#i wasn't even on this timeline much less this planet

[skymagpie]

I love doing that little quest when Khadgar calls the council to tell them they will be working with the Horde against the Legion because

Khadgar waiting for you outside and behind the Violet Citadel like a nervous kid because he knows what is about to happen when he steps inside.

He is nice enough to let you know that this will be Bad and he knows ahead of time it will suck for you.

Jaina full caps "NEVER" followed by calling you vermin to your face (ouch)

Khadgar having none of it and pushing the vote anyway, aggressively

You having to deal with Ansirem who is still around and voted "Nay" to your face like okay we are all pretending this didn't happen

[thewertsearch]

You produce your most spirited LAD SCRAMBLE yet, and hop up to the next GOD TIER, achieving the illustrious REVENGE OF DOCTOR RAGNAROK. All of your vitals go completely bonkers. Your MAN GRIT is off the charts. You're embarrassed for us to even know what it is. It's that gaudy.

Remember when I described the God Tiers as 'less silly' than the Echeladder's levels?

...yeah. I should have known that wasn't going to last long.

You put forth your best LASS SCAMPER of all time, and clear another sweet GOD TIER, the nigh-unattainable SAYONARA KANSAS.

For Jade, these tiers are essentially meaningless now. She's the First Guardian of Earth, and wields powers far greater than the paltry parlor tricks of an ascended Sburb Player.

Jade's not a God Tier - She's a god.

Nobody should ever mess with you. Not even me.

And Hussie knows it.

You don't get boondollars anymore. That shit is for babies now. Instead, you are finally ready to have your first ACHIEVEMENT BADGE sewn on to your KIDDIE CAMPER HANDYSASH! You each receive the badge GIFT OF GAB, enabling you to engage in simple, direct dialogue with others, without requiring any gimmicks to facilitate communication. You don't need to type through a chat client, or talk to a sprite, or traverse through a memory in a dream bubble, or wander around in an interactive game environment, or any of that stuff. You seriously never thought you would live to see this achievement unlocked. It almost feels like cheating.

Getting a little sick of that restriction, eh, Hussie?

Sufficiently advanced Players are allowed to break the rules of the comic, a concept which is brimming with potential. Next thing you know, they'll be picking up objects without a Sylladex, naming their children before they're thirteen, or violating the sanctity of the alpha timeline wait what was that last one

A verbal conversation, with no Pesterchum handles in sight. This really does feel like a milestone, and it's incredibly funny (and on-brand) that we needed a Prestige Class to unlock it.

Also... this is decidedly not a three-millisecond journey. Just how long are they stuck here?

JADE: im not sure! JADE: some sort of limbo dimension between the two walls i guess JADE: like a realm with unusual spatial properties we have to cross through

Jade, for her part, is not aware of the metacanonical implications of this little trip. I think it was Scratch who first told her about the Fourth Wall, and it's clear he made a few tactical omissions concerning its true nature.

JOHN: we escaped the scratch? JOHN: like, we still exist and everything? JADE: yes! JADE: we still totally exist john JOHN: ok, just making sure. JOHN: i still felt pretty existy, but you never know.

A pertinent question, considering where they are.

Technically, they might be more real than they were before, since they've left the fictional medium(!) of their reality.

JOHN: i mean, we crashed through that giant window you magically made with witch powers to escape the scratch, so we can keep existing, right? JADE: yes JADE: i didnt make it with witch powers though, i captchalogued it hours ago because karkat told me to…

Wait, but wasn't it Future Jade who told Karkat to do that?

It certainly sounds like it was - and the current, post-session Jade should already be older than any 'future' Jade who talked to Karkat during the session.

By now, Jade should know why she arranged for herself to grab the Wall - but she's acting like she only did it because Karkat told her to. Maybe I'm just misinterpreting what she's saying.

JOHN: did you at least make it huge with witch powers? JADE: i did make it huge with witch powers! JOHN: so i guess that's what witch powers do, is make things huge? JADE: they also make things small JOHN: right, like you did with all those planets. JADE: yup JADE: also JADE: witch powers can teleport things, and fling things around through space at very high velocities JADE: all sorts of stuff! JADE: but to be honest, im not sure how much of that is attributable to inheriting becs abilities…

All of it, actually.

The only thing Bec didn't do was fling an object around at a high velocity...

...until you remember he did this, which absolutely counts.

So far, nothing Jade's done has been through her God Tier abilities. She's so powerful that her status as the Witch of Space is completely, utterly superfluous.

[amethystheartsx]

SCATTERED ACROSS THE STARS

Sylus Angst

After years of yearning, eons of loyalty what does a man do when all he gets is pieces, uneven and unfair.

Warnings: angst, slight mentions of chaos murder, drug addiction, and suicide (all mild)

AN: I often think all LIs and MC deserve better. A happiness of their own, not the kind tainted with curses and what not. If you don't like it don't read (°∀°)

Contains reference of another fic I wrote of zayne. I'll add link in case you wanna read.

Sylus was pissed.

No, that's not the right word, it portrays nothing but mere annoyance and anger. Sylus was beyond that.

Sylus was hurt.

No, that's not the right word as well, he wished he was just hurt. He wished it was only pain he felt every time he saw her with them.

Sylus was broken.

Tsk, incorrect yet again. How can one be broken when they were never whole to begin with.

For someone known to have everything worldly in the palm of his hand, Sylus lacked the most essential of his being. His soul, torn and used to bring life into another, one supposed to be his one true companion. His beloved. But Alas! 

Universe played a dirty trick.

For a dragon who owned the treasures of many fallen kings, the one who Never shared any of his possessions, even the one he did not care for, was forced to share the most precious one.

How ironic.

He thought his love was the purest, a beautiful yet tragic legend woven into the ancient ruins only for it to soar once again when they reunited.

He thought none like him existed, one who dared to love so fervently. A valiant display of ardent affection despite the curse that eventually killed him.

Sylus prided himself in his ability to love after the cosmos banned together to refrain it from happening, he prided himself to make a place for himself just so he could, for once, live out his fairy tale with her.

He deserved it right? After everything they went through. He still stands tall after that ever-longing suffering; her warm embrace should be his reward, right?!?.

Wrong.

Ah yes, wrong. Sylus felt wronged.

For the one whom he loved the most, was not his, at least not entirely.

Not the way he belonged to her. No. He longed for her, kept all of his love, his softness, his laughter reserved for her, made it so sacred so that when he laid it bare in front of her it would be nothing the eldest star in the ever-growing galaxy had ever witnessed before.

That's until he learned of them, their desires, their history.

A messenger who betrayed his god.

A god who led down his people.

A royal who left his own planet in ruins.

A fallen soldier who didn't let even death restrain him.

Each of them bared down their lives, people, treasures, and sanity. Over and over again. From gardens of jasmines to bonds of eternal. From past to future and across multiple timelines in between, tangled web, whispered myths and many fostered anecdotes.

Each of their feats rivaled the other, a grandeur display of Romance, that seeps through the galaxies and into her heart.

Wherever it beats, it finds her. They all find her, Love her, and then inevitably lose her.

Yes. The eternal cosmic affairs that have rattled the divine always end in the same way.

Heartbreak.

Tragic.

Unfulfilled.

Tsk. What a waste.

—--

Knowledge is power only some can bear, and Sylus would know. He had spied on them, all of them. Learned about them trying to find the flaws he could use to pry her away from their grasp. All for it to turn into failures.

Not just because they were clean slate, no like him they had their own fallouts.

But because of how happy she looked with them, so happy, just as she did with him. Not more, not less.

Just as much.

How unfair.

For he wanted her all for himself, blame his dragon roots but sylus don't share, how could he do it with the one who owns half his soul.

Is it so wrong he wants it all to himself? To get back the loyalty he had shown for eons?

He wasn't asking for much was he?

Everyday he will see her with one of them.

Under the starlight, along the oceans, in cozziness of duvets or the serenity of the night sky.

And she would dazzle for them just like she dazzles for him.

Nothing more, nothing less.

Nothing special.

__

His beloved was scattered across the stars, and he too only got the crumbs. The spared affections she had to offer, and sylus had enough.

He deserved to have something sacred. Something all for him. Just him.

And as the time went on he noticed…

So did she.

She deserved to have love that doesn't demand her being, her life, her blood, her heart.

She deserved to love as easy as breathing, not one suffocated with unseen linkages that burned with cosmic mischief.

She deserved to love and be loved with free will. Not because she was designed to, programmed to, and especially not with those picked by forces beyond her kin.

And so sylus decided to let her go, it wasnt easy, nor was it gentle but it did happen.

He pulled apart the string of fate, to let her free. It wasn't clean, certainly not smooth at edges but now she could breath. 

Soulmates can be platonic, romance isn't mandatory and besides, Kittens thrive better untethered, untamed.

—

After the “breakup”, if you can even call it that, a word far too trivial to define the undoing bond burned within the constellation, Sylus threw himself into work. Even more than before, going as far as taking Down the cheap underling, spreading chaos on the streets of the N-109 zone.

He was a ruthless killer before now he was a reckless one as well. His strategic movements and calculated attacks roughed up with insatiable need to wreak havoc.

He barely used his henchmen; why should he when he could do it better than them and also get the thrill of it?

Getting his own hands dirty in the hopes of removing the traces she left behind. He had learned the art of letting go, didnt mean he doesn’t get to process his grievance on his own accord, no matter how bloody it is.

Turns out he wasn't the first one to do so, it was the doctor. He, too, had to de-tangle himself from bushes full of thorns that had given him scars to last a lifetime, to plant a whole new garden with another flower just as fragrant, just as pretty. Even though it was small, it was still beautiful because it was entirely in bloom, not just the scraps he had to lose so much for.

Though Sylus was not looking for one, too tired by the charade to bother himself with it. He lived this long he would live out the rest of it as well.

Or so he thought.

---

During a hunt for a specific rat that had infiltrated the base, Sylus was not pleased when his carefully laid out trap was outsmarted by the traitor, fleeing the spot after tricking someone else into it.

“Looks like the rat trap ended up catching a little mouse” he spoke up approaching the bird cage that held just a sweet little thing, at least compared to him. 

He is displeased red eyes were now on,

You.

your pretty big eyes on him as well as crimson shades dust your cheek. “I- I am not supposed to be here…” you spoke, rightfully scared as the man in front of you approached the bird cage, his veiny hand reaching out to hold a bar, still studying, still weary.

“Obviously” he says in a bored tone “you do not fit the description. It was supposed to be a large burly man and not a, well…a fragile little thing too easy to break” he says.

You couldn't help but giggle and that caught him off guard. “Sorry, it's just- your voice is just as deep as I imagined,” you say, making the man in front of you give you a questioning glare. “Excuse me?” he asked. Of course, she wasn't the first to say something like that to him. Many had tried to tempt the man who runs the city to no real outcome.

“You are sylus right? I- am a huge fan!” You say looking up from your place nearing the bars of the cage.

Many had claimed to be his nemesis, his rivals, even admirers, but a fan? That was a first. “A fan? A fan of what?” he asked, his low voice not portraying the hint of curiosity he felt.

“You know, like your achievements and stuff” you reply simply, matter-of-factly.

There was a beat of silence.

“You mean my criminal record?”

“A mighty impressive one”.

His devilishly handsome face contorts into a slightly puzzled expression as he refuses to look away at the shorter person in front of him who continued to look at him….like that.

Sylus was aware how blessed he was aesthetically but he couldn't help but be drawn to her eyes and how she looked at him. They brimmed with admiration, respect and slight fear that didn't aim towards him. Now it isn't that no one ever looked at him like that before, no. What made it different was how pure it was, how easy it came to her when it really shouldn't. Her desires were sated and she didn't require anything of him. Not his favor, not his hate. She was so contant in the moment just being present here, with him.

Sylus had to step back and look away. An unfamiliar weight unfolded in his chest

“Enough with this charade whatever this is” he says “how did you end up here? Because with what you have said so far I believe you are some kind of stalker? Is that what it is?” He speaks with accusations directed towards you.

“Oh no! No” you to quickly step back, panic drips your demeanor “There is a misunderstanding, I have been played to be accurate”.

“Oh? Why tell me more about it little mouse” he says crossing his arm, his tone was sarcastic yet sincere. “I am all ears”.

With a deep breath you begin “that big and burly man you mentioned vaguely, were you talking about daryl? Also known as the bishop?” When he nods cautiously you continue “right! So what happened was, I owed Daryl a favor and he cashed it in and told me to make this delivery for him and well I had no clue that delivery will bring me here” you breath out seemingly calm but that slight shakiness in your voice didn't miss him. “I assume he somehow knew it was a trap then set me up as an escape goat” 

Once you were finished sylus ran a hand through his hair, visibly frustrated. It doesn't happen often that one of his strategically laid out traps doesn't work or catch someone innocent, but even in this moment after his failed attempt his mind was more interested in you “And why would a small thing like you owe a man like bishop a favor” his eyes narrows down at you with suspicion laced with intrigue. Just who are you? First, you claim to be a fan and then turn out to have some sort of connection with a rat that Infiltrated his base.

The question made you chuckle “ah so funny story” you begin, now having sylus’s full attention because how would it be funny to know a man like The Bishop.

“So my dad killed his dad, and then like kind of adopted him because of guilt since his mom was a druggie, she ended her life subscription after like 4 to 5 years or so anyway” You wave it off like it was no big deal and the red-eyed man could only just listen to you stunned. “So yeah Daryl kind of came and went never really stayed, got in the wrong g crowd and found out the truth so he obviously tried to kill us all but thankfully couldn't” you rambled, sylus felt they were losing the plot “If he tried to kill you all why would you owe him….anything?” He tried hiding how absurd he found it, but she could see it as “that's the funny part of having a dysfunctional family.” she leaned on the bars of the cage. “Can't live with them, can't live without them. After nearly burning down our house and running away for good, or so I thought, he returned again remorseful because, well, my dad did take him in, and we were nice enough to him.” She shrugs. Sylus shifted on his feet, impatient “Still doesn't explain why-”

“I am getting there jeez” you giggle, “though we did not really forgive him and cut off our ties I had to reach out to him because” you take another deep breath and sylus holds his.

“I needed the money, we were in ruins, and all kinds of bills were stacking up my books, not making enough. It- it was rough,” You chuckle, but there is no humor in it; the sparkles in your eyes dim down, replaced by the pain of the past that still seems to haunt you. “It was a good chunk I borrowed and was paying him back bit by bit after I started doing well till out of the blue he called in and asked a favor in exchange for forgiving the rest of the loan and- well, rest is history” she stands straighter arms crossed “that answered all your questions?”

Sylus stares you up and down. He knows, of course, that you are not lying or deceiving him, that your heart is pure even after all you've been through, and it is only what you tell him; he wonders what else you hide behind that flowery smile.

“even if you are saying the truth you have seen too much now, and given your…complicated relationship with the bishop I suppose letting you go so freely won't be an option,” he says, his voice dropping low to that cold tone that can make anyone succumb to their knees, the one you had in your eyes right now. That's the look Sylus was used to, not that mellow one you have been giving him.

“No! No wait, don't kill me” you grabbed onto the bar's desperate pleas falling from your lips making him smirk “I-I can be useful I can help you find him! everything I know I'll tell you. Please” the last word falling much softly.

“mhm is that so then maybe you can be spared” sylus says knowing damn well he was never planning on killing her in the first place.

“Well then” he smirks “I am expecting your full corporation little miss”.

AN: This was supposed to be long lol, but I figured I'd make it a whole part 2 later. It is almost written but I have so many ideas I need to arrange it all first

Anywho, let me know if I should write it or not.

Also here is the link.

[raileurta]

Hi raileurta!

Just read your transformers Symbiosis and got curious. What do you think would happen if the humans just up and left ?

Hi 👋! You guys can just call me raiL.

Depends on the point of the timeline were talking about here. Which I'm going to respectfully name pre-virus and post-virus. While it is true that some bots can be problematic with their human partners 95% of the time there's no issues. So if a human leaves while bots will be sad or angry they can get over it. Later in the timeline not so much. I felt that there would have to be a real big reason for transformers to more or less act like stereotypical yanderes.

So my thoughts drifted towards the idea of a deadly virus that inflected the human race. Millions died and it brought humanity to near extinction. Even when it was cured the damage had already been done; leaving only 10% of the population alive. While there were still enough humans to continue their species there wasn't enough for the Cybertronians. Unlike in most canon where there's only a few hundred Cybertronians left in my au there's billions. (I did say it was a bigger planet)

So yeah there's not enough little buddies to go around and add in the trauma of the virus? Yeah humans are seriously fucked.

If a human even thinks of leaving transformers go completely psycho. If a human is not bonded with them then they'll just be a little creepy but otherwise fine. For humans to activate a bot's weapons they got to do a soul bond. While both parties will suffer emotional difficulties if they go without a bond for too long bots are the most affected by it. A human theoretically can live without a transformer partner just fine but it's not the same with them. I haven't decided the specific reason yet but it's probably got to do with that they got a physical soul. (Spark)

So in short in the earlier part of the timeline it's Gucci and in the later part...... hope you don't mind not having skin.

[escape-music1432]

Prologue ll

(MCU!Adam Warlock x Ex-Avenger!Reader)

Next | Previous

Description: I live for angst, and this is going to be just a short few parts where reader rejects Adam's advances but slowly finds themselves being hit with the realization that they do indeed harbor feelings; although, not as strongly, but they were beginning to grow.

Warnings: mentions of canonical deaths, canonical violence, swearing, reader fell for Steve Rogers, alcohol consumption, (more will be added accordingly)

Word count: 1,771

If you're reading this then, yes, the description is clickbait cuz it doesn't happen till way later in this short ahh story I'm writing.

None of this is proofread.

Follows the MCU timeline so keep up!

However I’d like to inform you that this is very much simplified and is based around vol.3 of Guardians of The Galaxy as well as Endgame, a small brief moment of Love and Thunder and the Holiday Special.

Enjoy and pls don't come for me, I'm just having fun and simping for this golden mf :)

The first flight off of Terra was agonizing, the urge to vomit right on the ships floor was one of your first thoughts. Adjusting to your new life was going to be difficult, flying was already becoming one of those hardships. It didn't take long for the sickness to subside; the absolutely beautiful sight of stars and galaxies took your breath away. It was definitely a sight to behold, never in your life had you thought of ever leaving Earth, yet here you were on a spaceship rushing through the vast, endless space to who knows where, with an interesting group of creatures.

You were introduced to the whole group with a stoic expression, almost intimidating. As easily as it was for you to mingle with people that sickness came back tenfold as you jumped through a golden barrier.

Rocket wasn't too harsh with your introduction, mentioning you being a sweet doll who helped him, and Nebula settle into Terra during the first year after the Snap, welcoming them with open arms like they were family. He obviously left out the drunken nights he'd spent nagging your ear off with his sobs and passive aggressiveness.

Nebula stepped in to give good word as well, making you out to be this mighty badass which was high praise but honestly made you seem like someone who would bump heads with anyone and everyone.

That wasn't true, right?

Just as you finished that thought, her hand found its way up on your shoulder as she nudged you forward aggressively, it felt incredibly rude to you. You nearly snapped at her. You knew affection was not her strong suit, so you let it go almost as quickly as the anger rose.

That answered your question.

When you joined the Guardians, you didn't realize Thor had tagged along as well as his friend Korg.

It ended up being you, him and Korg being the closest of everyone else, which didn't come as a surprise. You'd spend most nights up drinking with Thor but not as much as he could, he could drink an ungodly amount and barely be getting a buzz.

Those nights you'd talk to them about Steve, you'd open up to him like one would to an older sibling and instead of judging you he would give you advice, a helping hand.

He taught you many things about Asgard, how it was before Ragnarök and his sister, brother and father. He would talk highly of his mother. He even mentioned Jane, and how he missed her deeply. Korg would pitch in a joke or two to lift the mood just enough for you two to relax. It was like a nightly therapy session for you both, never ending and oh so sweet.

Once you became accustomed to the others on the ship conversations ran smoothly.

You were everything Rocket and Nebula described you to be, a sweetheart with a short fuse who could be a badass in the field, a combination that oddly fit you well.

The missions weren't too hard, most would last less than a day and some lasting weeks. The ones you enjoyed were visiting different planets and seeing the culture, the food, the species. It never got old seeing such beautiful places.

When you weren't on missions Rocket would teach you some random technological stuff you hadn't really memorized as easily as he wanted you to. You stuck with it, even the random long tiring night up late helping him build and fix trinkets and weaponry were becoming like second nature to you.

Nebula on the other hand, would need your help fixing things around the ship as well as helping Rocket build new weapons. It never stuck to one thing though, she helped teach you the planets, galaxies, things to stay away from, who to stay away from, what precautions you needed to take and so on. Your relationship felt like a sisterly bond. She'd scold you, you'd argue back then bounce right back to being friends again like the broken machinery and tense atmosphere didn't happen.

Quill taught you how to pilot the ship, but it was mostly him asking questions about life on Terra and how the music industry is doing, even as going as far to ask for song recommendations when his music wasn't hitting as hard as it usually did.  You learned from Nebula that her sister and Quill had a thing before Thanos tossed her off a cliff, a relationship that you knew had him broken up since she came back from the past. Unknown to anyone else you and Quill got quite close due to his habit of drinking with you, Thor and Korg. It was just another group therapy session with him included. It made those night more fun when him and Thor would bicker back and forth like second nature, then go back to being big saps about the women they've lost.

Kraglin had joined your adventures not long after, leaving this group of people called the Ravengers. He was someone who had spoken very highly of Quill, mentioning that him and another named Yondu raised Quill within the groups of Ranvengers. It was a lot to take in, but his explanation was simplified enough for you to grasp for the most part. You two practiced his use of his flying arrow or as you've come to know its name of a Taka arrow, powered by the fin atop his head. Kraglin had absolutely no control over the arrow when it would constantly piercing the wrong thing, not limited to Drax, yourself, Nebula and pieces of hardware. He was good fun to be around otherwise.

Drax, Groot and Mantis were just a bunch of goofballs. sharing their stories of past adventures.

Drax was very literal, and his honesty was like being hit by a truck. You were told by Quill how his species worked and how some things would go over his head if you weren't up front about asking him direct questions and giving him direct instructions. You two got along well with arm wrestles and brute force, which was entertaining for everyone to see. He talked about his life before the Guardians and how he lost his wife and child, something you could somewhat relate to but not entirely.

Mantis was very sweet and a bit oblivious to certain things, she wasn't annoying but very close to it. You enjoyed her company and how she would talk about her solitary life with Ego and how she became a Guardian. Her and Drax would bicker sometimes and she would end up hurting his feelings, only for her to magically make him feel better with a simple touch and instructional words. You hoped you hadn't already been rewired by her, which was now a constant fear for you as less threatening as she seemed.

Groot was a hard one to crack, not being able to understand a lick of what he said.

"I am Groot." Can only be translated to just those three words, you honestly thought everyone was joking that he said full sentence or just a single word, but as time went on you slowly came around to understanding most of what he was saying. He'd pop out a flower every now and again, different varieties of them but once he figured out your favorite, he'd be constantly giving you one. It was a sweet gesture especially on those days that had you stressed and wanting to jump out the airlock.

They were all very welcoming considering everything that had happened. It wasn't just friends, it was a family. As much as you loved and cared for the Avengers, this group had struck you in the heart much harder than they had. It was really a happy family, a family you didn't know you needed.

It was nice.

Life in space was vast, something new every day, but you enjoyed the celebrations after a tough mission; many of them included drinking and dancing, dancing was something you've come to enjoy and had a knack for. There was just something about having space right in front of your eyes that made it seem like life could go on forever and you would never get sick of it. it was like a never-ending adventure, but once again life had to slap you with a reality check.

Things were always changing and there was nothing you could do but watch it unfold and adapt.

That change had been Thor, who had business to attend too with a mass god murderer on the loose. He left abruptly which had left you with a much bigger hole in your chest than you would've liked. He even offered for you to go with him, but you knew it would hurt much more leaving the Guardians than it would be to let go of Thor.

"I will visit when I figure out what is happening. Please don't forget me."

Thor was so dramatic it was honestly something that you adored about the god but you knew he would keep his promise.

It was a very dramatic exit for the God of Thunder, he had everyone on the ship relieved of his departure especially Quill, who always had to rival against his attempts at claiming leadership. It was always an interesting interaction; it always had you folded over laughing your ass off.

You would miss that; you already knew it.

Everything after Thor left the Guardians was a blur. Once he left, the missions were a bit harder to deal with. You and Drax taking most of the beating and taking down more of the larger opponents.

The medical bay was always occupied by one of you, mostly Drax, who thought he could out rank you in strength by being a complete fool and diving headfirst into danger just to prove a point. You only stayed in the medical bay to rest after a mission, just to heal within a half hour to an hour depending on the wound.

Everything continued to move smoothly up until you had the bright idea of mentioning a home, like the ship wasn't enough for you. You thought they'd get offended, ague with you but to your surprise they had agreed.

That was when you all chipped in to buy the head of a god from someone called The Collector, a severed head of a god called Nowhere. It was a big fixer upper if they asked you, but it was definitely a nice start to having an actual home compared to sharing bunks and limited space within a ship.

[catofadifferentcolor]

Terrible Fic Idea #84: Star Wars, but make it the Outer Rim

I've been reading a lot of Star Wars fic lately, much of it involving time travel in some shape or form. Most of it is wonderful, but after a while some of it starts to read as let's fix the Republic so we can bring the light and civilization of the core to the outer rim. Which, while possibly disingenuous, feels a little too much like the justifications made by Europeans for their colonial empires.

As I said, I'm probably reading too much into certain tropes, but can't help but wonder: what if one of these fics started in the outer rim as a way of bringing light and goodness back to the core? Or: Save Tatooine, save the galaxy.

aka the One Prairie Outpost fic

Just imagine it:

Several years have passed after The Book of Boba Fett in the original timeline. While the New Republic calls Daimyo Fett's leadership just another crime syndicate masquerading as good government, anyone who's actually been to the planet knows it's the other way around. Most crime syndicates don't care for planetary infrastructure or public vaccination programs.

Boba has encouraged Din to use his palace as a base for his bounty hunting activities - and as a home planet for the small community of Mandelorians building around their Mand'alor. Ideally, this would be the start of a courtship that wouldn't be moving as slowly as it is if Din wasn't an oblivious idiot about 1) his feelings and 2) traditional Mandalorian courting, but it could also simply be vod'e being vod'e. Dealer's choice.

And so Din is on planet when someone tries to bribe Boba for one reason or another with an ancient Sith artifact.

Din calls in a Jedi from Luke's school to investigate - Cal Kestis, who is one of a handful of trained adults in the new Jedi Order and the most knowledgeable about weird force osik...

...which doesn't stop Cal from accidentally triggering the artifact and sending Boba, Din, and himself back in time to the year 53 BBY, shortly before Jaster Mereel is set to die in the Battle of Korda VI.

As if finding themselves on Tatooine approximately 66 years in the past - well before any of them were even born - isn't enough, all three find themselves in their teenage bodies. Boba and Din are somewhere between 15 and 17, when they have most of their adult height but none of their bulk, while Cal is disgusted to find himself a particularly short 12. This in no way reflects their real differences in ages, and they are forced to attribute it to more inexplicable force osik.

Despite their ages, this proves an opportunity to stop the Empire from ever forming. But how? None of them know enough about the precise course of events to begin to stop it, and even if they could manage to get the Jedi Council to listen to them, waltzing into the Jedi Temple and declaring themselves time travelers is bound to put them on Palaptine's radar in a way that is likely to end their painful deaths.

The solution, they decide, is to get the Jedi to come to them. After all, if they repeat Boba's actions from the future, overthrow the Hutts, and free the slaves on Tatooine, someone from the Jedi is bound to come and investigate.

Taking over Tatooine proves easier than their wildest dreams.

Killing Jabba the Hutt in his own throne room and transmitting a signal that jams slave chips across the planet is all that's needed to spark a general uprising against the slavers and Jabba's criminal empire.

It's a little less easy getting the representatives of the colonists, freed slaves, and native peoples to believe that a pair of teenage Mandos and a half-grown Jedi took out a member of the Grand Hutt Council, but once they hear Boba's plans to convert the planet's slave-based economy to a viable democracy funded in part by the wealth of Jabba's vaults, they're more than willing to vote him Daimyo. His actions more than make up for his apparent age.

The Republic is naturally less sanguine. Mandalorians on Tatooine? Is this the start of another war of conquest? (To say nothing that several of the more corrupt members are in the position to lose a lot of money if crime and slave trade is disrupted in the outer rim.) The Senate orders the Jedi to investigate.

The Jedi are also in an uproar. Not only do holos show a young force sensitive helping a pair of Mandos take over Tatooine, but one of those Mandos has a lightsaber the likes of which they've never seen. (Tensions between Jedi and the Mandalorians are such that no one recognizes the Darksaber for what it is or what it means.) Could this mean some dark side sect has sent some of their apprentices to help rebuild the Mandalorian Empire?

The Mandalorians are also unsettled - Death Watch because the Darksaber seems to have disappeared overnight, only to end up with a child in unpainted beskar half a galaxy away; the True Mandalorians because it looks to them that Death Watch might be sending children into battle to build the empire they're always going on about; and the New Mandolorians because this is exactly the kind of violence that gives Mandalore a bad name.

And all of this fails to take into account the Sith, who are naturally upset that the fear and despair they've worked so hard to cultivate on the edges of the Republic has been disrupted with something so light as hope.

All parties converge on Tatooine.

The Mandalorians arrive first. The True Mandalorians are just beginning to investigate when Death Watch decides to attack first and ask questions never.

Boba, Din, and Cal were expecting this and so have a plan in place that allow their forces to take down most of the terrorists while ensuring Jaster Mereel survives, thereby preventing Korda VI, Galidraan, and all that follows. Montross is killed in the fighting without his double cross ever being known.

This also manages to convince the True Mandalorians that they're just a bunch of kids trying to make their way in the galaxy, and while they ask why take over a planet? why not just join a mercenary guild?, Jaster can't deny that they're doing a good thing. He stations some of his people on planet and leaves them be, content Din isn't going to try to push his claim as Mand'alor and/or build another extremist terrorist sect around the Darksaber.

The Mandalorians leave right as a large number of Jedi arrive. In this party are most of their best lightsaber dualists, including a less jaded Yan Dooku and a young Qui-Gon Jinn (who is only a few months out from Xanatos' Fall and in desperate need of a mind healer). Forced proximity has made the later very clear to all the Jedi Masters involved, and this alone prevents many of the tragedies of Obi-Wan's early apprenticeship.

Qui-Gon's mental health aside, the Jedi presume they'll be attacked by dark siders the moment they touch down on Tatooine. Instead they're invited to the Daimyo's palace, given refreshments, and brought before the planet's new ruling council. Which includes two freed slaves, a wizened Tusken grandmother, a pair of moisture farmers, and a representative from one of the cantinas in addition to a pair of teenage Mandos and a young force sensitive.

This meeting goes a long way to convincing the Jedi that what's happening on Tatooine could be a good thing - particularly after Boba turns over everything they could find regarding some of Jabba's dealings with several shady senators and businessmen within the bounds of the Republic. Including one young senator, Sheev Palpatine of Naboo. While several are able to talk their way out of trouble, it removes the worst of Palpatine's future lackeys from power.

The Jedi also invite Cal to come back with them to the temple to "finish" his training. Cal invites them instead to build a satellite temple on Tatooine. After all, there's no reason why a religious order should be tied to the Republic government, and setting up a temple in the outer rim would allow the Jedi to help those on the outer rim more easily, without waiting for the approval of the Senate.

The Jedi obviously don't agree right away - but it does mean that they come back fairly often to discuss the particulars, meaning that someone is on planet when the Sith decide the best way to fix their plans is to try to assassinate the young Daimyo and his allies, revealing the Sith's continued existence decades early.

Which is where my plot bunny starts to fizzle out.

With Jaster Mereel alive, the True Mandalorians have a real chance of stopping both the terrorism of Death Watch and the cultural genocide of the New Mandalorians, leaving Mandalore in a position of strength versus the Republic. So long as this remains the case, plans for a New Sith Empire must be put on hold.

With the shadiest characters removed from the Senate, it's harder for a Sith to take charge of it - especially when a strengthening Tatooine continues to disrupt smuggling and slave trafficking in the outer rim, reducing the darkness and the funds he has access to.

And so though the details are up to the dealer, taking over Tatooine disrupts the Sith's machinations enough that they're forced to show their hands too soon, and thus defeated before they can ever give rise to the empire. It's not easy, but it involves a lot less suffering than the original timeline.

Bonuses include: 1) Merrin and Grogu also traveling through time as a result of the force bonds that they have with Cal and Din respectively. They wake up on the currently uninhabited planet Luke's school will occupy in the future rather than Tatooine and have to go through a quest of their own to get off planet and rejoin the others. This should involve accidentally helping the other's plans to prevent the empire, such as by disrupting a crime syndicate or blowing up the Trade Federation's first droid factory; 2) Teenagers being teenagers. These kids may have been adults in the future with all their adult memories, but they've got teenage bodies now and it shows; and 3) Boba and company never outright admitting they're time travelers, but dropping enough hints to the relevant parties that they eventually come to that conclusion on their own. Only then do they share the details of the horrible future they've prevented.

And that's all I have. As always, feel free to adopt this bun, just link back if you do anything with it.

More SW Fic Ideas | More Terrible Fic Ideas

[a-wartime-paradox]

Paradox of the Thirteenth, or "There's a surprising amount of Faction Paradox in Series 11-13"

Despite not being many fan's top choice, the Thirteenth Doctor's era shared concepts with the Faction Paradox series surprisingly often. Some of these were explicit, such as The Paradox Moon featuring Siblings Same and Different (although these Siblings' Faction is otherwise unrelated to the FP Faction, as of 2023), whilst others are simply similarities in creative choices, again varying in how obvious they are, from the "Ashad" (Series 12 - The Timeless Children) resembling FP's technosapiens, to Time Lords "binding" time in Once, Upon Time (part of Series 13/Flux)

So, here I will attempt to list every possible connection between the Thirteenth Doctor/Chris Chibnal's era of Doctor Who and the Faction Paradox mythology

Firstly, an explanation as to why this is all happening...

Explanation as to why the Thirteen Doctor is meeting Faction Paradox-esque entities.

The War has been ended for a long time, and the Great Houses have finally, actually, fallen (see The Timeless Children) leaving no one to hold up their imposed metastructure of history. Why didn't anyone invade in Series 1-7, before the Time Lords returned?, you ask. Well, it's not because The Day of the Doctor is a bootstrap, as I don't believe in perfect bootstraps, but rather because well... They did. During Series 1, the Reapers arrived, explicitly due to the lack of Time Lords (Father's Day), and so did a lone Dalek (Dalek), and finally the original Dalek Emperor's last Time War fleet (The Parting of the Ways). Then in Series 2, the Cult of Skaro arrived (Army of Ghosts/Doomsday), followed by Davros (The Stolen Earth/Journey's End)- who along with the Supreme Dalek, somehow survived the Crucible's fall (The Magician's Apprentice/The Witch's Familiar)- and then the New Dalek Paradigm emerged, from survivors of the War (Victory of the Daleks). All this interference from War-time participants is what's preventing pre-Anchoring entities entering the Third Universe, as it echoes the status quo which was so hostile to their very existence.

Oh, and "Dvapara Yuga" means "the Dark Times, as understood to not be an early period of universal history, but rather the state of history metatemporally predating Rassilon's anchoring of the thread"

She is born out of an interaction with a past Doctor (Twice Upon a Time) - if it wasn't for acausal (and unintentionally) intervention of the First Doctor, the Thirteenth Doctor never would have existed. This is a bit of a stretch, as interference forwards in a timeline is much less paradoxical than the reverse, but this is her first appearance so...

The Solitract, from It Takes You Away, is an intelligent & conscious universe, exiled from the main universe in order to allow for it's creation. "Creation" here probably refers to Event One/The Big Bang, but, if one is on the train of "the universe before the Anchoring of the Thread didn't have a beginning, and the Big Bang was retroactively added by Urizen [Rassilon]", then this is very easily re-interpreted as a mention of the early Sun Builders (a.k.a Time Lords) cleaning up their area of spacetime in preparation for imposing rationality on it. To be even more bold, I may suggest that this isn't a universe at all, but instead an intercreational, a class of being first mentioned in The Book of the War, although one type was first mentioned in the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures novel The Taking of Planet 5, as a "Swimmer". I propose that the Solitract is not a Swimmer, or a Leviathan, but rather a smaller intercreational, perhaps growing out of the Third Universe (the main DW/FP universe), before being banished by the Great Houses. See Explanation as to why the Thirteen Doctor is meeting Faction Paradox-esque entities at the top of this post.

The Ux, from The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos, are clearly some gods from the Dvapara Yuga.

Orphan 55 features a future version of Earth which deviates heavily from most other depictions of it. Speculatively, this means the Thirteenth Doctor travelled to an aberrant timeline, or that the Ghost Point has somehow worsened since the degradation of the Great Houses's imposed metastructure, rather than healing.

During Fugitive of the Judoon, the Doctor interacts with Gallifrey's distant past. I can't really explain this even by the standard explanation at the top of this post. However, one thing interesting to note is that the ancient Time Lord "Gat" considered "Mutter's Spiral" to be a "tiny galaxy". This is notable because Gallifrey is basically always said to be in the centre of Mutter's Spiral - that is, the Milky Way - and naming a galaxy as "tiny" kind of implies that you aren't from it. Maybe Gallifrey wasn't always in Mutter's Spiral, and got moved? Or maybe Gat and the Division come from some alternative Gallifrey? I don't know, just interesting to note.

The novel At Childhood's End (written by Sophie Aldred, actor for Ace) featured Ace meeting the Thirteenth Doctor, and descriptions of the former's fractured timelines. Notably, the next time Ace and the Doctor met (in The Power of the Doctor), neither one of them mentioned this, almost as if the timeline in which it happened had fractured...

Rakaya and Zellin from Can You Hear Me? are clearly some kind of pre-anchoring gods like the Ux. In Time Lord Victorious short story The Guide to the Dark Times, it was confirmed that they were, specifically, Eternals (not the MCU kind), and another Time Lord Victorious text, a novel called The Knight, the Fool, and the Dead, claimed that Eternals were among the other inhabitants of the Dark Times, the "Old Ones". Interestingly, multiple Eternals do indeed appear in the "classic" series of Doctor Who, implying that the Anchoring did not fully remove them, but as they didn't appear in NuWho until now, I feel safe in speculating that the War somehow barred them from it - perhaps they'd joined the conflict, on the side of both the Time Lords, Daleks, the Enemy, and others, "helping out" wherever it benefited them?

Ashad, first appearing in The Haunting of Villo Diodati, and then in the following serial Ascension of the Cybermen/The Timeless Children, is an "emotional Cyberman". Any readers of Faction Paradox could immediately draw the connection between this and Faction Paradox's "technosapiens", named as such partially to avoid infringing on the BBC's trademark, but also because The Book of the War showed that many sects of posthumanity had become cyborgs, but many were not emotionless and evil like the Cybermen.

The Timeless Child, first appearing in The Timeless Children, is vaguely reminiscent of the idea hinted upon in The Book of the War that the Great Houses stole the power of regeneration from another species, in The Book of the War being the Great Vampires, and in The Timeless Children being the titular Timeless Child. This note of continuity was expanded upon by the writer @aristidetwain in his short story Out of the Box introduced the "Child-That-Was-Taken", intended to be a member of the Yssgaroth species, and to be the Timeless Child itself. Additionally, this Child was the motivator for the Great Vampires' war with the Great Houses, the Eternal War (a.k.a First War in Heaven).

In The Timeless Children, Tecteun is shown alongside Rassilon and Omega. Previously, the figure alongside Rassilon and Omega was the Other, a version of the Doctor from before he was the Doctor. My personal fix for this, which I admittedly took from @/aristidetwain, is that there were many Others, assisting Rassilon and Omega at different points in time. Other Others may be the human Dr. Who from the novel Human Nature, the Eleventh Doctor "Cheesemaker" (The Lost Dimension), Osiris (in his car future), and the Sixth Doctor (The Scrolls of Rassilon)

In Shadow in the Mirror, the Thirteenth Doctor released Aphasia / Daughter of Mine from her mirror of entrapment, despite the fact that Aphasia mentioned a "ginger haired doctor" who "believed himself to be the last" (likely Muldwych/Merlin), meaning that the Doctor had been interacting with Aphasia out-of-order, which is... Reasonably dangerous.

Throughout Flux, the villains "Swarm" and "Azure" attempt to remove the Mouri from the planet Time, effectively de-anchoring the thread. They're method, strangely, is to try to destroy the entire universe using "the flux".

Village of the Angels features the first instance of Weeping Angels being shown to posses proper intelligence, as they ally themselves with Tecteun, presumably in exchange for something, and even more interestingly, they have a rogue member, suggesting power structures in their ranks. This isn't particularly Faction Paradox -related, but it feels like it is, and I hope Faction Paradox writers use Weeping Angel - analogues to continue to explore this.

Eve of the Daleks features the Doctor "resetting" the TARDIS, causing a localised time loop. However, perhaps more notably, the Daleks which appear in this episode are "Dalek Executioners", which make their debut in Time Lord Victorious.

The Power of the Doctor won't be mentioned here, perhaps I'll grant it a full post going over all of its batshit-insanity (affectionate?) some other time.

This post was made after I saw @familyparadox remark at the high amount of Faction/Thirteen content

[tytarax]

Lasso of Lust

Lemon🍋

-Kill a supreme kai

-Take the position of supreme kai

-Exchange body with the most powerful Saiyan in Universe 7

-Travel to a timeline where the destroyer god was not a problem

-Ally with his future self

-Kill the supreme kai of Universe 10 and kill him... again

-Start the "zero human plan"

....

Those are some of the things that caused Black and Zamas to be in big trouble against the supreme Kaiosama Gowas and the god of destruction Ramoosh...

____ stopped Zeno from disappearing them, of course in exchange for something, and that something was that Black and Zamas were punished... they were condemned to live among mortals... for a time, in the case of Zamas, since he was the successor of the supreme kai, but Black had a different destiny, he had to live among mortals for the rest of his life, with his mortal body.

Knowing that Black couldn't live among humans... ____ invited him to live with her on the planet Vegitta, to which he gladly accepted, he preferred to live surrounded by Saiyans, the most powerful race in Universe 7, the race that lives from other planets, exterminating their inhabitants and selling the planets at a good price, perhaps only then, his dream of exterminating the scum of planet Earth would come true.

That was approximately 1 and a half years ago, a year without Black being able to kill or exterminate any race, first, he had to adapt to his new life and second, he wanted to complete his punishment quickly, until he did, a year of punishment, and until now, half a year of happiness for Black, they still did not go to planet Earth for certain reasons...

The thing is that Black could finally live happily, fulfilling his dream little by little, although without realizing it, exterminating races was already his everyday life, he no longer did it because of his dream but because it was his normal life. Wake up, eat, go on a mission, kill, come back... and fuck ____ from time to time... who am I kidding, that was also part of their daily life... except in certain times when Saiyan females got pregnant of course.

They weren't even a couple to have children, they were 2 Saiyans who loved each other without knowing it, they loved feeling, testing each other, and spending as much time as they could together on the same surface.

____ as a Saiyan female, she loved how that male dominated her, he made her his whenever he wanted, we would call it toxic, they would call it... they didn't know what to call it, maybe love? Or just wish? Or it was how Saiyans expressed that they liked spending time with someone specific.

Black loved how that female allowed herself to be dominated, how she made him feel, he loved hearing her scream his name, begging him for more of her, being her pet, obeying him in everything he asked for. . . . .

____! Come here right now!

Damn... and there he is again, I couldn't say that this is the Black that I like or the one I don't like, he was... a little less rude when it came to intimacy, but what can I say, I'm a Saiyan and I like being treated bad...

(IT'S LEMON TIME!)

I knew that it was useless to escape from him, so I resigned myself to doing what he asked of me, when he arrived, he was already waiting for me with his exposed member.

"You already know what to do, don't you?"

Of course, taking off my clothes, kneeling, with my hands behind me, had already become normal, and that was precisely what I did.

"Do it now"

I knew this was wrong, he was one of the worst enemies of my family and friends, but I couldn't help it, I wasn't one of those females who lived by satisfying the males, but satisfying only one, and that one alone

He was satisfied with me and made me want to do everything possible and impossible with him... so I didn't hold back, and I did what he wanted me to do so much, I submitted once again

"Good..."

I approached my mouth to his member and he pushed my head impatiently towards his manhood. I was very nauseous and wanted to take him out of my mouth, but he kept me in that position. I no longer had any other option. I began to suck him deeply and lick him.

He let out loud muffled sighs while we were in the act, I already wanted to take him out of my mouth so I could breathe but he kept my head there.

"You're not going to take it out until it's over."

Already starting to get used to it, I started sucking harder, and he started pushing my head faster, that meant only one thing, all that was left to do was prepare myself.

"Relax your throat!" I order myself

His cock hit the deep part of my throat while I did my best to swallow everything he gave me.

"Ah...ah..."

"Way to go. Did you miss me?"

"A lot"

"Good girl, you won a prize, I'll let you choose."

"Would you make me yours?"

"Is that what you want or is that what you think I want?"

"I want it, I can't take it anymore to have you between my legs"

"I can't deny you that... Stand up! Now!"

I stood up and kept my hands to myself, no matter how hard I wanted to touch him.

"Go to the bedroom"

I went to our room, and before sitting on the bed he stopped me by grabbing my tail.

"AH!"

"Not yet, wait." He made me lie down on the bed and he slapped me on the butt "Ngh!" He settled behind me, I thought what I longed for would arrive, but he just started rubbing his member with my entrance.

"Mh... you feel so good, and so wet"

"Ahhh..."

"Do you want more?"

"Yes... ah... please"

"Please what?"

"My....my god"

"Hmmm... wait a little longer."

Damn, I can't take it anymore... what do I do!?

"Nggh... I... I missed you so much"

"Oh yeah?"

"Y...yes, I had to try very hard not to touch myself"

"That must have been difficult" he says as he places me on the bed, I tighten my tail around his arm and he puts his on my thigh, he brushes my entrance a little generating a moan from me.

"You know I hate leaving you."

(tytarax: *looking at the computer* What am I doing with my life)

"Are you ready?"

"Please"

I moved my tail a little lower and he settled at my entrance, I squeezed his arm tighter as he entered, earning a pained moan, since I would never get used to his size, I clenched my fists a little from the tension.

"Don't squeeze or I won't do anything," he said, knowing that would make him finish faster.

"I'm sorry" He grabbed my hips and pushed, letting his manhood touch the deepest spot inside me.

"Squeeze when I tell you"

"Y-yes" he was fighting the urge to stay still, he was testing me. Black came out and came back in suddenly, establishing a very fast pace, still testing me as he did it to me roughly. He held me still with his hands on my hips. "Be a good girl," he warned sharply. ...

"Mhmm! Please don't stop!"

"Damn! You're so tight!"

"Do you want to cum?"

"Y-yes"

He slammed into me again. "Come, now!" I moaned and felt how he touched that point again.

"AHH... RIGHT THERE!" I said as I made myself through orgasm.

"Good girl"

"Please come inside me"

"Squeeze and beg me to do it"

"Please do it, I need it!"

"That's good, but you can do better"

"G-god!"

The moment I said it, he slammed into me again and it was over. It filled me as he moved inside me. He growled as he squeezed my hips, making me his.

Masterpost

DBS Masterlist

[hungrydolphin91]

ok I had to go make my own post about Eugene Cassette Beasts, it's not fair for me to fill up everyone else's tags w how much I love this guy. I wanted to speculate a little about his backstory here cause it honestly fascinates me and I feel like I havent seen this happen much in other media, much less turn based monster collecting RPGs.

So Eugene is from a future world (seemingly the only party member who is except maybe Barkley but he's a dog so.) It sounds like he's from the turn of the century, maybe 2100 or so, and mentions in his rank 3 friendship that in his world, there was a massive reformation when society as a while realized they couldn't keep fucking each other over and destroying the planet, so everyone worked hard to abolish the kinds of structures that unilaterally hurt people (for instance, capitalism). Sounds like a utopia right?

Eugene only says good things about his world really, how much people value acts of goodness and kindness. But he says it all with such a sad tone, like something he's missing out on, because he thinks he is, he didn't fit in. He says that he wasn't great at being helpful all the time, which is why he wants to do better in New Wirral, a world removed from his own where he can be a better person than he was in his own world.

But the thing is, he IS a nice person. Maybe that's by design, everything he does in New Wirral is about him playing the hero, but it's also oh so clear that he brought his own expectations of goodness from his own timeline and they're just as much of a burden here. Even when hes succeeding, he won't cut himself slack, he says he needs to have a cause to rally behind, or what that archangel said to him would be proven true: he IS empty. Or at least, useless, which is probably the same thing to him.

What really grabs me about all of this though (besides the usual love of angst and guilt complexes and hero complexes and whatnot) is this future of moral reformation. Those are a pretty common historical phenomenon, often involving moral panics and an emphasis on presentation--- what matters is that you LOOK pure compared to others. And poor Eugene just felt like he couldn't keep up just because he has some small selfish impulses, or something in that nature I'd imagine--- I think he'd rather throw himself off a bridge than admit whatever the reason was that he didn't fit in in his own world.

It's easy to see his world being our future, in a way. I'd be delighted if terrible oppressive governments and economic systems were torn down in favor of ones that promote equality and universal well being, but currently moral purity is just as much of a trend as ever--- look at any discussion of book banning, not to mention transphobic legislature, fandom antis and so much more. So this hypothetical future is one where even though the 'right' thing has been done, there's still a subtle form of policing going on to enforce it. Maybe that is successful at keeping cruel practices from coming back. Or maybe it's just traumatizing people like Eugene who feel judged by their every action and pressured to be a saint every single moment of their lives.

One last thing I thought was interesting--- as part of his level 4 friendship rank, Eugene mentions how his parents' generation still seem scarred by the cruelties they endured before this reformation. But Eugene is too young to have lived through it himself so you know what that means?? Generational trauma babyyyyy. He's inherited guilt about a time he wasn't even alive for, along with a pressure to make sure it never ever happens again, so no unkindness is tolerated. It's no wonder this boy has so many issues.

So that's my late night rambles about this guy, probably like 50% of this is just me projecting but it's also fun to dissect what's happening here. Like I said before, it's unusual to see a unique concept like character like Eugene and his world in what appears to be a fun little indie game about turning into monsters with cassettes.

[hellsbellschime]

This is the most BIZARRE and WORST timeline we are living in right now. It's like a waking nightmare every day. We have a convicted felon, failed business magnate, reality "star" and overall misogynistic white supremacist as president. A South African billionaire nazi is somehow "working" for him with a fake department. A gross sycophant for vice president, a group of people in charge of OUR money and one of them goes by "big balls"??? (Ew gross), and simultaneously losing all of our alied countries etc. Who knows how long it will take for this country to go back to the way it was before he took office. It will take generations for other countries to trust us again. I'm constantly sick to my stomach.

I feel less and less crazy for thinking it every day, but for quite a while I've been suss about Elon or someone on the Trump team actually fudging the numbers with the election. Not that it makes much difference at the moment, but I honestly don't think he won because the stats literally do not make sense. It's insane that we're like 40 days into this nightmare, and it's very upsetting that we're completely fucked now, but if Trump has done one thing, he's demonstrated why frankly the US should not have as much power as it does. No single country or single person should have the power to determine this much, because as Donald Trump has proven, if the wrong person is in that position, the consequences are catastrophic.

The US wasn't the most powerful country in the world because it had the most people or the most resources, it's because after WWII we basically decided that we should be the arbiter of worldwide politics, and our economy and influence is HUGE specifically because we exercise(d) an enormous amount of control over the security of the entire frick planet basically, and while I'm furious to see how that is coming back to bite everyone now, it's honestly quite a long time coming. Even the GWB/Iraq invasion era was beyond the pale, and would have left the US incredibly isolated if we didn't already structure so much of the world's military around ourselves. That really should have been where the line was drawn, but it wasn't, so now we have someone even more destructive as our president, and it's showing exactly why no single country should be this powerful.

I can only hope that it doesn't completely tank our economy, because again, our position in the economy of the world isn't driven by our actual resources or man power, it is literally built off of our trustworthiness and reliability. If we keep going down this road, we could be REALLY fucked, like becoming a third world country overnight really fucked. Aaaandddd that's all going to happen because a couple of stooges were terrified of going to prison so did everything they could to manipulate our elections in their favor.

Also, not thrilled that Trump was hammering home the WW3 thing, because he never says shit that he isn't repeating from someone else, so Putin or one of Trump's other puppetmasters has definitely put that into his head, meaning it's a significant possibility. So, we're in deep shit, the entire world wanting to maintain the current order is keeping us out of deeper shit for the very moment, but this really could be catastrophically bad in the future. But on the bright side, at least JD Vance's pathetic attempt at public speaking and Zelenskyy's face when Trump started going off about Hunter Biden and Adam Schiff are great meme material.

[deconstructivesurgery]

this is my first attempt at a poll because I'm genuinely curious and I've been thinking about my Borderlands rewriting plans and shit and I can't decide which of these alternate-to-canon scenarios I want to go with for katagawa jr

Context: I am insane about the funny Maliwan guy. Lord knows I have a habit of latching onto characters with like 5 minutes of screen time and getting so fixated on their potential that I go mad over it, and he's no exception to that rule.

I also have a huge Borderlands AU in the works that overhauls pretty much everything I didn't personally like in the series and integrates all of these one-off headcanons into one timeline. If I ever finish writing the goddamn document with all the information about this on it, I'll post it 😭

With that said, which one of these four potential arcs for him I could execute do you think would be most fun? Important to note, I'm not necessarily picking the most popular. I'm just curious :3

ALSO, regardless of his penultimate fate I plan on doing a lot more with him and the general Promethea arc in BL3 in terms of insight into Maliwan, his family, and the way it works. That's inevitable. This is just what happens to him after all that.

explanations for the last 2 since they're pretty vague

(***) This one is less realistic, but I don't always care much for realism and him and Rhys' dynamic is never not hilarious to me. Long story made short as possible: this one takes place in a world where getting Maliwan's ass off of Promethea wasn't just as simple as kicking Katagawa in the shins. Even in his absence (presumed death initially), Maliwan's heads (and the disgruntled parents of 13 corporate children) continued to attack the planet in order to recoup losses by taking control of Atlas, a profitable company. (You know, the reason they wanted it in the first place.) Jr. himself plays into this because he survived the VH attack, retreated to Maliwan safe quarters, and then was promptly nearly executed by a family deeply unhappy with his performance. Packing his shit and escaping in another war vessel sent down to Promethea, he decided to use his excellent backstabbing skills to take not only his technical capabilities (I like to assume he made and designed the mock-up Zer0 suit himself, but that's a rant for another day) to his insider knowledge of the company and their weaknesses to Atlas' front fucking door.

TLDR: This isn't some "I'm nice now immediately" type shit, it's more of a "bedraggled feral asshole in a suit begs you to let him work with you on equal footing this time because he wants to kick his family's ass and you can't really afford to say no because you're kinda losing a major corporate war right now" leading into fucking Wacky Coworker Shenanigans(TM).

the last one: Honestly similar to the tangent I went on above, except years of being raised a corporate cult patsy only to encounter failure and nearly be destroyed because of it leads to Kat seeing the rest of his family as "in the way" as his siblings were, leading to him waging internal warfare on the company after his scrape with Vault-Hunter induced death behind the scenes as the battle with Atlas continues. Could also segway into a funny unintentional "the enemy of my enemy is slightly less of my enemy than before" thing with the Atlas crew.

[the-whispers-of-death]

anyways. red string soulmate au :) wink wink nudge nudge :)

something something the damn fucking imagery of stone staring at the string as it leads into the ocean, horrified at the implications of where it leads.

or maybe in a different timeline, he's with kali there, one of his soulmates he had already found, and both of them come to the conclusion that their 3rd halves are across the pond and them unanimously deciding that *yes* theyre *getting* over the fucking oversized puddle no matter what. they already have each other, yes, but they cant leave their soulmates hanging either.

idk i am a huge sucker for the red string au, but i think ive made it clear with how much my brain rots over it.

take this either as a request or just a general idea. idk, its been a while since ive sent in fic reqs (like. over 2 years at LEAST lmao)

Red String AU, Red String AU!

Chose to have Kali and Stone also be soulmates in this AU, because it's fun like that.

This is just the start, so they might not even meet Sylvester and Butcher (I'm assuming we're adding Butcher into this AU).

A little lore tidbit because it's only kinda explained near the end: Red strings are invisible, but people can feel them around their wrists and can feel the distance between soulmates.

Wordcount: 1,281 words

Vikram stood on his porch, his hands resting on the railing as he looked up at the stars. The stars looked so beautiful and so far away, and he wanted to know what knowledge lay in the stars, how many aeons they had seen over the course of their life, knowing that most of the stars he saw in the night sky were either planets or stars that were so many lightyears away that they were already dead.

"Have I ever told you how breathtaking you look when you gaze up at the stars, baby?" Vikram's boyfriend, Ashok, whispered into his ear as he wrapped his arms around Vikram's burly waist. Ashok leaned down slightly, hunching his shoulders so he could comfortably rest his chin on Vikram's shoulder.

"You have indeed, but you can say it again," Vikram replied, his lips twitching until they eventually pulled into a small smile.

A rumble expressing his satisfaction spread throughout Vikram's chest, melting against Ashok as his soulmate held him. As he kept his hands on the railing of the porch, he could feel the red string on his left hand that connected him to Ashok, and he could feel the other red string on his right hand which spanned across the ocean, his other soulmate being so far away.

Both Ashok and Vikram had two soulmates, one of whom was obviously each other, and both of their other soulmates' red strings went across the ocean. They wanted so desperately to go and find their soulmates, but the only times they were across the ocean were when they were on deployments and had no time to go find their soulmates because they were on duty. They tried to find time to go when they were both not on deployments, but deployments came suddenly sometimes and as soon as they started thinking about booking flights to try and find their soulmates, they'd get deployed.

Like how last week, Vikram and Ashok were talking about trying to find their soulmates and then they both got orders that they were going on deployment this week. It was like the universe knew it wasn't their time to find their other soulmates.

Ashok brought Vikram back to the present, pressing a gentle kiss to the taller man's neck. "What are you thinking about, my sun?" he asked, gently rubbed circles on Vikram's waist. "You've been so silent ever since you got your orders."

"I'm usually silent," Vikram grumbled, turning his head to the side to nuzzle his cheek against Ashok's. He sighed at the touch, his soul feeling less empty than it would be if he hadn't found Ashok, but his soul still wasn't complete. "Thinking about how our plans to find our other soulmates keep getting delayed. It's so frustrating."

"I know, baby. I feel the same way, but it's the way it is right now. That's not a comforting thought, I know. But you believe in fate, so believe that fate is waiting until the right moment to bring our soulmates to us."

Vikram took in those words, not really liking them but he knew Ashok was just doing his best. He rested his hands on Ashok's hands that were still on his waist, intertwining their fingers. "When did you get so wise?" he murmured, leaning down slightly to kiss Ashok's lips.

Their kiss was short, but sweet, the two of them letting the kiss calm their frustrations down. When they pulled apart, they rested their foreheads together despite the uncomfortableness in the position they had twisted themself in.

"I'm not wise, as people love to tell me," Ashok said, chuckling. He squeezed Vikram's hands in his, loving the way his boyfriend's larger hands engulfed his. "But I know you well enough to calm you down, even if it had taken twelve years just to break down your walls and learn all of your quirks. I wouldn't change a single second for the world, though, my sun. And I know I'll feel the same way once we meet our soulmates, it's only a matter of time."

Their conversation died down after that, the two enjoying looking up at the stars. After a while, Ashok pulled back and tugged Vikram inside, murmuring about how they should go to sleep.

Vikram looked back up at the starry night sky before he went inside, as if he could use the stars to decipher the coordinates to where his other soulmate was.

He hoped Ashok was right, that they'd meet their other soulmates soon. He didn't know how long he could wait.

Besides, he'd be on deployment soon, which would keep his mind off the search for his other soulmate.

*************************************************************

Vikram sighed as he drove into base, having been on deployment for a week already and he was missing Ashok big time. As he drove to a parking spot and parked his car, he hoped his soulmate was having a better time at his own deployment.

He knew he shouldn't complain, he was fortunate to be placed as the Corpsman of a really friendly squad who didn't care that Vikram refused to tell them any truly personal information, not even his actual name.

Most squads hated how cagey he was, hated the way he relied on his stoicism to protect himself from allowing himself to get attached to any of them. But this squad only cared if he was a good Corpsman, which he was.

He had gotten lucky at that, and he had also gotten lucky at Ashok being deployed nearby.

Ashok was at another base, but at least they were placed in the same housing base, able to see each other regularly if they weren't away on missions. It made long, stressful days better when he could go over to the house the military had set up for Ashok and to be in the presence of his soulmate.

The thought of his soulmate made him look down at his wrists, feeling the invisible red strings that connected him to his soulmates. The right red string felt shorter, since he had gone overseas for the deployment, but still farther than where Ashok was.

His other soulmate was in the city, but he couldn't tell where. And he had no time to go searching still. But at least he was closer than he had ever been.

He unbuckled his seatbelt and got out of the car, locking it once he was out. He made his way to the main building, needing to sign in before he could go to the training center to find his squamates.

Vikram merely grunted in response when the receptionist greeted him, simply picking up the pen to sign in. He was about to leave when the receptionist called out for him.

"Stone!" she called out, using his callsign since that's what most people only knew him by. When he turned back around to face her, she continued, "Captain Karev told me that when I saw you, I should tell you that the entire squad is being debriefed soon. They're in Conference Room 220."

Vikram nodded to signify that he heard her, turning slightly to go down the long hallways until he reached where the conference room. Thankfully, they hadn't started until he got there, so he sat down and waited for the captain to tell everyone what their new mission was.

He tried to listen, he really did, but all of a sudden, the red string on his right wrist gave a little tug. He would've sat up straight if he wasn't already doing so, his excitement giving way and flooding his brain.

A tug meant his other soulmate was here. On base.

Finally, they'd meet.

*********************************************

Hehe, and I'm going to end it there. Just Stone's luck that he'd feel Sylvester in the same base just as he was about to go on a mission.

[thewertsearch]

Ask Comp 12/8

@williamjakespeare asked: One of the recent posts concludes that the circumstances around Vriska's god tiering were "so much worse than anything I thought was going to happen" and I'm curious. What exactly did you think was going to happen?

Back before I knew how God Tier ascension worked, my theory was that Vriska's Quest Bed might grant her access to a special dream moon, and that Tavros's presence there might throw some sort of spanner into the works. I wasn't sure what kind of spanner, and my theories were very vague.

Vriska's a huge taskmaster, and I thought she might have given him an instruction that he was unwilling or unable to carry out. Like, maybe she told him to leave her God Tier Moon, and he was unwilling to abandon her to a fate he didn't understand.

I guess I was right. In the end, she did give him an instruction he couldn't carry out.

Anonymous asked: For the kid who was the most vocal about her 'distaste' for their guardian, having Mom be the reason that Rose snaps is actually very sweet, in a sad way. ~DJ

The above line from Rose implies that she had a lot more affection for her mother than she was letting on.

Their relationship was complicated, but if Rose viewed her as a sister, I think there had to have been some camaraderie between the two. We just never saw it on-panel, because the narrative began on the most stressful day of Mom Lalonde's life.

@elkian asked: So, fun fact about that time John joked about rescuing Rose from the Broodfesther Throes and you were going "yes it's a joke BUT IT'S ALSO SERIOUS JOHN!!!": Hussie's author note for that page is almost verbatim your reaction. Homestuck is as serious as it is silly and typically both at once.

Every time Hussie and I share the same thought, a subtle chill runs down my spine.

@gl1tchypyr0 asked: In regards to the thing about LOWAA potentially corrupting Eridan, itd be a little smart to remember what Sollux said in his conversation with Terezi about a prophet has to go blind to earn their stripes or how an angel earns its wings, Sollux states that 'angels are terrible feathery demons that paradox space uses to usher in the end' and Eridan was actually killing them even if he wasn't Supposed to. If you really think about it I actually kinda find it sad? If he was already a troubled individual Before Sgrub and then was on a planet of 'terrible feathery demons' that whisper prophecies in his earfins for an entire month that he was made to feel he Had to kill, honestly it makes me nervous imagining just how many doomed timelines there are where Eridan snapped far earlier. Not to mention the fact he's also on the Blue Team ie Derse players ie most susceptible to waking up in his sleep and seeing tentacles and eyeballs staring back at him (not that he wouldn't be /used to that/ back on alternia with his job of feeding glybgolyb so Feferi wouldn't have to). Not really defending eridan but just, food for thought kinda? About how LOWAA might have affected him enough for Doc Scratch to bring up such a hypothetical. The idea that Eridan was already pretty bad before the inevitable Sgrub trauma and then LOWAA made thinks /worse/.

Oh, don't get it twisted - Eridan's just as much of tragedy as any of the other trolls. He's certainly written to be less sympathetic, but he didn't deserve to be raised in the Alternian Empire. Just like Vriska and Equius, he could have been a much better person, if only he was raised in a less violent and oppressive culture.

Of course, he could still be an asshole if he was born on Earth - but at least he'd have a chance to be better. Alternia stacks the deck against you in ways that simply aren't fair.

@galaxa-13 asked: It is very satisfying watching you pick apart everything Doc Scratch says without playing his game. Rose wishes she could, but unfortunately she is a child and not as smart as she pretends to be. Usually it's fun to watch people theorize because of what they don't know, so it's extra fun when someone as smart as you doesn't have the pieces I already do. Just chortling to myself, "Oh ho ho, just you wait!" @elkian asked: I may have sent this before but I ADORE your Doc Scratch dissertations. What few liveblogs (and fandom during/after the run) I've followed have other strengths and focuses, so these moments where you stop everything to shred his dialogue to see if fhere's even a GRAIN of truth are novel and absolutely fascinating. I think you've done the most thorough analyses of any 1 of his convos let alone all of them and I'm here for it. Rip that shady motherfucker apart! :D

Despite myself, I am enjoying puzzling out the true meaning of what he says. I've just got to remember that he is fully capable of lying.

I do think, on balance, that there is some hidden meaning to his words - it's just hard to find. His '50% chance of ascending' statement is definitely foreshadowing something, I just can't figure out what. I think it has something to do with the reboot session, but I'm waiting to learn more about the reboot before I really start theorizing about it.

Anonymous asked: In case the 7 Gates haven’t been fully explained yet — the Gates over a player’s house are all either entry (transport to somewhere on their planet) or exit (destination of a gate on the planet of the previous player in the chain). Using John as example: Build to gate 1, which takes him somewhere on LOWAS. Find gate 2 elsewhere on LOWAS, this will take him to the matching gate over Rose’s house — build up to her gate 3, which will lead to somewhere on LOLAR, then find the planet’s gate 4, etc.

Here's my old interpretation of the Gate system, from way back in Act 4. I'm fully in agreement with you about John's path here - the problem is that when you use it to extrapolate Rose's path, things start to fall apart.

See, this ordering method implies that in a four-player chain, your own Seventh Gate is located on the Land preceding yours, rather than your own. This means that Rose's Seventh Gate is the one that got John killed on LOWAS - the one which leads to his Denizen. It additionally implies that John's Seventh Gate should have been on Jade's Land instead. It's all very confusing.

Anonymous asked: Something I love about how this god-tier immortality system is described, however it works, is that "remaining neutral" will PROBABLY keep you alive… but when you think about it, remaining neutral means not making a REAL DIFFERENCE. As a God, if you want to make a difference in the world around you -- good or bad -- you have to be willing to stake your life on it.

True! It's an interesting balancing mechanism, where each God Tier has to decide whether their life is more valuable than their personal agency. Gods who avoid Heroic and Just situations are almost invincible, but they're also completely ineffectual.

I'd obviously try to game the system somehow, but the vague, subjective definitions of Heroic and Just make this a difficult system to game.

@spyril4132 asked: with the reveal of the heroic-just system, there's now a reason you might not want to god tier immediately: sacrificing one of your selves for a heroic cause and then doing what aradia did (but intentionally)

Good point. Although, I'm not sure I'd want to rely on the Quest Slab for my resurrection - at least, not yet. We don't really know the rules are, and how they differ from normal Quest Bed rules.

Anonymous asked: "I don't really care if Paradox Space sanctions his actions - he needs to be taken down, and if that upsets the natural order, then it's time for a new natural order." i think you for sure lean more lifeways on the life/doom player axis lol. oh, the laws of the multiverse say death is inevitable? well, that fucking sucks and i hate it, so i'm gonna wedge myself into the cracks and loopholes and *make* it evitable one day at a goddamn time, life finds a way motherfucker.

Life finds a way, motherfucker!

I actually find both Life and Doom fairly interesting, as Aspects go. I think, at this point, I'm committed to giving one to my kidsona, and the other to my trollsona.

If another Aspect ends up catching my eye, we'll have to start workshopping a Carapaciansona!

Anonymous asked: I think you got it kinda twisted what's going on with Rose. Yes she is slightly corrupted by the Horrorterrors powers/boons and Scratch's… Sheer Existence. But in her mind, she's doing this to Save her session, so if she does go God Tier and gets killed, her death wouldn't be Just, it would probably be Heroic. As she probably would've died tryong to save her session, which would cancel out the corruption from Scratch and Horrorterrors. Either way she still dies, but it's the difference in Why she dies that's important. […]

See, this is the whole problem, isn't it? These terms are incredibly subjective.

I personally think Rose's attempt to save her session is extremely Heroic - but Skaia couldn't possibly approve of her assault on the game, so I don't think it would cancel out her Horrorterror corruption. Sburb itself is probably the last word on what qualifies as a Just death, so I think that's what she'd get tagged as, if she died as a God Tier in the Green Sun's explosion.

I'm also not sure if getting tagged as Heroic would cancel out a Just tag. They're not necessarily opposites - Vriska, for example, is designed to have a controversial alignment, and could easily die in a way that counts as both.

@ben-guy asked: Small correction, you referred to the Alternian empire as "intergalactic" when it only exists within one galaxy as far as I'm aware. Yes, kind of a silly nitpick, and one that I could be wrong about, but I happen to enjoy thinking about the comparative scale of space faring societies lol. If there is a quote contradicting that, I'd like to see it! Pretty sure it's merely a galactic empire tho :)

Nah, that's fair - that's the kind of nitpick I'd point out, too.

Galaxy, singular. I think I parsed the Empire as intergalactic because massively faster-than-light travel is clearly possible in this setting, via time manipulation. We don't actually know if Alternia had access to time manipulation before Sgrub - but Earth seemingly did, so who knows?

@abacusdictator asked: Found your liveblog a few days ago and furiously binged it. Happy to find another Homestuck liveblog! Especially one I can see happen in-progress! I hope you enjoy the rest of the story!

Thanks - and you're certainly coming in at an interesting time!

Anonymous asked: Scratch "chooses not to lie," but he also has the privileged position of knowing in advance that Rose will misunderstand what the Scratch is, leading to her doing what he wants. If he knew that not lying wouldn't get him what he wants, or even if he didn't know for certain that it would, would he lie? If so, that basically means it's pointless to try to figure out his true meanings, because if you succeed, he'll have retroactively lied about it anyway.

Yeah, this is pretty much my take.

Does it really matter if he 'doesn't lie' if he can foresee all the truths that will mislead you? When you're playing at his level, the actual truth of your statements barely matters.

@skelekingfeddy asked: to my knowledge this has never been commented on by hussie, but i feel like doc scratch doesnt lie in part because he was made from the cueball. its a fortune telling device that predicts the future with remarkable precision and accuracy. you wouldnt expect it to lie, would you? its just that the difference between scratch and the cueball is that he can pick and choose WHICH truths to reveal at which moments. (his penchant for jokes thus probably comes from cal (‘haa haa hee hee hoo hoo’) i feel like him never lying is also a way to feed his own ego. its a self-imposed(!!!!) restriction, and yet despite it he effortlessly plays everyone like fiddles. and he KNOWS it. he CHOOSES never to lie. he VOLUNTARILY hands the people he manipulates an advantage on a goddamn silver platter, and he STILL wins. ‘Isn't it funny how during our various matches, I can tell you what my moves will be in advance, and still win?’ hes so fucking smug. what a pompous dipshit. i love him Anonymous asked: I think that when Scratch say he don't lie, he mean it, and not because of some vilainous valor but out of sheer ego. Scratch is prideful, he love beating other by "playing with cards face up" and tricking them with exact word, he doesn't tell the truth because it's "honorable", he tell the truth because he doesn't need to lie to win.

Also, this. He's just a smug fuck.

Do we know for sure if the cueball is always truthful, actually? Scratch heavily implies it here, but he's only stating it as a hypothetical.

Anonymous asked: Scratch is like a fae, he doesn't lie but you better watch out how he word what he say.

I'd be so screwed against the fae. Not because I couldn't parse their statements, but because I'm only halfway competent with human social customs, let alone weird alien ones.

@manorinthewoods asked: Honestly, I think it's great for his character if Scratch is actually completely dead of emotion inside, possibly even thoughts, and is just near-mindlessly carrying out the necessary parts of his role in the story so that his desired outcome is achieved. He's omniscient, he doesn't need to think. On the other hand, he does seem to have experienced genuine emotion, on occasions… ~LOSS (24/7/24)

A pseudo-omniscient character, mindlessly following the optimal path to their ultimate goal? This smells suspiciously like a Certified Contessa Moment...

Anonymous asked: In the trolls game all the trolls got to see and speak to their lusi after they died because they put them in the sprites. Meaning Gamzees dad coming back wouldn’t get him sober. Ideally Gamzee would be able to interact with his dad way more then he ever had in the past because his dad now had to guid him as his sprite.

Fair point. Although, we know that prototyping tends to affect your personality, and shifts your priorities towards guiding your Player through the game.

Goatsprite's sprite knowledge might have informed him that Gamzee needed to be on Sopor Slime, or game would become unwinnable.

@heliotropopause asked: "Well, no! That’s the problem! The cueball’s omniscience is completely redundant, because the MEOW code already contains an omniscience gene! According to the Scratch loredump, any ‘intelligent’ host for the MEOW code will be granted near-omniscience. Scratch didn’t need the cueball," I think it's worth considering the what exactly he meant with that- it seems perfectly plausible that the teleportation-based powerset established for bequerel would make an intelligent agent very good at observation, either by physically hopping around, or by teleporting light around to see distant places, or by sending out telekinetic "feelers"; we know bec has the capability to separately manipulate individual objects in physical contact from afar. None of this would give him knowledge of the future, or of physically disjoint spaces like the human session, so the cueball is not at all redundant.

It's possible. See, this is another situation where we're really being hampered by our small sample size. We've only seen two First Guardians, and only one of them has been a 'standard' First Guardian, unaltered by HONK. As such, we don't really know how First Guardian clairvoyance is supposed to function.

Another Guardian with human-level intelligence is desperately needed, for science. It's almost enough to make me want the Scratched Guardian of Earth to be made from a human...

@manorinthewoods asked: As an alternative explanation for the double-omniscience problem, one could say that the cueball, in being used to create Scratch, retroactively and conceptually gained his omniscience - so effectively, any use of a cueball allows you to attune to Scratch's awareness (as long as he's alive, perhaps?). This would subsequently imply that First Guardians are all linked to their components - for instance, there would be some link between Bec and all dogs, or specifically Halley. ~LOSS (23/7/24)

As this ask points out, I might just be drawing the causal arrows in the wrong direction. If the cueball is omniscient because of Scratch, rather than the other way round, then there's really only one root cause for his clairvoyance.

I'm not sure why it would work like that, but I do like the idea of Colonel Sassacre running around the early 1900s with a suspiciously powerful dog.

@manorinthewoods asked: The link between 'Skaia's final gate of defense' and 'first to find Alternia' is something I just didn't notice (because I didn't really pay attention to the words and botched my experience by not watching the Flashes), but it would imply, to me, that the gates run in reverse order, Skaia to World - first meteor in, last meteor out. This would mean that the moon which dropped on Jade was the last meteor to hit […]Skaia. ~LOSS (23/7/24)

Hey, good catch!

Jade's meteor was the last to arrive on Earth. By this logic, wouldn't it have been the first thing to leave the session, rather than the last?

That makes a sort of sense, actually. A meteor this enormous would dwarf the entire Incipisphere, so the game would probably want it out of the picture as soon as possible.

@manorinthewoods asked: You seem to have run with the interpretation that all First Guardians run on the same fundamental genetic code, identical to MEOW but using different letters. Not really how I thought of it - I interpret that every FG's code is different, although I also didn't think too hard about the FGs. No reason that they'd necessarily all have to have the same genetic code - after all, Bec's a dog and Scratch's a Scratch. You'd only really need a single gene to code for Green Sun powers… ~LOSS (23/7/24)

It does say they share a genetic sequence, rather than an entire genome. Becquerel presumably contains some dog DNA - the 'host' - which is absent in Scratch, so their genome can't be identical.

Unlike Becquerel, Scratch's hosts were entirely synthetic. They didn't have DNA - which, to me, implies that his entire genome is just an amalgamation of the BR8K H34DS T1CK T0CK HONK sequences. His DNA is just the First Guardian sequence, plus whatever is in HONK.

...what the hell is in HONK, then? If it's DNA, it has to come from some living thing, and I have a horrible feeling that Gamzee spliced his own DNA into the sequence. Why else would he call it HONK?

@skelekingfeddy asked: ‘…the fucking bow-tie! He’s wearing Cal’s Alternian clothes! The proof’s been staring us in the face this entire time, and we were none the wiser!’ look at what regular cal is wearing underneath his blue ‘CAL’ shirt :)

My guy's been pulling the long con.

@morganwick asked: "#but now that i have an antimatter pellet I can feed it to my bees. they can create nuclear waste honey without all the fission rigmarole" Minecraft, Sollux style. (Or maybe Minecraft, Problem Sleuth style?)

Sollux would be a Productive Bees specialist, wouldn't he? That, alongside every computer mod in existence.

@elkian asked: Sorry if I'm the 80th person to mention this but Vriska's 8r8k could also refer to the act of shooting the cue ball at the group of pool balls at the start of a game, known as a "break". @ben-guy asked: Fun fact: In pool terms, the "8r8k" actually refers to the opening shot that sends all the balls flying everywhere. Additional fun fact: The game of pool has a history of being used as a metaphor for causality, which lends some interesting metaphorical weight to Doc Scratch as a cue ball.

Oh, that's true - pool balls are often used as an analogy when talking about causality. Surprising that that's never occurred to me before.

I like to think that when the Felt storm a rival gang's lair as a group, they call their maneuver The Break.

@manorinthewoods asked: Oh my god, Aradia uses Jack to go to the Green Sun. That's such a cool detail. It's so fast, I didn't even see it. To be fair, although the timing is ridiculously impressive, Aradia is both a god and specifically a god of time. Although it's never stated, perfect timing is an obvious power for Time God Tiers to have, which does mean that Aradia would be a half-Flechette. ~LOSS (18/7/24)

And Kanaya's a fashion designer, too. Aradia x Kanaya when?

Anonymous asked: Hey, unfortunately the reqs list link seems to be janked out on my mobile client so I hope this is ok but if you haven't already heard of it I highly highly reccomend Jon Bois' 17776: What Football Will Look Like In the Future It's about football in the same sort of way that homestuck is about video games

Love that story - and I still have to read the sequel, actually!

Anonymous asked: Forwarding another question from the person without a Tumblr account: ~DJ. [I think the change in Equis and Nepeta's behavior is explained by "being together and solving problems together for a long time was great for Equius' and Nepeta's relationship" and "the destruction of Alternia helped Equius realize some facets of Alternian culture he believed where false" (because unlike Eridan he is able to change his mind about stuff like this). - RM]

I really want to see what Equius and Nepeta got up to for a month, as well as all the other trolls. It'd be great to get an 'untold stories of Homestuck' anthology at some point - and hopefully, that's something we'll see in some of Homestuck's tie-in media.

Anonymous asked: I’ve been thinking about Bec prototyping himself and I think I’ve got an answer that works for me - not necessarily the whole answer or the only answer, but I think it’s got something. Basically, Bec knows he can’t / shouldn’t get rid of the meteor entirely (he came down in a meteor that built the frog ruins, so even if we’re just going off what he’s experienced we can say that he probably on some level understands that these meteors landing is important) but he also understands he doesn’t have the type of power or the finesse with that power to only delay it until Jade can take the shot. After all, he could’ve just teleported the living room junk to a different part of the house, but he sent it into deep space because his doggy brain can only deal in absolutes when it comes to perceived danger to his best friend, and the only power we’ve seen First Guardians use (to my recollection) that would in any way help with slowing the meteor is teleportation. He can’t reliably teleport it back only far enough that it will keep falling, but won’t yet land, and he doesn’t have anything else at his disposal - except becoming a sprite, who we’ve seen use beam attacks, which allows Bec to push the meteor back as a delaying measure. Don’t know if he knew it would help so specifically, but even so, I can see Bec understanding it as the only option he has that isn’t either ‘send thing as far away as possible’ or ‘let thing squish most beloved person’. I do think the weakest parts of this theory are What Bec Understands, but puzzling through that devilbeast’s thoughts is hardly a new impossibility. If nothing else, we can all understand that he did this to save Jade, because he loves her, and we love him for that. -Megido (am a new anon, just spent the past couple days catching up and have enjoyed this liveblog immensely)

I think this theory is a good one, and Hussie's comments support it.

The meteor needed to be destroyed in a very specific way for the timeline to retain its integrity, and Bec should instinctively know that, born from Sburb as he is.

Anonymous asked: There are three lenses I think you can view troll romance through: the Xenopsychology lens, the Propaganda lens, and the Parody lens. The Xenopsychology lens is that trolls do in fact experience alien emotions which cannot be felt by humans. It's not just that troll society chooses to categorize the same types of feelings and relationships that humans have differently; these are genuinely unique and original emotions, like a new color that a human couldn't imagine. Describing kismesissitude as hatemance or rivalry or abuse, or moirallegiance as bromance or besties or queer platonic partnership, or auspisticism as third wheeling or mom friending or refereeing are all fundamentally incorrect, because there is no human analogue. You can take this a step further and say that matespritship is also fundamentally different from human romance, even if it appears similar. Therefore all attempts to analyze or write troll romance should be forays into xenofiction, attempting to understand things within a nonhuman framework. The Propaganda lens is that actually troll emotions aren't really any different than human ones, but the quadrant system benefits the hemocasteist militaristic empire by keeping trolls divided enough to become either fucked up killers or submissive victims by the time they reach maturity, but have the minimum support structure needed to actually reach maturity. Kismesissitude is fundamentally unhealthy, auspisticism serves as a counterbalance to keep everyone from killing each other, and moirallegiance serves to prevent trolls from having multiple close friendships or from being fully open with their matesprit by arbitrarily sequestering who it’s appropriate to have certain positive interactions with. None of this is really romance except the one that’s analogous to human romance, but trolls are raised to buy into the system under threat of death. It’s hard to form community and contemplate uprising if everyone confines the meaningful relationships in their life to like 4-5 other people, half of which are based on negative interactions. Also it’s a commentary on how human rules about love and relationships and where the platonic ends and romantic or sexual starts are socially enforced rather than wholly natural and can be arbitrary and unhealthy. Anonymous asked: The Parody lens is that this is all Hussie making fun of fandom shipping tropes. All sufficiently devoted rivalries are actually romantic love. All sufficiently strong friendships are actually romantic love. These two are so hopelessly oblivious to the fact that they actually want to get with the guy they hate, or that the other person they think just wants to be friends actually feels the same way, they need a third party to push them together. (Okay this one doesn’t work because auspisticism seems to basically be the opposite of that? Maybe auspisticism is supposed to be like, contrived elimination of competing romantic options to assure an OTP. Idk if anyone really knows what auspisticism is supposed to be, least of all Hussie.) Also because this was early 2010’s Hussie, there’s maybe a certain level on which trolls being societally obliged to polyamory and bisexuality is also making fun of shippers, although if it was I think Hussie turned around pretty quickly to actually being cool about it. Much like how light is a wave, and a particle, and a ray, all of these are true at different times. This is because the nature of Hussie's writing is that even when things are serious business, they are also jokes. And this is also why the Homestuck fandom will never agree on the correct way to understand and depict the quadrants.

Great breakdown. As you could probably predict, I lean a lot more towards the Propaganda lens, with a healthy dose of Parody mixed in.

The Xenopsychology lens isn't necessarily untrue - it's just that, as I've discussed before, the trolls read as extremely human to me. I honestly believe that if you raised a human on Alternia, they'd probably be compelled to form the same quadrants as everyone else.

I once got an ask stating that, according to Hussie, each of the quadrants are meant to be exaggerated versions of human relationship dynamics. I'd really like to check out that full quote, so if anyone's got a link, send it my way!

[zalrb]

Stray-ish Doctor Who Thoughts So Far...

So, some thoughts about RTD's Doctor Who vs. Moffat's and Ten's Era vs. Eleven from what I've seen.

On an episode-by-episode basis, I like RTD's era more than Moffat's, like there are episodes like Midnight or Gridlock or Smith and Jones or Forest of the Dead that I quite enjoyed more than individual episodes in series 5-7. However, when it comes to entire seasons, I prefer Moffat's era because there's a certain grandiose quality to the seasons and Moffat is less episodic so it feels like we're actually building up to something, which in a few ways can make it a more exciting viewing experience. It makes sense to me that he wrote Silence in The Library and Forest of the Dead because they have that overarching/two-parter-leading-up-to-a-climax quality (and of course, there's River!).

I found that Ten's era/RTD's era was more interested in human nature and therefore more interested in consequences, which in turn made the episodes emotionally darker, which I appreciated, so we get episodes like the Planet of Ood where the Oods who were lobotomized and effectively enslaved by the villain of the episode turn him into an Ood and Donna remarks that being around the Doctor, it's getting more and more difficult for her to know what's right and what's wrong. We have Midnight, which I loved, delve into how quickly people can turn on each other out of self-interest/survival and then at the end, no one, not even Ten, remembers the hostess' name (of course I have a few issues with how the Black characters were treated by that is par for the course with RTD's era, it seems).

On the other hand, I find that Moffat had a more "equation" approach, Eleven's era/Moffat's era was more interested in overarching concepts and philosophical moral dilemmas, dealing with matters such as vengeance and war, like The Hungry Earth and Cold Blood and I think he was really interested in ideas, like the idea of Rory waiting for Amy for 2,000 years or Amy having three universes in her head or River being the Ponds' (+ Tardis') daughter and they were cool ideas (not the River thing) but like I mentioned before, I don't think he deals with the consequences and implications and ramifications of those ideas, rather, he tidies it up at the end by being like well that happened in a universe/timeline that no longer exists whereas I think RTD's era would've gotten into the emotional meat of the outcomes of those ideas. And although I thought the previous seasons dealt with human nature more, I found that Moffat's characters (or well, how he wrote them) were more memorable, maybe because I found them funnier and wittier and slicker so I found them more engaging, although in the RTD era, the characters were very much ... human.

With Matt and Tennant. I said it a few days ago, I think Tennant played more emotional nuance as the Doctor, while Matt was more charismatic. I am more inclined to believe companions going along with Eleven than Ten. Also, now that I realize that Ten had three different companions, I feel sort of robbed that Eleven only had Amy, Amy + Rory and then Clara, and Clara wasn't even Eleven's companion too long before he has to regenerate. Eleven did have River but I would not consider River a companion.

I do prefer Eleven over Ten.

[mwolf0epsilon]

The Umbaran Pathogen - Day 3: Separated from loved ones

Summary: Moments like these made him wish he wasn't such a goddamn freak.

Warning: N/A

Prev / Next

[In which the events on Umbara are worsened by an unknown pathogen taking hold of both the 501st and 212th. These series of drabbles will follow a non-linear timeline based on the AI-less Whumptober prompt list for 2023.]

THIS STORY IS ALSO ON AO3

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To say there was an air of trepidation as they approached the shadowy planet of Umbara, was a complete overstatement. The atmosphere within the Negotiator was more than a little tense, to the point where an eerie silence seemed to permeate the air of the large Venator-Class Star Destroyer.

It was stiffing. Oppressive. But most of all, irritating.

Not that Peel was one to give in to irritation all that easily. Especially not since the fiasco that had been the mission to Bray. He'd had to learn to be more patient and cautious after that ordeal. And not without good reason...

Running his tongue over his unusually sharp canines, the vampiric trooper had to keep himself from sighing out loud as he noted the aftertaste of battery acid that stubbornly clung to his teeth enamel. Reminding him of things he really wished he could forget. Of his new nature as... This... Whatever this was.

Sure, Canivete had reassured him that his newly acquired habits and instincts weren't anything need fearing, since he'd figured out a pretty easy way to keep himself from succumbing to the urges that had been haunting him after he'd been "cured" of Lord Ravna's influence. But that didn't mean he had to like the way that the vile monster's taint had altered him.

Especially not when he had to preemptively feed himself as much charge as possible before every mission. It was doubtful he'd have a chance during their deployment on hostile planets, so he was often forced to stalk off and hide away in shame, as he sunk his teeth into every piece of machinery that Canivete had pilfered for him in silent solidarity. She was amazing like that. Never shying away from helping even the strangest of cases... Which he supposes came down to the fact she had a batcher who'd ended up in a much worse situation than Peel had.

That said, Canivete was a bit of a mother hen and tended to fuss a little too much when she thought he was neglecting his own needs. It wasn't like he wanted to stay awake late into the night, or that he didn't want to eat a nice tasty meal among their brethren... It's just that, sometimes, all the noise could be a little overwhelming.

Umbara would be overwhelming too... He just knew it. Especially after they'd gone through the rushed briefing. The lack of information they were working with put him and the rest of the vode ill at ease, which was what was causing so much tension all over the ship. What was making it so hard for him to shake off the pre-barricade-busting jitters.

Not even draining the mouse droid he'd managed to corner settled his frantically beating heart. He hoped the poor thing didn't hold it against him. The engineers would be able to easily fix it, but you never knew a droid's temperament until you crossed it.

"Peel." Startling at the sound of his own name, he turned around to see who'd called him. At the end of the hall he'd been pacing in, stood Cani in her medical fatigues. Her hair was down, which meant she'd just recently woken up and hadn't had the time to put it up yet in the way she liked.

Which itself meant she'd been looking for him since she'd woken up.

"Canivete." He greeted, flashing her a quick smile before subconsciously clamping his mouth shut so that his fangs didn't show too much. Even if she wasn't bothered by these bizarre attributes of his, he didn't particularly like showing his teeth to other vode. It made him feel weird. "Do you need something?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact, I do." She made her way over to him and ran a hand over her face, trying to shake off the lingering sleepiness from her eyes. "The Negotiator will be breaching the planetary barricade soon. According to the Commander, a couple of squads of pilots from the 212th and 501st each, will be keeping the Umbarans busy while the Generals and the rest of the men engage planet-side via LAATs."

"What are we working with down there? I know we don't have much in the way of intel..." He couldn't wait to get down on solid ground and get some of the nervous energy out of his system. The sooner they landed, the faster they could take Umbara and then go back to Coruscant.

"... That's what I wanted to talk about..." Canivete frowned, her gaze lowering guiltily onto the floor. "You're not going."

"What?" He stared at her, eyes going wide and jaw dropping slightly.

"I've noticed your vitals have been a little erratic as of late..." She explained "And I know you've been downplaying it too. You've been sleeping less and draining more energy than usual. Down there there's no way of telling if we'll be able to meet your requirements, and I don't want to risk a freakout in the middle of the field. Especially not if you start zeroing in on the General or his saber..."

"I... You had me written out of the mission?!" He didn't know what to say. He felt betrayed. "What the hell Canivete?!"

"I'm trying to protect you!" The medic snapped at him.

"I don't need protecting!" He barked back, furious that she'd go behind his back like this. "I'm not a ticking time bomb! I've been preparing for this! Been feeding regularly so I wouldn't have to worry down there!"

"We have no idea how long this might take! You can't possible tell me you think this will be a quick run... Not with how little we have on the enemy or their goddamn tech!"

Snarling, Peel turned away and began to pace again. On one hand, Canivete was right. This was definitely not striking him as an easy campaign and he didn't even know if all the preemptive feeding would maintain him for long. He'd been getting hungrier and hungrier recently. Something deep in him feeling like something big was coming... He wasn't sure what, but he had his suspicions.

And so did his worrywart sister.

If he ended up running on empty down on Umbara... He might become desperate enough to eat his brothers's blasters as a last resort. Or worse... Try to eat their Jedi. And if neither of those things happened? What would become of him? Would he collapse? Would he die? Neither of them knew for sure...

The point was that, by technicality, he was a liability and Canivete was right to request he stay on ship. It was the safer option.

But he didn't want to sit around while his brothers, sisters and siblings fought a bloody battle. He didn't want to be separated from them and be left wondering if any of them would come back safely. Something deep in his core told him they might not.

Not that he had a choice in the matter. Canivete had made sure of it.

"I'm sorry Peel. I really am... But as a medic I have to do what's right by my patients." Cani looked genuinely sorrowful. "And as a sister, I have to do what's right by my siblings... Even if I have to go behind their back to do it..."

"If you die down there, I'll never forgive you." He spat out coldly, uncaring if he hurt her feelings. "I won't say your name in my remembrances, you hear me?"

"...That's fair." He hated that she looked resigned to that. He wanted her to argue with him. Not accept whatever he told her in a fit of bitter anger. "Keep the ship safe Peel. I'll do my best to make sure everyone comes back in one piece..."

With that all said, the medic turned around and left. His words weighed heavier in his heart because she didn't look back. Peel was watching his vode, his loved ones, marching towards uncertainty and potential death. And he couldn't do anything about it. He felt helpless.

Moments like these made him wish he wasn't such a goddamn freak.

[lazyarchivist]

The Man Beside You, Ch 2

Chapter 2, which I am not super happy with but will have to do. Chapter 3 is where things get moving again, and chapter 4 is the reason I started writing this whole thing in the first place.

Chapter 1 here. Chapter 3 here. Chapter 4 here.

I've also started cross-posting this on my Ao3 account: Ryter21

He followed the Luna Wolves back to the village, watching as they regrouped and mourned their dead.  Euprhatie and the two Rememberancers who hadn't survived the encounter in the first timeline were ushered back up to the Vengeful Spirit, and Garviel watched as Ezekyle Abaddon made planet fall.

He was unprepared for the intensity of emotion he felt at seeing his former Mournival brother step out of the Stormbird.  Rage and despair, and he was surprised to realize there was a small flare of joy.  Despite everything, he had still loved Ezekyle.

He made sure he was elsewhere when the Warmaster joined them.

As he wandered through the encampment, he tested what he was able to affect in the material realm; in short, not much.  He walked unseen and was unable to move things, though if he concentrated hard enough he could make his voice heard.  Even so, his words were dismissed as more whispers from the mountain.  He could walk through solid objects but enjoyed the mundanity of physically walking on the ground, restricting himself to using doorways and stairs instead of phasing.

When the encampment began to pack up and return to the Vengeful Spirit he slipped onto one of the transports.

Once the transport docked, he found it took him quite a while to leave it.  Every time he made to step off the landing ramp, his mind flashed back to the last time he had been aboard this ship.  It wasn't until long after the deck had cleared of all but the most basic of support staff that was he finally able to make himself step onto the grating.

Once fully on all fours aboard the Vengeful Spirit, Garviel felt… nothing.  He wasn't sure what he had been expecting.  He wasn't sure if he was disappointed with the lack of reaction or grateful.

He roamed the ship, ducking down corridors and weaving around mortals and Astartes alike.  He re familiarized himself with old haunts, watched brothers he had long lost, either to the warp or to the war, and spent time in the Rememberancer's Retreat.  The hall was alive with cheerful civilians and off duty ship personnel alike, and Garviel let himself be swept away by the noise.

He had avoided this place like the plague when he had been alive, but now he wished there had been a place like this for the Astartes, where they could meet and talk in the open.  Perhaps the lodges wouldn't have pervaded so many of the legions then, and less of his brothers would have been lost to the corruption of the Ruinous Powers.

He specifically avoided the command deck.

At one point as he meandered through the training cages, he heard his own voice from the middle of a group of Astartes brothers.

"I was there the day Horus killed the Emperor…"

Garviel left the room before the sentence was finished.  Even without a corporeal body there was a sour feeling roiling in his stomach.

He sat in on the lodge meetings, watching as the members talked and laughed and wondered where it all went wrong.  He was hoping he would be able to pinpoint when, exactly, the poison started but so far the lodge was what it had been advertised as: a fraternity of brothers, meeting without consideration of rank.

Eventually they arrived at Murder, and the next few months passed as Garviel remembered them.  He had tried whispering what he remembered about the Interex's musical relays to the engineers working on decoding them, but it had been so long that the translation was still slow going.

During this time Erebus himself arrived on the Vengeful Spirit, and though Loken wished to tear the bastard's head from his shoulders, he did not have that kind of power.  One moment of weakness did reveal however that with the amount of warp energy Erebus already contained, Garviel could focus enough to make small actions be felt, and he took great pleasure in nipping at the Word Bearer's heels often enough that Erebus grew concerned there was something infesting his armor.

He briefly considered possessing someone to be able to tear the chaplain's head off, but dismissed that thought almost as quickly as it had come.

Sanguinius's arrival was much more welcome, and seeing the Primarchs interact as beloved brothers was a balm upon his rage.

The war on Murder was just as long and bloody as it had been originally.  Garviel had slipped down at one point to see if there was anything he could do to help the fight, but the Megarachnids were not creatures of the warp, and so were outside his ability to affect.

It was good to see Saul again, at least.  Those two months on Istvaan 3 had forged a bond between them that Garviel still held dear to his hearts. 

When the Interex finally arrived, Garviel was still at a loss for what he could do.  With how much the Interex feared the warp and the things that lived within it, it was likely he would not be able to step foot upon the planet without setting off some kind of alarm.  His fears turned out to be accurate when Diath Shehn and his envoy boarded the Vengeful Spirit for the first time, and Garviel was unable to get withing a hundred meters before the unmanned sagiitars began shifting in his direction.

He backed off, hoping he had not given the Interex more reason to distrust them but what would it matter in the end, anyway?

The would be wiped out before the Luna Wolves left the system.

The lodge meetings felt different when Erebus attended them.  Perhaps because the Word Bearer knew how soon his plans would come to fruition, but he was already planting the seeds of heresy in the minds of the members.  Little things, about how stressed Horus was with his new responsibilities, about how the Emperor had left them to fight alone as he went back to Terra.

Garviel could see how these small cracks would grow and break the Son's of Horus's belief in the Emperor.  Especially for Abaddon who, for all his faults and choleric temper had loved the Warmaster dearly.  All Erebus had to do was stoke the flames of ire already within the first captain's heart, and Ezekyle was all too happy to spread his complaints with the rest of the lodge.

Despite Garviel's vain hope for a difference, the situation with the Interex continued exactly as it had before.  Erebus stole the Anathema and burned the Hall of Devices, Jephta Naud slung accusations of deceit, and the Xenobia Principis burned under the might of the Luna Wolves.

~

The Warmaster-

No.

Horus Lupercal sat alone in his personal chambers, hunched over with his head in his hands as he wept.  They were finally leaving the Interex system having wiped out the remaining opposition, and Horus finally had a moment to himself to grieve.

He had had so many hopes when meeting with the Interex; that he could reunite the lost colony with the Imperium.  That he could prove that the Astartes were capable of so much more than pure violence.

But it seemed as though he was destined for only war, and the suffering it wrought.

Garviel padded into the room, head low and ears pinned back as he felt the pure anguish radiating from his genefather.  He whined softly; he felt more useless now than ever before, unable to comfort Horus in the way he desired.  He hesitated a moment before jumping up onto the bed beside his Primarch, situating himself to lay beside Horus and resting his head in his lap.

If Horus felt his weight he did not react.