you think exactly happened to everyone involved? Why did this summoning go so awry, and why did none of the other attempts before have the same results? How does all this tie into what Brogod was doing regarding summoning and translating? Did Brogod somehow cause what happened to the human gang, or were both sides victims? Also, why was Brogod found unconscious and barely breathing after making contact with Jen? What’s even going on with Jen? Lastly, do you think Brogod is okay and, if so, will Brogod try to make contact again?

I do think Brogod was responsible for why everything went awry. Cause its like he was trying to summon the summoner which probably created an extreme magical paradox

ezzy

my guess is that the two "summonings" happening at the same time is what caused everything to go all whoopsy-fucky

khkddn

i think the previous seances never worked because each time, there wasn't someone like brogod on the other end doing their own seance

it's weird that brogod got all messed up but the humans didn't. maybe it's because there was one of him and seven of them?

RebelVampire

i assume brogod got messed up more from making contact with jen

rather than the seance itself causing it

like had he bailed and said "no lets not talk to this person" he mightve been fine?

ezzy

i think the thing with jen is like... either happenning in his head or he's like projecting his conscious to another plane and thats why he's fountaining blood

RebelVampire

yeah

i got the simulation impression

like brogod was tapping into another world

another world i would not be surprised was purgatory or something

whereas the humans got physically transported

simulation world also cause last i checked human eyes dont glow blue like that

unless jen was secretly a cyborg all along

khkddn

im trying to figure out what jen is saying in the non-translated parts.... too hard >_>

RebelVampire

by process of elimination i believe jen was the one who chose to sacrifice limb, so i hope that thing brogod put on her doesnt have long term consequences

khkddn

sacrificing limb sounds pretty straightforward in terms of making it literal, wouldn't want to pick that one

the only non-translated part i think i understand is the one on this page https://sketchdump.org/tagged/comic/chrono/page/32

p sure she's saying something about his tail

RebelVampire

makes sense

i can read "That's a

but the rest i cant figure out

im really curious why brogod seemed to have all those translation bug things as the thematic colors we keep seeing to represent each character

khkddn

they also flew away into the void (i think they did, he tried to catch them) so im wondering where those lil things went

RebelVampire

i mean the most likely conclusion is to the other characters

considering in the latest page we can confirm emily made contact

and clearly the language barrier would still apply without help

ezzy

yeah, it would be silly to have the characters run around without being able to speak the language

so thats a neat solution

RebelVampire

also interesting. cause magic shenanigans must be at work

i do think brogod is gonna be fine and be back again to figure out wtf is going on. cause i think after he wakes up he might realize he had something to do with it. or hell make contact with jen and gleam info about their situation and go "whoops"

ezzy

im really curious about what's gonna happen lmao

RebelVampire

QUESTION 4. As the comic has only gotten so far, there’s a lot of speculation to be had about the future. Do you think the human gang will ultimately get back to their homes? At the very least, do you think they’ll at least be able to find each other given they all seem to be quite separated? How do you think Iladyl will be involved with the plot considering his friend seemed to have located Emily? Why is the friend interested in involving Iladyl in the first place? Do you think everyone else has made contact with someone like Emily and Jen? On a different note, what about the world interests you the most right now? Finally, in general, what sorts of conflicts, events, or anything else are you hoping to see or think might happen?

so in line with the topic of sin and sacrifice earlier, im really concerned ana is gonna die. cause thats one way to sacrifice love

ezzy

i feel like they'll be separated for a long time and will have to deal with their relationships while being apart and thrust into a new and foreign situation

you know, like college

RebelVampire

yeah i dont think theyll find each other anytime soon. although the characters who know them may find them. like maybe brogod will find Iladyl's friend and they can chat about their alien friends. but i assume the humans are kind of like in pockets where they cant make contact with each other until theyre out in the actual physical world where there isnt a white void everywhere.

ezzy

they'll probably have to reevaluate their relationships under duress and will be different people by the time they see each other again

RebelVampire

yes, definitely. i mean not even their relationships. theyre gonna have to evaluate themselves cause they all seem to be early 20s or younger with exception to jake who seems to be working at a hospital

tho exception in the sense that im not sure what his job is there

ezzy

the description does say 2 teens and a number of young adults

i wanna say five but i cant fucking count

RebelVampire

i assume most of them are around jack's age

again minus jake

cause it really depends on what jake does

cause if hes a nurse or doctor or something hed be a lot older cause med school takes a long ass time

ezzy

if hes a nurse he might be younger i think(edited)

because nursing school doesnt take as long

RebelVampire

true. but tbf jake could also be some sort of genius and did the whole college thing at 10. hes mostly just the wildcard i wont put eggs into the basket

on a different topic, i bet the others are not having as great as time as jenna or emily. cause i will be surprised if they all manage to meet someone who legitimately wants to help them

ezzy

my guess is that theyre all within 4 years of each other

it will be interesting to see if they all have like... a demon counterpart to play off of

RebelVampire

i think thats plausible, just all their demon counterparts might not be the best of ppl. like knowing slaves are a thing in this world makes me think one of them is kind of destined for it

ezzy

yep

RebelVampire

the bit of world im most intrigued by is from this page https://sketchdump.org/post/174655505354/sketch-dump-c01p24-minor-seizure where brogod gets mad about almost damaging the most priceless artifact in the palace. cause i cant decide what hes talking about, although i assume its the lighter. and if so, wtf happened in the world that its the most priceless artifact

alternative could be talking about the computer, but considering technology seems rampant idk

khkddn

it does look like an ordinary lighter, but who knows

(ordinary lighter w blue fire, that is)

ezzy

hmm the computer says something about a gift and lyddal(?) also mentioned a soul gift

maybe its a soul lighter

lladyl lmao

RebelVampire

hmm that could be

but now that tells me why the friend probably wanted to get Iladyl involved

maybe Iladyl's soul gift is something that will help

with emily

COMIC TEA PARTY- THURSDAY BOOK CLUB END!

Sadly, this wraps up this week’s Thursday Book Club chat for now. Thank you so much to everyone for reading and joining us! We want to give a special thank you to Aleks Stock, as well, for making Sketch Dump. If you liked the comic, make sure to support Aleks Stock’s efforts however you’re able to~!

Read and Comment: https://sketchdump.org/

Aleks Stock’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sketchdump

Sketch Dump’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/sketchdumpcomic

[poneshyay]

I want human Genji and Sock w/ family headcanons. Add in the other Pokemon and stuff?

THIS IS THE LONGEST ONE I THINK I HAVE EVER FUCKING DONE.

Edit: I fucked up last night somehow and all of these were deleted thank gosh for Copy and paste

~Sock is a guy in a faded Pikachu hoodie that has drawstrings. If you embarrass him, he pulls the said strings and hides his face.

~Genji is a full foot taller than his boyfriend and he teases him for it almost constantly. Genji wears a pink scarf constantly and hates when it’s taken off.

~ Bradley, called Baby by everyone, is a toddler just starting to get around by walking. He was the second one adopted.

~ Peter , often called ‘Pikachu’ because of his hoodie, is a bit younger than Baby and is the cutest boy. He likes coloring and cuddling with his dads. He was the first adopted.

~Ian, nicknamed Gandalf by peers as an insult but he uses it as a nickname, is the middle child. He was the most recent adoption and he’s a prodigy. He is very smart and he was able to skip quite a few grades in his lifetime. He collects spoons (like around the world spoons, cartoon spoons, not basic table spoons). His parents support his education but also make sure he takes breaks.

~ Cedric is the oldest son and he’s the stereotypical emo/scene kid. He shops at Hot Topic, listens to emo bands, and watches a lot of anime. He has a black rainbow tail that hangs from his belt loop, lots of those thick rubber bracelets, and always has his hair in his eyes. Genji kinda adopted him because Cedric’s real parents suck and Cedric more or less lives with him and Sock.

~Mallory is the second oldest son (technically the oldest because Cedric isn’t really in the family) and wants to be like Cedric. Mallory is accident prone and makes up 79% of the families yearly hospital visits. He was the third adopted.

~ Flake is Genji’s best friend who can not stand Angel. People close to him call him ‘Snowslash’ due to his amazing skills on a snowboard. He and Angel will fight nonstop if allowed. Puddles has a kid crush on him.

~Rocky is a professional wrestler known by the name ‘RockShock’ and the neighborhood celebrity. He lives in the house behind Genji and has to deal with the kids shenanigans from time to time, like the time the kids threw rocks in his backyard and nearly broke the glass. Aside from that he gets along with the family and often comes over to hang out. He doesn’t like Baby very much because as he puts it, “The kids eyes peer into my soul and knows my sins.”

~Angel is Socks best friend and she doesn’t like Genji very much. She’s kind of a snob but is smart. She constantly bickers with Flake. She likes ice cream.

~Blue and Puddles are the neighbor kids who spend so much time at Genji and Socks house that they might as well live there. They’re twins, but Blue was the first one out the womb. Their parents are barely ever home and rather than hire a babysitter they pretty much just dump them at Genji and Socks without warning. Genji does not like their parents at all and Sock barely tolerates them.

~ Brock (Drella’s dad) and Crowley (Tox’s dad) are brothers and do rescue missions. Everybody is kinda intimidated by them. Drella (the oldest) is kind of a bully while Tox is a but shy and likes eating things that should not be eaten. They live together and tend to keep to themselves.

~ Teddy is the kids babysitter, and a good one at that. Nothing gets past his watchful eye and everybody likes him. He is super good with the kids and Genji likes him.

~ Lucky is the kids father figure aside from their actual fathers. He is easily the most intimidating person in the neighborhood and he has his own kids to take care of. 

~ Genji teaches a martial arts class on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Friday nights. So Sock has the kids and often times Cedric to look after.

~ Mondays and Thursdays Sock works as a greeter at a store, so Genji stays home with the kids and Cedric.

~ ‘I love you’ is a common thing said in the house, after every kiss; every bath; every timeout; every bandaged up boo-boo; every phone call; and every night before bed.  ‘I love you’ is said at least ten times every day by everyone. Even the kids say this to each other.

~ Both dads are good in the kitchen, Sock at cooking and Genji at ordering take out on the phone.

~ Blue and Puddles don’t think their parents are bad people, they actually love their parents very much.

~ Genji cannot be in a room by himself for more then ten minutes while at the house, one of the kids will find him and more will join.

~Angel and Flake once punched each other at the same time and they both knocked the other out.

~Cedric wasn’t used to hearing I love you so the first few times people at the house began saying it to him he was suspicious.

~ Sock is easily stressed by the toddlers needs for attention while he’s busy doing other things, so he sends them to Genji or an older sibling.

~ Baby and ‘Pikachu’ share a room and if one starts crying during the night they BOTH start crying, so Genji and Sock both have to get up and tend to them.

~Puddles has a huge crush on Flake and he keeps telling her know, because she’s like 5 and it’s ridiculous, but she won’t listen.

~ Cedric is lazy and will fall asleep anywhere, he falls asleep in the nursery on the floor once and the kids get stuff in his hair.

~ Blue and Puddles parents forget they have kids and go on vacation and then halfway through they remember and call the GenSock to see how the kids are. It takes every ounce of self control in Genji not to cuss them out on the phone because there are children in the room. Once they get back Genji let’s them have it in two different languages.

~ Half the kids know how to speak french, the other half wings it.

~ Teddy comes by often and after a while he and Cedric begin hanging out outside the house, Teddy being like a big brother to him.

~ “It’s quiet, why is it quiet?” “KIDS, WHO’S DEAD?” “Genji calm down!”

~ Family naps are a thing.

~ “Daddy cries when his cups empty too.” “I will not have you making that joke near my children’s ears!””They’re my kids too.”

~ Rocky and Angel get together and make an epic slip and slide in their backyards because it has a hill and no fence dividing their yards. Every time Flake tries to get on, Angel messes him up.

~ Genji and Sock rarely have the bed to themselves and they kind of accept it.

~ Sock is nervous about his appearance so he rarely takes his hood off outside the house.

~ Genji’s scarf is so long that not only can he and Sock share it in the winter, they can share it with every single child as well.

~ They met when their second best friends (Peepo and Swirl) met up at a smoothie bar and stared going out.

~ Sock is a heavy sleeper and a huge hugger.

~Genji got used to the hugs after a while.

~Genji takes the kids to a pool one day and half of them don’t get into the water and the half that does either pees in it while clinging to his body in their floaties or winds up getting the family sent to the emergency room.

~ Blue has a dog but it doesn’t live with him and his family, it lives in the neighboring neighborhood as a stray.

~ Sock and Genji always make sure to have family dinner, making sure there are NO electronics and nobody left out. Also feeding the family dog your vegetables is a crime punishable by no dessert and an early bedtime. If Cedric doesn’t eat his vegetables he has to give up his phone and game system.

~ Baby is one of the stare kids that stares at you for almost forever.

~ ‘Pikachu’ is Socks favorite but he’ll never admit it.

~ Genji teaches the kids how to do martial arts and Sock has to keep reminding them not to beat up each other or break anything.

~ Genji takes the kids out to play in the snow and neither of the toddlers can come out because it’s too cold, so they just watch through the window making Genji feel bad until Sock sets up a movie for them.

~ Genji and Sock got stuck in a closet once when they first started dating and just made out for three hours. Turned out the closet wasn’t even locked.

~ Mallory was once in the hospital for breaking his arm while trying to kick flip off the roof.

~ When they first met Sock and Genji fought, but then came a series of awkward flower giving then came dating.

~ Genji takes the toddlers out for their first snow and Sock is dying laughing on the porch because they’re bundled up so tight they can barely move and they keep falling. At one point ‘Pikachu’ slips down the driveway and Genji just takes them in.

~ The dads encourage Gandalf to be smart, but at the same time make sure he takes breaks. They have dictionaries in every room in case they need to look up a word he just said and are always willing to check his work for him if he asks.

~ Gandalf will use Mallory as a guinea pig for any experiments he has if not stopped. Mallory has no problems with this.