#if you didn’t click on the readmore-

[needle-thread-thimble-spear]

RGU and the Transfeminine, Part 1

OR

Why Miki Kaoru is an Egg

Fig. 1: The Sunlit Garden

When I’d first watched through Revolutionary Girl Utena, Miki Kaoru was initially one of the characters I had the hardest time figuring out. Unlike the other poisoned sibling relationships in the show, Miki and Kozue’s didn’t really make much sense to me. I couldn’t decide how I felt about the character, whether he was “better” somehow than Touga, Saionji, or Akio, or if he was “just as bad”. And of course. What the hell is with that damn stopwatch dude??* Looking at fan writings afterward just deepened the confusion. Everyone seems to have a different opinion on what’s going on with Miki. It’s only after much re-watching, and introspection, that I think I’ve figured out why I’m so conflicted about the character. I’d like to share why- and hopefully along the way I can at least show that Miki is more interesting than many give him credit for. Click the readmore if you please!

(And, to be clear, what is written below is a reading, a blend of evidence from the text, from the subtext, and my own personal experience. I do not claim to be the first to interpret the character this way nor do I claim that this is the definitive read of the character. Nonetheless, I hope I can make my case to you!)

and, a big thank you to @empty-movement for collating all the high quality screengrabs and scans in this post!

Fig 2: Rookie Princes

While I’m not the first to notice, I think it’s frequently overlooked just how similar Utena and Miki are in the first arc. It’s definitely something that flies over the heads of many first-time viewers. But Miki and Utena, are extremely alike! Of course, they are both motivated by an unattainable image of the past, and Miki’s early episodes codify the “sunlit garden” into the RGU symbolic environment. But it’s more than just this. Utena and Miki both treat Anthy in basically the same way. Utena has an easy time convincing Miki that the dueling game is objectifying nonsense. That the principled thing is to leave the whole exercise behind and treat Anthy like a person. It isn’t very hard for Miki to convince Utena to duel him for her hand either. They both view themselves as her personal protector, and (while maybe at different times), both project their imagination of what she must be thinking onto her. Utena does a bit more than Miki to try and figure Anthy out, but it doesn’t take much for her to get swept up in her own image of prince. In both their minds, Anthy needs them to save her. And, when Anthy looks them in the eyes, and tells them. I’m not yours. It destroys them. Freezes them in their tracks, breaks their hearts. Screaming, its a lie, you can’t mean that! Of course they get along so well! They see themselves in one another, plain as day. Little rival princelings, seeking the affections of the same princess, but always with chivalry and good intention.

Fig 3: Heartbreak

But I think there is more to it than that! Miki and Utena (and later Nanami) are some of the youngest duelists (at least, without a black rose anyway). And, they have fairly similar relationships to the other members of the student council. Juri acts as an older friend, mentor, and source of advice for both of them. Its not unlikely that she sees her younger self in the two of them, and while she does very directly take this out on Utena, its her sword that Utena takes to her second duel with Touga. Indeed, Touga manipulates Miki and Utena in unsubtle and sexually aggressive ways, as compared to how he might treat Saionji or Juri. And for both, its their relationship to gender that he directly attacks. He attempts to break Utena’s spirit by turning her “back into a normal girl”, and for Miki he seems to challenge his masculinity. And while this may seem as though the two of them are being shoved in opposite directions, in both cases, Touga hits them in the same place. “You’re a prince then? I don’t think so. Unless you prove it”. Touga isn’t the only one to question Miki’s ability or status. Utena and Juri both tell Miki. You are much more suited to playing piano than dueling. The main difference here is that they tell him this with genuine compassion, but the implication is the same. You aren’t suited to this prince thing. Give it up.

I don’t think it’s just the audience who is conflicted slotting in Miki with the other “men”.

Fig 4: Strange Friends

Much ink has been spilled on Miki and Kozue’s relationship, but I do think there is one thing consistent across readings. There is a power struggle going on between them, and they’ve both got something to hold over the others head. Personally, I don’t believe there is any attraction between them. Rather, What’s Going On With Those Two is their mismatch in understanding their sexuality and the RGU concept of “Reality”, and the friction that creates in their image of themselves and one another. That reading may go as follows. Miki sees Kozue as acting dangerously and immorally. In his mind, she is his responsibility, to keep out of trouble at the very least. Perhaps he sees himself as needing to step in for their absent parents. So he sees himself as the mature and grounded one, a father figure needing to keep the both of them on the straight and narrow. Kozue on the other hand, sees Miki as being essentially blind to Reality (with a capital R). She believes he doesn’t have a good grasp of what sex is, or what adult relationships look like. She may believe that she understands what happened with their parents much better than Miki, and clearly sees that her brother is in danger with his creepy music teacher. So she sees herself as the mature and grounded one, needing to protect her brother both by warding off people who would take advantage of him and by getting him to grow up and see things as they Really are. Without their parents, they feel the need to take care of one another and control how the other approaches their sexuality. But in the end, it does seem that Kozue is the one who is better able to manipulate Miki’s behavior, helping Akio convince him to duel a second time. That Miki needs to grow up and accept what he wants. He sees a vision of Anthy, and he’s driving the akiomobile. And, with fearful realization, he discovers the identity of End of the World.

Fig 5: Fear

So then. Why should Miki be so hung up about his sexuality? It clearly makes him very uncomfortable. And why does he compare the sister he had in the past onto the one he has in the present? What’s so special about that sunlit garden, anyway? What is Miki Kaoru’s shining thing?

Let me spin a yarn, if you'll indulge me-

As far as Miki remembers it, when he was little things were perfect. His parents were still there, and he and his twin sister were thick as thieves. They would play piano together, and drink milkshakes. Things were simple and happy as far as he’s concerned, and while his childhood was not nearly as rosy as he remembers, it was certainly better than whatever he has to deal with now. Now his parents are gone for reasons he doesn’t quite understand, and his sister has drifted away from him and acts promiscuously. His body is starting to change, and it fills him with disgust. Worse still, he finds himself envying his sister for some reason. It all floods him with shame. He needs to fight those feeling with everything he has. Being very clever for his age, he finds himself the youngest member of the student council. He becomes involved with the dueling game as it is revealed to him, and goes along with it, not wanting to act out of place. He gets a crush on Anthy, and is unable to figure out what the hell he should do about it. Later, he meets Utena, and the two become fast friends. And how lucky, his new friend is roommates with his crush! She’s just so perfect. She’s kind, and quiet, and chaste, not at all like his sister. He feels a kinship with her. And in an act of cosmic fate- she plays for him his favorite childhood arrangement. It’s just as Touga says. He can’t let the world get to her, the way its getting to his sister. The way its getting to him. He needs to make sure that Anthy, and his memories, are safe. But alas- it seems she doesn’t feel the same way. She’d rather be with Utena. Hopefully, Utena can protect her where he cannot. Miki and Utena go back to being friends, and he nurses his hurt feelings privately. It wouldn't do to make a scene about it, and besides, it wasn’t appropriate for him to think of her like that anyway. Thinking about anyone like that. He can’t help but feel disgusted with himself for allowing it. Later, his relationship with his sister continues to deteriorate, and his father is remarrying. But he can stick by his principles, and stay out of it all, the dueling especially. Kozue, Touga, and Akio have other plans. He is confronted with Reality, and it terrifies him. He sees himself in the drivers seat, Anthy his. This is what he is now, no point in trying to hide from it. He challenges Utena again, taking an early advantage utilizing his new resolve and Utena’s confusion. But that resolves breaks quickly. What is Kozue doing with Anthy?

Pay attention, or you’ll lose.

Fig 6: Crash!!

Miki is disgusted with himself, his role, because he does not want it. He hates what’s happening to himself and his family. He admires Utena and Juri, for embodying his ideal self. He listens to Touga, puts up with his music teacher, even if they make him feel gross and uncomfortable, because he feels he has to and that he doesn’t have a choice. He idolizes Anthy, so much. He is attracted to her, but maybe there is something more. Maybe, Miki wishes he could be her. Miki, in my mind, is a closeted trans lesbian going through puberty as a boy. I think that part of this might be projection, perhaps. But I hope that I might have made my case using the text of the show. But even if you disagree, I hope that you might have a better appreciation for his character. I think he’s fairly consistently people’s least favorite council member as a character, but honestly he’s my favorite and I think there’s a lot more too him than a lot of people give him credit for.

Fig 7: Three Lesbians Hanging Out

… this all being said. I think it’s interesting that Miki thinks Anthy is the picture of femininity right? That this is what he wants.

In the end, all girls are like the rose bride.

Please wait patiently while I make the case, that while Miki is an egg. Anthy has long since hatched...

(And I do mean be patient! This subject, and the concept that Ohtori represents a transmisogynystic institution at its very core, is WAY more personal than this headcanon, and also is much more of a difficult thing to write for dozens of reasons. I'm still not 100% sure it would even be right of me to post my thoughts on that publicly. But if enough people are interested, maybe that would motivate me to write it!)

*What’s a good Miki essay without some sort of Stopwatch Theory tm? Well (and I freely admit much of this is probably projection, but it’s not just me projecting! It’s also my girlfriend!!), Miki seems to get very wrapped up in his own thoughts. He is very self conscious, takes the criticisms of others very seriously, and also seems to get ideas about How Things Are Going To Happen in his head. He desperately tries to make sense of his surroundings, and finds himself consistently failing to do that. So my guess is the stopwatch is a way for him to regulate and calibrate his thoughts and hypotheses and self image. He picked it up in his duty as council secretary, but its something he feels is significant outside of that. Aha moment? Click. Unexpected end to a council meeting? Click. Something go completely as expected? Click. It helps him process I think. That is my formal Stopwatch Hypothesis tm.

Supplement Fig 1: Stopwatch

[elyvorg]

The Most Significant Change in AAI2’s Official Localisation (according to me)

Ace Attorney Investigations 2 finally has an official localisation! This is kind of mind-boggling to those of us who played the fan translation and have loved it in that form for years, never expected an official localisation to happen, and now suddenly have to get used to everything about it being Just Slightly Different.

Having played the official localisation in full, I can say that for the most part, it’s even better than the already-excellent fan translation! Most of the lines have just a little bit more colour in them now, and there’s a bunch of small nuances that went over my head before that are emphasised better in the new version. There are some lines I prefer in the fan translation, but they’re vastly outnumbered by all the lines I prefer in the official version. All in all, strongly recommend fans of the fan translation to check out the official version in some form.

However, among these minor lines here and there that I prefer in the fan translation, there is also this one small but much more significant thing from the fan translation which is not present in the official version. I happen to care about this small-but-significant detail a lot, so here is a post explaining exactly why this is a Thing that Matters (to me, at least).

(This will mention major spoilers for the game! Do not click the readmore unless you have experienced the entire story of AAI2 in some form.)

The Thing is this: In the fan translation, Simon refers to his friend as “Knightley”, all the time. Meanwhile, in the official localisation, Simeon always calls him “Bronco”.

Now, I get why the localisers did this. It’s a Japanese cultural thing – in Japanese, it’s common for even close friends to address each other by their surnames, and indeed, Sim(e)on referred to Knight(ley) by his surname in the original Japanese game. This is usually changed into friends using each other’s first names in English localisations, because it feels strange in English to see two close friends addressing each other in what feels like a distant and formal kind of way.

(For example, in The Great Ace Attorney, Ryunosuke and Kazuma addressed each other by their surnames in Japanese, and this was – very correctly – localised to them using each other’s first names in English. It would feel wrong to an English speaker for these best friends not to do that, even though they are still characters from Japan.)

So it just makes sense as the obvious localisation choice to have Simeon refer to his friend with his given name, rather than his surname.

However! In this particular instance, I firmly 100% believe that this was the wrong decision.

See, Simon calling Knightley by his surname in the fan translation isn’t just an awkward holdover of a somewhat more direct Japanese translation – it actually means something. It’s a subtle hint that Simon doesn’t actually see Knightley as the friend he supposedly is; he’s distancing himself from his friend by talking about him in this more detached way.

This is subtle enough that it isn’t a spoiler, either! On my first playthrough of the fan translation, I never batted an eye at Simon using his friend’s surname. Some people in English-speaking countries do just prefer to go by their surname, even to their friends – particularly when their first name is kind of awkward. It felt perfectly natural that Knightley might prefer to be called just that even by his best friend, instead of “Horace”, which sounds somewhat old-fashioned and dorky.

(And this would go double, surely, for someone whose first name is freaking Bronco of all things. It’d make plenty of sense that he’d rather be called Knight!)

Knightley himself probably didn’t even question it. I imagine Simon would have called him Horace while they were kids at the orphanage, but then when Simon reappeared in his life years later after his disappearance and was calling him Knightley instead, Knightley probably shrugged and figured, yeah, Horace is kind of a dorky name, he’s not a kid any more, “Knightley” is way cooler. (Especially with his obsession with chess, not to mention his whole white-knight complex towards Simon.)

The biggest reason why this means something is that Simon calls him Knightley almost the entire time, with one single exception. In the flashback to their impromptu nighttime meeting in the prison, in which Simon knows he’s about to get his “friend” killed and this is the last time he’ll ever see him, the final thing he says to him is, “Goodbye, Horace.”

He uses Knightley’s first name, for the only time in the game’s present. And so, precisely because he’s used his surname every other time, this simple line becomes an achingly telling sign that Simon still cares about his best friend despite everything, despite the fact that he is literally getting him killed. It’s like he’s remembering the happier times they had being friends at the orphanage before everything turned sour, like a part of him wishes they could still have that, and it breaks my heart.

(This is the same in the Japanese, too – he uses his friend’s given name, which is a sign of extremely close friendship in Japanese and would have even more of an impact to Japanese-speaking players.)

This implication isn’t there in the official localisation, because it can’t be. Not when Simeon calls him Bronco all the time anyway, even when he’s revealed his true colours and is no longer pretending for the sake of Edgeworth and company. Which means that he simply did call him Bronco the whole time, even after they reunited, even while secretly wanting him dead. In that context, using the name Bronco when saying goodbye to him in the prison means nothing in particular. It’s just the name he always uses.

…Okay, granted, it’s not like that flashback scene has no emotional weight in the official version. It still is Simeon coming to talk to his friend one last time when he doesn’t really need to, which still means a lot on its own. But the final line itself isn’t a particularly notable part of it. In the localisation, it’s “Goodbye, Bronco. …And farewell.” The added “farewell” mostly just serves to make it obvious that he knows this is the very last time they’ll meet, but I suppose there is at least something to the fact that you wouldn’t usually say that to someone you didn’t care about. I don’t think it hits nearly as hard as calling him Horace for the first and only time in twelve years, though.

It seems like either the official localisers didn’t notice the significance of the given name in that line there, or they did notice it but they decided that localising Simeon to use his friend’s given name the rest of the time, like localisers normally would, was worth losing the impact of that line. And I firmly disagree that this was worth it. There’s nothing inherently wrong about Knight going by Knight even to his best friend, even if it might feel a little awkward in principle, and the emotional impact of the final thing his best friend says to him would have absolutely made up for that.

[carminecherry]

ENCLOSURE | mikey sano

this is part four of the series kill the lights

⇝ PAIRING: timeskip!biker!mikey sano x fem!reader

⇝ SERIES SYNOPSIS: after moving by yourself to tokyo, you black out at a party and wake up with a new friend. as she sweeps you up in her fast-paced city life, you feel yourself falling deeper and deeper for her mysterious brother. but something dark is brewing in the city. as his past threatens to resurface, mikey must fight not only physical enemies but the mental battle of his feelings for you. he can't resist you , but could he ever forgive himself if something happened to you? he'll love you selfishly and protect you savagely.

⇝ PART FOUR LENGTH: 2k words

⇝ PART FOUR WARNINGS: mentions of violence (18+ minors do not interact):

all characters are 20+; Alternate Universe! Canon Divergent. a friend from university invites you to his house party. as the drinks flow, you slip into a pleasant buzz. that is until a particular masked man makes his appearance, unveiling himself.

⇝ AUTHOR'S NOTE: a short chapter with a little spice at the end ;) more chapters coming soon! keep an eye on the tags and stay safe! <3

DO NOT INTERACT WITH THIS WORK IF YOU ARE A MINOR. BY CLICKING THE READMORE, YOU CONSENT TO VIEWING ADULT CONTENT.

Your eyes flutter open as morning light trickles into your room. You bury your face in your pillow, trying to buy a few more moments of sleep. You had been having the most wonderful dream. It felt so real. Those delicious lips on your neck. Your hands running over his toned chest. The heat of your bodies pressed to one another. Please, just five more minutes. Five more hours. But your body betrayed you.

With a frustrated whine you turned over, resigning yourself to being awake. Rubbing your eyes, you feel your mascara clump under the pressure. Shit, had you fallen asleep in your makeup? You sat up, blinking sleep from your eyes. Your throat was dry to the point of being a bit sore but other than that, you had escaped one of Yuuki’s house parties without a hangover! You could count on one hand the times you’ve woken up after one of Yuuki’s parties without hating your life. 

You rise, feeling gross from sleeping in your party attire. Quickly shedding your clothes and tossing them in the wash, you move to your bathroom. You washed your face gently and thoroughly, each splash of water a prayer that you didn’t get a breakout. You brush your hair and hop into a nice warm shower, rinsing off the unpleasant feeling that comes from not completing an evening ritual. Also taking the time to finish what your dream didn’t. After toweling off, you slip into the pajamas the sober you from last night had so kindly left out in preparation for the drunk you. Things don’t always go to plan, clearly.

Whipping up a quick breakfast, you rummage through the door of your fridge for the carton of iced coffee, grabbing a yogurt cup before closing the door and moving to your spot in front of the TV. There is decent counter seating at the small island in your kitchen, but you usually opted for sitting on the floor in front of your coffee table, resting your back on the sofa. You click the button on the remote and the screen illuminates, the news coming back from a commercial break. 

You dig into the meal as you finally check your messages. The sound of the TV is mostly white noise as you open several messages from Emma. There is a thread of spam from the party.  Her spelling getting progressively worse.

11:00 I lost you Im heading back frm the bathroom.

11:03 OMG Senju is here! You’d lioev her! Come meet her! *Blurry selfie

11:07 Where arrrreee yyyooooooouuuuu??,,

11:08 Og shit I forgot you an  Mi

1:20 Y/N I lovw yoi thx ro tnotight

10:00 Fuck me. I’m so hungover. What happened last night?

You reacted to the message from this morning and quickly typed up. 

“I’m so sorry! I Didn’t see these last night!!! … Are you sure you wanna know?” 

You send the message before clicking out to open a message thread from Yuuki,

1:30 “It was great to see you Y/N. Hope you got home safely!”

You heart the message and reply, 

“It was seriously AMAZING! Thank you so much for the invite! I hope the damage is’t too bad. LMK about next time uvu”

Just then, the report on the news caught your ear and your attention was dragged away from your phone screen. “Developing story: There was an Arson Attack at a car dealership in Roppongi in the early hours of the morning, Saturday. Police are reporting extreme property damage and evidence of a robbery as well as several cars missing from the lot. Two employees are in serious condition at the local hospital. A security guard has been placed under arrest. He is suspected of conspiring with the attackers after reviewing security tapes from the crime scene. The situation is still developing and anyone with information about this event is being urged to report details to the number below.” 

The TV replayed clips from the security tape showing three masked figures and the security guard. They cut to a wide shot of the building now with a reporter in front, smoke still rising from the charred building as a phone number scrolled across the bottom of the screen. You shuddered. Japan was a safe country, but it meant that when something did happen it was big news. The faces of the two employees appeared on the screen, one younger and one who looked to be in his fifties. You mentally wished for a speedy recovery for the two of them. The news cut away to the newsroom and switched to the weather. It’s jarring how the world keeps turning, you think.

Your phone buzzes and your attention returns to the smaller screen in your hand. You take a big bite of toast. You read a new message from Emma.

“Noooooooooooo~ Is it bad, I’m gonna KMS”

“It’s not BAD bad, you were cute ;p But you should probably buy Yuuki a new houseplant”

“skull emojis”

“Regardless, I had a blast with you last night  <3 I’m still up for coffee tomorrow if you are~”

She hearted the message and replied, 

“Yeeeeesss~ I wanna check out that cute place you told me about in Shimbashi!”

Now it was your turn to heart the message, 

“Meet at the station and then head there together? What time is good?”

“How about 11?”

“Sounds good to me! See you then!”

You finish the last of your yogurt, taking a sip of your coffee. You pull yourself up, depositing your dishes in the kitchen sink with a small clatter. Today was shaping up to be a lazy day. Your phone buzzes again, a message from Emma appears on the screen, 

“Mikey is here and being annoying, do you care if I give him your number?”

You can’t help it when your heart beat increases, images of your dream flash in your mind. You type out, 

“Sure! No problem, thank him again for dropping me off last night <3”

“Thank him yourself, I’m going back to bed”

She concluded by sending his contact details. You input his contact as Mikey with a strawberry emoji next to his name. A smile plays on your lips. You followed Emma’s instructions and typed up,

“Thanks again for last night!”

As you send the message you get another from Emma, a picture attached. You click it before shutting your phone quickly, face heating. You compose yourself. Opening it again. Emma’s message read,

“What the hell?”

And attached is a shirtless picture of Mikey, seeming to toss a plastic bag of something at the camera. It’s a bit blurry but the bruises wrapping around his ribs are clear as day. Mortified doesn’t even come close.

“AAAHSHHSHHSHHGGG!!!!!!!” 

“Did you guys get into a fight or something? Please tell me you won ;p”

“Oh my god! *dead* I didn’t realize I was holding on so tight :’)”

“He drives like a maniac, I don’t blame you you should squeeze harder next time, just Heimlich him”

Emma’s joking helped to calm you down. You still felt an icky feeling that you had hurt him.

“If this job hunt keeps tanking, I’ll consider it the next time he’s hitting 100mph  on the highway” 

She likes your message before sending a short video. You press play. You see Emma chucking a pillow at him and yelling “Put on a damn shirt!” before the video cuts. You laugh, sending a pillow emoji. You open your chat with Mikey and follow up with another message,

“Hey,  I saw the damage, sorry about that” 

A bubble with 3 dots appears.

“I’ve had worse.” 

He replies. The period at the end makes his message weirdly formal. You pause, unsure how to continue the conversation when another message pops up.

“You’re welcome.” 

Period again. You like the message and respond, 

“Next time I’ll squeeze lower, maybe we can get a cool pattern going.” 

You cringe and move to unsend the message. A+ flirting. He likes your message before you do.

“Maybe we can come up with a better story too. Something other than you being a little wuss. Something that’ll impress the guys.” 

“I’m not a wuss >:( look what I can do to a tough guy like you, and not even a scratch on me.”

He is typing a response for a while, you migrate to lie on the sofa under the AC.

“Touche.” 

Is all he responds with. Feeling the conversation go dry, you lock your phone. You lay there, soaking in the cold air. You start a mental list of chores for the day; vacuum and mop, do a load of laundry, run to the grocery store. The joys of adulthood. You didn’t hate it as much as you used to. You learned to find peace in those little moments. Mindless tasks that allowed you to clear your head. An added bonus is having a tidy environment does wonders for your mood. 

When you were younger you lived in organized chaos, your parents constantly chiding you to clean up. When did you become so sensitive to your surroundings you wonder. You peeled yourself from the couch, pulling up a podcast to keep you company while you set to your tasks.

It's always nice to have an enclosure day once in a while. Today had been much needed after all of the socialization yesterday. You hang your laundry to dry out on your balcony. Before retreating back indoors. Your house sparkled and you reveled in your hard work. You throw on a simple outfit for a grocery run. Your list was short, it would be a quick trip. You kill the AC in your room and check that your balcony door is locked before hunting for the remote to turn off the TV. 

As you flip your couch cushions over, another news report flashes across the screen. “Breaking News. A young woman has just been attacked and stabbed in Roppongi. The attack occurred in broad daylight. The attacker is still at large. Witnesses say the attacker is a male, mid to late 20’s, around 180 cm and medium build. Residents are being urged to stay out of the area for their own safety. Be warned, footage of the attack taken by security cameras and bystanders are now circulating on social media. The suspect’s identity is still unknown. Viewers, please be advised that the following clips are graphic in nature. Those with any information about the attacker are being asked to report to the number at the bottom of the screen.” 

The news cut from the caster to a grainy video shot on a cellphone. The woman’s body is blurred out. It showed the man standing over her before fleeing into an alley. The man was masked and the video was grainy and slowed in an attempt to reveal any identifying features. The same scene from a different angle is played. Finally a collage of screenshots of the man’s covered face are displayed on the screen. 

The woman’s picture came up on the screen with her name and age. She was 22 years old. There had been no gore in the video, but you felt sick to your stomach. You flipped the TV off, sliding down the couch to sit on the floor. You weren’t close to that area of the city but you couldn’t help feeling scared. This type of crime, so violent in nature, is not normal here.

What really gnawed at you is that she was young, just making her way out in the world. You wondered if she had just graduated university. Your mind was spiraling. What dreams did she have? Why had that man done this? That pit in your stomach grew deeper and you felt sweat begin to prickle on your body. How long had you been sitting there? You hit the remote control to turn the AC back on. The TV remained off. You reassessed your fridge with new motivation and decided a grocery trip wouldn’t be necessary tonight.

[jjelleefsh]

;; honey cherry and my lover’s sun sipped wine

˚ ༘♡ ⋆｡˚ ❀˚ ༘♡ ⋆｡˚ ❀˚ ༘♡ ⋆｡˚ ❀˚ ༘♡ ⋆｡˚ ❀ notes: i woke up and this just appeared in front of me. cw: reader is sort of simping for zhongli? zhongli is a beautiful beautiful man , gn! reader I think (if I used a gendered pronoun please just tell me k thx) also I couldn't find the readmore thing to put or I swear I wouldve put it in here. I hate longposts.

˚ ༘♡ ⋆｡˚ ❀˚ ༘♡ ⋆｡˚ ❀˚ ༘♡ ⋆｡˚ ❀˚ ༘♡ ⋆｡˚ ❀

It was blasphemous almost, to see a visage as such on a mundane day like today. It should be considered sacrilegious really. The sunlight at the break of golden hour, filtering through the gaps between the curtains glazing his skin in the most nostalgic hue of yellow.

The back locks of his hair, still uncombed, draped over his shoulders, reminding you of aged ebony, falling like ribbons of water from ornamental rocks. The mirror he stood in front of, reflected the sunlight to his face, giving him the most sublime countenance. Deft hands shuffle closer to his face, as he leans into the mirror, lithe fingers focus on lining eyes of molten gold with a red eyeliner in hand. An amalgamation of all these observations coming together to make a scene that would make the romantic artists of Fontaine cry out in envy. 

“my god...”

Aureate eyes met yours and you just know their shade was the inspiration when a cor lapis decided to take on its colour. The slight crinkle of his eyes when he smiled, the gentle click of the brush as he set down the eyeliner. All about him, everything about him was so lovely, 

“You called, dearest?”

Zhongli, although his tone sounded curious, knew full well the meaning of the reverent gaze you were looking at him with.

“Mr. Zhongli, I think I might be in love with you.” 

“Well, I’d certainly hope so. It would be rather awkward if the person I chose to take my vows with did not reciprocate my affections.”

Vows. You repeated in your head, yes, this breathtaking man, with a face that would have had wars fought for his hand, was yours. Yours as in you married him, stood on the altar, took your vows, bowed to each other and you married him.

A giddy grin creeps its way up to your face, the kind that will not go away no matter how much effort you put into trying to stop it. Oh Celestia above, you are so terribly, infallibly in love with this man, it is sickening. 

A hopeless devotee you are; someone who simply had the luck of having their affections reciprocated by a man— by a god, but you’d argue, it is just as romantic, even if it was before you found outabout his divinity. 

“Well, you need not worry about that, I can assure you, your spouse returns your affections wholeheartedly. I was told so by them personally.”

“They said that now, did they? Very well, I hope you relay my gratitude to them.”

“ah, but it will take reimbursement, Mr. Zhongli.” you chirp out, fully intending on cashing out as much as you can out of this conversation.

“Is that so? Very well, what might your charges be?”

You didn’t know it was possible to smile wider, Wordlessly you pointed to your forehead. Zhongli takes your action in stride, walking over but instead resting his lips upon yours. Cradling his face, you have found home in a chaste kiss. As he pulls away, now standing upright again, you look up at him.

“A tip for your hardwork, yes? I hope my message reaches my lover soon.”

—

Zhongli looks at your smiling face, grinning with teeth and all. The mirror reflects the sunrays on your head, covering you in a heavenly halo-like lighting; a scene that would make heaven fall to its knees, to that he can attest.

Its mundane mornings like these, he thinks, that make him realise a god too, can turn devotee in the presence of his lover.

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dont ask me what this is bc idk either. "but esha didn't you write this?" yes and I blanked out and poof this appeared. also I kinda would not read this but like bleh. i don't like how it came out.

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12:41 pm ; 14/9/2024

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[andreabandrea]

The AndreaBandrea UTY post

I need some place to put my Undertale Yellow (UTY for short) thoughts & criticism, and this is my blog, so I might as well put them here. If you don't want to see constructive criticism about Undertale Yellow, don't click below the readmore!

Pretty much everyone I talk to really likes this game, and honestly, I'm really sad that I don't like it more. I like some parts of it quite a bit! But I have mixed feelings about other parts-- I think the writing and characterization could have been a little more impactful than they were, and I’ll be discussing that here. I don’t want to just rag on this game without expressing suggestions and parts that I do like in more detail, so those will be covered as well. 

I also want to add a disclaimer that I don't have negative feelings towards the development team or fans of this game in the slightest. I have nothing but respect for the creators of Undertale Yellow. This project was obviously a massive undertaking with a lot of love behind it, and I'm glad to see that it's found success and a community of people who do enjoy it. 

The reason I’m writing this post is that, again, I liked parts of this game and wish I enjoyed it more. If I didn’t like it at all, I just wouldn’t engage with it at all anymore. I also haven’t really seen any other people expressing constructive criticism on the game’s writing, so it’s felt more important for me to express these thoughts, be heard, and see if others feel the same way. 

The Good

I'll start off with the things I like. The art, the animation, and the music are all fantastic. I was very impressed by the battle backgrounds and the little touches, like the way Clover runs. Clover doing things like reaching for other’s hands, giving fistbumps, drawing their weapon, changing their expression at times-- they feel very dynamic and fun to play as.

The music is really catchy and fun. I love the iterations on the battle theme-- Snowdin’s battle theme having bells, for example. 

I also had fun with most of the fights in the game! I liked the unique mechanics that came into play (e.g. the lasso in North Star's battle). I think that changing the way Clover attacks compared to Frisk feels organic and fun. 

I also love the mail system. Ever since you could deliver and receive letters in Paper Mario 64, I’ve been hooked on mail as a storytelling system in video games. I think the letters you receive are interesting and clever, and it’s a great way to keep past characters relevant in lieu of a cell phone. 

I’m going to be discussing criticism of the characters later, so I’m going to take a moment to talk a little about things I liked about them. I really like Martlet’s optimism and belief in humans. Starlo made me laugh quite a few times and the Feisty Five have a great dynamic with each other. A lot of the background characters in the game are fun-- I like the one who serves you at the Honeydew Resort. The fact that you can go back to these vendors later on and get four new topics to talk about is fantastic and makes the world feel a lot more alive. 

The Slightly Less-Good (and more disclaimers)

The writing is where the game falls short for me-- and it’s sad for me, because the writing is the heart of Undertale. I don’t think that the writing is bad by any means! I like the characters and story well enough, but- again- I just wish that I liked them more. I’ll try to incorporate suggestions so this isn’t just a total downer post without anything backing it up. 

I want to express something about the ‘suggestions’ that I’ll be offering after the criticism. I know that Undertale Yellow  is now out, and the team isn’t going to go back and change it now, and that’s totally fine. I don’t want to make it sound as if the team should change Undertale Yellow just because I have some reservations about it. I’m just one fan out of many. In the very off chance that a member of the Undertale Yellow development team is reading this--

First of all, hi! 

Second of all, I know that changing major parts of Undertale Yellow at this point is very unrealistic, and I wouldn’t want you to. If anything, I’m honored you’re reading my ramblings at all. I’d be touched if you’d be willing to take some of my words to heart as you move onto your next creative projects.

The reason I’m including suggestions, therefore, isn’t because I think that the team should or must make these changes, but because I don’t want to just sound excessively negative about this game without offering a little feedback. 

I don’t presume that my criticism and suggestions are objectively correct or better than what the Undertale Yellow team created. This is my personal blog, and these are my personal rambly thoughts about Undertale Yellow. The reason I’m including so many disclaimers is because I’ve gotten into discourse before due to poorly thought-out posts about Undertale, and I hope to avoid that this time. I don’t want to just not post something on my own blog, though, because I’m afraid it could be misconstrued or possibly upset somebody. So, I’m trying to discuss this as carefully as I can. 

As one final disclaimer, I'll say that I know that it was more likely than not that I'd be at least a little disappointed by Undertale Yellow. The original Undertale was a very important game for me, and very little could reach that standard. (I think this is one reason why Toby decided to do Deltarune, a sort of AU/spinoff rather than a full-on "Undertale 2", and I respect that decision.) 

I also think that quite a bit of my criticism is subjective-- several of the characters didn't fully click with me and several of the jokes just didn't land for me, personally. More people than you might think just didn’t connect with the regular Undertale, either. I’ll be talking a little about my subjective opinion on characters, but I’ll try to explain why I feel the way I do rather than just say, “XYZ character sucks because they’re lame, moving on.” 

With that said, the post. I’ll be addressing my criticisms from smallest to largest. To begin, I’ll recap the plot of UTY to better analyze aspects that I do and don’t quite like. Spoilers abound.

Undertale Yellow Plot Recap!!!!

The central story of UTY, to my memory and understanding, is as follows:

In the past, a fallen human being went on a rampage in Snowdin and hurt Kanako, the daughter of Chujin, a former royal scientist and monster who happens to be a boss monster. Dalv, an unrelated monster, was also hurt in this incident and sealed himself away in the Ruins in a self-imposed isolation. Chujin’s family (presumably him or Kanako, but not Ceroba, as she doesn’t recognize Dalv) felt bad about this and left him corn from Starlo’s farm as a gift. But, when Chujin died, the corn gifts stopped coming. 

Stepping back a bit, after the incident, Chujin developed a deep hatred for humanity. He invented a security robot called Axis and told it to go kill the human. Axis did this (and we will return to this later). Chujin kept the soul (at least, for a time) to experiment on.

At some point in this, Axis failed to impress Asgore and Chujin was fired as the royal scientist. At some point as well, he began to teach Martlet how to build puzzles. Martlet got a job in the royal guard and Chujin disapproved because humans are very dangerous.  

Due to experimenting on his own boss monster soul in an attempt to find a way to turn regular monsters into boss monsters so that monsterkind could potentially stand up to the threat of humanity, Chujin wound up very ill and then passed away. He left video tapes to his wife, Ceroba, asking her to finish his research. However, he asked her to leave Kanako out of this so she could live a normal life. 

Ceroba agreed to finish this research, but Kanako found out about it and asked to be experimented on because she, like her father, has the power of a boss monster. Ceroba agreed to experiment on her, which injured Kanako and caused her to ‘fall down’. Ceroba sent the near-death Kanako to Dr. Alphys, the new royal scientist, who was collecting ‘fallen down’ monsters for her own experiments with determination. 

Plot summary over. I’ll take a closer look at some of these aspects going forward.

UTY Plot Criticism

I don’t feel like this is a bad story, necessarily. With that said, it doesn’t feel quite as tied together as Undertale’s story does, and I think certain aspects don’t land. 

First, I feel that the majority of the plot elements about Chujin & Kanako get dumped on you at the last minute. You might be thinking that the story about Chara & Asriel is also dumped on you at the last minute-- and to an extent, this is true. You do get a massive amount of information regarding their story near the end of the game, in the True Lab.

However, Chara & Asriel's story is a massive part of the narrative from the very beginning. You meet 'Asriel' (Flowey) in the very beginning of the game. Toriel is in the Ruins due to the fallout of Chara & Asriel's deaths. Asgore and the monsters are trying to kill Frisk and steal their soul because of this, and the royal guard has taken it up as their mission. Sans is aware of an anomaly that will end everything (implied to be the player), and he would have 'killed Frisk where they stand' had he not made a promise to Toriel. And so on.

I’ll be reviewing criticism of the game’s plot in sections themed around each major character. I will be discussing suggestions about each character in their respective section here, as I discuss things I didn’t quite like about each character, my suggestions are intrinsically tied to why I didn’t quite like them. 

Dalv

The connections between characters and the Chujin & Kanako plot feel a bit tenuous to me. Similarly to Toriel, Dalv is in a self-imposed isolation in the Ruins due to a major incident in his past. He fears humans due to the attack he suffered in Snowdin, and he suffers loneliness  after losing his friend (who left him corn). When he sees Clover, he wonders if this is “some sort of haunting” (implying he knows that the human who attacked him was killed). 

In the pacifist route, Clover can prove to Dalv that not all humans are evil and Dalv can move out and learn how to trust people again. This becomes a recurring theme-- Clover, pure of heart, proving to monsters that humanity isn’t that bad after all. 

However, Dalv then disappears from the story. His motivation is to basically be left alone, but once you prove to him that humanity isn’t so bad, his role in the story is essentially complete.

I feel that, by comparison, Toriel’s motivation is more active-- to protect humans who fall down from Asgore. It’s this motivation that drives her to return at the end of the true pacifist route and ultimately make the true ending of Undertale possible.

Dalv’s passiveness makes him a weaker character to me. Now that you’ve proven that you’re his friend and humanity isn’t so bad, I would have liked to have seen him take an active motivation to protect his friend or help them in some way. We don’t have to copy Undertale beat for beat and have him dramatically save Clover from Asgore or anything, but it would have been nice to see him vouch for Clover in some way at some point. 

Now, for the final time, I know that UTY is released and major changes aren’t likely. Some of my suggestions are “I would have liked to see this, but this change would require redoing the entire game,” which I don’t think should or could be done at this stage. This is just daydreaming and- if I’m praising myself highly- potential considerations for the devs’ future works (and the works of any other creatives who are reading this). 

With this proposed major change to Dalv’s character out of the way, I’ll suggest instead the most minimal possible change that I would like to see, so my suggestions don’t feel entirely like just daydreaming. 

I really like how Dalv sends Clover a letter about his moving out to Snowdin. This is active of him in terms of motivation-- Clover is his friend and he wants to keep in touch with his friend. I’d be absolutely thrilled to see a little bit of extra dialogue for him in an update. After you go back to Snowdin and see him, I think the dialogue he already has is totally fine! But, I’d be really happy if he’d take initiative and tell Clover a little more about his experience with the past human, or invite them to rely on him, too. 

Martlet

Martlet felt… a bit restrained in terms of her writing, to me. I think that one aspect of Undertale’s writing is that it’s not afraid to go over the top. Papyrus isn’t just silly, he wears a costume every day and cartoon eyes pop out of his head when he’s surprised. Undyne isn’t just determined, she aspires to be a badass anime heroine. I like Martlet just fine, but she never had a moment where she really stood out to me in this way. 

Martlet’s defining traits are that she likes puzzles, she loves reading and abiding by the rules of the royal guard, and she believes in humanity and wants to help Clover. As I said before, I really like this optimism and belief. I’d like to see more of it. 

Near the end of the true pacifist route, Martlet says that she was taught in the royal guard that humans are scary, but Clover proved to her that humans are kind. This felt very abrupt to me at the time-- we know that Chujin disapproved of her joining the royal guard due to his own trauma, but Martlet had no personal involvement in the last human’s violent actions. 

Martlet doesn’t seem to have any reason to dislike humans more than any other monster. We learn in her diary that she essentially joined the royal guard out of a desire to help people and build puzzles, and also because she needed a job. 

If she’s just supposed to be a representative of the average monster and their feelings toward humanity, and her growing to like Clover is meant to represent how all of monsterkind could grow to like humankind, that would be one thing-- but I think that she specifically is meant to represent a person who wholeheartedly believes that humans can be good and that humans and monsters can live in harmony. In the no mercy route, she repeatedly pleads to Clover to do better, that they don’t have to act this way, that she wants to help them. That’s not the response of the average monster, who fights Clover or tries to flee from them. 

I believe the intention is that Chujin & Martlet represent either end of an ideology axis (no pun intended). Chujin believes all humans are evil no matter what, but Martlet believes that humans can choose to be good. But why does she choose to believe in humans other than a sense of personal optimism? 

I would have liked to have seen some defining event that made Martlet choose to believe in the goodness of humanity. I would have liked to have her being kind and optimistic to a fault be more of a defining trait-- to have that go over the top in an Undertale-style way. A lot of her interactions with other characters just personally weren’t very memorable to me. 

Martlet spends a lot of the game sidelined. She loses you in the Mines. She gets thrown in jail in the Wild East. She has to go back to Snowdin once you're freed. Yes, she's there for you in the true pacifist route, but she's otherwise pretty absent through the neutral/true pacifist routes.

I recognize that the main characters in Undertale can be absent after you leave their respective sections of the game. However, you're able to call Papyrus & Undyne as much as you want, and you get a major hang-out (or “date”) with each of them and Alphys which gives time to expand on their backstory and character arc. Martlet doesn't get that. We even get a little bit of time to hang out with Dalv after we become his friend, but Martlet shoves us on a boat and hurries us to the next area as soon as we beat her. And sure, we get to talk to her on the boat, but it’s just a bit of silly dialogue-- it doesn’t really expand on her character. It feels like a missed opportunity. 

So, yes, my major suggestion on her would be to zoom in more on her belief in you and let her be a liiiiitle sillier and more over the top, and give more opportunity for Clover to hang out with her. 

At this stage, however? In this proposed minor ‘dialogue update’, I’d be really excited to see a little something more from her. Maybe a letter? She does send you one, but only in the neutral route to tell you to meet her on top of the apartments. It would be a good opportunity to either let her be silly or explain a bit about when she came to want to believe in humans-- or both, ideally. 

Starlo

I honestly have very little to say on Starlo. He seems to be the fan favorite, and I did find his section fun! Ultimately, though, he's just kind of… there? I mean, he's on the periphery of Ceroba's (and Chujin and Kanako’s) story because he's her childhood friend (and his family grew the corn that Chujin gives to Dalv), and yes, he later on reminds her that she can still choose to be a better person because he also almost killed Clover! However, every monster in the game almost killed Clover.

There’s nothing wrong with having a silly character who wears a costume and isn’t a major player in the plot. I feel like Starlo is similar to Papyrus in this way. But Papyrus isn’t just a goofball, he’s the monster in Undertale who believes unerringly in Frisk & the player’s ability to do better because he firmly believes that you can make anything happen if you just try. This belief helps elevate Papyrus from comic relief to an actual rounded character. 

I don’t feel like Starlo has any sort of strong conviction like that. We do learn that he wants to bring hope to the Underground by roleplaying as a sheriff in the Wild East town, giving them a slice of (supposed) surface life. I think this is fine, but I’d like to see a bit more of it. In the no mercy route, he does bravely stand against you because he’s a sheriff and it’s his job to bring justice to murderers like Clover. 

My expectation when I first met him, a fellow cowboy (gender-neutral), was that he’d have his own ideas about justice. I expected that he would clash with Clover about these ideals, and neither of them would be quite right or wrong-- and this would prove that justice can’t be measured mathematically, and one outcome can’t be applied to all situations. 

But, he’s not at all bad the way he is. He has a lot of fans, after all. The minor change I’d suggest now that the game is out is that I’d be interested in learning why the cowboy aesthetic specifically appealed to him. Maybe a diary in his room explaining that Westerns are the epitome of ‘justice’ to him? I’d like to see a peek into the motivation that transformed an ordinary farm boy into someone who could bravely stand against a murderous human. 

Ceroba

I’ll be honest. I want to like Ceroba, but I don’t.

I understand that there's an attempt to mirror Asgore in that the war against humanity, in general, has taken Ceroba's partner and her child from her-- and ultimately, Clover forgives her and helps her learn how to move on. It's about letting go, just like Undertale. I get that. But Ceroba’s story doesn't land for me, personally. In order to talk about Ceroba, I need to talk about her husband, Chujin, because Ceroba spends so much of the story acting out Chujin's will. 

Whereas monsters in Undertale do attempt to kill Frisk and steal their soul, and Asgore has killed other children before, it's framed in a very 'video game' violence sort of way (again, Undertale has these meta elements). Ultimately, in the True Pacifist route, none of Frisk's deaths have stuck, and Asgore's actions- while reprehensible- allowed for Asriel to break the barrier once and for all.

Chujin, in the video tapes he leaves for Ceroba, implies that Axis’s murder of the human- presumably a child, like Clover and Frisk- was very violent and bloody. It feels a tiny step beyond the 'video game violence' aspect, for me. While it’s shown that Chujin regrets this, it still doesn’t change the way that this violence is expressed in the game. 

Instead of giving the human’s soul right to Asgore to bring monsterkind closer to freedom, Chujin- who has already been fired by Asgore, I should add- chooses to keep the soul and experiment with it.

This is very selfish, even though he has good intentions. He’s told nobody else about his experiments with his soul at this point- not even his wife- and Asgore has told him to cease all activities as the royal scientist. 

While monsters do want Frisk's soul for their own selfish reasons, they notably do not butcher them violently, succeed in this, and still try to get painted with the same quirky and fun brush that the other characters get. 

After Chujin dies, he leaves detailed instructions for his wife to continue his work-- and although he says "don't involve Kanako", he leaves her all the tools she would need to experiment on Kanako, and notably, no other way to finish his work except to experiment on Kanako.

As I said, Kanako finds out about this and asks to be experimented on. And while she does give consent, she is a child. I cannot stress this enough-- she is a child who just lost her father and is still wracked by grief. Kanako is a child who cannot possibly know what she is consenting to. 

Ceroba chooses to experiment on Kanako and more or less kills her. And then she chooses to send her 'fallen down' daughter to Alphys's experiment, despite the fact that Kanako presumably has some sort of trace of human soul/determination left in her-- which could have compromised Alphys's work as well.

Let's return to how I said that Ceroba is a mirror for Asgore. She's made so many mistakes and it's cost her her family and she can't stop now or it will all be for nothing. She's done horrible things, just like Asgore.

But the difference is that Asgore is the king of monsterkind. Asgore has no desire to kill human beings. He declared war on humanity in a fit of anger and grief, but the Underground had lost hope due to the loss of Chara & Asriel. Believing that Asgore could gather seven human souls and free them all brought hope back to the Underground.

His actions, while wrong, are selfless-- and much less explicitly violent and more 'cartoon violence'-like. Chujin & Ceroba have the well-being of monsterkind as their own pure intentions, but their actions are far more selfish and violent. Axis, Chujin’s creation, massacred a human being. Yet we're still expected to find them silly and fun and relatable-- it just feels unusual.

I’m not someone who hates nuance or morally gray characters. One reason I’m so sad that I don’t quite like Ceroba is that I love morally gray women. It’s just that we’re not allowed to really dislike Chujin or Ceroba for what they’ve done, and instead we’re supposed to see Ceroba- and Axis- as silly and relatable like the rest of the characters. 

Immediately after Ceroba’s boss battle, instead of processing what just happened to a greater extent, Clover chooses to sacrifice their soul for monsterkind. 

I understand that the intention is that Ceroba's grief and Chujin's desperation to protect monsters from humanity contributed to Clover's decision to sacrifice their soul. However, the idea is- to me- abrupt. Ultimately, too, Clover's decision is just as much about how much they love their friends (and how it's impossible for them to hide out in the Underground forever) as it is about Ceroba and her family.

Chara & Asriel’s deaths, Asgore’s war on humanity, the war of humans and monsters-- these elements impact every part of Frisk’s journey. But Chujin and Ceroba’s actions, while impactful on Martlet and Dalv to varying extents, are only part of Clover’s journey. And Chujin and Ceroba did awful things for this comparatively minor impact on the plot. 

EDIT: Further analysis about how Ceroba doesn't have a lot of agency and spends a lot of the plot just acting out Chujin's will, as well as the inconsistency in her characterization (and feelings about sacrificing Clover and the well-being of Kanako), with input from @carlyraejepsans. Thank you!

I would have liked to have seen a bit more from Ceroba without any influence from Chujin- maybe an interaction explaining her relationship with Martlet and an additional conversation about Martlet’s nearly unwavering belief in humans vs Ceroba’s inherited grudge against humanity- but I don’t know where this would fit in. Adding more time for Clover to process Ceroba’s boss fight before sacrificing their soul might throw off the pacing. 

In general, though, Ceroba's boss fight- while flashy and fun- ultimately feels pointless with how little she learns from it and how quickly she changes her stance on using Clover's soul for the benefit of monsterkind, and what will happen to monsters after they break the barrier. To quote @carlyraejepsans in the ask linked above:

In addition, it's like the writing didn't want to commit to her delusions and little character development. She feels that her daughter is alive and thinks she can save her—wait no that was a lie—wait it wasn't. The moment she's defeated she goes "Agh, what was I thinking!" out loud (which is already a questionable writing choice imo but i digress), and recognizes that sacrificing Clover for her plans is horrible... and then 5 seconds later Clover chooses to sacrifice themself to break the barrier and whoops nevermind she's suddenly the one getting the others onboard with the idea... wait. didn't she say she was making the serum because the humans would've only slaughtered them again if they broke the barrier? oh wait wasn't that also chujin again? whoops.

I would have felt better if there were more room to view Chujin and Ceroba in a critical light (and time to view Ceroba outside of just being a mom and wife). I can’t think of any ‘minor’ suggestion that wouldn’t require a lot of editing. 

Axis…

And... okay. Let's talk about Axis real quick.

I want to give the dev team the benefit of the doubt, but I need to point out that this security robot's name is "Axis 014." If you don't know what I mean by pointing this out, I'll just say that both of these terms are nazi dog whistles and allow you to look up the specifics.

I recognize that, by this point, it’s too late to change his name. I’d at least be grateful if the team would acknowledge this and confirm that they aren’t nazis. 

Axis’s name makes his actions far worse in retrospect. He, as a security robot wants to kill a child, but he isn't able to anymore because his programming has changed. So, as a legal loophole, he forces them to hold 'a weapon' (a trash can lid) so he can justifiably kill them. This is the same robot that brutalized and murdered a human being in the past at Chujin's behest.

It feels tone deaf and ultimately the one thing I’d just outright call bad about UTY. I don’t think it was intentionally done this way, but I don't like that we're supposed to find this nazi-aesthetic police brutality robot "quirky and relatable" like the Undertale cast. In the true pacifist ending, he falls in love with a robot made out of a trash can and his eyes turn into cartoon hearts and etc. It’s even more jarring than viewing Chujin & Ceroba in a fun/relatable way. 

In the no mercy route, Axis will defend himself and claim that his programming forced him to kill the human and he didn't want to. This "just following orders" defense feels weak to me as well, personally. Axis clearly delights in harming humans, going out of his way to try to kill Clover. But also, Axis spends a significant amount of the game displaying a very similar amount of free will to the other characters. He’s not just a janitor robot that sweeps back and forth. 

He’s a nearly sentient being-- and the fact that there are these nearly sentient robots makes Alphys’s accomplishment of creating “a robot with a soul” (at least, so she claims-- Mettaton is only the ghost in a machine) much less impactful to me, personally. Yes, Asgore thinks that Chujin failed in creating a sentient robot, and so it’s impressive that Alphys supposedly did it. But I don’t know why Asgore wouldn’t be more skeptical of Alphys’s accomplishment after Chujin failed more than eight times and set fire to his flowers. 

I think that Axis is ultimately a missed opportunity to make a really villainous character. This concept that he disobeys his programming- used as sort of a parallel for law, as a security robot- to attack Clover could have been explored to further the ‘justice’ theme. He doesn’t write his programming (the laws), he just carries it out (violently enforces the laws). 

The ‘minor’ suggestion I’d make, though, is to just acknowledge the name. 

Undertale & Meta Elements

Now, we’ll be addressing my largest criticisms-- the omission of meta elements and the way Flowey is written.

Undertale Yellow never quite stopped feeling like a fan game to me. And it is, of course-- but I think that it feels as if it tries so hard to be Undertale (in the writing style, the humor, etc) that it fails to forge an identity of its own, and that holds it back from being just a fangame to a fangame that succeeds in expanding on the original creative work. 

At the same time, although UTY tries to feel like Undertale, I don’t think it captures certain elements that make Undertale be Undertale. 

Whereas Undertale was ultimately about video games as a medium and the normalization of violence in them, UTY doesn’t have this level of metatextual commentary. UTY does have a running theme of 'justice'-- and I don’t think this is bad! After all, if Undertale already said all there was to say about video games and violence, why retread that path? I respect that UTY knows its limits and simply focuses on justice as a concept instead.

At the same time, Undertale isn’t just an RPG about mercy-- it’s an RPG about RPGs. The fact that you can talk to and spare enemies isn’t just a quirk of the game, it’s what the game is about. This is one thing that makes Undertale great that UTY doesn’t focus on.  

UTY doesn’t completely ignore these elements, of course. Flowey takes over resetting for you, and you do have three distinct paths based on whether or not you kill enemies-- the ‘true pacifist’ path, the ‘neutral’ path, and the ‘no mercy’ path (I will not be calling it the ‘genocide’ route, especially in light of recent world events). Through whether or not you choose to kill enemies, the theme of ‘justice’ is explored-- who is Clover seeking justice for? In the true pacifist route, Clover seeks justice for the monsters, while in the no mercy route, Clover seeks justice for the fallen humans before them. 

However, Flowey taking over the mechanics of saving and resetting for you makes concept of ‘the player’ obsolete. I recognize that not everyone in the Undertale/Deltarune fandom quite enjoys the concept of 'the player' and the meta elements of these games due to the fact that there can be implications that playing Deltarune (as an example, which ups the meta elements quite a bit) can actively hurt Kris and make their world a worse place. However, Deltarune isn’t a complete work and we don’t know this for certain. Additionally, I feel as if at least acknowledging Toby's intentions are important to analyzing the work, no matter what one's personal feelings are about them.

The Importance of the Player

The presence of you, the player, is important in Undertale. Frisk is a subversion of the 'blank slate protagonist' trope. You think that you're able to name them and control them, but in the True Pacifist route, Frisk begins to act on their own (they walk slowly in some parts of the True Lab because they're presumably afraid, etc). In the end, you realize that Frisk is their own person with their own name, and you as the player have to let go-- when Frisk & the monsters go to the surface, Flowey (a mirror of the player themselves) urges you to let them go. Don't treat this as a game anymore-- don't replay and wring out any last drops of content you can. You enjoyed it, now move on.

But many players want to see the No Mercy route because it’s the last thing they haven’t done in the game, and they don’t want to let go. And that's where the role of you, the player, becomes undeniable in the game's story. What is the No Mercy route except playing a 'typical' RPG in the way it's meant to be played? You grind to become stronger, killing every enemy that stands in your way. And when you've killed all the monsters and become as strong as you can be, you've won.

Many players didn't do this because they hate the characters in Undertale and want to hurt them-- if they hate them, they likely just wouldn't play the game. Many players did it because they like the characters in Undertale, and wanted to see what would happen. They couldn't stop playing. And this is exactly what Sans means in his dialogue during his boss battle-- to paraphrase, "you think that because you can, that means you have to."

This is one of the ways that Flowey is a mirror of the player. Flowey didn't start killing out of malicious intent, but because he had become so bored and isolated that he just "had to see what happens".

Chara's role at the very end of the No Mercy route is to call you out directly for this. They tell you that their power was yours. Their words were very misconstrued by fans for a long time, and they themselves wound up as a scapegoat for the No Mercy route-- but ultimately, there's no reason for Chara or Frisk to kill every monster in the Underground. The only reason is because of you, personally. You want to see what would happen. You want to grind and play it like a typical RPG.

They call you out for this if you don't want to delete the game world at the end. Why go back to that world that you've already destroyed? Why play nice with the monsters that you just massacred because you can?

Why am I talking about this at such length? Because I believe that ‘the player’ and how they interact with the world of Undertale is important. Characters lampshade the UI and battle mechanics often-- Flowey talking about the world as a game and ‘saving’ and ‘loading’, Papyrus telling you to “press C to open the dating HUD”, Sans explaining ‘LV’ and ‘EXP’, and so on.

This is my personal opinion, and I recognize this is very nitpicky, but I feel that not acknowledging this or adding to these meta elements in some way makes UTY weaker for me. 

Flowey’s Role in UTY

Flowey essentially saves and resets for you because he's bored, and he wants to use Clover as a tool to access Asgore’s five stored human souls. His role as a mirror for the player becomes him essentially just acting as a stand-in for the player. While this in itself can invite self-reflection, I think that the execution of his role is a little awkward. 

We learn at the end of the neutral route that Flowey has already reset the timeline hundreds of times by the time we first start playing the game. According to him, Clover always ends up at a dead end (they choose to stay in the Underground for the rest of their life) or they die (and they can’t reset of their own power). Thus, Flowey chose to set Clover on an alternate path by sabotaging a lever in the Ruins, which made them fall into the Dark Ruins and meet Dalv.

Flowey then tries to kill Clover and absorb their soul because they, again, hit a dead end. Yet he gives up on it after a while because Clover won’t stop fighting back, and he thinks he can just reset and try again anyway. 

At the end of the true pacifist route, Clover instead opts to sacrifice their soul willingly to Asgore & monsterkind. Flowey comments that he could just reset (and you still can, if you want to play again), but Clover “earned their rest” and he calls them a friend. 

This progression from “Clover is a tool that Flowey is using to access the 5 human souls” to “Clover is a friend and Flowey willingly lets them die and stay dead” feels undeserved and underdeveloped to me. 

"But, Andrea," you might say, "Flowey went from trying to kill Frisk as Omega/Photoshop Flowey to hugging Frisk as Asriel really quickly too!"

Yes, but in that short time, Frisk and Flowey/Asriel had a Whole Thing where Frisk 'saved' him like everyone else and he learned he needs to let go, too. It was a short time, but it was a poignant time. By contrast, Flowey is pretty much absent throughout most of UTY's true pacifist route. Sure, you could easily say that he just got bored of Clover and gave up-- but that, too, doesn’t feel quite right to me. 

I really hate to say this, but I feel that Flowey’s writing in UTY cheapens the original Undertale for me, which is why this is one of my major criticisms of the game. 

Flowey's entire character arc in Undertale is about how he was stuck with the same places and same people for an endless amount of resets. In my opinion, the limited amount of places and characters for him to interact with in Undertale only adds to how trapped he is (and the Underground being so small really strengthens the concept of "there's overpopulation and the monsters are running out of time to find a solution/earn their freedom" that we see in the game, but I digress).

So when something finally changes and he meets Frisk, it's deeply impactful to him. Finally, someone new to play with! Finally, potential for change! Even though Flowey admits that, even if Chara came back, there's a great chance that he couldn't really love them due to his lack of soul, just experiencing something new for the first time in ages is as close to love as he can possibly get. So Flowey:

Starts to believe that Frisk is Chara, this person he ‘loves’ or wants to love, or some manifestation of Chara. 

Refuses to let Frisk go, even if that means- when Asriel has the power of seven human souls- just resetting the Undertale timeline over and over instead of going to the surface or doing anything else.

For Flowey to have gone through everything that he does in UTY- all these new places, all these new people, Clover included- weakens this, in my opinion. And sure, there's very heavily implied to be lots of places that Frisk doesn't explore and people they don't meet-- 99% of New Home and its residents, for instance. But Clover themselves is the real problem for me.

No matter how many times Flowey reset with Clover, I really struggle to believe that he would get bored of a human being that easily. He even said that Clover's actions and choices would sometimes change from reset to reset, and he only recently learned how dramatically he could alter their path by sabotaging that lever in the Ruins. Clover isn't a static being-- and even if they were, they're at least a new static being.

And although we learn in the neutral route that Flowey can't really absorb Clover's soul because they fight back too much, I can't believe that would stop Flowey so easily. What about at the end of the pacifist route, where Clover has given it up willingly and it's being transported in a little jar? Clover’s body is separated from the soul, now-- could Clover still fight back?

Or, what about if Flowey tried to kill them as soon as they entered the Ruins? Or, what if Flowey played nice the entire route and then at the end tried to convince Clover that if they sacrificed their soul, he would take it to Asgore for them? With access to full control of the timeline, I don't think Flowey would give up on this. We learn in Undertale how painful it is for him to be soulless and how desperate he is to access power so that things will change.

For Flowey to acknowledge Clover as a 'friend'- maybe even a true person, not just a compilation of dialogue- suggests character growth. It suggests remorse for his resets that he isn't capable of having and doesn't have until the events of Undertale. I just don't feel like it’s earned. 

Flowey is, of course, an unreliable narrator. 

At the end of the no mercy route of UTY, Flowey expresses that he never saw Clover as a friend-- he only enjoyed watching them die over and over again. It should be noted that this was said while under extreme duress (Clover is LV 20 by this point and has killed everyone save for Asgore), and this route isn’t canon in the way that the neutral and pacifist routes are. 

With that said, if we agree that Flowey can’t feel love as a soulless being, then I could argue that this is about as much of a ‘friend’ as anyone could be. This is how he wanted to keep Frisk (“Chara”, in his mind) for eternity when he had the six human souls + the entirety of monsterkinds’ souls-- just watch them try over and over again, for eternity. 

Why am I contradicting myself? Because, let’s suppose that Flowey doesn’t mean Clover is a ‘friend’ in the traditional sense- that they earned his respect and he cares for them in some way- but Clover is a new toy that he got bored with and gave up on. I feel like this, too, makes Undertale a little weaker. 

If Flowey did have some type of positive regard for Clover, but was willing to let them go, then it feels- to me- like Frisk’s role in his story isn’t that significant. Frisk helped him learn how to let go and move on, but Flowey has already demonstrated being capable of this. The circumstances are different- if Flowey gives up at the end of Undertale’s true pacifist route, it’s over for real, whereas if he gives up at the end of UTY, he can just wait for another human to fall- but I feel like the core feeling is the same. Flowey, by the start of Undertale, doesn’t strike me as someone who’s capable of letting go. 

So, how would I have changed this?

I recognize that- again- Undertale already made these points about video games and violence, and Flowey has his entire character arc in that game. For Flowey to have more of an arc in this game would potentially make this game no longer line up with canon Undertale or weaken Undertale further. And why retread old ground that Undertale already talked about?

I respect the decision to tell a self-contained story, but the meta commentary about video games in Undertale is so significant for me that I personally would have liked to see a bit more of it in Undertale Yellow. I also recognize how much of my criticism of Flowey’s writing in UTY is subjective. It feels unrealistic for me, his arc feels abrupt for me, it makes Undertale less poignant for me. 

A lot of people love his inclusion in this game, and it’s very novel to see Flowey as a friend throughout most of UTY and hear his snarky commentary on demand rather than having him as an enemy who’s absent through most of the game, as he is in Undertale. 

The Flowey Suggestions

First, I’ll be honest. I know this is not and has never been possible, but my easiest solution to the dilemma of Flowey’s lack of a character arc- and the lack of an ability to give him a character arc- would have been to just remove him from UTY. 

I think that Flowey’s inclusion in the story of the yellow soul human and his role saving and loading could have been interesting. It goes against certain story elements implied in Undertale, and popular fan theories-- and I don’t mind that, if something meaningful is done with it. But, I feel as if Flowey’s relationship to Clover isn’t impactful enough to justify including him. 

To clarify on ‘implied story elements’ and ‘popular fan theories’: 

While I might be misremembering, I thought that it was implied in Undertale that Flowey came into being after Asgore had already collected six human souls, and that a significant amount of time had passed since the last human had fallen down. 

I won’t go into it at length because this post is long enough and I, again, am not an Undertale expert. With that said, it’s also implied that all human souls are capable of saving/loading/resetting in the Underground. If you make Frisk tell Asgore that he killed them before, he just nods as if he’s used to it-- and he’s the one character who we know has killed humans before.

Now, how did Asgore successfully kill beings that can just reset the game whenever they die? Well, Sans faces the same dilemma in Undertale’s no mercy route. There’s no way that he can permanently defeat you, the player, who is a real being. Therefore, the way he ‘wins’ is by infuriating you enough with his difficult boss fight until you give up and stop playing Undertale (or, at least, reset and make better choices). 

Think about all the times you’ve played a game, got stuck on a hard boss, and never played it again. While it’s not ‘canon’ to the story- giving up on your copy of Mario doesn’t mean Bowser really wins- functionally, giving up on a game means that the story ends for you. This is how I believe Asgore captured the six human souls, even if they were also capable of resetting like Frisk is-- he fought them until they gave up.

Humans all are said to have great amounts of ‘determination’, not just red soul bearers. We don’t even know what trait the red soul exemplifies. Whatever it is, I don’t think it’s determination itself. 

The bottom line is that I don’t think it would be unrealistic for Clover to be able to save/load/reset on their own, or for Flowey to not exist yet during the time they fell down. 

But, I get it, Flowey was in UTY’s demo that has been out for seven years. He’s in the trailers. He couldn’t be removed at any part of development, and he sure as hell can’t be removed now. 

My second suggestion would have been to zoom in on him, instead. While the prequel is about Clover, the yellow soul human, I would have liked to see it be about Flowey in a significant way. I kept hoping for Clover to have an opportunity to ask Flowey at some point, “why are you helping me, anyway?”.

This is my personal interpretation, but I’ve come to believe that Flowey thinks that the reason he’s stuck as a flower is that it’s a punishment. Because he, as Asriel, refused to fight back, he failed Chara, and now they’re dead. Now he’s stuck as a rinky-dink flower with no soul, he can’t love his former family, and he can’t stop playing this game. 

In the no mercy route of Undertale, Flowey feels very much like he’s trying to appeal to Frisk- the person he believes is Chara- in a way like a younger sibling trying to impress an older sibling. He says he’s impressed by how you killed everyone. He helps solves puzzles so you won’t have to slow down. He brags to you about how he’s also a heartless killer. 

Notably, he talks about his past. He tells ‘Chara’ that he was afraid to start killing, at first. He said he wouldn’t enjoy it, but he just had to know what would happen.

Then, Flowey laughs and says that you (Chara) know how liberating it is to be this way-- to kill people and shape their fates. He ‘recognizes’ Frisk as being actually Chara because of how they killed everyone in the Ruins. 

But we have no indication that Chara was a violent or evil person in their life. I believe that Flowey is partially projecting and partially recognizes Chara because, in the last moments of their life, they were telling him to kill. He always knew that Chara hated humanity and wanted power to better the position of monsterkind. This is why Flowey brags about how he has a plan to get the human souls, and once they do so, they can go to the surface and “finish what [they] started.” 

To Flowey, in my opinion, killing people isn’t just about seeing what happens. It’s about trying to understand and appease Chara and doing what he thinks he should have done all that time ago, as Asriel. 

I bring this up because I think that I would have liked to have seen this be explored in Undertale Yellow. Flowey is still a very misunderstood character today due to being an unreliable narrator. I believe that a lot of Flowey misinterpretations are due to taking him at face value-- hearing him say that he’s an unfeeling, manipulative, patient killer and agreeing with him.

But Flowey contradicts himself at several points. He gives up his “catch these friendliness pellets” trick after you dodging just a few times. These aren’t the makings of a perfect manipulative killer, but an impatient child. That’s who Flowey is at his core-- a child. 

I recognize that, again, if Flowey told all of his tragic backstory to Clover and they became true friends, this wouldn’t fit with canon Undertale and his actions in that game. Flowey and Asriel distance themselves from each other, and it wouldn’t make sense for Flowey to tell this to Clover-- especially if he just views them as a tool to use and play with. 

I think, however, it wouldn’t have been impossible for Clover to have learned this information about Flowey in a way that could still be canon compliant with Undertale itself. Hypothetically, maybe the “hopes and dreams” statue in the UG Apartments near the Core could have sparked intrigue in Flowey. 

Maybe analysis of Flowey could have come up during his neutral route boss fight-- after all, Clover appears to peek into the minds of Ceroba and Martlet during the true pacifist and no mercy run boss fights, respectively. We already get a little of this- Clover has to run through a hallway of flowers in Flowey’s boss fight, and we hear sad and scared dialogue that’s presumably from a past version of Flowey himself. However, it’s not necessarily new and doesn’t quite add to Flowey’s character in my personal opinion.

I feel that including Flowey’s story more in some way would justify having Flowey in the game, and knowing the history of Asriel & Chara could factor into Clover’s decision to give up their soul for the sake of monsterkind. Chara, too, sacrificed themselves willingly, after all. 

I don’t have a ‘realistic suggestion’ that could be implemented with a dialogue update because these suggestions are so vast-- and, ultimately, very personal and subjective. I have very strong feelings about Flowey.

Meta Elements of Undertale 

In Undertale, you’re asked when you should or shouldn’t fight. As a pacifist, you can get through the Ruins without killing anyone. Flowey will then ask you what you would do if you met a relentless killer. Would you betray your morals and fight? Or would you give up and let yourself die?

Undertale is the friendly RPG where nobody has to die. While you have to kill Asgore at least once to do the neutral route, and you do have to fight back against Omega/Photoshop Flowey to end his battle, the game ultimately posits that there never is a good time to fight. You don’t beat Omega Flowey by being stronger than him, you do it by appealing to the souls and allowing them to rebel. You don’t beat God of Hyperdeath Asriel Dreemurr by beating him up, you do it by saving your friends- him included. The game, again, is about an inversion of the necessity of violence in video games to me.

I would have been interested in seeing an exploration of when it is necessary to fight, and this could be done through the lens of ‘justice’. Would Clover fight if it brought them closer to justice (on a pacifist route)? Is it morally correct to kill one person if it saves thousands? 

Sparing someone is always the correct option in Undertale. In that way, the true route is quite linear-- there’s one solution that works for everyone. What if there were situations in UTY in which there is no single correct option that works for everyone? What if Clover were placed in situations in which they had to act as arbiter and decide between two outcomes and what is right? It could have been like how they get forced to solve the trolley problem in the Wild East, but with consequences. 

Adding to putting a ‘twist’ on the elements that Undertale introduces with its combat system-- what if sparing someone ultimately enabled them to keep hurting others? What if fighting to weaken someone was the correct solution for once? These inversions could have built on the meta elements of Undertale, and I think that it would make Clover’s decision to sacrifice themselves to bring justice to monsterkind more poignant to me.

Again, I have no ‘realistic’ suggestion for this in the full release of UTY. I think that the plot about justice alone isn’t bad, but I would have been happy to see it tie into the gameplay a little more. 

Conclusion

Ultimately, I think that UTY tries too hard to be Undertale without iterating on the aspects that made Undertale memorable. The characters feel like they fail to pop or relate to the game’s story in meaningful ways, and to me, the main story isn’t executed as well as it could have been (and far darker than the main Undertale in ways that don’t feel as if they’re handled sensitively). 

I will say, again, that this project is very impressive in scope, and I applaud the dev team for finishing it and releasing it. I recognize that a lot of my distaste is subjective, and creating another Undertale is a fool's errand considering the acclaim that Undertale got. I recognize one final time that my suggestions are just daydreaming, and this game has already found a lot of success-- which I think it deserves.

I tend to criticize a lot of media I like, which might sound contradictory to some, but it makes perfect sense to me. If I don’t like something, I won’t engage with it. I think that the original Undertale has its flaws, too. At the end of the day, I like UTY, but no media is perfect. This is how I think it could have been better, and I hope that I think other creatives who want to make Undertale fanworks (or any creative works, for that matter) will take these thoughts into consideration.

Thanks for reading.

[shomatoriashi]

formerly jinwoosungs

hello! my name’s rei and this is my new blog. i just felt the need for a new start, hence why you’ll see me over here. i didn’t wish to change my url again, so if you’d like to follow me here, then you’re free to do so (⺣◡⺣)♡

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11/16/24; 09:03am - sung jinwoo

writing tag

[jackdraw-spwrite]

Frigid, Ch. 3

Words: 3863 Characters: Danny, Clockwork Warnings: Darkness, restraints and claustrophobic situations (they end up in a cave) Danny worrying about freezing people to death?

For Ectoberhaunt Day 9: Fall

“Feel better?” Clockwork asked.

“Loads,” said Danny. He patted off the ice that had followed him home from the past, and it fell in tiny speckles to the ground.

“Good,” said Clockwork, and then ruffled his hair.

.

It even was good. For a while.

Read the rest on AO3 or below the readmore:

Without irises or even pupils, It was always hard to tell where Clockwork was looking. It shouldn’t have mattered – Clockwork could see everything.

Sometimes, Danny still got the impression that Clockwork wasn’t seeing him.

He bit his lip. “Clockwork?”

Something in Clockwork’s gaze shifted, and the impression vanished. “Yes, Daniel?”

“It’s getting worse again.”

Clockwork clicked his tongue. “Then it’s time for another outlet.” He turned to his screens, staff half-raised.

Danny usually trailed after him to look over his shoulder. This time, he didn’t.

“What if it doesn’t help, though?” Danny hunched in on himself.

Clockwork turned back, frowning. “It’s helped in the past.”

“And you know it won’t help! It won’t keep helping, at least. It’s…Clockwork, it’s helping less every time and–and what if it stops helping? What if I’m just like this, forever?”

He thought about never returning to Amity.

Never seeing his friends or family again, just frozen deep in an iceberg he couldn’t help but make.

“Daniel,” said Clockwork.

Danny looked up at him.

“I can see the future,” he said, and put a reassuring hand on Danny’s shoulder. “You might remember that.”

Danny forced a smile. “I do,” he said.

He did.

He didn’t find it reassuring.

—

Frostbite mustered a smile. “It doesn't appear to be hurting you, Great One.”

“That's good. Isn't it?”

“Yes! It's very good, that's one concern mostly off the table.”

One.

And not the one keeping him up at night. Danny bit his lip. “What about the cold buildup?”

Frostbite's smile collapsed.

—

Clockwork found Danny in one of the storage rooms off Clockwork's clock workshop.

Danny didn't notice him at first, too occupied worrying. If they got frozen, ghosts could thaw and be none the worse for the wear. Probably. Humans, on the other hand…

Danny laced his hands together and unfolded them to stare at his palms.

Tok.

Danny jumped. Clockwork was standing in the door, face impassive, staff raised as if ready to knock against the doorframe again.

“Hi,” said Danny.

“Hello,” said Clockwork. He raised an eyebrow. “I didn't realize you held such a passion for brass.”

“Oh.” said Danny, abruptly conscious both that he was sitting on a long brass sheet, and also that long metal sheets tended to bend when you sat on them. “Sorry.”

He got up–or tried to.

He was stuck.

“What–” Danny twisted around to see what was going on and discovered to his horror that ice had glued him to the brass.

He hadn't even noticed.

Flustered, he phased himself free and bounced into the air to assess the damage. Frost rime spread out in a halo from where he’d sat, wrapping the brass in a sheen of white. A good third of the sheet he’d sat on was covered.

“Oh no,” he said.

Sometimes at dinner, Danny would half-listen as his parents discussed engineering problems like thermal shock. Had he just broken the sheet? Or at least made it unusable for machinery? They’d mentioned steel getting too brittle to work with. Wasn’t brass a lot weaker?

Danny's heart sank. What if he got to the point he was doing the same to the gears of Clockwork's tower by accident?

And then his heart stopped cold.

What if he started doing it to Clockwork?

He felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Daniel.”

Almost against his will, he looked down at Clockwork's hand.

White spilled from beneath Clockwork's glove where it lay on his shoulder. Danny watched it grow, creeping up Clockwork's fingers like a fungus until it met the first joints of Clockwork’s fingers, and then the second. The frost nearest Danny’s shoulder thickened, a forest of tiny needles springing up from Danny’s shoulder.

Well. At least he'd find out if ghosts could recover from being frozen solid, soon.

“Daniel,” said Clockwork, again.

The ice met Clockwork's knuckles.

What if Clockwork couldn't fix his hands?

Clockwork's hand flexed against Danny's shoulder, then pulled away. Ice flecked from the surface of his glove. Left behind was a perfect imprint of Clockwork's hand on Danny's shoulder, done in sparkling white.

Danny blinked. “Clockwork?”

“There you are,” Clockwork smiled at him. His face felt far away.

“Your hand” began Danny–

“Is fine. See?” Clockwork waggled his fingers at him. A few remaining bits of frost flaked from his gloves.

“Oh.” Danny said.

The fear that had threatened to swallow Danny didn't vanish, but it no longer felt like it was swallowing him. Just nibbling. He felt wobbly.

Clockwork offered him a hand, and Danny took it. Even as the ice crawled up Clockwork’s hand again, he didn’t let go. Instead, he looked at Danny’s hand with the same distant expression he’d been getting lately.

Danny had the brief, terrible thought that Clockwork might be developing Dementia. Could ghosts even get Dementia?

“Clockwork,” Danny started.

The distant look vanished. Clockwork was seeing Danny again.

He swallowed. “If I lose control, will you keep them safe? I don’t want to–” he squeezed his eyes shut. It didn’t help. If anything, it made it easier to visualize what had happened in the other timeline.

When he opened them again, Clockwork was frowning.

For a brief, heart-stopping second, he wondered if he was overstepping, like he’d done with the other other timeline. With Vlad.

“I see,” said Clockwork, quiet. He gave Danny’s hand a squeeze, shedding ice as he did. “If you’re afraid of that, I have a place for you to stay. Here, in the tower.”

It was Danny’s turn to frown. “But–the ice–”

“It has weathered worse cold before, Daniel. It’ll be fine.”

Danny wasn’t sure how, but he didn’t know what Clockwork got up to in his free time. Maybe he visited the horsehead nebula to vacation.

Clockwork cleared his throat. “And,” he said, “I think it might be time for a field trip, of sorts.” A smile flitted around the corners of his mouth.

His heart still twinged, but the prospect of a field trip was too enticing to ignore. Danny perked up. “You don't mean–”

The smile settled on Clockwork's face fully. “I think you'll find I do.”

—

Danny almost hopped through the portal.

Almost, because he hadn't quite accounted for just how little gravity pulled at him here, so he pushed off the ground with far more force than needed. He went tumbling feet into the air before flying back down to rejoin Clockwork, tail streaming out behind him in a long ribbon. His hair swayed–not in the wind. There was no air here.

If Clockwork thought it was funny, the only sign was a crinkling at the corners of his eyes. Danny still pouted. Clockwork didn't have to worry about walking. He never walked.

But his feigned defensiveness lasted less than a moment. How could it, with where they were?

Danny looked past Clockwork to the ice they’d appeared on. Like that of Earth's Cryogenian period, this one was vast and pale. Like the Cryogenian, there were no clouds.

Unlike it, there wasn’t enough atmosphere to paint the daytime sky a different shade. Instead, the sky was swathed in stars. The only tell that this was day, in fact, was that one of them blazed far brighter, far larger than the rest. Here, the Sun was a fraction of the size it had on Earth, but it still dominated the sky. Or would have, if not for the other planetary bodies visible as crescents. Here was Ganymede, hanging like the moon on its hugest nights. There was her distant sister Callisto, a fingernail just a bit larger than the Sun itself.

Danny spiraled up, up hundreds of feet, as if to reach them was only a few miles more. They were so close!

But–not that close.

His eyes fell from the other Galilean moons to the horizon. It was close enough here that the world felt strange, shattered. Like he was just at the top of a great plateau, and wasn't quite high enough to see the ice roll away beneath it to a more distant horizon.

And the surface itself…

Here, as below, the ice seemed endless.

Ridge after ridge of it stretched away to the truncated horizon. Someone else might have found it boring, but Danny was so excited he felt as though his skin was fizzing. He was having a hard time staying anything close to still, and that extended even to his fingers, his tail, his hair. And his skin. It was like every part of him wanted to dance.

He did a little somersault, and then another. Soon, he was flying in enormous loops, peaking hundreds of feet above the ice and bottoming out as he zoomed past Clockwork again and again.

Clockwork let him. Danny could see the smile playing on his face every time he approached, before it blurred as Danny whipped past him. It felt like he should be sending Clockwork's cloak flapping with how fast he was going, but without any air, it stayed as perfectly positioned as ever.

Unless…

On his next loop, Danny angled his path ever so slightly, laughter already bubbling up at the idea of Clockwork's face when Danny pulled his hood down–

Where was Clockwork?

A hand grabbed his tail, and Danny came screeching to a halt in a brief but visceral impression of a rubber band. He came to a rest hanging upside down from Clockwork's fist.

Caught. In more ways than one.

He gave Clockwork a little wave. Clockwork raised an eyebrow in mock skepticism, but the smile still lingering on his face gave him away. Danny wiggled, trying to mime ‘please let me go’ with only facial expressions.

Obligingly, Clockwork dropped him.

Danny rolled into his back before popping upright again. Before he could return to the sky, Clockwork clasped his shoulder, and at Danny's questioning look, pointed down.

At a second, more questioning look, Clockwork phased them both into the ice.

“We can hear one another like this,” said Clockwork. He was oddly warped by the ice between them, and the usual deep rumble of his voice gained an echoing swell that plunged deep below before emerging, high-pitched and liquid, from invisible cracks in the ice.

“We can?” asked Danny. “We can! Oh, that's weird.”

He sucked in a breath to whoop and immediately choked.

“We can't breathe in,” said Clockwork. “We are in ice.”

Danny paused his attempted recovery to send him a dirty look. Clockwork pretended not to notice.

“Regardless,” said Clockwork, voice a hall of echoes, “I thought we might explore a bit.”

“Down?” asked Danny, who had spent more than one summer afternoon daydreaming about what lived under Europa’s ice.

“Maybe,” said Clockwork. Danny could hear the smile. “But let’s do things in order–”

Danny scoffed. Clockwork never did things in order.

“--and explore the surface first. What do you think the brown is from?”

Danny paused partway through planning how to wheedle Clockwork into deep sea exploration. “We're close enough to them?”

“Only a hundred miles or so,” said Clockwork. “I thought you might like to get a feel for the rest of the surface, for comparison.”

Danny wondered how well tackle hugging Clockwork would go while they were still inside ice. “That sounds good. Let's do that. And then the oceans after?”

“I never said we wouldn't.”

—

Europa’s surface was famously smooth, but that was from an astronomical perspective. Smooth meant no huge mountains or valleys, not that the surface was perfect. The ice was covered in chaos terrain – a pattern of long, winding cracks that had healed over with ropes of ice-melt, refrozen after welling up from deep below, or from being pressed closed with such force that the two sides fused. Some were small, but many were a hundred feet tall or more–huge pileups of ice large enough that someone from Earth (an alien from Earth! Like they were! They were aliens!) would have considered them hills or ridges.

This was odd enough–exciting enough–without the cherry on top: many of them were brown.

No one had ever gotten close enough to figure out why.

Well. They'd figured out from spectrum analysis that it was sulfur compounds. But that was what, not why.

Danny darted around Clockwork like an over-excited minnow, straining against common sense. He wanted to go explore, go investigate, but leaving behind the only other person here would have been dumb. That Clockwork was also the only one who knew what was going on in such an inhospitable environment as this made it dumb even by the standards of Danny's most distracted moments.

Still, far too slowly for his taste, they made their way to where the ground was stained brown. Danny landed and crouched, straining his eyes to try and pick out some detail visible to the human eye. Or Danny's eye, at least.

It was flecks. Just flecks, like bits of rust that had fallen off some piece of junk. Danny tried phasing one out of the ice, and it came apart in his fingers like mud.

Huh.

He’d need a microscope to see if there was anything in there, and somehow he doubted Clockwork had one on him.

It wasn’t, quite, disappointing. Danny knew the prospect of surface life on Europa was slim. He’d kind of been hoping for skeletons, though.

After a short inspection to double check, he rocked back on his heels and sent Clockwork a plaintive look. It turned to mock outrage when Clockwork ruffled his hair, and then excitement when Clockwork gestured to a fault line that twisted, narrow and deep, into the depths.

.

The crack didn't go all the way down. Of course it didn't; Europa's ice was miles thick. As they descended, the light from the sun quickly went from bright to an otherworldly glow cast through and along walls striated from countless cycles of freezing and thawing. And then, the glow faded into half-light, then shadows.

The sinuous caves grew tight, narrowing from a mouth large enough to fit a car, into crevices that a human would have struggled through. In places, they arched away from one another again to form curving alien hallways with absent floors. In their place was only the crack, delving deeper into the ice.

The ice itself was a strange mixture of abrupt edges and smooth lines as they descended; massive boulders with sharp faces bridged the gap, their corners melted into the rippling canyon walls.

Eventually, Danny found himself following the light of Clockwork's aura further and further into the depths as the light from the surface faded, first into twilight, then into nothing more than a smeared suggestion above their heads.

Their glow flitted across the ice as they descended, highlighting broken pebbles within the cracks and striations along its surface, melting inches into the ice itself before bouncing back in a hazy nimbus.

Where the passage narrowed, Clockwork simply shifted his form to be smaller or more sinuous, eeling between cracks far too small for any human to manage. Danny followed, the sensation of ice pressing in around him from all sides landing somewhere between soothing and unease in his mind.

In one spot where a whole fall of boulders sealed off most of their passage, Clockwork simply turned intangible, instead.

Danny followed suit, and in the space of the moment it took to fly out the other side he heard a cavernous groan before the near vacuum of the other side once again stole all sound away.

He stopped.

Was that a whale? It sounded too huge, but then again, Europa's oceans were supposed to be a hundred miles deep…

Clockwork turned to look up at him, red eyes aglow in the dark, and Danny shook himself from his wondering. He wouldn't find out here, after all, but deeper. Down, far below.

Beneath the rock fall, the crevice grew yet narrower. The sides pressed close, closer until Danny found himself slithering after Clockwork with the shape of the ice molding his form like clay; a frigid sculptor's hands drawing him thinner, longer even as ice pressed inexorably against his back, his chest, his face and caressed his throat.

It drew him out until he felt a mile long and thin as a wire and then–

Then, Clockwork stopped.

Danny piled up behind him as he skated along a seam lit only by their glow: here, the crevice closed.

Clockwork was in his youngest form now, small enough for the walls of the crevice to just barely restrict him, but restricting him they were. He fiddled with something on his staff, and Danny let his tail skitter across the ice above them as he waited.

Like this, the vise-grip of the ice was soothing. He felt safe, comfortable. With his surroundings so cold, nothing would be hurt if he let go, just a little.

Right?

Danny loosed the grip he had learned to keep on his core. Just a little, just enough for the pressure inside to fade, and waited for Clockwork to react.

Clockwork reached out and hauled them both into intangibility and into the ice, Danny's tail flowing like a ribbon behind them. And then the ice pressed in. The sensation of it, its chill, its pressure, wrapped around every inch of Danny. And yet it was gentle around them, like they were floating.

“Clockwork?” Danny asked, and his voice was full of the ice’s own fluid echoes.

“It's safe, yes. Until we reach the ocean, you can relax.”

They descended.

There were countless tiny bubbles trapped within the ice, and they rushed past him – or he past them – like snowfall in the night. The memory of the world above was already dim, but now it grew muffled, too, as though blanketed in a thick layer of snow.

Away from the surface of the ice, Clockwork became a sedate blur of light.. And as he followed, the floating sensation intensified, swaddling him in layer upon layer of uncertainty. Softly, inexorably, it crept in around his edges, reaching delicate feathers just under his skin.

The feathers grew longer, pressed deeper, stole into cracks in Danny himself. There, their razor-edges found his sense of direction and pried it loose. Abruptly, he realized he’d lost track of down and up.

There was only Danny, and the ice, and Clockwork’s silvered glow. There was only forward, and everything else.

And then, he lost even that.

.

He was unmoored within the black.

.

And then, he began to notice his surroundings anew.

There was Danny. Ahead of him–maybe down, perhaps up–was Clockwork. Danny couldn't tell. Around them, tiny bubbles clouded the ice, and the glow of their passage sparked them into countless points of light.

They were the only steady things around in an endless night.

Danny had the disorienting thought that he was a giant. That he was incomprehensibly vast and barely visible, moving through stars so much smaller than himself that Danny could cradle dozens of solar systems in a single hand–if only he reached out.

It was like being a nebula.

Something in Danny's core twisted.

Reality gained a different cast.

Danny looked down. There were stars shining inside him, too. Some threaded through a leg and up his torso, like diamonds on a necklace. There was a patch of them on his shoulder. They speckled his arms by the dozen, nestled gently within his silvery outline.

Danny's core keened with some deep, insatiable longing.

The echoes in the ice had melted into singing. He didn't know when.

It was like being a nebula.

Deep within unforgiving black, farther from Earth than any human had ever gone, Danny reached out a hand to cup the stars, and it was perfect.

Almost.

They were hard to see the newborn stars against the brighter silver of his glove and instinctively, Danny pulled on his invisibility–

And the stars vanished. The singing stopped. Reality snapped back in.

He wasn't. He wasn't–

“Daniel,” murmured Clockwork.

“Clockwork?” Danny asked. He didn't like how his voice wobbled, but–it felt like he'd just had a dream torn from his fingers.

He rubbed at his chest. His core was doing something funny.

“You were singing,” said Clockwork.

“I was?” Danny asked. He looked up at Clockwork’s face.

“Yes,” said Clockwork. The stars gathered around him lined his face in a shining veil. “Do you want to stop? We can return another time.”

Danny shook his head. “No.” There was another pang in Danny's core, sharp. Urgent. “No, I want to see.”

And he did. The idea strummed across his heartstrings in a way that pulled them tense and hungry. The idea of going back without going down–

“I need to see.”

It set his teeth on edge. Turned the pleasant fizzing of his skin inwards to saw at his nerves.

Clockwork's brow was still furrowed in a frown.

Danny's core twinged again, laced with panic. “I have to.”

For a long moment, Clockwork said nothing.

Danny hung in place, feeling simultaneously like a pinned insect and like he was going to fly apart at the seams until he was nothing more than dust. His tail – and when had it gotten so short again? – his tail twitched.

Maybe he should just go down alone.

“I see,” said Clockwork at last, and held out his hand.

Shakily, Danny took it.

The solidity, the familiarity–it anchored him, and as they descended, he felt just a little bit more himself.

—

Clockwork was singing.

Danny was still holding his hand, too unsettled to be embarrassed about it.

But. Clockwork was singing.

It was a haunting and baritone thing, and it lingered on the knife-edge between sound and sensation. But there were notes, long and slow, and they rose and fell like a funeral dirge.

The song crept through their clasped fingers and seeped up Danny's arm to calm his heart and core. His core still sat odd in his chest, but the singing smoothed the twinned restlessness and helplessness back into anticipation; into excitement.

They were descending. Soon, they'd hit water, and then–

Danny was too excited to close his eyes. But their surroundings faded as he thought of what lay beneath. Of the oceans, and what might live within them.

What if there were animals? What if there were whales?

They descended.

And then, from beneath rose a pale curtain.

It lingered just on the cusp of visible, lit only by their glow. As they approached, it brightened. Spires and ripples emerged from the dark, and it became clear that the curtain was frozen, unmoving, and nothing of the kind.

Clockwork aimed for the nearest spire. Danny went with him and found his perspective flipped on its head when instead of landing, Clockwork phased through it.

Because they were at the bottom of miles of solid ice.

Danny shook his head to clear it, drew the icy shroud of his power back under his skin, and followed Clockwork past the veil and into the world beneath.

[wint3r-h3art]

Pisces

Pairing: Namor x Fem!Reader x Attuma

Synopsis: This is a No Powers AU. Namor and Attuma are renowned businessmen who built business empire around the globe. As best friends and business partners, they share everything, and that include you.

While on his business trip, Namor’s attention shifts toward his business empire and less on you. Feeling unloved and unneeded, you decide to runaway. Of course, it doesn’t take long for you other lover to seek after you and bring you back to them.

Word count: 8.2K

Warnings: smut with plot!! slight angst! Established poly relationship. Predator/prey play, praise kink, finger kink, fingering, vaginal sex, car sex, oral (male & female receiving), dom/sub undertone, spit roasting, cum eating/dumping

18+ ONLY | MINORS DNI | By clicking readmore, you agree that you are 18 and over. Your media consumption are your own!

**** DO NOT COPY, TRANSLATE, PLAGIARIZE, OR REPOST MY WORKS ANYWHERE ESLE !  If you enjoy my works, please reblog/comment for support!

You could feel his unyielding gaze on you even from this far out. His presence alone should intimidate anyone that came within his vicinity, after all, he had always been a presence unto himself. His height and build had always been overwhelming to many, especially by the way he was carrying himself. 

The man was close to 6’5” and built like a tank with broad shoulders and chest. His waist and legs were thick with muscles. He could easily be mistaken for an athlete, and it wasn’t so far off either.

Attuma was a businessman through and through despite his past with Talokan’s Elite Special Forces. You came into his life after he retired, so you didn’t know much about what exactly he did. You just knew that the man served his country well, and now he’s working on his own thing. 

Perhaps it was why he’s renowned for running his business like his battlefield–ruthless and unyielding. His tactic has always been aggressive–an all-for-nothing sort of way that drives his competitors up the wall, which was unlike Namor who was more cautious and guarded. 

But that was how it made them the perfect team.  

Attuma’s gaze burned you in a way that you couldn't explain–it was awakening something primal inside that both were terrifying and exhilarating. He was looking more and more like a predator the way his deep, brown eyes bore down on you. His jet-black hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail as he leaned his massive frame against the marble column inside the luxury boutique. He was sucking on a lollipop as he was eyeing you.

The all-black suit did nothing to hide his impeccable biceps and the massive plane of his chest. No one dared to question him or what the hell he was doing because they knew who he was, and everyone knew to mind their own business when he showed up. The septum piercing was a dead giveaway, but it was also the aura that he was emitting as well that everyone just knew he was the owner of the whole damn place.

A smile spread across your face as you weaved through the crowded boutique. Attuma shook his head in warning. Despite his relaxing composure, you know exactly what that means. 

No games. It was time to go. 

You wanted to play—you craved the thrill, primarily when Attuma got all worked up. 

You haven’t seen him for almost a week since Namor brought you along for his business trip here in America. Being all cooped up alone in the hotel room by yourself was making you antsy. It didn’t help that Namor was so focused on his work that he barely spent any time with you, so now that you were out and about, it was only natural to want to seek a little thrill–y’know, giving him a little taste of what it feels like to be left all alone.

Attuma loved the little game of cat and mouse. It drove him crazy whenever he had gotten a chance to just let himself lose. He knew the instance when you began to walk away from him with that little smile on your face. It wasn’t the first time that you act up, and he knew it wouldn’t be the last either.

As you took a step back, he took a huge step forward, pushing through the crowd. He knew that goddamn look, and he knew he had to work for it.

A quick dial on his phone and Namor picked up the call at the first ring.

“[I found our Birdy, but we’re going to run a little later than planned. She wants to play.]”

Namor grumbled knowingly, throwing the document across his desk. He could feel his head throbbing, trying to figure out what the hell he wants to do with you. He understood that he wasn’t great at keeping you happy or entertained. On the other hand, you needed to stop acting like a brat. His patient could only go so far.

“[You’re enabling her.]”

“[Well, you should have thought of that when you brought her here and left her in the hotel room all by herself. You could have waited for me. You know how she gets when you don’t give her enough attention. But what do I know?]” 

Sarcasm drenched his tone as continued to follow you. Attuma could feel his friend rolling his eyes even through the phone. If no one was going to say, he would. He had no problem with that.

“[That is not my point.]”

“[My point is, you pissed her off, and she takes it out on me, and it ends up being me doing all the work just trying to get her back. Have you ever stopped and considered that perhaps she needs you, which is why she acted this way? We agree on this that we will try to make this work together, but you just can’t keep doing to her, K’uk’ulkan.]”

Namor fell silent. He knew how you could get when you don’t get your way, especially when he doesn’t let you do anything you want. The past couple of days had been hectic for him, and he admitted that his busy schedule made him spend less time with you…It still didn’t justify the way you act up though. The bratty behavior needed to stop, and the fact that Attuma let you get your way all the time was unacceptable.

They knew that you know the sort of power you have over them, and how much you love to abuse it, knowing full well that they can’t say no to you. They may be in control when it comes to sex, but at the end of the day, it was you who held all the power over them in the palm of your well-manicured hands. Even if Namor had always been stern with you, he still let your behavior slip 9 times out of 10. 

Running his fingers through his hair, he sighed in defeat. 

“No funny business, Attuma. Do not drag this little game of yours for more than 20 minutes. Or I will kick you out of the suit together,” he warned. 

A sarcastic laugh left his lips, making the people inside the boutique stare at him, but Attuma didn’t care. It was almost comical in a way that Namor’s love for control seeped into their everyday lives. As nonchalant as Attuma could be, sometimes, he asserted his own authority over his friend as well, especially when it comes to you.

He knew what was at stake here. Under normal circumstances, Attuma would take his sweet time, dragging out the little game until you were too exhausted to run from him. But now, he had to put in the effort to actually catch you. The little cat and mouse game has just gotten interesting, and here he thought this little trip was boring. It brought him back to his time as Talokan’s soldier.

“15 minutes is all I need. Also, fucking get something to make it up to her. I can only do so much. If you love her, do something about it.”

Namor had already gone ahead and ordered all the made-up gifts and flowers, even dinner reservation for the three of them at a three-Michelin star restaurant that you have always loved. He was going all out on his apology. Of course, that would come after the little punishment, of course.

“And one other thing. I owned that fucking hotel. You can’t lock me out of my damn property, you jerk.” Attuma hung up before his friend could utter anything, leaving Namor exasperated and annoyed.

.

.

.

You watched from a distance as Attuma placed his phone in his suit pocket. You knew who he was calling. The look he was giving you now was a complete 180. He wasn’t in the mood to play with his food anymore–no, he was going in for the kill, and you knew your time starts now.

Without any hesitation, you took off. There was zero chance that you could beat him in this little chase. You were set up for failure too many times to count, but it didn’t stop you from trying. Perhaps this once, you can outrun him. 

Weaving through the rush of people, you looked back to find Attuma walking–no, he wasn’t walking. That damn man was stalking you with the look of a starved predator. His stride widened, and each time he took a step forward, he seemed to gain another foot or so closer to you. It was like you made no progress at all.

Damn his long legs, you muttered under your breath as you continued to run.

You turned right, then left, hoping to throw him off his game. This was a luxury mall after all, there was no way he could just breeze past the patrons without causing any issues, you thought to yourself as you turned left. 

There was fucking way he can catch you now that you have thrown him off with all the turns.

Your legs were burning as you tried to pull air into your lungs. Your blood was practically pounded inside your eardrums the faster you were going. Every ounce of you was buzzing with adrenaline. It felt like it was not going to end, but your hope swells when you find the exit. There was a twinkling of hope shining dimly. The victory was so close that you could almost taste it on your tongue. Just a couple of more feet and you would win.

Your hand grasped the handle of the door and yanked it open.

But nothing.

Your heart felt like it dropped to the pit of your stomach as you tried to yank the door open again, not daring to look behind you.

Nothing.

Anxiety bubbled up inside of you when the realization finally dawned on you. You finally turned around in hopes to make it out of this section at least before Attuma got there, but it was too late. He was already there, leaning against the wall, sucking on that God-forsaken lollipop as if he hadn't just dashed through the crowd to get here. 

Not a single hair on his head was out of place, and not a single drop of sweat poured down his face. The man was the epitome of cool, calm, and collected. This place was his playground, and he knew every entrance like it was the back of his hand. Your chance of running away for less than 1% the moment he entered here.

“Alright, Lil Birdy. The Big Fish is getting impatient, so we have to go back before he gets mad at us.”

“You haven’t won yet,” you pointed out. There was a fire in your eyes, and he loved that a lot. A woman who was as fierce as you deserves only the best challenge he could give you. 

You sized him up, walking slowly closer to the opposite wall, creating enough distance that you could just bolt right past him.  As long as he hasn't physically captured you yet, you still have a chance to win. All you had to do was sprint past him.

Yes. That was it.

And as if Attuma had read your thought, he took a small step closer. His larger body looms close to you. He was built like a goodman fortress, so to get past him, meant you had to be quicker than him.

“Sweetheart, no funny business, remember. Acting bratty with me will only get you into more trouble.” There was a warning in his eyes as he slowly approached you, but of course, you took off, or at least you tried to.

A pair of strong arms wound around your waist as your body was being hauled back. Before you knew it, your world was being turned upside down. A loud, surprised yelp left your lips as you found yourself being slung over his shoulder. You tried to flail your arms, hitting him, smacking at his ass or whatever part of you can reach, but Attuma just laughed as he smacked your ass in return.

“How many times have I told you that you can’t win at this kind of game?”

You didn’t answer him. Instead, you let out a whining noise as you flailed in his arms. Attuma didn’t seem to be bothered by it as he stood there, waiting for the staff to unlock the entrance doors for him.

“You cheated.”

“It is simply an aggressive tactic, that is all.”

“Still cheated,” you whined, pursing your lips as you continued to wiggle over his shoulder.

A large blacked-out car pulled up at the entrance. Its door had already opened by the time Attuma put you down and ushered you inside. 

“And you are still a brat,” he muttered as he sat beside you. 

You were more annoyed and frustrated at this point as Attuma sat there quietly, not even bothering to look at you. You crossed your arms and looked the other way. If he wants to play this game, you can do the same too.

“Why are you always taking it out on me whenever Namor pisses you off?” Attuma finally asked after some time.

His tone was light, but there was a heavy undertone to it. Perhaps annoyance…or worst hurt. You couldn’t help but look at him for a long moment. You knew exactly what he meant. It seemed like you always went to him whenever your other love upset you. Attuma has always been your rock now that you think about it.

He was the first to approach you and the first to court you between the two. You only met Namor because Attuma introduced you to him, so why have you always treated him this way? Was it because he never showed you anger or resentment? Or was it because of something else? Your love for him was as equal as your love for Namor, but why has it always been him that you always take your attitude on?

“I don’t know,” you admitted after some time. The answer didn’t satisfy you or him, and you were fully aware of it. “Maybe because I know you would come looking for me?”

He didn’t look at you. He didn’t often express his anger or hurt around you, but it often showed up in his attitude and action. Like for this instance: his silence.

He was often boisterous and loud when someone else pissed him off. Oftentimes, he acted on his urges, but with you though, it always ended in silence as if he was holding himself back as if he didn’t want to scare you off.

You said sorry to him. This time you place your hand on his cheek so that he could look at you. His expression was still unreadable, but then again, you could never read him when he doesn’t want you to.

You slowly perched yourself up on the seat, so that you were looking at him at the same eye level. He had gone ahead and pulled up the partition so whatever you two were doing in the backseat of the SUV wouldn’t be known to the driver, but it was still nothing.

“I just know you will be there, that’s why I keep doing it. If Namor won’t come after me, I know you would…That was enough for me to know that at least I have you, so if you’re still mad at me, now it’s a good time to push me away,” you said softly. 

Your breath brushed against his lips, making them tingle slightly. Attuma was still silent, except that his eyes were bored into yours with an interest now. Those deep, earthy brown eyes of his seemed to melt as your words finally sank into his head.

“To be quite honest with you, I am more hurt about it than angry at you.”

His words made your heart drop to the pit of your stomach. You stared up at him and felt the worst possible emotion. There was no playfulness in his tone, which made you even more guilty.

“I am the worst, aren’t I?”

Attuma sighed as he noticed your tearful gaze. Oh fuck, he really hated it when you cried. You really didn’t mean to, but when you think about all the times you caused all the trouble, you realized that you were being unfair to him.

“You’re not…I just spoil you too much and let you get your way too often,” he sighed. “I just wish you would treat me less of a punching bag, and more of your partner…Can you do that for me moving forward?”

You nodded. 

“I need you to say it,” he whispered against your lips, brushing them almost feathery that making your skin prick with goosebumps.

“I can. For you, anything.”

“Good girl.” Attuma leaned in, kissing your forehead first before capturing your lips. 

It wasn’t a hot kiss that you often shared, but something softer, more intimate than your usual antics with him. It felt more like a reassuring kiss–something along the lines of him validating his words and feeling for you.

Attuma felt it in his bones when his lips moved against yours, creating a soft friction that he has been craving since he arrived here. The slow, tantalizing kiss soon melted into a heated one, filled with needs and fervor that burned you to the core.

Your body buzzed as he slipped his tongue inside your mouth. Every ounce of uncertainty seemed to melt away as the kiss deepened. Soon, you find his large body covering yours. Heavy and hot. His lips were soft yet demanding. There was just enough pressure and suction as his lips rubbed against yours. His tongue caresses your lips before he nipped your lower lips just before he drew it in to gently suck on it.

Your hands clung onto his massive back. Your hips moved on their own as you were rubbing your aching pussy against his thick thigh, hoping and wishing that the thick muscles of his thigh were enough to sate your throbbing pussy. 

You were breathless and panting as excitement coursed through your vein like liquid fire. Your hands were everywhere–fingers dug into his thick back, feeling the way his muscles rippled beneath your palms every time he moved.

His mouth slid along the column of your throat, lips grazed over the thrumming flutter of your pulse and along your jaws. Attuma paused at your ear. You could feel his warm, wet breath brushing against the shell as words spilled out of his mouth, full of sweetness and promise of never letting you go. Even through the haze of your arousal, you knew he was speaking the truth. 

His fingertips sought out the buttons of your blouse. His lips found the center of your collarbones before his mouth traveled down to the space between the valley of your breasts. He lingered there longer, kissing and sucking on the soft skin. His large palms cupped and kneaded through your bra like he hadn’t touched you in ages.

The thing about Attuma that you loved the most was his devotion to your pleasure. He had always put you first above all else. Every touch was meant to bring you closer to your release. He had never asked too much in return, yet you always make sure to reciprocate the same love he had given you.

Attuma went lower still. His dexterous fingers made quick work on your jeans, pulling them off you easily. He could have torn the things to pieces, but he refrained. There was no use of brute strength here.

Soft, mewling sounds slipped past your lips as your body succumbed to the soft pleasure that slowly built up inside of you. Your legs fell apart easily once Attuma tossed your jeans over his shoulder. Then his mouth bored down upon your flesh once more. Soft and wet, licking and sucking, stroking every nerve ending in your body, devouring you alive.

His low, deep guttural moans were like quiet words whispered against your skin. When he delved his thick finger inside you, you felt your body being consumed by the fire he set. Your body easily molded into whatever shape he wanted, yet he had never asked for more than what you have given him.  

It was a slow and tortuous touch, yet you opened up to him, allowing him to take whatever he wanted. Attuma slipped another thick finger inside you, and you knew you were done for. His fingers moved slowly at first, dragging out the sweet and delicious friction that you longed for. Your hips bucked upward as he pushed them all the way to his knuckle until your juices leaked out and rolled down till they pooled under your ass. 

Pleaded words left your lips as he continued to administer his slow, and desirous torture. 

His thumb pressed firmly against your small bundle of nerves, circling it and rubbing it until your legs started to shake. Pathetic whimpers left your lips as you clung to him with all of your might. No longer was the feeling of resentment and anger, and instead, your heart was filled with love and adoration that this man simply could give you with simply by his touch alone. You came not too long, but you didn’t let yourself catch any breath.

Attuma found himself being pushed back as you made quick work of his zipper. Your mouth watered at the sight of his cock. He was so hard and so ready for you. You gave him a tentative stroke from base to tip. You eyed him, watching the way the corner of his mouth twitched at the friction you have given him.

With your hand gripping his broad shoulders, you lifted yourself up and lined the tip of his cock against your opening before you slowly sank down onto his shaft.

Soft gasps slipped through his lips as the sensation of being enveloped by your warm, wet heat slowly consumed him. No matter how many times he had taken you, it always felt like it was the first. His length and girth had always intimidated you, even now, after years of being together, you were still unnerved by him.

You could only grunt as you slowly lift your hips up before slowly sinking down on him again. Each time you moved, you felt like you were about to split apart. Attuma stretched you out so deliciously that you felt like your mind was splitting. It was hard to concentrate on anything else when your mind was trying to focus on pleasing him.

As you began to find your pace, Attuma’s patience was running out as well. Without a word, his hands grasped your hips, holding you still as he began to piston his hips upward, driving himself deeper and after into you.

No noise came out of your mouth as he drove into you with such vigor. It was too overwhelming and just too much that you couldn’t think of anything else except for the way his cock was practically splitting you apart. Every time he slammed you back onto him, you felt like you were going to bust right then and there.

Of course, it didn’t take long for you to come. Your body convulsed and spasmed in his arms. It took you a while to realize that he hadn’t come yet. You pushed back and looked at him, but of course, you noticed that the car had come to a halt.

Your eyes were still bleary. Your skin was still feverish of the way your lover had made you feel. Attuma’s gaze was still burning into you. His arousal was still prominent against your thigh. You know the moment you leave this car and make your way up the hotel, you will be punished.

“Time to face your music, Little Bird. You can’t keep running away from your problems forever.”

You sighed. He was right. It was childish to even do the thing that you do, but you wanted attention from them, so it was the only thing you could think of at that moment. 

You took his hand in surrender. It was time to face the music.

You ended up staying in Attuma’s suit instead of Namor’s.

Your nervous energy was far too palpable that Attuma didn’t have the heart to let you face Namor immediately. His friend could wait some more. After all, it was his fault that you did what you did. It was a reminder for both of them that you cannot be controlled and tied down, and that if you wish to leave, they cannot stop you from doing so. It was a reality check for the two men and a greater one for Namor.

His way of loving you was perhaps a bit more extreme than Attuma's.

He had always had a sense of overprotectiveness over you to the point where it becomes smothering at times. He knew that his career often gets in the way of his life too. He’s managing multiple businesses globally. It was difficult to balance work and life altogether. There was no doubt about how much you meant to him, and he was confident that you could hold your own as well, but he understood that even the strongest person needed support, and he couldn’t be there.

Stepping outside the bathroom, you sighed constantly as you wrapped your body with a soft plush bathrobe. Your nerves seemed to relax a bit more, but of course, once you looked up, you found your heart sank.

Attuma was sitting on one of those large, plush sofas, looking at you with an unreadable expression once again. On his left stood your other lover, dressing in a deep navy suit, looking at you with a stern expression. 

Though Namor was not as tall as Attuma, his presence was his own. There was a regal air about him, almost like an air of authority. His presence commanded attention. His words commanded respect. No one ever dared to speak over him, and most important of all, no one ever dared to disrespect him. 

You couldn’t tell which one he was feeling at the moment by the way those brown eyes bored you. You didn’t know if he was mad, annoyed, or disappointed. Whatever it was, you really didn’t want to deal with him. No words had uttered out of his mouth, yet you knew what they were going to be.

Silence lingered inside the room. The quietness was almost deafening and the tension made the air thick, almost unbreathable. You waited, but nothing as the silence continued to stretch out further. Your first thought was to run to Attuma because you knew he would comfort you, but all sense of rationality seemed to slip out of your mind when Namor took a few steps toward you. His deep, brown eyes bored into you with an unreadable expression. The heaviness in the room only grew heavier once he was in front of you, intercepting your path and preventing you from reaching Attuma. You halted immediately as you stumbled backward, clearly surprised by his sudden movement.

A gasp slipped out of your lips when you found his thick strong arm snaking around your waist, caging you and holding you close to him. Heat radiated off his body, flooding your nostrils with nothing but his deep, masculine cologne–the one that you gifted him. His eyes bored into you with an intensity that made you want to crawl under the cover. 

Blood rushed to your face as you struggled to look him in the eyes, so you cast your gaze elsewhere, but Namor would have none of that. He grabbed you by the nape of your neck and force you to look at him. You could smell the sweetness on his breath when he exhaled. The warm heat tickled your skin, making your nerves buzz and hum.

Your mouth went dry in an instant as you tried to swallow. Whatever you planned to say to him seemed to dissolve the moment he touched you, and it scared you the fact that Namor had such power over you.

“Why did you leave me?”

His voice came out like a soft tremor, making your body hum with anticipation. Namor knew the reason already. It was more than obvious. He just wanted you to say it out loud. 

He knew he fucked up on his part, and there was no amount of gifts or apology that could remedy what he had done. He just wanted to know why you always do this–making him some sort of a bad guy. He was not perfect, and he tried to be the best partner he could be for you. He wasn’t as attentive to your needs as Attuma was, and he knew that. He wanted to be better. He would have given you the whole damn world you wanted because that’s the kind of man he was. 

At the same time though, you were the only person on this Earth that knew how to push every single one of his buttons. He wasn’t sure whether your defiance came from your attention deprivation or not, but he didn’t appreciate being tested and questioned all the damn time.

“You know why,” you answered. You were surprised by how small your voice sounded. Your hands shook from your nerves as you tried to hold his gaze. Those deep brown eyes felt like a fortified fortress, hardened and unyielding–almost unforgivable the way they could just pierce into the depth of your soul without realizing it.

Namor wasn’t happy with your answer, and you knew this by the way his grip got a little firmer than before, making you gasp in an instant. You could almost taste his breath on your tongue as he closed in the distance.

“I want you to say it.”

“Why should I? You’ve never had to justify yourself whenever you do something wrong, so why should I do that?”

Attuma’s lips quirked, trying to hide his smirk at your defiance. Only you could speak such works to Namor, and Attuma was quite amused by that. As a matter of fact, he was so proud of you for standing up to Namor that it started to make him stiff all over again.

Namor let out a warning grunt as his eyes bored into you. 

“You are in no position to demand anything from me, my love.” His fingers dug into your skin, almost imprinting his fingertips straight to your bones.

You winced at the dull pain as you continued to stare at him defiantly. You could feel his patience fraying the more you were egging him on, and it excited you in some way. You wanted him angry–hell, you wanted him to be furious, just anything to show that he cared or felt something for you.

“I think I do…and you know it too, dearest love of mine.”

Namor grunted and took a step back. He looked over Attuma, then at you. His expression soon shifted into something else entirely–something that you knew would make your knees weakened. He looked at you darkly. There was an underlying hunger that made you swallow thickly. 

“Take off your robe,” he said firmly as he slowly took off his suit jacket. His dexterous fingers made quick work on his tie. His eyes were trained on you as he slowly rolled up his sleeves. You could see the way his arms flexed by the way the muscles strained and corded. The image made your core throb. 

“Do not make me ask twice, in yakunaj,” he warned. His voice was firm, full of authority. “Attuma will not be able to help you now that you are here with me, so what’s it going to be?”

You stood there silently for a long moment, and the realization finally dawned on you once you let out a sharp exhale breath that you were holding your breath this whole time. Reluctantly, you took off the plush bathrobe, letting it fall off your shoulders and pooled by your feet. A cold shudder shot through your spine as cold air brushed against your naked form. Attuma looked at you with much interest now, eying your body from head to toe. He could feel his cock twitch at the way you were clamping your thighs together. He could clearly see the way your wetness slowly seeped out and rolled down your inner thigh.

“Good girl,” he said as he stroked your cheek, caressing it almost so lightly that it made you shudder. “But being a good girl is not enough to get you off the hook with me, darling…What should I ever do with you?”

You stayed silent, but you could feel your body warm. Your pussy was throbbing to your frantic heartbeat as you stood there, wishing that he would punish you already. This drawn-out game wasn’t for you. 

“I don’t know,” you answered. Your voice was no more than a whisper. Namor didn’t miss the tremor in your voice as his hand now cupped your face, pulling you ever closer to him. 

Warm, wet breath brushed against your skin, awakening the carnal hunger that you have been yearning for.

“That’s not a good answer.”

You chewed on your lips momentarily, but he didn’t give you enough time to think when the next words left his lips.

“On your knees.”

You felt your stomach do a flip, and your first instinct was to turn and look at Attuma, but Namor’s hand was firm on your head, holding it there, allowing you to only look at him.

“You know what to do next. Do not make me spell it out for you.”

With trembling hands, you made quick work of unbuckling his belt, then unbuttoned his pants. You noticed how much your fingers were trembling when you pulled his zipper down. You eyed him with a nervous look as you slid down his pants, and you were met with his bulge. 

Namor’s hand was still stroking your face, watching you as you lowered his boxer brief.

Your hand gently wrapped around his half-hardened shaft, stroking it slowly in your hand. Namor clenched his jaw tightly, trying to hold in the little noise that threatened to leave his mouth as he stared down at you. 

Attuma was watching both of you intensely. He could feel his cock aching and twitching in his pants as he sat there. When your mouth slowly closed around the head of Namor’s cock, more fire burst through his body, threatening to explode in his balls. His hand gripped around his bulge. He was so hard by the time you started to suck on Namor’s cock that he didn’t think he was able to walk or move.

“Ah..fuck, I love the way that mouth of yours feels,” Namor said with a deep, husky voice as he tipped his head back. His hips bucked forward, pushing himself further into your mouth. “Oh, fuck, that’s it, sweetheart. You love sucking on this cock, don’t you?”

You moaned onto his shaft as you replied. Your eyes never wavered from his.

Attuma eyed you closely as you slid up and down Namor’s shaft, dark and ridged with veins. He wasn’t as long or as thick as he was, but Attuma always found it arousing, watching the way Namor’s cock would stretch out your mouth, especially the way you struggle to breathe whenever his friend decides to fuck your little mouth. He couldn’t help but take out his own erection and started to stroke himself, wishing to feel the way your mouth felt on his cock too.

You rested your hand on Namor’s hips, fingers dug into the hard flesh of his muscled thighs as your head bobbed, trying to swallow his whole length. Namor groaned deeply in his chest when you pulled back and let his fat bulbous head slide out of your mouth. A string of saliva trailed down your chin before you swallowed him to the base again. Namor’s eyes shifted toward Attuma, who was watching tentatively, jerking his own cock off too as he was mesmerized by you. 

You gagged a couple of times before you took a step back to catch your breath, your hand was still on his shaft, stroking and jerking him off, worshiping him like a god.

“Come here,” he said as he moved over to the large bed. You followed him, crawling on all four, giving a full view of your drenching and pussy to Attuma before you knelt in between Namor’s legs. Without a single word, he turned you over and laid you on your back. His palm kneaded your breast slowly as he eyed the other man, gesturing to come over.

“Come over here and eat her pussy,” he ordered Attuma. 

Namor didn’t have to say it twice as the bigger man hastily stripped himself off of his clothing. His heavy erection was in hand as he crawled onto the large bed. You watched the way the mattress dipped below him as he slowly approached you like a hungry predator. The sight made your pussy clench and unclench as anticipation filled your veins. He was so hard and heavy, his cock was practically dragging over the mattress as he moved.

“Fuck her with your mouth until she can’t take it anymore,” Namor muttered against your skin. His fingers were around your stiff nipple, pulling at it and twisting it between his rough digits. “I want her to beg, you hear me?”

Attuma didn’t need any more urging. His mouth found your stomach first, kissing his way down your torso, nibbling at your soft skin along the way. He knelt in between your legs, draping each one over Namor’s thick thighs, spreading you even wider. You let out a soft moan when you felt his rough palm massaging your flesh. A warm, familiar heady feminine scent drifted up to his nostrils, and it made his mouth water.

“Ah fuck, such a pretty pussy you have, Lil Birdy. I always love playing with it. So pretty and so perfect for us.”

Your legs twitched and Attuma eyed Namor as he continued to tease your breasts, palming them in your hands, kneading them until the buds were stiff and almost painful.

Without a word, Attuma dipped his head, inhaling deeply, and ran his tongue over the slippery pussy. You jerked against him and sobbed softly. Your hand flew to his long, dark mane, fisting it in your hand. He licked again at your slippery folds, pressing a kiss and there, suckling on one side first, before suckling on the other. He kissed you higher before he finally pressed his mouth over your clit and kissed you there, sucking on the small bud until you were wreathing in Namor’s arms. Your clit pulsed against his lips and you gasped and tugged harder at his hair.

Attuma licked, and swallowed your juices, feeling the way your body shuddered below him. His tongue slipped between your slipper folds and dipped into your warm, inviting heat. He fucks you slowly with his tongue, thrusting shallowly into your tight holes. 

Once he had enough, he pulled back slightly and pushed his thick fingers inside you, filling you and stretching you with them. He moaned deeply at the way your body clenched and closed in around his digit so hotly. Your moaning was only getting louder when he added his third finger, and his gaze was on Namor as he was attending to your breasts. His tongue once again found your clit as he continued to tease at the sensitive bud.

“Oh my God, please, please, please,” you panted. “Please, I can’t take it anymore. Please…”

“Not yet,” Namor said, smirking before shoving his fingers inside your mouth. Gone was your rationality as you suckle on his digits with desperation while Attuma was fucking you with his own fingers. He would want to make you come, but not yet. He wanted to draw this out as much as your body could.

Attuma licked some more, flicking at your clit before sucking on it with intent. Your hips lifted off the mattress, but with his vice-like grip, he held you there, sucking on you and drawing out your orgasm until your muscles tightened.

And when you felt like you could go over the edge, he would pull back, making you sob softly in Namor’s arms. It really was unfair, and you couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

You were at their mercy after all.

It felt like an eternity when Attuma finally gave in, and let you come. Your body tightened to the point of pain. Heat rushed out of your body and poured out onto his tongue. His cock was throbbing almost too much now. His balls felt tight, and for a brief second, he thought he was going to come too. Breathing out his mouth, he managed to control his own.

Namor rubbed his face as he watched. His cock was aching and throbbing. What a wicked sight it was to watch you come undone by Attuma’s mouth. Something about watching you writhing and begging with your frantic sobbing really turned him into a different person.

Without a word, he rolled you over onto your stomach. He commanded Attuma to switch places with him while they gave you a brief moment to catch your breath.

“Attuma, move over in front of her,” Namore ordered. His voice was gruffed as he, himself, moved between your legs. His fingers stroke at your quivering pussy lazily, allowing your juice to coat his own fingers, which made you whine in response. 

A smirk etched on his lips. It had always been Namor who did all the commanding and ordering around, and Attuma never had any issue with it–as a matter of fact, he enjoyed it. He didn’t have to think too much. He knew his role, and he liked the idea of just letting go and focusing more on your needs than anything else.

You looked up to find Attuma’s cock jutting up, almost brushing against your face. He was so much thicker and longer, and every time you sucked on his dick, you felt like your jaws were going to dislocate or some sort. 

“Since Attuma worked hard today, you need to reward him too, darling. Make him come with just your mouth. I want to see the way his cock stretches you out and fills you up—show me what that pretty mouth can do, sweetheart,” he said as he spread your legs apart. 

One hand gripped firmly at your hip, while the other lined the head of his cock at your entrance. He waited, watching you intensely as your mouth slowly closed in around Attuma’s thick, fat cock, and then he pushed his body into you, sheathing himself all the way to the base.

You responded with a muffled moan as the motion made your body surge forward, forcing you to swallow Attuma halfway through. You felt like you almost choked as tears rolled down your cheeks. It was too much, being filled at both ends. You felt like you could be torn apart at any moment as you tried to breathe through your nose. 

Your jaws ached, and your pussy was quivering, on the verge of coming again from simply so overstimulated by the way your two lovers were giving to you. 

Namo hissed at the way your pussy was clenching around him as he moved inside you, thrusting slowly at first. It didn’t take much resistance because of how dripping wet you were already. 

“Fuck, love,” he moaned as spread you wider so he fuck you deeper. It was to the point where if he wasn’t holding onto you this firmly, you would have collapsed onto your stomach by now. “That’s right, make him come, baby. Suck on him like that,” he murmured almost incoherently.

“You love sucking on that cock so much, don’t you?”

You couldn’t answer as you tried to focus on pleasing Attuma. 

Namor didn’t like that, so he bucked his hips a little too hard and made your body surge forward, taking a couple more inches of Attuma’s dick.

You let out a muffled whine before you let out a little, “Mmmmhmmm.”

“Hmmm, aren’t we lucky to have such a good girl being our little cockslut,  Attuma?”

The other man grinned, flashing his dimples at you as he stroked your tear-stained cheeks. 

“Yeah, we do. She’s always so good at being a hole for us to fuck—A-ah, fuck, Little Bird, you’re gonna make me come if you keep doing that.”

You moaned before bobbing your head along his shaft quicker, hollowing your cheeks to create enough suction onto his cock. Your jaws were tired at this point. The sensation was fading between pleasure and pain.

Attuma’s breath quickened. He was fighting the urge to fuck your little mouth. Namor was watching him, noting the way Attuma’s hand was gripping his hair, bunching it into a tight fist. It wouldn’t be long. He was very close to his release.

“Keeping going, darling. Keep sucking on him. I want you to drink up all of his cum, you hear me?”

You moaned as best as you could as you continued to bob your head, sucking on him, stringing him up until he couldn’t take it anymore.

“At, fuck,” Attuma groaned as he came.

You could feel the warm, thick fluid shot down your throat, making you choke out.

Attuma watched you through the haze as your mouth left his dick, and a string of the thick fluid sputtered from your mouth and onto the mattress. 

It was a messy affair as your face was marred with tears and cum. He didn’t think he could love you any more than he could, but every time he made a mess out of you, he just knew he wanted to spend the rest of your life with you, and one day watch you round and full with his babies.

Namor reached around under you and found your clit, which made you jump with his heated touch. He rubbed at it as he continued to plunge into you with an unforgivable force until you cried softly. Your pussy clenched and convulsed around him, and he knew you came.

He stayed there, kneeling with his dick still hard as a rock, plunging in and out of you more erratically now, using you to satisfy his need. Your body surged forward like a rag doll as Namor fucks you with intensity and vigor, sending heat from the base of his spine before it exploded outward as he poured himself into you, filling you until he was dripping out.

Namor let out a string of cursing that you didn’t understand as you lay there on your stomach, feeling so worn out and so spent. Your body felt boneless and heavy. Your nerves still hummed from pure electricity that coursed through you as you tried to recover from the mind-blowing orgasms that both of your men just gave you. 

You could feel Attuma move from the mattress momentarily by the way his weight shifted off the large bed. He came back a few minutes later with a warm towel, wiping your face and lips before placing a gentle kiss on your forehead. 

Behind you, Namor moved to snuggle and spooned you. His arm wrapped protectively around your waist as he laid his cheek on your arm. His lips kissed whatever skin he could touch as you lay there, completely exhausted. 

Attuma joined you a bit after, letting you lay your head on his broad chest.

“Promise us you won’t leave us again,” Namor murmured. His tone was softer now, almost lulling you to sleep.

“Hmmm,” was all you could say.

“You have to promise us,” Attuma added. 

“I promise,” you said tiredly. 

“Don’t you have anything else to say to her as well, K’uk’kulkan?”

The other man sighed and moved to rest his weight on his elbow so he could look at you.

“I’m sorry as well for not being a good lover to you. I promise that I will try to be better at attending to your needs.”

The words felt genuine, and you couldn’t help but shed a couple of tears as you looked at him. Namor leaned in and kissed the tears away.

“Thank you,” you said softly as he leaned in to kiss you. 

“Well, now that you both are made up. Let me just take a little nap…the jet lag is killing me.” 

Namor rolled his eyes before he laid back in bed. You, on the other hand, were rubbing Attuma’s chest in an effort to soothe him. 

“Alright, big guy. Take a nap. You earned it,” you said cheekily.

Attuma only grunted before his noises were were slowly replaced by his deep snore. You and Namor soon found yourself passed out from exhaustion as well.

[kas-eddie-munson]

Part 1 ~ Part 2 ~ Part 3 ~ Part 4

more disabled steddie. (readmore is just because it's a longer section. no new content warnings.)

~~~

The Thursday after Thanksgiving, Steve helped Eddie back into his house after his appointment, as usual.  He lingered at the door afterwards and scratched his neck.

“Hey, uh, this weekend, if you’re feeling up for it, I was maybe wondering if you wanted to come with me and Robin to a bar in Indy?”

Eddie wasn’t sure what he was expecting Steve to say but it wasn’t that.

“We’ve been there before!  No steps, doors are pretty wide.  It’s usually busy and I don’t know if it’s… really your scene but, she said I should ask you, so.”

Eddie wasn’t sure why exactly, but he said yes.

~~~

Usually Eddie spent ages deciding what to wear for stuff like this, but it was a lot harder to take clothes on and off these days, so he quickly pivoted to messing with his hair for half an hour to expel the nervous energy.

Steve’s car pulled up and he knocked at the door.  Robin watched from the passenger seat, wide eyed, as Steve helped him to the car.

It was a longer drive than most he took these days, and he was thankful for Steve and Robin bickering almost the whole way there.  For best friends they sure did argue a lot.  He could relate to that.  He used to tease his friends at school all the time.

It took Steve a while to find a parking spot that wasn’t super far away from the bar.  Eventually he turned around in his seat and talked to Eddie about pushing him down the sidewalk instead of circling the place like vultures until someone close to the building left, and Eddie agreed to that.

It was immediately clear that this was a gay bar, drag queens and all.  Eddie wasn’t shocked per say, but he was surprised.  He wondered which of his two friends found this place and when.

It also, like Steve told him earlier, was packed.  Steve still pushed his chair, and even though he was maneuvering carefully, nobody else in the room was looking down.  Several people bumped into him, or pushed a chair back into Steve, jumping away if they noticed why there was traffic.  Two men stood close together at the bar leaned closer and whispered to each other as Eddie and his friends passed, giggling and taking what they probably thought were very subtle glances in Eddie's direction.  Eddie overheard something about whether or not his dick worked and the two laughed.

Eddie never considered himself a shy person, or one to back down from someone being an asshole, but he shrank, not sure if his face was more red from anger or embarrassment.

Steve brought the three of them up to a table and let go of Eddie.  He asked what the two of them wanted to drink and headed to the counter.  Robin sat down across from him, clearly uncomfortable.  He wasn’t sure if it was because of him or on his behalf.  Someone moved his chair by the handles to get between two tables and he swatted their hands away, locking his wheels, but they had already disappeared into the crowd.

A guy came up to him from the right.  He was tall and hairy, and he asked if he could join them or if Robin was his date and he was totally lost.  Eddie didn’t get to respond before the guy sat down.

“Hi there!  That’s a pretty neat jacket,” he said with a wide smile.

Eddie didn’t get out of Hawkins much even before the Upside Down.  But when he did, people in bars usually avoided him.  Found him intimidating.  Or if they approached, they hit on him.  He wasn’t sure why this guy was talking to him like they were acquaintances catching up at the grocery store when they were in the middle of a gay bar.

“So, what are you doing here tonight?  What’s this all about?”  He motioned to Eddie’s wheelchair.  “Looks really intense.”

This was why Eddie always used to talk so loud, dress louder.  Nobody ever used to talk to him like this, like he owed them something, minus maybe Mrs. Click.  He tried to muster that volume, that anger, aim it like a weapon, but there was just too much embarrassment on top of it all.

Robin butted in, said something about their friend sitting there, actually, and it was then that Steve finally came back, looking more pissed than he’d probably ever seen him before.  And there was no way in hell he even heard what that guy was saying all the way across the room over the music, not even taking his hearing loss into account.

The guy apologized and scrammed when Steve set their drinks down.

“Who the hell was that?”

Eddie realized he didn’t even say his name.

Robin pulled a mini notebook out of her purse and began furiously scribbling in it.  She showed it to Steve who frowned deeper.

A woman with a pixie cut came up to their table and greeted Robin, who froze.  Her mouth dropped open and she stuttered through the conversation, eventually looking to Steve for something, who shook his head.  He turned to the girl, and said, “She’d love to!  Go have fun!”

Robin still looked nervous, and maybe a bit mad at Steve, but her face was also beet red as the stranger took her hand and led her to the dance floor.  Steve watched with a smile.

Eddie reached for the notebook still sitting on the table, and scribbled down a quick good for her.

Steve smiled at him warmly, then frowned, staring at the notebook..

“I, uh.  Did… Did Robin tell you?” Steve said, sheepish.

Eddie wasn’t sure what he meant.

“My hearing.  It’s… it’s not what it used to be.  It’s not a big deal.  Like, I manage, right?  It sucks, but.  She’s making this big deal out of it.”

Is she treating you different? Eddie wrote in the notebook.

Steve’s brows furrowed.  “No,” he said after a pause.  “Well I mean, there’s this whole thing,” he gestured to the notebook.  “But, that’s fine I guess.  It’s just, I feel like it’s silly, right?  To need that.”

Eddie thought for a moment.

Does it help?

Steve’s brows furrowed again.  He nodded.

“Like I can hear.  I hear stuff all the time.  I thought I was just going crazy at first.  I would just miss these little things.  Maybe half a sentence.  I can work with that.  But then there’s times like this,” Steve said, motioning to the bar around them, “and I get.  I just get nothing.  I just had to like, cross my fingers the bartender heard me right when he repeated my order.  Or at least, I think that’s what he was saying.”  He mumbled the last part, almost to himself.

Steve changed the subject then, but the two of them talked like that for another hour or two.  Steve had this beautiful smile when he laughed, and Eddie realized he was kind of fucked.

~~~

A couple days after the trip to Indy, a pickup truck pulled up outside his house that he didn’t recognize.  It lurched and creeped the whole way up the hill, and Eddie watched out his front window as Steve clung onto the passenger side door for dear life, face pale, Robin smiling wide in the driver’s seat.

Eddie opened the door and was surprised by the breeze, warm for November air.  Steve and Robin got out wearing light jackets, and started hauling lumber and power tools from the trunk.

Steve approached him, and explained that Robin wanted to build a ramp for Eddie’s front porch.  He joked that he was surprised they made it there alive.  Eddie wasn’t sure what to say.

“Is that okay?”  Steve made a pained expression, “I told her we should ask first, but the tools are all rented so it wouldn’t be a big deal to just,” he pointed over his shoulder with his thumb.

Eddie thought about it.  Looked at the step down from his house.  He felt a mix of hope and warmth and guilt.

“Could be worth a shot.”

Eddie tamped down his feelings and grabbed them a couple glasses of water while they worked, eager for something to do besides just sit there and watch.  He told Robin he was surprised she knew how to work with this stuff, and she went on a rant about women being just as capable of building stuff as anyone else, and then berated him for forgetting her three years working stage crew, Munson.

The ramp was… not perfect.  It didn’t look great.  It was still difficult to get out the front door.  But it wasn’t too steep, it was wide enough, and they put a railing next to it for leverage.

It was better.

Part 6

[mistergandalf]

ULTIMATE TOLKIEN BLORBO MASTERPOST

Who is THE blorbo of the Tolkien fandom here on tumblr dot com? Let's find out!

What are the criteria for voting?

What is a blorbo to you? As Aragorn would say: What does your heart tell you? Therein lies your answer. For me, it's who I'd like the whump the most. Maybe for you it's who is the most shippable. Maybe it's the one that means the most to you for what they represent. Maybe it's your poor little meow meow (looking at you, Angbang lovers). Let your feelings guide you.

Is this only supposed to be about the books, or is it based on any Tolkien-based media?

This is about blorbos. Wherever you found your blorbo, that's fine. If you want to be a book purist about it, you're valid. If you love Thorin Oakenshield simply because Richard Armitage is hot, you are also valid.

***PLEASE ALSO NOTE that my blog is a Rings of Power positive blog! If you don’t like it that’s fine, but if you post negative comments or reblogs on my posts, I will block you! I don’t want negativity in my activity feed, thank you!***

When will polls be posted?

Polls will be posted daily at 12pm EDT (GMT -4), staggered by 5-10 minutes on each poll. There will be a day between final votes as the data will be needed for the next poll!

Schedule is as follows: (Updated because I’m dumb and didn’t realize how many rounds the second chance bracket has)

4/23 - Round One 4/25 - Round Two (Primary Bracket) 4/26 - Round Two (Second Chance Bracket) 4/27 - Round Three (Primary Bracket) 4/28 - Round Three (Second Chance Bracket) 4/30 - Round Four (Second Chance Bracket) 5/2 - Round Five (Second Chance Bracket) 5/4 - Round Six (Second Chance Bracket) 5/5 - Round Four (Primary Bracket) 5/7 - Round Seven (Second Chance Bracket) 5/9 - Round Eight (Second Chance Bracket) 5/10 - Round Five (Primary Bracket) - decides the finalist 5/12 - Round Nine (Second Chance Bracket) - decides the finalist 5/14 - FINAL ROUND - THE ULTIMATE TOLKIEN BLORBO

Check the tag #ultimate tolkien blorbo to see new posts! Feel free to share your thoughts in the tag as well!

I have more questions!

Okay, click the readmore then!

Hey! Why did you pair this character with that character?

Because I spent a whole evening googling how tournament brackets work (I am not a sports person) and then I did a lot of math and sorting.

Okay, but I really want to know!

WELL first I thought: "How can I quantify and rank blorbos?" The answer: AO3. I went into the Tolkien fandom general tag and ranked the first 32 characters by the number of fanfics in which they appear.*

Then I split them by story. I roughly kept Hobbit characters with Hobbit characters, LotR with LotR, and Silmarillion with Silmarillion to keep it as fair as possible and give all corners of the fandom a chance to see their blorbo win. Some characters are in multiple sources, like Elrond or Gandalf, so I tried to keep those characters with someone who is probably just as well-known.**

Then I followed the rules the internet told me about how tournaments work. The highest-ranked character goes with the lowest-ranked character, the second-highest with the second-lowest, etc.

And that's how I did it! It was a fantastic way to waste an afternoon.

*I may have eliminated and/or played with a couple options. Some of these characters had fewer fics than the character "OC," which makes sense. I took off Erestor because literally only Glorfindel stans would choose him, and Glorfindel is on here. I also lumped together Elladan and Elrohir because if you can tell them apart, it's because they're both your blorbos. Tolkien did NOT give them distinct personalities. Also if I didn’t lump them together, I wouldn’t be able to fit Celebrimbor, and that would be a shame.

**Characters who appear in multiple stories had their rankings weighted to account for that fact. I got a C in statistics in college, though, so I frankly have no idea if the way I weighted them is correct, nor do I care, because I'm satisfied with how the rankings turned out.

I don’t like how you did this!

Okay, don’t vote then. Nobody’s making you.

FORTH EORLINGAS! Have fun voting! As Gimli would say... May the best Dwarf win! ;)

Round One [results & analysis]

Thorin vs. Bard | Bilbo vs. Dwalin | Kili vs. Gandalf | Fili vs. Thranduil | Legolas vs. Eomer | Aragorn vs. Eowyn | Elrond vs. Elladan & Elrohir | Frodo vs. Merry | Gimli vs. Pippin | Samwise vs. Boromir | Faramir vs. Galadriel | Maedhros vs. Celebrimbor | Maedhros vs. Celebrimbor (RoP free version bc some of you are whiny babies) | Maglor vs. Finrod | Glorfindel vs. Morgoth | Sauron vs. Celegorm | Fingon vs. Feanor

Round Two [results & analysis]

Thorin vs. Bilbo | Legolas vs. Thranduil | Pippin vs. Éowyn | Maglor vs. Frodo | Gandalf vs. Samwise | Elrond vs. Maedhros | Faramir vs. Glorfindel | Sauron vs. Fëanor

Round Two (Second Chance Bracket) [results & analysis]

Aragorn vs. Elladan & Elrohir | Gimli vs. Morgoth | Merry vs. Bard | Finrod vs. Celegorm | Boromir vs. Kíli | Fíli vs. Celebrimbor | Éomer vs. Galadriel | Fingon vs. Arwen

Round Three [results & analysis]

Bilbo vs. Legolas |  Éowyn vs. Frodo | Samwise vs. Elrond | Faramir vs. Fëanor

Round Three (Second Chance Bracket) [results & analysis]

Aragorn vs. Gandalf | Gimli vs. Maedhros | Merry vs. Glorfindel | Finrod vs. Sauron | Boromir vs. Thorin | Celebrimbor vs. Thranduil | Éomer vs. Pippin | Arwen vs. Maglor

Round Four (Second Chance Bracket) [results & analysis]

Aragorn vs. Gimli | Merry vs. Finrod | Boromir vs. Celebrimbor | Pippin vs. Arwen

Round Five (Second Chance Bracket) [results & analysis]

Aragorn vs. Bilbo | Éowyn vs. Merry | Boromir vs. Elrond | Pippin vs. Fëanor

Round Six (Second Chance Bracket) [results & analysis]

Aragorn vs. Éowyn | Boromir vs. Pippin

Round Four [results & analysis]

Legolas vs. Frodo | Samwise vs. Faramir

Round Seven (Second Chance Bracket) [results & analysis]

Éowyn vs. Faramir | Pippin vs. Legolas

Round Eight (Second Chance Bracket) [results & analysis]

Éowyn vs. Pippin

Round Five [results & analysis]

Frodo vs. Samwise

Round Nine (Second Chance Bracket) [results & analysis]

Éowyn vs. Frodo

FINAL ROUND

Samwise vs. Frodo

[chaotic-neutral-knitter]

I saw this post going around and got really curious as to how OP came up with their numbers because I could not replicate them at all.

I was going to reply directly but it was getting very very long and I didn’t want to wade onto someone’s post with a bunch of my own stats bc it seemed rude, so I’m putting my response here.

I’m going to preface this by saying that I’m fully in the camp of “write because you like writing, not for an audience response” because if you don’t like the process of writing, there is no level of audience response that will make writing worth it. But. I’ve seen a lot of folks agonize over Ao3 stats and get stuck in the weeds on Ratios™. And I think there are a few really common misconceptions around what these numbers mean.

The rest of this is going to be under a readmore to spare y’all but basically it’s a breakdown of trying to calculate my own percentages like the OP in the original post and then dialing down into why hits != readers.

Here’s the stats from one of my fics as of today, May 1st 2023. I am by no means a prolific or widely known fic writer - I happen to be in a big fandom and writing for for the main pairing in that fandom.

completed multi chapter fic, rated Mature:

So this one has three chapters, 2736 hits, 436 kudos, and 146 comments. Kudos divided by hits is 16%.

“Oh no!” I might say, seeing this. “Only sixteen percent of people liked my fic enough to leave a kudos? Either my stuff is shit, or fic-readers are a bunch of lazy fucks who don’t appreciate the work I’ve put into this. Either way, I’m mad now!”

But (and I say this with a lot of love in my heart, I promise) that’s silly. Not just for the philosophical reasons of writing what makes you happy and not caring about the response. It’s silly because it’s wrong.

On a multi-chapter fic, each person who finishes it is responsible for at least 3 hits but can only leave 1 kudos. Dividing the total hits by 3 gives you 912 hits. So, once you’ve corrected for number of chapters, the percent of people who have hit kudos is 47%.

“Holy shit!” writer-me says, “I’ve published original fiction in my university newspaper, original fiction that I poured my heart and soul into btw, and if approximately half of the people who read it  sent me a little heart emoji, I would have died and gone to heaven. Fic readers are the Nicest, Most Generous, and Most Beautiful readers on the planet and I am so grateful to be in this community with them.”

But! 47% is still wrong. Here’s why.

Hits != Readers

I don’t how other people do this, but my process of reading a fic is often like this (each step is one hit):

open link from someone else's rec, try to click "mark for later"

realize I'm logged out. sign in to Ao3, go back to fic and click "mark for later"

come back to read fic, generating at least one hit per chapter

open a second tab so that I can write a comment as I go (again, generating at least one hit per chapter)

finish fic, create bookmark, and then navigate back to fic to mark it as read so it's taken off my marked for later page

if I really liked the fic, I'll end up opening it back up in a tag many times so I can rec it to people by sending them the link

if I really really liked the fic, I'll come back and read it again (this is doubly true for explicit fic, btw.)

I think I’m on the high end of generating hits, but it only takes a few of me to really dial up that hit counter. And most people are going to do one or two of these things - I’d argue that it’s pretty rare for someone to leave just one hit on a fic unless they nope out of it in the middle.

Formula for calculating number of readers from number of hits:

There isn’t one. And it would take a much better mathematician than me to make one. Because this is way more complicated than dividing by chapters. Most readers leave more than one hit - especially if they like the fic a lot. Short fics and explicit fics are more likely to be read multiple times.

“But what if I crave validation?” writer-me complains, irritated with math-me for not downloading statistics software, shoving a million Ao3 fics into it, and producing some kind of bullshit linear regression. “What if I constantly see people with higher kudos/hits ratios than me? This is all very optimistic but it really doesn’t jive with my deep seated belief that everyone secretly hates me all the time and they’re too nice to tell me about it. Do they hate me? They probably hate me, right? Tell me if you hate me.”

To which I say, listen very closely, writer-me. You can either decide that AO3 stats mean something and lose your damn mind deciphering what they mean, or you can be like that kid who got an avocado for christmas and say “it’s a avocado comment!! Thanks!! :D”

And that kid seemed pretty happy.

[chaseprice]

hi!! hope i’m not a bother. i just came across u and i wanted to ask something,,,

basically, i joined the life is strange fandom in 2018 so i never got to experience the pre-bts era, meaning i didn’t get to experience what rachel was like to the fandom back then or see the different interpretations of her.

i did some digging and i found some fan content of her from 2015-2016 & i’m absolutely infatuated with all aspects of the fanon version of her, especially her personality & how she looked. i totally wanna embody her. also the love is strange vn was so interesting to play, i love how she was written. i’d love to know more!

i stumbled across ur blog while i was doing my digging and i saw an old long post of urs saying how bts didn’t live up to the fandoms expectations, as almost everyone perceived her differently.

sorry for all the yapping LOL but what i basically wanna ask is,,, how *exactly* did the fandom perceive rachel back then (2015-2016). what were some popular headcanons for her? things you guys even considered to be canon? what were some of your own *personal* headcanons? (can be silly, realistic,,, just anything you thought resonated with her)

do you have any favorite arts from that time period that you thought really captured her? what were your hopes for the prequel/rachels character before it was released? what did you want to see in terms of story? was rachel’s style, appearance, & personality extremely different than what you expected? what did you expect?

i assume that rachels treatment in the fandom was different then than what it is now. whether it’s better or worse, i’m not sure. i was hoping u could answer that too😞. recently i’ve just been seeing constant hatred or lack of care for her character so i’m starting to think that if bts was written differently and based on the fandom’s interpretations instead, the hate now wouldn’t be this bad.

from my digging it seems like you guys had alot of fun sculpting rachel’s character on your own, and the interpretations were probably more realistic than what decknine put together.

anyway i’m sorry for the yapping essay on this random saturday, most old lis accounts are dead & i didn’t know who else to ask☹️. just trying to relive what you guys experienced the best i can. hope i’m not bombarding you with this. thank you so much if u respond !!

hiii u def did not bother me, i am not in a position to answer all of these questions, but although it makes me feel ancient, it's cute to see so much passion for rachel and pre-BTS fandom opinion, so i'll try answer some and for the rest (art, hcs, etc.) im just gonna have to direct you to my archive* (will continue under the readmore)

*(tumblr archive is so broken on mobile so you gotta go on pc for this, but also there's so many gifs from that time so it will Definitely slow down your browser). i was insane and 17 years old so like, just excuse all of the cringe content i guess. you can click tag and filter it by either #lis #rachel amber #amberprice or whatever to try and find stuff like art. and i got into lis sept 2015 so that's like, as far back as it will go, but i was fully lisbrained from 2016 through 2018)

to be honest, in alignment with pre-bts thought lmao, rachel is whoever you want her to be. there was less of 'this is a correct objective fact about her personality/history' and more 'yeah, this is an idea the fandom really likes and has become fanon, most likely because it is a nuanced and entertaining and realistic interpretation of what we have seen of her character in lis1' which means people whose opinions conflicted with that might've be contested/laughed at/unpopular, but they weren't wrong per se. there were plenty of people i'd criticise (and ridicule) back then for implying that this teenage girl was evil, and being a teenager myself back then, i'd call them morally reprehensible and cancellable and whatever, but tbh, as an adult now, i can just see that it was simply a boring interpretation of her character informed by misogyny

i'd disagree with the notion that fandom treatment of rachel's character was better before bts, back then there were plenty of people seemingly excited to characterise her as emotionally manipulative, a cheater, deserved what she got, etc. as well, bc tbh, the story did leave room for that interpretation, but it left room for so much more as well. i feel like bts just really locked in on a certain story they wanted to tell plot-wise, and didn't choose to explore a lot of the questions fans had about rachel as a person. it's hard to turn the ambiguity of a friendship turned situationship over a period of 4 years into a playable experience for an audience - so they didn't. regardless, it got people thinking about rachel more, putting a spotlight on her, hence increased attention both positive and negative. i feel like there's just a fundamental difference between what lis1 fans enjoyed about the potential for her character and how she related with chloe and the world around her, and what deck9 wanted to portray in bts (yes they hit the astrological headcanons, the charmingness, her rebellion, the emotional conflicts... but it personally felt hollow, contrived sometimes, i suppose). but there were a lot of people who loved bts (i enjoyed a lot of parts of it!). just, in my opinion, some of those were quite different people from who loved lis1, and with that wave it brought a lot of emotional immaturity to the fandom (like... ship wars, really? that was an insane change to fandom dynamics for me lmao, but maybe i was just spoiled by surrounding myself with people whose takes i respected)

anyway i highly recommend also that if you're hungry for that kind of content, read fanfiction on AO3 by the old fans - by Mogatrat (TON of rachel centric ones there), explosionshark and tippytypewriter, chicknparm (though Cusp is written post-bts, it's informed by pre-bts characterisations), vicepoint (me hehe), def many more good ones out there those r jus my friends so they come to mind first, e.g. i liked homecoming by kriegersan back in the day, but you could def find some more by sorting the lis ao3 page by kudos and reading the older ones that are highly rated featuring rachel. and lastly, my gf wrote a beautifully worded blog post called "The Assassination of Rachel Amber by the Cowards Dontnod and Deck Nine" which gets into some of this from a media crit perspective (not about fandom) in a very eloquent way thru comparison w twin peaks and i highly recommend that

rachel hcs that def started way before bts: skater rachel, stoner rachel, punk music listener rachel (but also like, fleetwood mac cranberries cocteau twins grungy hippy stuff rachel too), rachel's parents being distant and still living in california, curvy thick rachel, things that i've accepted as canon but were def created by diff people: bri explosionshark hc'd that rachel paid for chloe's sleeve, mogatrat (i think) hc'd that rachel initially went to get her nips pierced with chloe (that's a longtime fan hc now idk who started that one) but chickened out at the last minute, i think she also hc'd that chloe made the earring for rachel which is cute too

[carminecherry]

THE LAST TRAIN | mikey sano

this is part two of the series kill the lights

⇝ PAIRING: timeskip!biker!mikey sano x fem!reader

⇝ SERIES SYNOPSIS: after moving by yourself to tokyo, you black out at a party and wake up with a new friend. as she sweeps you up in her fast-paced city life, you feel yourself falling deeper and deeper for her mysterious brother. but something dark is brewing in the city. as his past threatens to resurface, mikey must fight not only physical enemies but the mental battle of his feelings for you. he can't resist you , but could he ever forgive himself if something happened to you? he'll love you selfishly and protect you savagely.

⇝ PART TWO LENGTH: 7.5k words

⇝ PART TWO WARNINGS: Alcohol, suggestive content (18+ minors do not interact):

all characters are 20+; Alternate Universe! Canon Divergent. a friend from university invites you to his house party. as the drinks flow, you slip into a pleasant buzz. that is until a particular masked man makes his appearance, unveiling himself.

⇝ AUTHOR'S NOTE: some world building and character introductions. I upload to AO3 first and i'm slowly but surely cross posting here. iiif you can't wait and want more, check out my AO3. more chapters coming soon! keep an eye on the tags and stay safe! <3

DO NOT INTERACT WITH THIS WORK IF YOU ARE A MINOR. BY CLICKING THE READMORE, YOU CONSENT TO VIEWING ADULT CONTENT.

You glanced over at your illuminated phone screen, soapy dinner dishes in hand and a podcast playing over your headphones. The name flashing on your screen made the corners of your mouth turn up. You and Yuuki had been chatting a little more here and there. The tone of your conversations confirmed your sense that this was purely friendship with no nuance or hidden intention. Not overthinking the messages anymore allowed you to relax. You rinsed the bubbles from your hands and wiped them on your work pants.

Unlocking your phone, the message read, 

“Party tomorrow night starting @9:00. Bring something to share.” 

You liked his message, sliding over to your calendar app to put in the details. You typed up a quick message to Emma, 

“Hey, are you going to Yuuki’s party?” 

As you were typing, a bubble with 3 dots appeared from Emma’s side. You hit send right as you received a message from Emma saying, 

“Yuuki’s tomorrow night?” 

You cracked a smile, happy the two of you were on the same page. You liked each other’s messages in confirmation.

Tomorrow was Friday, the welcome end to a very long week. The bookstore and cafe were enough to make ends meet but business was slow. Moreover, you were trying your damnedest to get a job as an interior designer. The competition in the city was fierce and your sanity and sleep were suffering. One more rejection letter might tip you over the edge.

As long as the bills are paid on time you could push through. You slid out of your work clothes, discarding the garments into the washing machine. Pulling on a light summer night set, it took the remainder of your energy to perform your skincare routine and brush your teeth. You practically fell into bed, the promise of a party conjuring imaginative scenarios in your mind as you drifted off to sleep.

***

Work had been uneventful. This was arguably worse as it meant you had been counting down the minutes until you could clock out. You had spent hours listlessly tapping on the counter with your nails. It had been a solo shift which meant you didn’t have anyone to keep you company.

You had a bad habit of getting lost in your imagination, your attention swallowed up in the pages of whatever book caught your attention.  A few uncomfortable conversations with your coworker Shinji about “ignoring customers” had left you feeling uneasy about reading on the clock. Luckily you were working the book-side of the shop today which meant you could leave work after counting the drawer and locking up. 

The minutes ticked down and the shop remained empty. You practically cartwheeled over to the door to flip the sign to “closed.” With trained fingers you count down the drawer; perfectly even. You shouted a farewell to the barista as she mopped the cafe floor. Pausing, she waved goodbye and you were on your way out. She’s a new hire and you had wanted to chat with her during the shift but had stayed dutifully at your counter. 

You had made it home in record time to change and freshen up your makeup. Last time you had felt underdressed, so you decided you wanted to show up and show out tonight. Yuuki’s a fashion guy so why the hell not. You check your outfit and makeup one last time and then you’re hustling out of the door. 

You stopped at the convenience store outside of the station and bought your “something to share”. Or, in this case, things to share. Hopefully a bottle of Jack and a 2L of Diet Coke would suit everyone’s taste. You cradle the bottles in your arms and make the train ride to Yuuki’s apartment in the city. You do your best to ignore the eyes on you, at least you’re giving them something to look at.

It only takes 20 minutes before you’re being buzzed into Yuuki’s building and riding the smooth elevator up 15 floors. There’s no mystery about which room is his. A pulsing beat is already vibrating the walls and sleek black door situated at the end of the hall. You wondered if there would be any noise complaints from the neighbors before banishing the thought from your mind. Tonight is about letting loose and relieving stress, not being the fun police. Tonight, it’s not your problem. 

You move to adjust the bottles to one arm, freeing up a hand to knock on the door. Before your knuckles make contact it swings open, startling you. A large figure is backing out, calling back to the guests already inside. At full height, your head reaches just between his shoulders. Broad shoulders that were rapidly on a collision course with your face. 

“So, two more 6 packs, some more bags of ice, and- Oh!” He dodges you at the last minute as you sidestep straight into the wall; a failed attempt to move out of his way. “Hey, sorry about that.” He steps back to give you more room. He’s even taller when he faces you. Long, silky, black hair thrown up in a messy updo. His eyes are sharp and a unique rusty-brown color that are highlighted by his thick, dark lashes. The man knew how to dress too.

He moves again to hold the door for you as you try to play off your wall collision. Before you can enter, another man casually strolls through the open door, “If you think too hard you might hurt yourself, B. I’ve got the list; you just need to carry everything.” The dark-haired man, “B”, makes a face at the figure who stands a couple inches shorter than him. 

His hair is bleached in chunks and styled with a slight wave. It’s one of those trendy, choppy haircuts that only a small percent of the population can pull off successfully. It makes him look like a vogue model. Which he could be. This man is pretty. His features are softer than the other’s. He has plump lips, round cheeks, but his eyes were the most captivating. They were large and an interesting shade of yellow-hazel. A perfect beauty mark under his left eye. Despite his cherubic features there was a deviousness to those eyes. Another hint that he may not be as angelic as he appears is the massive neck tattoo peeking out of the collar of his shirt.

“You’re paying though, Kazu, and I expect a tip.” B sneered. His canines have a sharp snaggle to them that is unique and… Attractive. “I always tip the help.” Kazu responded nonchalantly before he turned those eyes to you, looking you up and down obviously. “Get out of the way so she can go in.” B says, pulling his companion from the doorway. 

“Sorry about him, I guess you can’t buy manners.” B quips to you, earning him an elbow to the ribs from Kazu. You make your best attempt at a natural smile and manage, “It’s all good, thanks.” You duck into the party, a little out of your element after seeing such good-looking men.

You hear, “Who is she ?” in a not-quite whisper between the pair as they walk from the closing door. The intended meaning of the comment is not clear and acts as a big motivator to get a tall glass of literally anything ASAP. 

The apartment is cast in low mood lights set to smoothly fade to the beat of the music. There was a haziness to the air. Did he have a smoke machine or something? If you didn’t know any better, you’d think you were at a high-end club and not a college buddy’s house party.

You make your way into the spacious living room that is already thrumming with bodies. You set your “somethings” on the table and pull out your phone to send a quick message to Emma about her ETA, social anxiety already sinking its claws into you. Before you can hit send, two hands clap down on your shoulders.

“BOO!” Emma exclaims as you whip around to face her, startled for the second time that evening. She laughs, “She’s so cute when she’s scared.” Tossing the comment over her shoulder to the man standing behind her. Draken, the biker from the other day, her boyfriend. His features are hard to read but you notice a slight tick upwards at the corner of his mouth. 

In a flurry, Emma is on you, pulling you into a big hug and spinning you around. “It’s so good to see you again! Thank god you’re here, it was turning into a total sausage fest.” She pouts, pushing you to arms length. “It’s good to see you too.” You smile. She looks you up and down, surveying your outfit before giving you two thumbs up and mouthing, ‘you look great! Wow!’.  You return the compliment with  dramatic hand movements to indicate she , in fact, is the one who looks great.  

You lean conspiratorially towards her, a glint in your eye, “Speaking of sausage fest, I just saw two absolute SMOKESHOWS when I came in!” You say in an excited whisper. The gossipy tone that can only be achieved between women. Draken chokes a bit on his drink and turns away from the two of you. His reaction draws your attention before Emma’s twinkling laugh brings it back to her. 

Grabbing you by the arm and swaying with you she laughs out, “Don’t let them hear you say that~ Their heads will get too big. I guess it’d be fine if it’s Baji, but Kazu is already insufferable.” Your eyes go wide, “Wait! Do you know them?! Uhg of course you do” You bring your hand to your head. “When will it be my turn?” you whine with faux drama. “God is so unfair in the gifts he gives to his children.” Emma gives your arm a few playful slaps leaning into you while stifling a laugh, the action drawing the gaze of a few of the other party-goers. 

Draken further turns his back to the two of you and you notice a slight bounce in his shoulders. “You have to stop. It’s too early and I’m too sober.” Emma manages. “Come on, let’s get a drink.” With that, she guides you to the refreshments table and sets to pouring two drinks.

Living in the city, you have gotten used to seeing more beautiful people than in the suburbs. But as you scanned the room, Yuuki’s apartment looked more like a runway show than a “bring something to share” house party. You thank yourself for taking the extra time to get dressed up. The extra eyes on you during your train ride had been worth it. Fears of being overdressed swiftly quelled. Emma gave a quick speech about friendship. A plastic tap of your cup as a ‘cheers’ and you're bringing the drink to your lips. 

You have to hold back a fully-body shiver as what smells like a fruity drink tastes like straight strawberry vodka. You swallow hard, the drink making your throat and chest feel warm. You turn to look at Emma who is sipping her drink like juice. You brave a few more sips before looking into your cup. You already feel like you’re getting buzzed and you gauged the remainder would spell your death. You actually want to remember tonight. 

You attempt to discreetly set your cup on the table and move to pour your own drink.  But Emma quickly notices and boos quietly at your mixology, You make your way back to the pair, a more reasonably portioned Jack and Coke in hand. 

“Not a fan of Strawberry Absolut?” Draken offers as you rejoin them. Surprised to hear the stoic man engage you first, you reply in a voice slightly too loud, “Not a fan of not remembering things.” Responding with a nod the man picks up your abandoned cup, pouring it into his. He takes a big sip and in your mind you say a silent prayer for him. Given his size, he’d probably be okay. 

Emma jumps in with a pout, “Well I LOVE strawberry Absolut. What even is that?” She asks tapping the rim of her cup to yours. “It’s a Jack and Coke.” To which she scoffs, “That’s like an old man drink.” “At least it’s a drink and not one big shot.” you quip back to which she takes an exaggeratedly big swig of her drink. The three of you chat there for a while. Your cup empties as time fades in and out like the party lights casting the walls with shadows and silhouettes. After bottoming out, you refill your drink. 

On your way back to the pair you survey the room again, the crowd growing in the time since you’d arrived. Emma’s attention moves with yours. “Say, do you know anyone else here?” you ask. Her eyes scanned the crowd, “Hmmm, most of these people are posers hoping to rub shoulders with actual cool people.” Emma’s candid take almost had you spitting your drink out of your nose. You have difficulty imagining these model-level gorgeous men and women, most of which are dressed head-to-toe in designer clothes, as posers. 

They carried themselves with an air of confidence that made them utterly unapproachable to you. You laugh a little, appreciating her brutal honesty. Her eyes turn to you as she continues, “I really just know the boys that Mikey and Draken hang out with and Yuuki, of course. Most of these other people aren’t worth the time.” Speaking of, “Oh, is he here tonight? Mikey?” Your curiosity gets the better of you.

For the last few days your mind had wandered back to the dark figure on his bike. The way his masked gaze had put you in a near flight or fight response. Truthfully, you were also curious what was under the helmet. If he’s related to Emma, he was sure to also be a solid 10. AND he has the biker thing going for him. The image of him in that leather jacket that had been tight in all the right places appeared in your mind; an image that you’d spend a lot of time with over the last week. As if in response to the memory, the familiar feeling of eyes locking onto you sweeps over you; as strong as the first time. The hairs on the back of your neck raise.

“He gave some half-assed reply when I told him about it earlier.” Emma shrugged, pouring herself yet another drink. “He knows it’s happening so he might show up.” You knew it though. He was here. As if on cue, you turn to face the now open apartment door. Three figures filled its frame. The taller figure, Baji, carried three heavy looking bags and was shoving the smaller figure, Kazu, who was noticeably carrying nothing. Kazu seemed to spit back an insult, his furrowed brow indicated they were bickering. The 3rd figure was slightly shorter than Baji but had a presence that made him seem larger. There was no mystery, that was Mikey.

It was your first time seeing him without his helmet on. You must say, your imagination had not done him justice. He had bleached hair like honey. His bangs are up and out of his face while the rest of his hair curved in gentle waves, ending just below his jawline. The light from the hallway trickled into the hazy apartment, casting his locks in a gilded glow. It almost looked like a halo. 

His eyes were different though. He was too far to see any real detail, but they were dark. Dark in a way that gave stark contrast to those of the pretty blonde sipping her drink next to you. What is gentle on her face is defined and sharp on his. He had a hollowness to his cheeks that made his cheekbones stand out strikingly in the low light. 

You’ve seen many beautiful people in your life, more after moving to the city. Fuck, half of them you see in this room tonight. But there was something special about him. He stood in front of the pair, his eyes locked with yours as he stepped through the threshold. 

Yuuki appeared as if conjured from thin air and brought Mikey in for a firm handshake in greeting. You were pulled back to reality by Emma whispering over your shoulder, “Speak of the devil.” Draken leaned down to whisper something to the blonde before moving past the two of you to greet his friend. 

You turn to Emma, eyes wide. You mouth dramatically, ‘That’s your brother?!’ She rolls her eyes and rests her head on your shoulder, “For better or worse, that’s my big brother. I’m kind of surprised he came.” You adjust to offer the softer part of your shoulder to her, turning your gaze back to the group that just entered. You jump slightly as you lock eyes with Mikey once more, your heart flutters and you quickly break eye contact, cheeks warming at being caught. 

She pulls back at the movement. Her honey eyes scanning you with an intensity, you note, she and her brother share. A devious glint appears in her eyes, a smirk pulling at the corner of her mouth. She turns from you with intent and pours a tall cup of, you lean slightly to see. Yup, straight Absolut Strawberry vodka over ice. She tops her cup off as well before she turns back to you with a mischievous look, handing you the cup.

“Emma, please, you’re going to kill me. I feel my organs shutting down.” you whine. “Go give it to Mikey. Like me, he has excellent taste. I’ve gotta go to the bathroom real quick.” The sarcastic comment you were loading about her “excellent taste” disappears as you turn quickly, panic flashing across your skin. “I’ll go with you, girls’ code.” You offer. “Nah, just go, I’ll be right back.” 

She turns you by the shoulders and gives you a nudge of encouragement and thumbs up before disappearing in the crowd of bodies. Traitor. You walk towards the group of tall men. This is your worst nightmare. You distract yourself, the smell of strawberry bringing your gaze to the cup in your hand. A smile plays at your lips. If you ignored the fact it was straight vodka, the contrast of a scary biker sipping on a sweet, strawberry drink tickled the part of your brain that managed absurdist humor. 

The distance was closed too quickly. You were lost in your imagination and hadn’t game-planned anything in way of an introduction. You look up to meet the gaze of Mikey. You stood there, frozen. The conversation of the group fizzling out around you. You feel eyes on you and your face begins to heat. You extend a cup to him. Realizing it’s the wrong cup you quickly withdraw and extend the other, splashing a bit of liquid out with the too-quick motion. Anxiety is clawing at your chest.

He looks from you to the cup and back to you. You realize how odd it must be to be offered a drink with no way of introduction. You attempt, “Emma…” You clear your throat. “This is from Emma...” You’re drowning. At this point you can feel you’re beet red. Yuuki steps in, placing a hand on your shoulder and with a laugh he supplies, “This is my friend, Y/N. We went to university together. She just moved back to the city.” Bless him. Baji jumps in first, volunteering, “I’m Baji, it’s nice to meet you.” He seems polite, sweet despite his appearance; towering stature, sharp features and all. 

“Kazutora, but cute girls like you can call me Kazu.” he says, leaning in to invade your bubble slightly. What a flirt. “Don’t be a dick, K.” Baji says, putting out an arm to push Kazutora back to a standing position. Sensing tension forming between the two, you offer, “It’s nice to meet you two.” “It seems you already know Draken.” Yuuki continues. Draken tilts his cup in acknowledgement. “Mikey.” the final figure states, taking the drink from your hand to finalize the introduction. 

Yuuki clocks the beverage immediately and offers, “How about we get you something nicer. I’ve been saving some Patron for the night you finally made it to one of my little parties.” He gestures dismissively to the sea of bodies behind him. Little party? You survey the room to confirm he was in fact talking about this full blown rager. How humble of him you think, sipping your drink. “This will do.” Mikey says with a definite tone, signaling the end of discussion. He takes a sip from the cup like it’s water and not straight liquor. These siblings are built differently. 

Speaking of, Emma appears behind Mikey and jumps on his back in a sneak attack hug. “Heeeeyyyy Miiiiikeeeeyyyy~” She drawls. His face softens in a flash and you see the resemblance more clearly. Now that you’re closer you can get a better look. His lips have sharp corners with a fullness like his sister’s. His eyes are different though, his are more angled and a slightly deeper shade like whiskey or amber. They share the same thick lashes though. He catches you staring again and you flick your gaze to the left, only to see Draken who eyes you in a knowing way. You avert your gaze to the safety of your cup. 

Mikey swings his sister around to set her down in front of him. “Hey, Em. Good to see you’re having fun.” She nods enthusiastically. Finding Draken without looking, she leans back into his tall figure. He drapes his arms over her before saying, “Y/N works at that old cafe we used to kick it at.” This causes a stir in the group.

“Oh no way! How nostalgic.” Baji says. “Huh, I thought they closed that place after what happened.” Kazutora said in a puzzled tone. “Seems like they rebuilt and renovated. They even added a bookstore.” Draken offered. This seemed to satisfy the former who shrugged, “Hopefully it’s less of a dump in that case.” This comment earned him a slap to the chest from Baji. Kazutora turned his eyes to you, “No offense.” You wave a hand in a ‘none taken’ motion. “It was rustic ” Baji said, lacing the word venomously. You get the impression this was an argument they’ve had before. “More like rusty I felt like I needed a tetanus shot every time we went.” Kazutora bit back. 

There was a lot to unpack. This was the first time you heard any history about the cafe. Admittedly, you chose to work there purely on vibes and the fact the hourly rate was above average. Your nosy side wanted to know more. “What happened there?” You ask innocently. All eyes turned to Mikey conspicuously. Maybe the question wasn’t as innocuous as you thought. 

Mikey shrugged, “There was an incident. The place was nearly torn to the ground afterwards. I’m glad to hear they could rebuild and salvage.” It was a non-answer with no real points to ask follow-up questions without giving away your nosiness. The delivery was also not one that left anything up for discussion. You simply nod, shoving the prodding questions down.

Emma piped in, eyes closed, “We should go back~ For old times sake~” Her words were blending together. Her drink must be hitting her harder than she anticipated. Mikey gave Draken a look which was returned with a nod. Wordlessly, Draken took the drink dangling from Emma’s hand which earned him some soft booing before Emma resigned herself to snuggling into his arms. You chimed in with, “If you come when I’m working I’ll sneak you guys some cafe goodies.” 

“How long do you plan to work there?” Yuuki asked, pulling you out of a daydream of the attractive group lounging in the cafe. A harmless enough question, but you felt a sudden wave of self-consciousness. You had momentarily forgotten where you were; this chic apartment packed with beautiful, rich people. Your gaze dropped to the floor as you replied, “Oh, you know. Until I can get a foot in the door at a company.” You realize you’re being vague, but you didn't want to risk betraying how lost you really felt. 

“You’ve got a show coming up, right?” You masterfully change the topic, shifting the spotlight to Yuuki. “Yeah, I’m working on the Autumn collection now.” Yuuki says, rubbing the back of his neck, telling the group more of the details as they engage him. Happy to have succeeded in avoiding that uncomfortable line of questioning, you look around, taking everyone in. Baji and Kazutora dip out of the conversation and seem to be bickering about something new on their phones, too quietly for you to pick up. 

Yuuki draws your attention again with a sweet smile. He says, “You should come.” You blink, nodding a ‘yes’, not entirely sure what you’ve agreed to. “Typical, Yuuki. Only inviting cute girls.” Kazutora teases, rejoining the conversation. You peer past him to see Baji pacing near the door, his phone pressed to his ear. 

Yuuki claps back at the accusation, “I’d invite you, but no doubt you’d end up acting like a damn dog.” “I’ll be good.” Kazutora whines playfully. “Ask Mitsuya then.” Yuuki dismisses, smirking at Kazu. Kazutora pouts. In that moment Emma lurches from Draken’s arms and throws up directly into the pot of a neatly pruned house plant. In a heartbeat, Draken is next to her, holding her hair back, eyebrows knitted in concern. Nearby party guests turn to see what’s happening. 

“Damn, Em, party foul.” Kazutora whoops sarcastically. Mikey gives him an icy glare that shuts Kazutora right up. Baji appears behind Mikey and whispers something in his ear. Mikey turns to respond and points between Kazutora and Baji, clearly giving some instruction before the pair are making a swift exit. Baji throws over his shoulder, “Nice to meet you, Y/N.” Kazutora simply winks at you as the door shuts behind them.

You wave absently at the closed door before you hear a weak, “Y/N~.” You turn quickly and kneel on the other side of the pretty blonde, still hunched over the expensive-looking pot. You rub small circles into her back. Feeling like you’ve sobered up slightly. She turns to you and cutely says, “Oops.” You can smell the strawberry liquor on her breath. You let out a small laugh and look at Draken. 

“Alright babe, I think it’s time for us to get home.” He says in a voice as soft as velvet. “Nooooo~” She protests. “I wanna stay with Y/N~ The night is yooooung~” He scoops her up. She nuzzles her head into the crook of his neck, mumbling something incoherent. He whispers in a soothing voice, “I know, baby. I know” before standing.

He turns to Mikey and they share a look. He offers to Yuuki, “Sorry about your plant. I’ll take care of it.” Yuuki brushes it off, “Don’t worry about it. I’ve seen my fair share of party fouls and this doesn’t even make the list.” “I can attest to that.” You add, hoping to ease any guilt Emma may be feeling. 

Her bobbing head and lazy smile give you the sense that she doesn’t have a care in the world. Draken stoops slightly to whisper something to Mikey who simply nods. With that, Draken carries a very sweet, very drunk Emma from the apartment. Before the door closes, Emma peeks her head over Draken’s shoulder and waves a goodbye to you. 

Everything had happened so fast, your senses dulled by the alcohol. It’s then that you realize your group of seven had dwindled to three. You turn just in time to see Mikey slide something into Yuuki’s pocket. You look at your friend with curious eyes. Yuuki’s laugh is strained but he takes no action to challenge the man before him. You see movement in the distance and notice a guest flagging Yuuki down. Your heart jumps into your throat as Yuuki too notices the man. 

 Yuuki welcomes the distraction. And with a, “thanks for coming, enjoy the party you two” is making his way across the room. You stand there, feeling abandoned. You chance a glance at the tall blonde standing next to you. He notices. Your mind goes blank. He holds you captive under his gaze. As if reading your mind and finding it empty, Mikey finally breaks the silence with, “Let’s sit down.” You blink, coming back to yourself. “Oh, I don’t think there’s any-” But Mikey is already on the move. 

The crowd of people naturally parts for him. He caught the eye of some guests but stares were quickly withdrawn. You trailed after him, grateful that you didn't have to elbow your way through the crowd. An edge of claustrophobia made a bid for attention in your fuzzy brain as the mass of bodies closed behind you. 

Absorbing the two of you and cutting off your way back to the door. Mikey stops abruptly, causing you to bump into his back. His back is muscular, like walking straight into a wall. You maneuver your cup to avoid a spill. He doesn’t seem to register the collision. His head turns to scan the room, locking onto something in the distance. And he’s off again, forcing you to quicken your pace to catch up.  

The crowd parts to reveal an elegant lounge sofa. The pair sitting nearest to you were deep in their flirtations. The woman is in a revealing cobalt satin dress, a dramatic slit trailing up her leg to end at her hip. Her long, chocolate hair falling in a curtain around her and her partner’s face. She’s sitting in the lap of a well-groomed man. He’s wearing a dark patterned suit and a black button-down shirt, though most of the buttons are already undone. 

The man’s hand rested high up on the woman’s leg, kneading small circles into the sensitive skin of her inner thigh. One of her hands was stroking a pattern into the silky material barely covering his chest, the other running through his short, dyed blue hair. He has an interesting design shaved into the side of his head that her fingers trace absently. It started at the temple and twisted behind an ear punctuated by several piercings. Their faces barely inches apart, conversation clearly hot and heavy. 

The PDA makes your face feel warm and you look away. Getting the feeling you were invading their privacy. Though, this didn’t seem to bother Mikey who stood, unmoving, over the couple. Perhaps noticing the shift in energy, the man’s gaze is ripped from the woman on his lap. Immediately the man is on his feet, moving to hold the woman close to his side. She seems confused, but what objections may have been spoken die when she sees the blonde man before her. 

“Mikey! I didn’t know you’d be here. It’s good to see you m-man.” The man spoke quickly, stumbling over the end of his statement as his eyes swept over you. Mikey sized the two of them up. You couldn’t help but notice how the woman adjusts herself under his gaze, angling to give a better view of her chest to the blonde. 

Her boldness surprises you, given she has the arm of the handsome man whose bones she was about to jump still wrapped around her waist. You weren’t the only one to notice, as the grip around her waist tightened. Her mouth twitched mischievously, as if a goal had secretly been accomplished. 

“Hakkai.” the blonde responded with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. Turning his sole focus to the man. You too looked at him, his eyes a pretty shade of blue. He has thick lower lashes that are heavy and give him a permanently sleepy look. You wondered if he had dyed his hair to perfectly match his irises on purpose. You see now that he has a large scar over the right side of his mouth that twists slightly as he talks. The scar took nothing away from his handsomeness. If anything it made his appearance unique, hotter.

The man, Hakkai, smiled sheepishly. “Here, have a seat.” Offering him the spot he had just occupied. “We’re actually going to head out.” He says leaning into the woman at his side suggestively. At this, the woman stops undressing Mikey with her eyes and returns her attention to the blue-haired man, giving him a sultry laugh. Mikey’s face is unreadable. 

The couple walk around Mikey who doesn’t move for them. The woman brushes against him and in a voice dripping with honey says, “Bye bye, Mikey.” He doesn’t acknowledge the advance. Instead, turning to Hakkai, “Monday.” He says, emotionless. The other man freezes, “Monday.” He confirms, not meeting Mikey’s eyes. With this, Mikey nods and waves them off. The pair disappear in the crowd. Mikey sinks into the plush sofa, brushing off the parts of his body the woman had touched. Seeing you still standing, he pats the spot next to him. You sit, eager to split from the crowd, head spinning with questions. 

You run your hands over the lush velvet to calm yourself, taking in the room from your seated position. The modern lighting fixtures, not currently in use, hang high on the lofted ceiling. The dark furniture devoured what little illumination was being cast from the party lights. The silver accents twinkled prettily. 

You scanned the bodies in the crowd, form fitting suits and dresses with the occasional designer logo popping out of the mass. Your gaze drifted to your left, meeting a pair of amber eyes now alarmingly close to your face. You hadn’t realized you were swaying, leaning into the warmth of the body next to you. You snap back to reality, the proximity causing you to abruptly lean back. Some of the brown liquid spilling from your cup . “You’re pretty clumsy, huh.” He commented. “Yeah, and you have a staring problem.” You quipped back. The silence that followed signaled the lighthearted nature of your jab hadn’t landed.

You busied yourself, drying off your lap. By some miracle you managed not to get any liquid on the sofa that surely cost a month or two of your rent. “So… Bookstore.” “So… Bikes.” The dry statements hung in the air. You offer, “So, I don’t know anything about bikes. Do you like, maintain it yourself?” “Yeah, something like that…” He replies. The silence that follows makes you squirm. 

You feel like the undulating mass of people is about to swallow you whole. Reaching your limit, you rise, “...Well, it was nice to meet you... I hope Emma feels better. I’d better leave if I’m going to catch the last train.” You lie. You hadn’t checked the time for awhile. If you were more sober, this fact would have worried you. 

“I like bikes.” Mikey says. “…That’s nice.” you reply, shifting your weight between your feet. “Working on something, building it from nothing with your hands. It’s nice to have control that way. When something breaks, I know I can fix it. If I mess it up, I know it’s my fault.” He says thoughtfully. You return to your seat, Mikey’s crumb of vulnerability being snatched up. 

“So, how long have you been into them, bikes?” He pauses, responding, “I guess since middle school.” It takes a moment for you to key into the math, “And what got you into them?” “My brother did.” A hollowness to his voice. “Oh, that’s cute.” The word was one that rarely described him. “Cute?” He repeats. 

“Yeah, I don’t know, I guess I’m like picturing you playing with motorcycle figures or something.” “Not figures. I started riding when I was in middle school.” He says flatly. Maybe he did have a sense of humor. “So, what, were you like a 12 year old biker?” You tease. “Yes.” His tone is unchanging. “Stop playing. That’s, like, super illegal.” “Yeah, I guess it was.” He says under his breath a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “So what, were you in a little biker gang or something?” “Not little.” He said, sipping his drink. Was he being serious? The conversation petered out. 

“Well, I for one, know nothing about bikes.” You say, hoping to fan the flames a little longer. “Wanna learn?” The question caught you off guard. He hadn’t said it in a teasing way. “Oh, uh, yeah. Yeah that actually sounds really cool!” You say, excitement unmasked. To your surprise, he rises from the sofa. You look around before you mirror the action, catching up to the blonde before he’s absorbed into the crowd.

You trailed behind him like before. The beat of the music hummed pleasantly on your skin, the sensation mingling with the warmth of the liquor from your drink. You made your way to the door and let him hold it open for you as the two of you exited. 

***

Yuuki’s eyes trailed after the two figures who had surreptitiously made their exit. A silver pair matches his. The handsome man next to him hums, “How indecent, Mikey. Making us all watch your foreplay.” He teases, bringing his cup to his lips. “Is that what that was?” Yuuki asks sarcastically. The awkward interaction of his friend and the blonde not conjuring the same image as the icy-white haired man.

“If you knew him.” The man says with a smile, leaning into the body of the man next to him, wrapping an arm around his waist. “Either way, it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.” Yuuki leans into the man’s touch. “Indeed.” He says with a soft smile. “Back to the festivities, darling, your adoring fans await.” The white haired man says, giving Yuuki a peck on the cheek. The romantic gesture goes unnoticed by the inebriated crowd.  “They can wait a little longer, Mitsuya.” Yuuki says in a low tone, bringing a hand up to toy with the silver earring hanging from the ear of his partner, stealing a proper kiss as the party continues around them.

***

 You stood next to the tall blonde, waiting for the elevator. The cup in your hand is nearing its end, the dangers of senselessly sipping. The elevator dinged, doors sliding open to welcome you to the mirrored space. Entering, you steady yourself on the hand rail. Using the reflective surface, you check your makeup and fix some smudged eyeliner. Mikey hits the button for the ground floor. With a ‘ding’ the two of you are descending.

You turn your attention to the blonde in front of you, doing your best to be discreet, taking in the view of his back. The fabric of his shirt is thin and taut over his muscled shoulders. There is a pretty shimmer the way it catches the low light of the elevator. You see the taper of his waist and how the dress pants accentuate his long legs among other things.

 “And I’m the one with the staring problem.” You tear your gaze from his back to see him clearly watching you in the reflective surfaces of the mirrored walls. You’ve been caught yet again, red blooming across your cheeks. He snickers.

Before you can defend yourself with a snarky comeback, the doors open with another ‘ding’ on the ground floor. He strides with intention out of the sliding doors and rounds the corner. Again, you have to quicken your pace to keep up. As you turn, you see him circling the bike from the other day. It's midnight black and glossy. The shine is the only thing that gives away its presence on the unlit street. 

He sets his cup down on the barrier between the sidewalk and shrubbery. Y ou stand there, admiring the vehicle before he beckons you over. He points to the bike, “This is a motorcycle , AKA, a bike ” You blink. Is he messing with you? “This is the seat . You sit on it.” He holds up the sleek helmet and taps on the top. Drawing out the words he says, “ Hel-met .” Your jaw dropped, a wide smile spread across your face. He was messing with you.

You decide to play along, bringing your unoccupied hand to your ear, leaning towards him, “What? Hel … Sorry, one more time?” His face is stoic but you see his eyes light up. “Helmet. It protects your head. Like this.” He wrestles the safety wear over your head before you can move away. You try to fight off the headwear in vain, protesting, “No~ my hair! My makeup!” He bites back a laugh, one side of his mouth being pulled up before it’s covered by a hand. Huffing, you pull the helmet off, cradling it in your arm. You pout. “And did you really just mansplain a helmet?”

“You might want to keep it on,” he says, fighting his crooked smile. “Even if you had left earlier, the trains stopped running about an hour ago.”  He seats himself on the vehicle. “Hop on, I’ll drop you off at home.” Warning bells cut through your tipsy brain fog. You heard your parent’s voices lecturing you about the dangers of motorcycles, and strangers for that matter. As if sensing your hesitation he adds, “Emma will kill me if she finds out I left you stranded at the party. I’m sure she’ll feel bad enough already that she had to leave early. That and the hangover she’s about to have tomorrow.” 

Remembering Emma eased your nerves slightly. Nonetheless, your grip tightened, making the cheap plastic cup in your hand pop slightly from the pressure. That reminded you, “You’ve been drinking tonight, do you really think you should be driving.” With this, he rises from the bike, walking over to his discarded cup. He gives it a hefty slosh around before presenting the contents to you. It was nearly full. “As much as I love strawberry, I don’t really like drinking at parties.” “Real party person, huh.” You shoot back, your last real hang-up flying out the window. 

“Gotta stay sharp.” He says pouring his drink into the bushes. He moves to take your cup to do the same. Before he can, you finish it in one shot, needing the liquid courage. He raises his hands, backing off as you look around for a place to discard your cup. 

Damn, you’re eternally mystified by how clean the city can be despite there being no trash cans. Seeing this, he swipes the cup from your hand, stacking it in his own before crushing them with a satisfying crunch. He discards them in the bushes, earning a disgruntled noise from you. “Someone will clean it up.” He dismisses moving back to take his position on the bike, the engine turning over. “No one would have to clean it up if you threw it away properly.” “Just keeping your hands clean, darling. Leave the dirty work to me.” He says, a tone of sarcasm peeking through. 

You huff, pulling on the helmet to cover the blush spreading across your cheeks. You climb on to the back of the bike, unsure how to situate yourself. After a moment of you adjusting, trying not to sit too close to the blonde, he grabs you by the wrist and pulls you flush to his back. It’s warm. The thin fabric is like a second skin.

“Hold on or you’ll fall off” he says seriously. Thank god you were behind him, in the safety of the helmet. You could feel your ears turning red. “R-Right.” You feel yourself getting cold feet. “Hey, you know, I never said goodbye to Yuuki.” You ramble. “I mean, you can go up if you want, but I have a feeling he’s busy playing the gracious host.” Mikey responds. “Yeah… Yeah, I guess I can just text him.” You say mostly to yourself. 

“Hey, we can just call a taxi if you’re uncomfortable. I don’t mind waiting with you.” You visualize the cost of a taxi at this time of night and that’s much scarier than riding on the back of a stranger’s motorcycle. “No. No. It’s okay.” You say, wrapping your other arm around him, signaling you were ready. 

“Where should I drop you off?” “Near the 7/11 next to the station, the one with that awful statue.” You say, steadying your voice. You feel him rev the engine before you hear it. The thrum sends fireworks of adrenaline shooting through you. You tighten your grip on the figure in front of you. “Nervous?” he teases, chuckling. The vibration mixes with the engine. “N-No.” You sputter. “You’re a bad liar.” He replies. Without another word, the two of you peel off into the night.

[notapaladin]

I was inspired by an old "your OCs as companions" meme template I found and decided to combine it with an official-encyclopedia-style blurb. Highly recommend it tbh.

(Font: Liberation Sans 9 pt)

Text below the readmore:

Sidebar

SPECIES: Human

HOMEWORLD: Dromund Kaas

AGE: 22

HOBBIES: Historical research, gardening, archaeology

PREFERRED WEAPONS: Matched set of single-blade sabers with ornate golden details; they are family heirlooms given to her by her father upon her acceptance to the Sith Academy on Korriban YAELLIA IVROS

A BRAVE AND HONORABLE SITH WARRIOR, Lady Yaellia – just Yaellia, to her friends – is the only child and heir of the noble Imperial House Ivros, which was founded by a freed slave and therefore has some...unorthodox views of Imperial policy. The family history which was instilled in Yaellia from a young age granted her a sense of cooperation and fairness unheard of in many other members of the Sith hierarchy. Unfortunately, this has not made her or her family popular among their peers. House Ivros is under constant threat from its many enemies, and before Yaellia was ten years old she’d already survived numerous attempts on her life.

When Yaellia was accepted into the Korriban Academy, she became determined to uplift her family at any cost, barring the sacrifice of her principles. Though these principles successfully prevented the poisoning of her entire dorm suite by a rival class, they also nearly got her Force-choked to death by one of her teachers; she was only saved by the timely intervention of Lord Alanais Venditor, and has looked up to him ever since. Though he wanted to mentor her, Darth Baras made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.

Being chosen as Darth Baras’s apprentice was the highest honor she or her family could have ever hoped for. Even though she loathes him personally, her personal opinions don’t matter next to her family’s status and safety. Accordingly, she has set out aboard the ship he gave her, a Fury-class Interceptor she has dubbed Zhasanai’s Grace, to do as little of his dark bidding as she can get away with. Rumors of her involvement with the Revanite cult remain unsubstantiated.

Likes: Honor, mercy, preserving historical sites, loyalty, animals Dislikes: Cruelty, collateral damage, dishonesty, eye contact

AS A COMPANION

Selection lines:

“My sabers are yours.”

“Can I help you?”

“Leave it to me.”

“It is an honor to fight by your side.”

Battle lines:

“I am your end!”

“For the Empire!”

“Come, face me!”

Exiting battle:

“I didn’t even break a sweat.”

“What a shame. What a waste.”

“They died well.”

“Where’s our next target?”

KO’ed/Low health:

“A little help?!”

“Ah...I’ve miscalculated...”

“Can’t...breathe...!”

“I don’t like bleeding my own blood.”

Resurrected:

“That was a fluke.”

“Time to reenter the fray!”

“One day I will die, but not this day. Thanks to you.”

Misc. click lines:

“Are you quite alright?”

“Remind me to catch up on my reading.”

(on Dromund Kaas or other wet planets) “Ahh, the scent of home!...lake water and rotting vegetation. Lovely.”

“The Empire cannot rise to greatness on the backs of slaves.”

“Oh! Did I tell you about the holocron I found the other day?”

“Take a holo, it lasts longer.”

Gifts:

Cultural Artifacts, Imperial Memorabilia [favorite]: “This is wonderful! Thank you, I’ll treasure it.”

Courting, Luxury, Delicacy [love]: “Oh, you’re terribly kind to think of me.”

Military Gear, Weapon, Republic Memorabilia [like]: “Thank you.”

Underworld Good, Technology, Maintenance [indifferent]: “...I...thank you. Truly.”

[rhyselinn]

In Defense of Toby Fox’s Halloween Hack

Twitter is all in a tizzy about the Halloween Hack as of late. The apparent reason for this is because the Halloween Hack uses a word commonly used as a homophobic slur, not taking into account that the hack was created in 2008 (when the internet was a different place) and that 2008 was 14+ years ago (and people are known to grow and change over this time). There appears to be some amount of discussion over whether Toby Fox should be “cancelled” for this.

I’ve seen a fair bit of banter from both sides on this, but what I haven’t seen people on the internet talk about is the CONTEXT of the game in which this word is used. And while I don’t spend a lot of time talking about HH due to Toby’s stated embarrassment when people draw attention to it, if the internet’s gonna go dig up old drama for some reason, then by golly, I’m going to go dig up my old love for this game.

So if you want to come take a wild ride through some internet history and literary analysis, then go buckle your seatbelt and click the Readmore.

(content warning: discussion of homophobic slurs)

A quick bit about me: I am an adult on the internet, and I fall into the original Halloween Hack (hereafter abbreviated as HH)’s target demographic: teenagers who existed on Starmen.net, an Earthbound fan website, in 2008. I am also a current admin for Starmen.net, which puts me in a good position to comment on the history and culture of the site as a whole, and how that ties into the reception of HH.

Starmen.net has a long and rich tradition of events called Funfests, in which the site staff run a combination art/writing/music/etc contest for the site members, usually coalescing around a theme such as “Earthbound”, or sometimes “Winter” or “Halloween”. These events offer prizes such as forum avatar/rank privileges, and historically they sometimes even offered physical prizes. The 2008 Halloween funfest had an entire website made for it, which you can view here. Toby Fox submitted HH to this 2008 Halloween Funfest under the internet handle Radiation.

This is the context of HH: a passion project made by a teenager for a fan website full of other teenagers/twenty-somethings. If you go to a high school science fair, you could rightfully lambast every project for being undeserving of a Nobel Prize, but that’s not why we host high school science fairs OR Starmen.net Funfests. These events are an opportunity for teens to show what they are capable of and receive commendation from both their peers and a panel of judges selected specifically for this age demographic and venue.

For perspective, here’s what one of the hosts of the 2008 Funfest had to say about HH:

“Radiation nearly outclassed himself with this effort of skill labour and love. What a lot of fun. Despite getting repeatedly killed in the sewers this was one thoroughly enjoyabe hack. I Think I’ll go and play it again!”

HH won an award in the 2008 funfest-- a #1 in the “Most Effort” category. For some perspective, few people on Starmen.net go to the lengths of creating an entire game for a Funfest (and HH has a playtime of roughly 5-6 hours!). Of those who do, most of the resulting games are consistent with the output you would expect from a teenage userbase, since it’s not fair to expect teenagers to produce professional-quality work. That said, I can say with confidence that HH is a standout in the areas of both effort and quality.

Another thing that needs to be said of HH is that it is not a standalone game made in today’s modern game engines-- it is a hack of a preexisting game. Earthbound's codebase is notoriously complicated, and a lot of the tools that modern Earthbound hackers use to make their jobs easier (eg Coilsnake, Ebmused) didn’t exist in 2008. Toby had to do a lot of manual coding grunt-work to make HH, up to and including manually typing hexadecimal values into his computer in order to compose Megalovania. (Source: Toby wrote a really in-depth post about the process he used to make HH way back when, which I’m referring to here, but it’s unfortunately been deleted since then.)

I can imagine a hypothetical objection at this point: “ok but high effort homophobia is still homophobia”. In this post, I am also going to argue that Toby’s usage of this word can be considered artistic merit when taken in context, but you’ll have to bear with me for a bit while I explain that context. I’ll also talk about some of the cool and neat things this game does along the way because I think they’re worth talking about.

HH is, at its core, a derivative fan work of the video game Earthbound. And while I love Earthbound deeply, I also recognize that it’s a cult classic that not everyone has played. So while I encourage people to play the game I love deeply, I’ll also sum up a few relevant plot beats here so folks can understand the source material HH draws from:

--Ness, a thirteen year-old boy, meets a creature named Buzz Buzz from ten years in the future who tells him that an alien named Giygas has destroyed the world (direct quote: “All is devastation”). As such, Ness and his friends must save the world.

--One of Ness’s friends is a shy boy named Jeff with a penchant for shooting bottle rockets at enemies

--Jeff’s dad is an odd character named Dr. Andonuts. Dr. Andonuts is a reclusive scientist who lives in a snowy region called Winters who sent his son off to boarding school at a very young age. Andonuts’s lab includes no other signs of life, certainly not any indications of a wife/Jeff’s mother. Andonuts ends his conversation with Jeff by saying “Let’s get together in another ten years or so.”

--Towards the end of the game, Dr. Andonuts uses a device he created called a Phase Distorter to send Ness and his friends to the venue for the final battle. This is very clearly telegraphed as a one-way trip, as the kids’ brains are described in text as needing to be transplanted into robots to get there, but the kids go along with it anyway because the world is at stake.

--The kids go on to fight the final boss in a spectacle that words can’t do justice to here. All I’ll say is that after a long-fought battle, in the grace of an unexplained Deus Ex Machina, the souls of the four kids are impossibly returned to their bodies so they can enjoy their happy ending.

These are all canonical events that happen in the base game of Earthbound. Earthbound’s sequel, Mother 3, was released in 2006, two years prior to HH, although the English fan translation wasn’t released until around the time of the 2008 funfest, interestingly enough. Mother 3 does develop Dr. Andonuts’s canonical character somewhat, but I won’t discuss it in further detail here other than to say it mostly re-emphasizes his odd, solitary nature and his overly cavalier attitude towards his science experiments.

It’s also worth noting that in an oddball game like Earthbound, there are a lot of weird and funny idiosyncrasies to theorize on. There are pencil-shaped statues that block your way, which need to be removed with a device called a “pencil eraser.” Ness and his friends fight robots, aliens, and Krakens, but they also fight handbag-wielding ladies and walking mushrooms. Dr. Andonuts’s character oddities, while strange, fit nicely into the evenly distributed mesh of oddities that comprise Earthbound’s world.

Derivative works, particularly fan works, exist in conversation with the source material. They answer questions posed by the source, interpolate details left out of the original, and otherwise build on the world of the original in a collaborative way. This conversation sometimes happens in a one-on-one manner, between fan and original creator, but it also happens in conjunction with the fan community as a whole. When a theory takes traction, it will begin to appear in more and more fan works, growing in popularity and notoriety until it is “accepted” as the most common interpretation of canon’s strange idiosyncrasies. Newer or more fringe theories are less likely to be taken as a “default” interpretation, but they are more likely to be taken as “fresh” or “interesting” until/unless they, too, begin to gain traction.

HH exists in a few conversations: one with the source material, one with the fan community of Starmen.net (and the broader Earthbound community as a whole, although there was much more overlap between the two back in 2008), and one with Starmen.net’s Funfest culture. In order for HH to be well received by the Funfest judges, it would need to be aware of the community sensibilities as well as push the boundaries of the fan conversation with Earthbound as a whole-- a careful balancing act of being both interesting but also recognizable.

So, the fundamental fan question that HH tries to answer is “why is Dr. Andonuts LIKE THAT?”

This is an absolutely fair question, and Toby was certainly not the first to ask it, although his answer in the form of HH is one of the most high profile now.

HH is set in the world of Earthbound a few months after the final boss fight in autumn, but one where Ness and his friends did not magically return after their one-way trip to the final boss. Word has it that Dr. Andonuts has turned evil and must be defeated. On its surface, this is standard fare for a throwaway plot for a Funfest submission, but the magic of HH is that it does not treat this premise as a throwaway plot. It sets out to earnestly discuss why this happened by delving into Andonuts’s psyche.

Coming back to the idea of derivative works existing in conversation with the source material and interpolating unexplained details: Earthbound does not explain why Dr. Andonuts lives in solitude, nor does it give any hint as to the identity of Jeff’s mother. It also gives no indication as to why Andonuts didn’t seem to have bonded well with his son other than the handwavey explanation that Andonuts is just “like that”. HH initially poses the question of “why did Andonuts turn evil”, but leaves the reader to puzzle that out while battling monsters in Earthbound’s RPG engine.

At first, Toby offers a partial explanation: in HH, Dr. Andonuts is portrayed as feeling immense guilt at having sent his son into what he perceived as a death trap.  (quote from the game: “The world is dead, and I’ve become senile with guilt and rage.” He also says stuff like “what’s the point in living without them”.) As such, he turned evil and created zombies to storm the world of Winters, causing a surge in refugees and desperate survivors. This is why the main character was sent to kill him.

(image transcription: a picture of a menu with the text “What do you do!?” followed with a single option: “Kill him”)

But in order to see the depth of this explanation, the true answer to the question “why is Dr. Andonuts LIKE THIS”, the player must hit “B” to cancel out of a menu at the correct moment, something Earthbound players tend to learn by habit from closing the equipment menu so many times, but never used as a plot-relevant mechanic in the base game. HH takes this subconscious muscle memory and turns it into a mechanic gating off half the game if you don’t “spare” the enemy, a precursor to the “spare” mechanic that would debut seven years later in Undertale.

When the player does this, they enter Dr. Andonuts’s “Magicant,” a dream-construct representing his inner psyche, with his hopes and dreams and fears all laid bare. The main character is tasked with finding Dr. Andonuts’s lost Courage. In the base game, Ness enters his own Magicant, so this feels familiar to a veteran player, but it also gives Toby the chance to more closely examine Dr. Andonuts’s character than he otherwise might be able to do.

Over the course of the rest of the game in Dr. Andonuts’s Magicant, the player continues to control the main character, a bounty hunter named Varik, but the NPCs in the game often mistakenly treat Varik as Andonuts. The dialogue we see from these NPCs reflects memories from Andonuts’s own life. We see a lot more characters try to make connections with Dr. Andonuts (”hey don’t you want to play baseball instead of doing math?”), but these are apparently rebuffed througout Andonuts’s life. One NPC guarding the entrance to the path leading to this lost Courage advises “Be careful. Be yourself.” We see memories of Dr. Andonuts’s presumed wife/Jeff’s mom, who is an OC Toby created for this work to answer the questions posed by canon.

Varik is tasked with fighting three “demons” behind three doors, where each demon is said to be stronger than the next. Since this segment takes place inside Andonuts’s mind, these are unsubtly implied to be Andonuts’s inner demons. The second and third doors represent Andonuts’s relationship with his son and his guilt over getting people killed; the first door is relevant to this post, so I’ll talk about it in more detail. 

Inside the first door, Varik sees Andonuts’s memories of something called “Remember Me,” who despite being faced in a battle, is friendly and affectionate and causes no damage apart from being “hard to think about.” This enemy has a stock overworld sprite of a male NPC from the base game.

(image transcript: a smiling purple sprite in an Earthbound-style battle. The text box says “The Remember Me? was a little hard to think about again”)

At the end of this map, we see a cutscene in which it’s implied that Dr. Andonuts felt disconnected from his wife, perceiving her as an incessant insect. She says things like “Lately, you’ve been acting kind of... disinterested in me. Is there something wrong with me?” She asks if Dr. Andonuts has been hiding something from her, which triggers the following battle:

(image description: an Earthbound-esque battle against three enemies, each a sprite depicting a closeup of a man’s muscular body: a bicep, a chest, and a swimsuit-clothed groin area)

All three of these enemies are named NO. The music that plays in the background is deliberately unsettling, and their battle moves consist mostly of “flexing in a masculine way”, “slapping their buddies in a masculine fashion”, and “being hard to think about again”. After three turns, these enemies deliver a series of un-dodgeable moves that kill the player before it’s possible to defeat them, ending the game. The only way to proceed in the game is to select the Flee option in the menu.

To summarize the themes being presented here, Dr. Andonuts is gay and repressed his homosexuality to try to preserve his relationship with his wife due to his lack of courage. From a game design and literary merit standpoint, this NO battle is actually a really poignant way of portraying Andonuts’s mindset and all of the fears that kept him in the closet, portraying men’s bodies as an enemy that he must fight, or in failing to do so, must run from. Remember that Earthbound takes place in 199X-- none of the 1990′s were known for being especially tolerant of gay men, nor was 2008 when Toby made this hack; 2008 was the same year that California passed a bill intended to ban gay marriage. In another since-deleted web page, Toby said that one of his motivations for creating HH was “the lack of non-stereotypical, major homosexual characters in media”. With that in mind, this is a surprisingly sensitive portrayal of the pains of repressing one’s sexuality, especially from a teenager.

Toby also portrays some complexity in Andonuts’s relationship with his son Jeff, making the case that Andonuts helped Jeff in his fight against Giygas as a way of living vicariously through him to feel like less of a monster. From this standpoint, it’s easy to see that Andonuts’s abrasive language might be a defense mechanism for his own self esteem issues, calling others monsters to deflect from the fact he sees HIMSELF as a monster.

(image transcription: a screenshot of the main character fighting Andonuts from the end of the game. The text in the textbox from Andonuts says “you idiots. look at your decaying, frostbitten bodies”)

(and just as a side note, I think the reminiscence of this dialogue to Flowey’s dialogue in Undertale is funny and interesting)

Dr. Andonuts says the following: "If I can't live with myself, why should anybody else? Ergo, nobody will live. Then, everybody will understand all the pain I went through. When everyone understands me... They'll cherish me so." This isn’t the expression of a healthy mind, but it is a portrayal of someone who’s experiencing some serious pain. I’d also argue that it’s a nuanced and sympathetic portrayal of a character who is clearly in a crisis.

Another Andonuts quote: “you’re going to kill me, because that’s what a hero does. he has to kill that monster, right? even in this form, i am shaking with fear. i don’t want to die. leave me alone”

The second-to-last fight in the game is against an enemy called Id. In Freudian psychology, the Id is the representation of one’s most base desires, in contrast to the Superego who restrains a person from operating on these desires. The game up until this point does a good job at portraying Dr. Andonuts’s Superego-centric repression strategies, so getting to see his underlying base desires directly is a novel development. The enemy Id consistently reiterates a desire to be left alone and for the main character to not kill it. At the end, it apologizes for not being much of a fight. Only then does Varik fight Dr. Andonuts proper, and without the Id, all that’s left is the Superego-fueled repression, labeled in-game as “hatred”.

Andonuts’s villain monologue starts as such: “I know what this feeling is. It’s hatred for the person who came so far just to destroy an old man. My mind is gone. All that is left is pure hatred.

YOU SEE THIS BURNING, BLOODY UNIVERSE. YOU SEE THIS ULTIMATE, UNLIMITED POWER? Varik. I HAVE FUCKING HAD IT WITH YOUR SHIT. you little fuckers are going to have your bodies ripped in half. i’ll shove your asses so far down your throats that when you crap, you’ll sing fucking beethoven.”

This monologue is the precursor to the infamous line:

(image transcript: a screenshot from the final battle, in which Andonuts says the words “tl;dr: eat shit, faggots”)

As established earlier, this is a line uttered by a gay character who is in a tremendous amount of pain, which would make it an act of slur reclamation. We could argue about whether Toby Fox is in a position to justify this usage, but I refuse to have that conversation because I don’t think real life queer people should have to out themselves in order to justify the art they make. Whether Toby Fox is actually queer or not is, I would argue, immaterial to the story he’s trying to tell here, which is nuanced in a way that a homophobe would be unlikely to write.

We can also have the conversation of whether this word choice is a good decision or not-- and there are, I would argue, a lot of parts of this game that a storyteller with more experience and maturity would have handled better. There are some parts that come across heavy-handed and needlessly edgy, and there are parts that could have been handled with more grace. We can discuss whether “bury our gays” stories were stale by 2008, or whether stories of queer pain had fallen out of vogue for stories of queer joy. But again, this is a work made by a 16-year old, and being needlessly critical of a fangame made by a teenager for a community of predominantly teenagers feels needlessly meanspirited. Just because the game has been unforeseeably thrust into the public light like this doesn’t mean we need to eviscerate it from a 2023 lens. It’s not fair to Toby Fox, neither the original 16-year old creator nor the adult celebrity today.

So I’m not going to do that. What I am going to say is that a queer reading of this work would indicate that this word usage may very well have been a decision made with artistic intent, and a death-of-the-author reading of this work might indicate that this word has artistic merit anyways. If a gay character sees gayness as bad and uses a slur associated with gayness to demean his opponent, that does fundamentally say something about this character, and in this case it reinforces the existing themes that Toby had put in place. I wouldn’t recommend people in 2023 take this approach in storytelling lightly, but I can see and appreciate the spirit in which the game and this word choice appear to have been made.

In the end, Varik does defeat Dr. Andonuts and kill him.

(image transcript: Varik standing above the machine containing Dr. Andonuts’s dead body, not depicted onscreen. The text box reads “You feel a little like this situation could have been avoided.”)

This is one of the last text boxes of the game, and I think it’s a good ending note for this work-- saying that queer lives do NOT need to go this way, that we do not need to bury our gays, that this genuine pain that Dr. Andonuts experienced is not an inevitability.

In conclusion, I do love Halloween Hack for what it is, imperfections and all. It was very clearly a labor of love made by a very earnest and well-meaning teen, and a lot of the things that would later go on to make Undertale so popular are present in their nascent forms here. HH has some genuinely interesting things to say about Earthbound, from both a plot and a character standpoint, and it’s clearly a good-faith attempt at grappling with queer and psychological subject matter. If people on the internet were to engage sincerely with it rather than judging it (and its creator) based on one out-of-context screenshot, I think they might find a diamond-in-the-rough that still manages to be an absolute gem of a fangame.

[bragganhyl]

'how badly do you want me?' for gaura and aloth please :3

Thanks, Anon, sorry, it took me a bit but here it is :D

this is your explicit content warning, do not click on the readmore if you do not want to be exposed to 4.3k words of smutty writing, please and thank you

Konstanten’s room was slowly filling up with steam while Gaura was taking off one piece of her armor after the other. She hummed a melody to herself – out of respect rather than discomfort – trying to tune out the lewd cries that managed to pass through the walls of the Wild Mare. In moments like these, the Watcher questioned if taking the tub in the brothel was actually preferable to the Luminous Bathhouse, but those questions would be set aside as soon as she remembered that at least, she got to be alone in the brothel. There was a time public bathing would have left Gaura unfazed, but that was before she was renowned as the Watcher of Caed Nua or the captain of The Defiant. That was before she was a piece in the game of powers that saw her as variable to be controlled. And there was a place where she might have felt comfortable surrounded by others, bare and – in some ways – out of her element, but in such a place she wouldn’t have been surrounded by people looking to her with either reverence or suspicion. She could do without the attention that she would have received in Periki’s Overlook.

But the rest of the crew headed that way. Aloth was especially reluctant to part ways with her that day. A soft tremor ran through her fingers as the Watcher recalled the way he held her hand, saying his goodbyes. She thought of his gentleness that she felt through the heavy gauntlet, she thought of the warmth in his gaze that made the sun streaming on them pale in comparison. She thought of the color of his lips after she gave him nothing more than a quick peck. She bit her own as she reminisced. The color promised a soft surface, a searing impact and an irresistible taste. Gaura didn’t notice that she stopped humming. Her movements slowed as she undid her belt, while her imagination painted the image of clothes being removed that belonged to someone else. An image of another getting shoved against a wall while she showered him in kisses.

The sound of the water boiling snapped her out of her musings. Gaura hurriedly took the cauldron and emptied its contents into the tub, half-full of lukewarm water already. She removed the last few pieces of her armor and the clothes underneath, excitement almost getting the better of her. As she stepped into the tub, the water began dancing around her legs lead by the ever burning flames bursting through her skin. She sat down, submerging herself to her neck, enjoying the rough bubbles assaulting her tense muscles. Soon, she was lifted by the movements of the water, her only support was the back of her head against the edge of the tub and her arms coming over its sides, anchoring her while she floated relaxed.

The trek up the mountain took time, Gaura mused as a sigh left her lips, Aloth could not have made it to the bathhouse yet. By the time he would, he’d be flushed by exertion and kissed by sunlight. The Watcher sighed. The water felt softer as she thought of the wizard. Or maybe she did. It was so easy to pretend that she was being touched, that she was melting as a response. It was easy to read more into the gentle impacts against the small of her back than the reality of them. It was easy to imagine slender fingers caressing her thighs and even easier to give in to the sensation. Gaura brought a hand to her breast as she parted her legs, while she thought of Aloth descending into the gently glowing pool. She envisioned a single droplet trickling down his lean body as she traced its path down her own chest.

Her daydreaming fragmented when her fingers found her folds and the small nub between them. Images overlapped with her movements, shifting with each flick of her wrist. She drew one circle and Aloth was leaning over the edge of the pool. His face was pressed against the tiles and Gaura was behind him, loving up his neck, kissing his shoulders, nibbling on his ear, as she reached forward and rubbed him steadily. The Watcher’s breathing grew staggered as she picked up the pace set by her imaginary self. Her mind was filled with the vision of Aloth on his back, sprawled out on the floor of the bathhouse, biting down on his lip, trying to keep himself quiet as Gaura grinded on top of him, filled by him, at a tempo that was far too selfish but she couldn’t help it. She allowed herself a quiet moan, just enough to fuel her fantasies without overpowering the sounds of the water enveloping her, the sounds she imagined echoing in the halls of the Luminous Bathhouse, the sounds that-

- that were suddenly interrupted by a knock on the door.

The Watcher froze in her movements. For a moment there was no sound, and no movement aside from the water around her rushing against her body. When she heard the knock again, her awareness returned to her fully – as well as to her more than compromising, arched posture. Even behind closed doors, Gaura’s hair fluttered shyly as she sat in the tub, her legs crossed, trying to repress the rage growing from her frustration by washing her face.

‘The room’s taken!’ She called out, snapping at the person behind the door despite her best efforts.

‘I know.’

The voice almost convinced the Watcher that she was still deep in her fantasies. When she didn’t respond, an impatient request followed.

‘Gaura, can you please, let me in?’

She got out of the tub in a hurry, nearly tripping over the edge of it. She was just about to grab the handle of the door, when she remembered to cover herself. The Watcher took a moment to ensure the towel she picked up was hugging her body securely and neatly, before she opened the door, and casually leaned against its frame. An easy smile brightened her face that hid all but the smallest hints at her craving for the wizard. Aloth blinked at her, his mouth slightly agape at the sight of her wearing nothing but a tiny piece of fabric and a small cloud of vapor rising from her skin.

‘I…’ he cleared his throat, ‘I hope I didn’t come at an inopportune time.’

Gaura chuckled, lust and mischief faintly ringing in her voice. ‘Quite the contrary,’ she stepped aside, ‘I was just thinking about you.’

‘As was I about you,’ Aloth stepped inside the room, strangely stiff. It was only then that Gaura noticed how out of breath the wizard was, how flushed his cheeks were and yet he closed the door behind him with a restraint that she would have mistaken for hesitance had she not seen it time and time again, usually right before they both gave in to their desires. ‘That… is why I’m here,’ he let out a short laugh, as he stepped closer to the Watcher, ‘I was wondering, if… maybe you could share the tub with me.’ He hid his hands behind his back.

‘Hm,’ Gaura closed the distance between them. Aloth did not move, he did not look away, merely his cheeks took on a slightly deeper shade as a heavy, but staggered breath escaped his lips. She glimpsed a spark in his lidded eyes that put an impish smile on her face. ‘I’m sure we can squeeze in,’ she said as she reached for a buckle on the wizard’s vest. ‘But I still can’t help but be surprised that you’d skip the bathhouse for a measly tub.’

‘The company more than makes up for it,’ he glanced down at the Watcher’s hands slowly undoing one buckle after the other. ‘As does the privacy.’

‘My, you must have craved both,’ Gaura teased as she undid Aloth’s belt and pushed his vest off him, ‘if you were willing to climb back down the mountain just to meet me here. Alone.’

‘Indeed,’ he chuckled as he took off his undershirt, ‘as foolish as it sounds, I… I couldn’t stop thinking about our parting earlier.’

He gingerly reached for the Watcher’s hands, and lifted them to his lips. He left a single lingering kiss on her wrist, while he placed shorter, sweeter ones on the knuckles of her other hand. Gaura laughed softly, turning Aloth’s gaze to her face again. He let go of her long enough to cast protective spells on himself, before he reached behind her head and brought it closer to himself. He rested his forehead against hers, fighting the urge to claim her lips.

‘I want you,’ he admitted quietly, breathlessly, but no less eagerly.

‘Care to demonstrate?’ The Watcher lightly nipped at his lower lip. ‘How badly do you want me?’

Aloth’s kiss was slow at first, but insistent as if he needed to drink Gaura in to shrug off the weariness of the road. Then a moment passed and the wizard only grew hungrier for her. The Watcher snickered into his mouth as he reached for the towel covering her and peeled it off with a gentle tug. He pulled her closer, and embraced her tightly seemingly ready to feed himself to the fire adorning her body. But he knew those flames: he knew that they did not scorch, they did not harm, they only lapped against Aloth’s chest with the tenderness of the lightest of kisses. Goosebumps formed where he was kissed by fire and a small tremor ran through him as Gaura reached for his hair and gently pulled it. The wizard sharply inhaled, warm, humid, smokey air filling his mouth until the Watcher latched onto his neck and allowed herself to be guided by her tongue along his shoulder. Only then did he remember to exhale.

‘Shall we take this to the tub?’ Gaura’s voice was deep with desire.

Aloth needed a moment to process the question, which was made all the harder by the Watcher’s warm breath caressing his ear. Eventually he gave her a few quick nods. ‘Please.’

‘Guide me, then,’ she hooked a finger in the wizard’s trousers as she took a step towards the tub, but her gaze remained fixed on him. ‘You see, while you were away my imagination was all I had for company,’ she walked with her back towards her destination, her hands firmly holding her lover by his waist, and her lips repeatedly finding their way back to Aloth’s.

‘It seems I have something to live up to then.’

Gaura laughed. ‘You better, you interrupted quite a nice fanta-’

Her teasing was interrupted when the Watcher’s foot hit a piece of her discarded armor and she was sent stumbling down on her back, pulling Aloth with her.

‘Gods, are you alright?’ The wizard pushed himself up, anxiously looking her over. Gaura was still laughing, however.

‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ she stopped herself, sniffing into the air. Something was getting singed. ‘The rug, however…’ she pulled Aloth down, wrapped her thighs around his hips and rolled over him in a few swift moves. She was still snickering as she claimed his lips again. Her smile faded to something faint, smug and satisfied as her hand trailed down the wizard’s chest, and he proved to be unable to resist her caress. He arched himself ever so slightly into her touch. His hand came to the back of her head, and kept her in place as he kissed back more and more desperately with each moment. And then Gaura reached his bulge. A quiet groan resonated against the Watcher’s lips and she pulled away to rid him of his remaining clothes. She grinned down at him as she was undoing his trousers, her anticipation warming her belly. Then a hand came to her wrist.

‘Please, I…’ Aloth swallowed, ‘I’d like to taste you.’

Gaura cocked her head, feigning to ponder his request. ‘I’d rather not risk lying down again, though.’

The wizard responded with a knowing smile. His free hand came to her thigh, his fingers idly traced a crack running along on its inner side.

‘I would prefer if you stayed on top, too.’

The Watcher shrugged and leaned over Aloth again. ‘How could I say no to you?’ She left a quick peck on his lips. Then another. And another. With each little contact the vision of his lips on her cunt became more and more crystallized. She savored the fantasy as she pulled away and shuffled over the wizard’s face. ‘Don’t forget to breathe,’ she reminded him, as she lowered herself.

The very first flick of Aloth’s tongue sent shivers along every fiber of Gaura’s being. He gripped her thighs tight as he latched onto her clit and lapped at it feverishly. The Watcher bit down on her finger, trying to suppress the sounds he drew from her each time he changed pace, rhythm, patterns. There was a sweet dissonance between the softness of his lips and the insistence of their movements, between the light brushes of his hair against her thighs and his fingers digging into them. He was unpredictable and meticulous and Gaura found it harder with each moment to restrain herself. It didn’t help that each time he sent her flames fluttering, they drew a shudder out of him, and his own sense of control demanded that he continued with more focus and with greater determination. He let out a few quiet notes, a barely audible but no less desperate whimper, as the fire dancing along the Watcher’s thighs lapped against his cheek and ears, and he nearly drove her mad by doing so. It seemed as if her muscles took control over her as Aloth overwhelmed her nerves and senses. She reached for his hair and dug her fingers into those dark strands while her hips began to move along their own rhythm. The wizard softly moaned against her folds when he felt her grind against him, but Gaura could no longer hear anything beyond her own heartbeat pounding in her ears. Not his sounds, not her own cries, not the sweet nothings that left her lips which only spurred Aloth on. The Watcher lost her sense of time as her pleasure was building within her. Her sense of rhythm and pacing betrayed her on the verge of ecstasy. She lost awareness of herself, of selfishness or discipline. There was only Aloth, precious and generous Aloth, who was so perfect to lose herself in, in all the ways she could still name. She threw her head back and allowed the warmth of her arousal to spread within her like a wildfire and consume her entirely. Aloth slowed down to help her guide her senses back to herself, then left a few parting kisses on her thighs just as she was ready to get off him.

‘You are so, so good to me,’ Gaura leaned over him, eager to taste herself on his tongue. She laughed into their kiss when she felt the juices of her arousal coat his nose and chin as well. Aloth answered by reaching for her ear and by making a futile attempt at tucking a lock of her flame-hair behind it. She pulled away then. ‘I love you.’

‘And I love you.’

‘You made that evidently clear,’ the Watcher laughed. She pulled away and took off Aloth’s trousers. She waited until the wizard reinforced some of his spells protecting him from her hair, the moved to straddle him again. ‘Will you let me be selfish with you?’ She asked with an impish smile while she descended on his cock. She was merely grinding against his length, letting her arousal coat him, but Aloth already tensed up in anticipation. ‘I’ll take good care of you in the tub after I’m done, I promise.’

Aloth let out a quiet laugh. ‘How could I say no to you?’ He sat up, echoing her words, and reached for Gaura’s shoulder. He pulled her down with him as he laid back down. ‘Just… please, stay close to me.’

The Watcher placed a kiss on his cheek while she guided his cock to her heat. She slowly rocked back against him, stealing the wizard’s breath away.

‘Close enough?’

‘Yes, and no.’ Aloth laughed, his joy mingled into his moan as the Watcher began moving again on top of him, until the last notes he exhaled were voiceless and his face became a canvas of pure need. ‘I… can’t get enough of you.’ Gaura kissed the corner of his lips. For a single roll of her hips, she slowed down, as her lips locked with his proper and drank in the long, hungry groan she drew from the wizard. She pulled away slightly with a chuckle and picked up the pace again.

‘Neither can I.’

The Watcher thought of the daydream she had in the tub. The fantasy of Aloth sprawled out on the tiles of the bathhouse and of herself seizing her own pleasure. And a part of her was tempted to turn it into reality. But the Aloth in front of her, under her, had fantasies hiding behind his eyes as well. He touched her cheek just as the first quiet moan passed her lips. He watched her, pleased, for a mere moment before his eyes fluttered shut and he craned his neck back towards the floor. A smile brightened his face until his expression was contorted by his own pleasure.

‘Gods, I adore you,’ Gaura whispered. She couldn’t resist the sight of his lips, his eyes, his arching neck. Her mouth wandered and soothed, her teeth encouraged and claimed, while her body moved to a steady rhythm. She allowed herself to grew drunk the visage of Aloth as ecstasy was building within him and the sounds she was drawing from him. She was intoxicated by the light touches on her back, the fingers tracing her cracks, the caresses on the back of her head, the crackling of magic against her scalp. She in turn called him beautiful, she called him precious, through slurred words and through wandering touches, through increasingly hurried movements. And soon, she grew forgetful, she grew unaware, she was mesmerized by the wizard under her, too much to pay attention to her own self. Her hips rolled back harder against him, her kisses turned forceful enough to resonate in her teeth, until she slammed against him hard and hit a spot that got her seeing stars.

Aloth groaned under her and kissed her on her cheek. The Watcher only stopped for a moment, but even that brief pause felt excruciating – and yet, at the same time, inviting.

‘Wait,’ his hands trailed down Gaura’s sides, until he reached her hips. His grip was light, but firm. After some shuffling, Aloth gave her a slow and gentle thrust, hitting the same spot again. The Watcher’s moan lingered in the air between them. ‘How does that feel?’

‘Almost perfect.’

‘Almost…?’ Aloth thrust again, slightly harder this time, and now the Watcher was ready to meet him.

‘Now, it’s perfect,’ she smiled down at him, as she started moving again in earnest, and he followed along. Gaura soon buried her face in the curve of the wizard’s neck, kisses and nibbles became her anchor as she got swept away in her own movements and the precious, lovely friction that stoked the heat pooling in her loins.

Aloth was tensing up under her as well. He didn’t notice his grip tightening on her, or that he hastened his thrusts. There was a light stutter in the way his muscles moved, there was a light shiver lingering at the tips of his fingers that he couldn’t ease through touch alone. His mouth was filled with his moans that got pushed out of him each time the Watcher’s flesh hit his. Gaura’s lips were slick against his throat, her tongue felt hot against his ear, her hands wandered along his chest, enjoying the feeling of his heart pounding fast for her at one moment and the tremors that followed her light brushes against his nipples in the next. But she did warn him that she would be selfish. Eventually her hand traveled down between them, to the clit he’s been neglecting, but just as guilt was about to well up in him, she grew tighter around him and Aloth forgot everything but her warmth, her embrace, the fire bursting though her, kissing his skin. She cried out as she collapsed on top of him, drowning out his own voice, her climax eclipsing his. The wizard held her close and tight as he rode out his ecstasy, but she squirmed her way out of his embrace. She left one kiss on his face after the other, she left no spot untouched and for those few moments, Aloth was convinced he was melting.

‘I must say,’ he said once he found his voice again, ‘I do enjoy you being selfish with me.’

Gaura chuckled. ‘I promise, I won’t make you regret those words,’ she gave him a lingering kiss, while he pulled out. A few moments later, she got up and helped the wizard stand, as well. ‘Just like I promised I would take care of you, now.’ She gingerly hooked her fingers into his as he guided him to the bathtub. She frowned at the water, disappointed in the lack of steam, and just as she assumed, the water was cool to her touch when she reached out for it.

‘Allow me,’ Aloth gave her hand a light squeeze before he let her go. He rubbed his hands together then he drew some runes in the air. He uttered a spell as he touched them. Magic flared up at the tips of his fingers then spread down to his wrists. The wizard then dipped his hands in the water and in a few moments, vapor was rising from the tub once more. A satisfied smile lurked in the corners of his lips as he gestured at the tub, and when Gaura reached for the water, it was as warm as she left it.

‘Show off,’ she teasingly rolled her eyes at him, which was met with Aloth’s widening eyes as he became aware of his own smugness. Gaura laughed sweetly as she kissed him on the cheek. ‘I’m only teasing, love,’ she left another peck on him. ‘Thank you, you’re a lifesaver.’

The Watcher stepped into the tub and reached back for Aloth. The wizard glanced at the water bubbling around Gaura’s legs then grabbed the hand offered to him with an excited grin. They sat behind one another, with Aloth nestling between the Watcher’s thighs. It was a tight fit within the tub, with little to no room to move, but at least as they were, Gaura was comfortable. Meanwhile the wizard sat a little straighter as the water rushed against his waist. He took a deep breath then undid the bindings holding his hair bit by bit. He ran his hands through his dark strands and leaned back against Gaura's chest with a sigh.

‘Gods, this feels magnificent,’ he took the Watcher’s hand and lifted it to his lips. ‘You are magnificent.’

‘You know my plan was to help you get cleaned up,’ she replied as she played with a few strands of his hair.

‘Just… give me a few moments.’

‘Or you could just give me the soap,’ the Watcher pointed to a fragrant yellow bar. Aloth sat up with a groan but he didn’t hide his eagerness to return to her embrace. She laughed as she took the soap and lightly rubbed it against the wizard’s chest. He seemed to grow more relaxed with each movement of her hand. And in turn, she took her time, she remained gentle.

‘Gaura…’ when Aloth spoke again, his voice was hoarse and quiet.

‘Hmm?’

‘I heard that the pool in the Luminous Bathhouse can be rented for private events,’ he caressed her knee as he talked. ‘Do you think that I could… tempt you... for such an event?’

‘Aw, you’re getting greedy,’ she blew a kiss on her hair. In truth, her daydream surged from the depths of her mind, and her heart skipped a beat at the idea of making it real.

Aloth laughed. ‘Nothing of the sort, I assure you,’ he shifted his weight slightly, ‘or… I don’t think of it as greed. There are just some experiences that I… would like to share with you.’

‘Nice save.’

The wizard shrugged. ‘It’s true, though. There are so many places that I want to see by your side... Memories that I want to form with you,’ he bit his lip. ‘Things that I’d like to try with you.’

The Watcher smiled to herself. ‘I feel the same way,’ she laughed. ‘Although I must mention that a lot of the places I’d like to show you are in the Living Lands and we have giant hornets there.’

‘I’m sure the perils would be worth it.’

‘You are making it very hard to say no to your suggestion,’ Gaura shook her head. ‘About the bathhouse, I mean.’

Aloth said nothing, he merely angled his head to look up at the Watcher. Gaura could only meet his gaze for a few fleeting moments.

‘Fine,’ she pretended to give in. ‘I’ll see to the arrangements.’

The wizard smiled. ‘Thank you,’ he turned away and closed his eyes. ‘I have to say, though… I wouldn’t oppose to… using the tub with you again. If you are of the same mind, that is.’

‘You know that I am,’ the Watcher tucked a lock of hair behind Aloth’s ear. In her embrace, relaxed, soaked and glowing in the aftermath of ecstasy, he looked almost like a dream. And certainly more beautiful than the ones Gaura has been having. ‘How could I say no to you?’