#it's kind of tense

[rosescries]

All right. Tell us about that Ghaster man. What did he do this time. Hahaha

What hasn't Gaster done?

But they each have distinct little relationships with Momma. Some are pretty similar, some are better than others. Some are pretty unhealthy.

Underfell and Swapfell Gasters kept Sans and Papyrus a secret from their wives too. That's why the three don't recognize each other during the first meeting, they had no clue the other existed in the first place. Gaster had intended to keep it that way, but things happen.

[inbabylontheywept]

Memories of Grandpa Hank

I'm eating a bag of mormon gorp that tastes like gasoline while watching the rain run down the mountain. The taste doesn't even bother me anymore - all homemade gorp tastes like this. It's just a natural consequence of everyone keeping their prepper shit in their garages. 

My dad's out in the clearing, wandering around with his GPS. He's got some pieces of wire out on top of it to try and make the effective antennae bigger, but it just makes it look like he's dowsing. Another mormon tradition. I ask him if he's close to find water yet, and he looks up at me, little rivers flowing off him, and says yeah - he can feel it. 

I'm sure he can. I settle under my tree and watch the droplets roll down the needles. Awaiting the final judgement of Judge GPS. 

A few minutes later, it provides: 

Turns out my dad forgot to record the location of the car this morning. The GPS remembers where we parked yesterday, but by luck my dad knows how to get from there to our car. Downside is that it's a nine mile walk just to get to yesterday's position, then another five miles to backtrack. That's fourteen miles total. 

I'm only thirteen. 

Think you can make it? my dad asks. And it's a kindness that he's worried, but it's not like there's an alternative. What else would I do, sit down in the murk and cross my fingers he finds me again? Ask him to carry me 14 miles? 

I'll be pretty jelly legged, I say. But yeah. I'll make it. 

Attaboy, he says. He fishes a bag of poptarts out and offers me one as - I think - a peace offering. A, sorry you're gonna have to walk 14 miles in the rain because I goofed kind of gift. 

I take a bite and, despite being individually wrapped, it still manages to taste like diesel fumes. We start hiking our incredibly long distance in terrible weather for foolish reasons, and I joke to my dad that the only way to make this day any more mormon would be by pushing handcarts. 

He laughs. Neither of us laugh again until 11 pm, when we stumble like drunkards into camp. My grandpa has stayed up late to make sure we weren’t lost, but he only stays up long enough to see us arrive. We try to eat a dinner of sweet potato stew, but after falling asleep in the middle twice, we agree to just go to bed. 

I sleep in well past nine and wake up to nobody in camp but my grandpa. My dad left with my sister to keep hunting around 5 am. I know that everyone assumes that their dad is invincible when they're 13, but I'm 28 now and part of me still thinks he's gonna live forever. That God made exactly one perpetual motion machine, and it raised me in the desert. 

---

Around noon my grandpa suggests hunting again. If it was my dad, I'd probably tune him out, but I like my grandpa's style of hunting. My dad hikes and hikes and hikes until the elk get tired and just let him shoot them. My grandpa finds the sleepiest, sunniest, coziest field and takes a nap there, figuring if the elk have any decent taste they'll come there at some point.

Man's got a knack for knowing what elk like - he's right more often than not. I think he might've been an elk in a previous life. 

I go with him, and much as I hate to admit it, the hike is good for me. I start off walking like a pirate on two peg legs, so stiff I might as well not have knees, but by the end of the mile and a half walk I'm almost normal. We make it to the edge of the clearing, and my grandpa finds a patch of grass taller and softer than the beds inside the trailer, and he curls up to sleep there. I look across the grass and I watch the comings and goings of critters through the field. Sometimes I use the scope to get a magnified view, but I never do so with my hand on the trigger. The thought of accidentally looking a person through that glass is something that sends a chill up my spine. 

Some deer wander through the glen, but it'd take a fool to mistake one of them for an elk. A few hours later, my grandpa wakes up and asks if I want to wander around a little. It's a lovely day. Rain comes in bursts in Arizona, and the day after is almost always clear as can be. And for a short while, all the desert browns turn green and lush. Hard mosses turn squishy and cacti swell up like fresh baked muffins and for a while you can get why people settled in these god forsaken wastes. 

So I go with him, and we walk on, me with my gun, him just taking in the forest. He looks so peaceful that I get a little jealous, but it's not until my grandpa stops and looks at me that I even notice it myself. Takes a mirror, sometimes, to know yourself.

Being near my grandpa is always a strange thing for me. He's quiet, and he doesn't talk much, and I don't ever get the feeling that he's particularly emotionally intelligent - but it's like he's interacting with a reality more raw and real than mine. Like I'm watching symbols on a screen and he's counting atoms. And sometimes, just being near him gives me access to that raw matter. Just something about how he is breaks the illusions of the world.

He looks at the gun like a foreign object, like he doesn't recognize it, then he looks at me. He speaks and he doesn't mince words. 

What would you do if an elk came across the path and you shot it right now? he asks. 

Well, I'd start cleaning it, I say, and he waves the words away like cobwebs in his face. 

But would you celebrate? he presses.

And I look at him, and I don't actually see any judgement staring back. He knows the answer, and he's at peace with it. He’s asking so I can see it too. He’s being a mirror so I can see my own face.

I think I might actually cry, I admit. And he nods along in agreement before reaching forward to take the gun off my shoulder. 

Lets just walk today, he says. No chance of killing anything. No worrying about that. 

Right, I say. 

He pops the chamber open and tosses me back my bullet. I catch it, and the relief I feel is palpable. 

Can I change my mind? I ask, and he shrugs.

Whenever you want. Hunt or don’t. It’s not the hunting that I’m worried about. It’s seeing you ignore your conscience.

And for a moment, I'm there in the real world with him, and my gloves are off, and reality is a metal cube in my hand: Sharp and cold and heavy.

Or maybe that’s just the bullet.

---

We make it back to camp a bit later than my dad. We get there and he’s waiting for us. If he's tired, he doesn't show it. 

How'd it go? he asks. My grandpa looks at me, and I don't know how to respond. I don't know how to explain it, and I am scared. 

Great, he replies. It's a shame Babs only has a doe tag. We saw a five-point out there. Close enough to hit with a football. 

No, my dad says. If his grin was a half inch wider, both ends of his mouth would meet in the back of his head and everything above his tongue would slide off.

Tell him Babs, grandpa says. And, not for the first time, and especially not the last, I try my hand at spinning a yarn. 

It's pretty good. But at 13, I still have a lot to learn.

[welcometogrouchland]

[ID in ALT] I've made posts before about Talia/Dick co-parenting Damian moments (will never happen but let me dream) and this came to me in a vision. Took me ages to finish for some reason 😭 and then even longer to post

[abyssal-ilk]

no more romance. romance is canceled. tell me about your warden/hawke/inquisitor's best friend and any info you want to add about their dynamic 🖐

[itsriotmotherfuckers]

Sirius caused the longest hat stall in Hogwarts history when he was sorted, by the way

[bisclavret]

and people say season 5 is bad

[ask2ps]

in the 2P takeover, alfred struggling to retain some level of consciousness while allen puppeteers him backfires in the end, as it only really allows him to be personally present for matthew's (permanent!) death at his own hands.

anyway i'm representing this through a discord meme redraw.

[bluerosefox]

Masks and Moonlit Night

-Crashes through DPxDC window and sticks a new AU sticky note down on everyones foreheads-

ANGER MANAGEMENT MASQUERADE BALL AU!

Jazz is forced by her parents to go to all Masquerade ball at Vlad's, whose using Jazz as both a way to keep Danny in line (as well as Jazz, basically Danny can't fight back or he'll hurt Jazz and Jazz can't fight back because he'll also hurt Danny who he has locked up at the moment) and to 'impress' the elites (As much as Vlad wants to use Danny for the party he knows the boy would do something to embarrass him in front of them, he at least knows Jazz will keep her manners in check) with how intelligent his goddaughter is.

During the ball, Jazz (in a stunning dress and mask, think like manhwa worthy outfit tbh if you want) meets Jason (who lost the Bats/Birds most recent 'Not it' game and was made to go with Tim to Vlad's party) and both hit it off when they meet in the garden, under moonlight, both wanting some fresh air.

Jazz wants to enjoy her time with Jason but worries about Danny and thus tries to leave and figure a way to help him without tipping Vlad off she was trying to save her brother. However she notices she's being watched by some ghosts Vlad employed and no doubt would report her should she even try. So she kinda uses Jason as way to keep them being unaware of her planning... or at least that was the case until she noticed another Team Phantom member sneaking into Vlad's place and knows its only a matter of time before her brother is freed.

Within the hour she gets a text from Danny who tells her, he's out and gonna fight Vlad for locking him up, that Dani is with him too so it'll be double beat down and that he'll come get her soon.

She is pulled away from the text when Jason asks what books she likes to read and now with the weight of her brother needing to be safe, or as safe as he could be, is lifted off her shoulder she answers.

Its magical, its wonderful, and for a moment Jazz is able to actually enjoy this party, ignoring the pained hits Vlad was no doubt receiving from what she can hear with her liminal enchanced hearing, because talking to Jason, or J as he introduced himself as, was very fun and wonderful and wow he was very handsome even with his mask and-

Jazz is startled out of her wondering thoughts when she could hear someone in the party scream, no doubt Danny, Dani, and Vlad's fight probably bleed into the main hall and she could see people starting to run out.

Jazz sits on the bench as Jason goes running in, no doubt curious as to what is happening and going to get his 'brother' Tim who he came to the party with out. Jazz takes off her mask and sits it down the bench and waits before Dani appears and says they should get going, Danny is keeping an angry Vlad busy and that she can take Jazz home.

By the time Jason comes back, with a researching on his phone Tim, all he finds of the charming woman he met at the dumb ball he got dragged to was her mask on the bench.

[weirdloverwilde]

its interesting that belinda got annoyed at her flatmate for calling her by a nickname, linda, but the doctor has essentially done the same thing, calling her bel constantly. like hes already disrespecting her in a way she explictly doesn't like

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Master manipulator vs Master manipulator

 [First] Prev <–-> Next

[inbabylontheywept]

Memories of Grandpa Dale

I was playing in the barn, but I was also hiding from my grandpa. I was aware that this hurt his feelings, but I didn’t know what else to do. Every year I’d ever visited him before, he’d seemed kind of mad at me, but I’d hoped still that year was the year that we’d finally be friends. I even made a list of things to do together. 

Unfortunately, the list did not fix things¹ so I'd been forced to acknowledge that if he couldn't be happy with me there, and he couldn't be happy with me gone, then perhaps he simply could not be happy. At least, not until someone invented The Secret Third Thing.

(But I was only nine. So. That someone would probably not be me.) 

Fortunately, being happy is a task that I've never needed to delegate - I’m actually quite good at it. I’d been sad in the barn for maybe an hour or so, but eventually that got boring, so I invented a new game where I would chase big clouds of shiny blue flies off the sun-warmed horse-poop and try to shoo them towards a corner of the barn that I knew had a large spiderweb in it. 

I was perfectly aware that this is not ideal for the flies, but I had just read Charlotte’s Web, so my empathy function was very biased towards spiders, who I perceived as patient and compassionate and slightly maternal women. Who just happened to have eight legs.  

(I, like most nine year old boys, would have personally been willing to fight a war for every patient, compassionate, slightly maternal woman I had ever met. If you, personally, have ever hugged a little boy who was trying very hard not to cry in front of his friends after skinning his knee, know that there is a child in this world that would kill in your name.)

(Now live with that knowledge.) 

I played my game with the flies for a long time. Long enough to get into a rhythm of running and laughing and then panting outside on my back while wallowing in the long green grass.

It was during one of those walks outside to lay in the grass that I noticed my mom. She was sitting on a hay bale, looking baffled. I don’t know how long she’d been there, but I was too young and confident to even feel odd. She asked me what I was doing, and I just kind of gestured to the ceiling, and said, You know, just. Feeding spiders.²

She nodded. I was feeding spiders. Of course. 

We sat there a few moments. It was an amicable silence, but I was still faintly relieved when she broke it.  

Your grandpa’s been looking for you, she said. He got some grapes earlier. Wanted to take you to feed the ducks.

I've always really liked feeding ducks³. Visiting them had actually been the next thing on my list. 

I was baffled by the effort. 

He’s mad at me, I pointed out. My mom, to her credit, looked genuinely confused. 

He’s not, she said. 

But he was mad when we picked blackberries, I pointed out. And when we went on that walk down to the prairie. And he snapped at me this morning when I asked if I could have some of his dried mangos. 

The mangos had been my last straw. The weirdest part was that he didn’t even say no, he just (angrily) said of course you can, as if it was an insult to his hospitality that I was asking when just the year before he’d yelled at me because I ate a tin of dried apples. Apparently, I was just supposed to know that those apples were exclusively reserved for The Apocalypse. 

(To be fair, my grandpa has always been very worried about the apocalypse, but mostly in the context of not having enough dried apples for it. There was a period of my life where I thought that The Apocalypse referred to some kind of prophesied biblical event where there would be No More Apples. This thought has stuck with me for a very long time⁴.)

Well. Yeah. My mom said. He’s mad. But he’s not mad at you. He’s just… Mad. 

I mulled this over. 

What about the mangos? I asked, and she shrugged at that. 

Alright, so that time he was mad at you, but that’s being mad one time in three days. Cut the man some slack, you’ve been asking him for permission before eating anything. 

I just don’t want to eat the wrong thing, I said. I’ve always been very defensive of my rule-following. Both because rules are important, and also because that #10 can of dried apples ripped through me like a shotgun full of razor blades⁵. That “snack” had 400% the recommended daily fiber for an adult man. And I was very definitely not a grown man when I ate it.  

It was a very painful experience is what I am trying to say. 

I know, my mom said. 

I don’t even like apples, I added. Still defensive. 

I know, my mom said again. She’s very good at saying it. It always feels like she’s agreeing with me, and not just trying to rush me onto The Point. Sometimes, people need to make detours from The Point in order to explain things. Like, hypothetically, why they once ate a very large number of dehydrated apples. My mom is wise, and she has always known this. . 

I just really wanted to eat something sweet, I continued. They don’t keep anything sweet in the whole house. The day before I ate those apples, I licked all the salt off a saltine just so I could eat the cracker plain. And then the cracker tasted just like a cookie. To me. That’s how crazy I was going. 

My mom nodded her head sympathetically. 

My first month of college, she said conspiratorially, I ate about a box of poptarts a day. 

There was another longish pause as both of us considered what led us to this point. 

My parents are crazy, my mom said at long last. It’s a very peaceful statement to her. I'm sure it was stressful when she first realized it, but she's had a long time to make her peace, and she's made it well.  

Will you go with me? I asked. To feed the ducks?  

He’s not mad at you, she said again. Reemphasizing her point. He’s just mad. It’s just how he is. 

But she went with me anyway.

I watched Grandpa Dale closely the whole way to the pond to see if my mom was right. She was. She almost always is.  He was angry while he drove, and he was angry while he parked and he was even angry while he strode purposefully towards the park. When we got there, he took several grapes, and he angrily put them in his hand, and angrily extended the hand towards the ducks, and he looked at me, and for maybe a tenth of a second he looked okay. Not exactly happy, but a little less mad. Then a duck bit the webbing between his pointer finger and his thumb.

He immediately, without hesitation, without even a second thought, hit the duck with a haymaker⁶. For a human, the punch would have been devastating, but the duck had the benefit of having essentially no inertia, so it just kind of moved sideways and looked perplexed. 

You son of a bitch, my grandpa said. This is a funny thing for anyone to say to a duck, but it was especially funny to hear coming from a former Mormon Bishop. 

Quack,⁷ said the duck. 

My mom started laughing. I'd felt a sort of holy terror at the anger my grandpa was exuding in that moment, but the moment she laughed I realized how absurd it was. I was watching a grown man beef with a duck. I was watching a grown man beef with the world. 

I started laughing too. In a better world, maybe my grandpa would've joined. Maybe he would've taken a good hard look in the mirror and questioned why exactly he was so angry. But he didn't. Instead he swore at the duck some more, and he threw his remaining handful of grapes at it overhand, like a baseball, and then the duck ate the grapes out of the water, and my mom actually laughed so hard she started dry heaving a little, and my grandpa had to go sit in the car for a few minutes by himself to regain his composure. 

¹ He managed to pick blackberries angrily

² Unfortunately, I do this kind of response quite a bit.

³ I got my first kiss from my wife because I managed to capture a duck. They're like, a motif for my life. Very lucky to have that.

⁴ I reference it again in this very weird short story.

⁵ I eat a lot of strange things.

⁶ My wife is concerned people will not know what a haymaker is. It is simply the most redneck kind of punch.

⁷ ...What did you expect it to say?

[canisalbus]

The way you draw bodies, especially the way you draw hands, is so genuine. It's so nice to look at because it looks so natural, graceful even. The body language and expressions of your characters say so much without them having to say anything at all, it's masterful work.

Thank you! Body language and believably expressive hand gestures are really high on my list of priorities and I put a lot of effort in trying to get them right. So it's really encouraging to hear people notice them!

[afurtivecake]

What if, unbeknownst to everyone around them, Tetsuji and Wymack are embroiled in a psychological battle of wits and nerve the likes of which would put Light/L (of Death Note fame) to shame? What if their negotiations over Kevin was less professional and rational, and more cutthroat and borderline threatening?

Think about it: why would Tetsuji let Kevin go just like that? Broken hand or not, Kevin is valuable property and Kevin has insider information about the Moriyamas. Even an outsider civilian like Kathy Ferdinand can point out that, surely, it would have made more sense for the Ravens to keep Kevin on board, career-ending injury or not.

WHAT IF. Tetsuji feared that Kevin had immediately told Wymack everything he knew about the Moriyamas and about him being Wymack's son and that Wymack might choose to go public with that information and cause a lot of problems. He might not have been sure what Wymack knew or what Wymack had solid proof of. (Maybe he went looking for the letter that contained the only evidence that he knew from Kayleigh who Kevin's father was and couldn't find it? Maybe he couldn't be sure if he had just lost it or if Kevin had somehow found it and handed it over to Wymack as proof when seeking shelter with him.) He has to walk a fine line between probing Wymack for what he knows and threatening him outright with Moriyama resources (which would definitely give him away).

And what if Wymack guessed that that's what Tetsuji was thinking and therefore chose to play it very carefully, not letting Tetsuji know just how much he knows, nor giving any indication about just how big of a fuss he's considering kicking up. What if he calmly and reasonably suggested to Tetsuji that Kevin doesn't to go back, nor does he want to talk about his time with Tetsuji and the Ravens - for now. He has a lot of concerns and questions to raise with Tetsuji about Kevin's physical and mental state, but perhaps they can all agree that those concerns are less important than Kevin's wellbeing at the moment. And that perhaps it would make sense for everyone if Wymack and his staff looked after Kevin for the time being?

What if that's how Wymack manages to get Tetsuji to hand over Kevin (and later, Jean) - basically blackmail.

It'd be so much fun if from Wymack's POV, AFTG is a high-stakes psychological/political drama involving the mafia, the ERC and the man he has an old grudge with.

[inmyowndelusion]

I fully believe that Kokichi figured out that they were in a show and/or simulation, so I believe he would break the fourth wall multiple times. He would look out into the distance(like at the camera but there isn’t a camera if you know what I mean) he would say stuff directed to the audience or the creators, or like creepily smile.

[major-alenko]

Trilogy Appreciation Week Day 2: Friendships

You've been there for me, too, Liara. No, I haven't. I wish I could have joined you back on Illium. You made up for it. Well, I suppose I did just write your name in the stars.