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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 years ago

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Patent troll's IP more powerful than Apple's

I was 12 years into my Locus Magazine column when I published the piece I'm most proud of, "IP," from September 2020. It came after an epiphany, one that has profoundly shaped the way I talk and think about the issues I campaign on.

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

That revelation was about the meaning of the term "IP," which had been the center of this tedious linguistic cold war for decades. People who advocate for free and open technology and culture hate the term "IP" because of its ideological loading and imprecision.

Ideology first: Before "IP" came into wide parlance - when lobbyists for multinational corporations convinced the UN to turn their World Intellectual Property Organization into a specialized agency, we used other terms like "author's monopolies" and "regulatory monopolies."

"Monopoly" is a pejorative. "Property" is sacred to our society. When a corporation seeks help defending its monopoly, it is a grubby corrupter. When it asks for help defending its property, it is enlisting the public to defend the state religion.

Free culture people know allowing "monopolies" to become "property" means losing the battle before it is even joined, but it is frankly unavoidable. How do you rephrase "IP lawyer" without conceding the property point? "Trademark-copyright-patent-and-related-rights lawyer?"

Thus the other half of the objection to "IP": its imprecision. Copyright is not anything like patent. Patent is not anything like trademark. Trade secrets are an entirely different thing again. Don't let's get started on sui generis and neighboring rights.

And this is where my revelation came: as it is used in business circles, "IP" has a specific, precise meaning. "IP" means, "Any law, policy or regulation that allows me to control the conduct of my competitors, critics and customers."

Copyright, patent and trademark all have limitations and exceptions designed to prevent this kind of control, but if you arrange them in overlapping layers around a product, each one covers the exceptions in the others.

Creators don't like having their copyrights called "author's monopolies." Monopolists get to set prices. All the copyright in the world doesn't let an author charge publishers more for their work. The creators have a point.

But when author's monopolies are acquired by corporate monopolists, something magical and terrible happens.

Remember: market-power monopolies are still (theoretically) illegal and when companies do things to maintain or expand their monopolies, they risk legal jeopardy.

But: The corporate monopolist who uses IP to expand their monopoly has no such risk. Monopolistic conduct in defense of IP enjoys wide antitrust forbearance. What's the point of issuing patents or allowing corporations to buy copyrights if you don't let them enforce them?

The IP/market-power monopoly represents a futuristic corporate alloy, a new metal never seen, impervious to democratic control.

Software is "IP" and so any device with software in it is like beskar, a rare metal that can be turned into the ultimate corporate armor.

No company exemplifies this better than Apple, a company that used limitations on IP to secure its market power, then annihilated those limits so that no one could take away its market power.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

In the early 2000s, Apple was in trouble. The convicted monopolist Microsoft ruled the business world, and if you were the sole Mac user in your office, you were screwed.

When a Windows user sent you a Word file, you could (usually) open it in the Mac version of Word, but then if you saved that file again, it often became forever cursed, unopenable by any version of Microsoft Office ever created or ever to be created.

This became a huge liability. Designers started keeping a Windows box next to their dual processor Power Macs, just to open Office docs. Or worse (for Apple), they switched to a PC and bought Windows versions of Adobe and Quark Xpress.

Steve Jobs didn't solve this problem by begging Bill Gates to task more engineers to Office for Mac. Instead, Jobs got Apple techs to reverse-engineer all of the MS Office file formats and release a rival office suite, Iwork, which could read and write MS Office files.

That was an Apple power move, one that turned MS's walled garden into an all-you-can-eat buffet of potential new Mac users. Apple rolled out the Switch ads, whose message was, "Every MS Office file used to be a reason *not* to use a Mac. Now it's a reason to switch *to* a Mac."

More-or-less simultaneously, though, Apple was inventing the hybrid market/IP monopoly tool that would make it the most valuable company in the world, in its design for the Ipod and the accompanying Itunes store.

It had a relatively new legal instrument to use for this purpose: 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act; specifically, Section 1201 of the DMCA, the "anti-circumvention" clause, which bans breaking DRM.

Under DMCA 1201, if a product has a copyrighted work (like an operating system) and it has an "access control" (like a password or a bootloader key), then bypassing the access control is against the law, even if no copyright infringement takes place.

That last part - "even if no copyright infringement takes place" - is the crux of DMCA 1201. The law was intended to support the practices of games console makers and DVD player manufacturers, who wanted to stop competitors from making otherwise legal devices.

With DVD players, that was about "region coding," the part of the DVD file format that specified which countries a DVD could be played back in. If you bought a DVD in London, you couldn't play it in Sydney or New York.

Now, it's not a copyright violation to buy a DVD and play it wherever you happen to be. As a matter of fact, buying a DVD and playing it is the *opposite* of a copyright infringement.

But it *was* a serious challenge to the entertainment cartel's business-model, which involved charging different prices and having different release dates for the same movie depending on where you were.

The same goes for games consoles: companies like Sega and Nintendo made a lot of money charging creators for the right to sell games that ran on the hardware they sold.

If I own a Sega Dreamcast, and you make a game for it, and I buy it and run it on my Sega, that's not a copyright infringement, even if Sega doesn't like it. But if you have to bypass an "access control" to get the game to play without Sega's blessing, it violates DMCA 1201.

What's more, DMCA 1201 has major penalties for "trafficking in circumvention devices" and information that could be used to build such a device, such as reports of exploitable flaws in the programming of a DRM system: $500k in fines and a 5 year sentence for a first offense.

Deregionalizing a DVD player or jailbreaking a Dreamcast didn't violate anyone's copyrights, but it still violated copyright law (!). It was pure IP, the right to control the conduct of critics (security researchers), customers and competitors.

In the words of Jay Freeman, it's "Felony contempt of business-model."

And that's where the Ipod came in. Steve Jobs's plan was to augment the one-time revenue from an Ipod with a recurrent revenue stream from the Itunes store.

He exploited the music industry's superstitious dread of piracy and naive belief in the efficacy of DRM to convince the record companies to only sell music with his DRM wrapper on it - a wrapper they themselves could not authorize listeners to remove.

Ever $0.99 Itunes purchase added $0.99 to the switching cost of giving up your Ipod for a rival device, or leaving Itunes and buying DRM music from a rival store. It was control over competitors and customers. It was IP.

If you had any doubt that the purpose of Ipod/Itunes DRM was to fight competitors, not piracy, then just cast your mind back to 2004, when Real Media "hacked" the Ipod so that it would play music locked with Real's DRM as well as Apple's.

http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3387871/Apple+RealNetworks+Hacked+iPod.htm

Apple used DMCA 1201 to shut Real down, not to stop copyright infringement, but to prevent Apple customers from buying music from record labels and playing them on their Ipods without paying Apple a commission and locking themselves to Apple's ecosystem, $0.99 at a time.

Pure IP. Now, imagine if Microsoft had been able to avail itself of DMCA 1201 when Iwork was developed - if, for example, its "information rights management" encryption had caught on, creating "access controls" for all Office docs.

There's a very strong chance that would have killed Apple off before it could complete its recovery. Jobs knew the power of interoperating without consent, and he knew the power of invoking the law to block interoperability. He practically invented modern IP.

Apple has since turned IP into a trillion-dollar valuation, largely off its mobile platform, the descendant of the Ipod. This mobile platform uses DRM - and thus DMCA 1201 - to ensure that you can only use apps that come from its app store.

Apple gets a cut of penny you spend buying an app, and every penny you spend within that app: 30% (now 15% for a minority of creators after bad publicity).

IP lets one of the least taxed corporations on Earth extract a 30% tax from everyone else.

https://locusmag.com/2021/03/cory-doctorow-free-markets/

Remember, it's not copyright infringement for me to write an app and you to buy it from me and play it on your Iphone without paying the 30% Apple tax.

That's the exact opposite of copyright infringement: buying a copyrighted work and enjoying it on a device you own.

But it's still an IP violation. It bypasses Apple's ability to control competitors and customers. It's felony contempt of business-model.

It shows that under IP, copyright can't be said to exist as an incentive to creativity - rather, it's a tool for maintaining monopolies.

Which brings me to today's news that Apple was successfully sued by a patent troll over its DRM. A company called Personalized Media Communications whose sole product is patent lawsuits trounced Apple in the notorious East Texas patent-troll court.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-19/apple-told-to-pay-308-5-million-for-infringing-drm-patent

After software patents became widespread - thanks to the efforts of Apple and co - there was a bonanza of "inventors" filing garbage patents with the USPTO whose format was "Here's an incredibly obvious thing...*with a computer*." The Patent Office rubberstamped them by the million.

These patents became IP, a way to extract rent without having to make a product. "Investors" teamed up with "inventors" to buy these and impose a tax on businesses - patent licensing fees that drain money from people who make things and give it to people who buy things.

They found a court - the East Texas court in Marshall, TX - that was hospitable to patent trolls. They rented dusty PO boxes in Marshall and declared them to be their "headquarters" so that they could bring suits there.

Locals thrived - they got jobs as "administrators" (mail forwarders) for the thousands of "businesses" whose "head office" was in Marshall (when you don't make a product, your head office can be a PO box).

Productive companies facing hundreds of millions - billions! - in patent troll liability sought to curry favor with locals (who were also the jury pool) by "donating" things to Marshall, like the skating rink Samsung bought for the town.

https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/why-south-korea-s-samsung-built-the-only-outdoor-skating-rink-in-texas

Patent, like copyright, is supposed to serve a public purpose. There are only two clauses in the US Constitution that come with explanations (the rest being "truths held to be self-evident"): the Second Amendment and the "Progress Clause" that creates patents and copyrights.

Famously, the Second Amendment says you can bear arms as part of a "well-regulated militia."

And the Progress Clause? It extends to Congress the power to create patents and copyrights "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts."

I'm with Apple in its ire over this judgment. Sending $308.5m to a "closely held" patent troll has nothing to do with the "Progress of Science and useful Arts."

But it has *everything* to do with IP.

If copyright law can let Apple criminalize - literally criminalize - you selling me If copyright law can let Apple criminalize - literally criminalize - you selling me your copyrighted work, then there's no reason to hate on patent trolls.

They're just doing what trolls do: blocking the bridge between someone engaged in useful work and the customers for that work, and extracting a toll. It's not even 30%.

There is especial and delicious irony in the fact that the patent in question is a DRM patent: a patent for the very same process that Apple uses to lock down its devices and prevent creators from selling to customers without paying the 30% Apple Tax.

But even without that, it's as good an example of what an IP marketplace looks like: one in which making things becomes a liability. After all, the more you make, the more chances there are for an IP owner to demand tax from you to take it to market.

The only truly perfect IP is the naked IP of a patent troll, the bare right to sue, a weapon made from pure abstract legal energy, untethered from any object, product or service that might be vulnerable to another IP owner's weapons.

A coda: you may recall that Apple doesn't use DRM on its music anymore: you can play Itunes music on any device. That wasn't a decision Apple took voluntarily: it was forced into it by a competitor: Amazon, an unlikely champion of user rights.

In 2007, the record labels had figured out that Apple had lured them into a trap, selling millions of dollars worth of music that locked both listeners and labels into the Itunes ecosystem.

In a desperate bid for freedom, they agreed to help Amazon launch its MP3 store - all the same music, at the same prices...without DRM. Playable on an Ipod, but also on any other device.

Prior to the Amazon MP3 store, the market was all DRM: you could either buy Apple's DRM music and play it on your Ipod, or you could buy other DRM music and play it on a less successful device.

The Amazon MP3 store (whose motto was "DRM: Don't Restrict Me") changed that to "Buy Apple DRM music and play it on your Ipod, or buy Amazon music and play it anywhere." That was the end of Apple music DRM.

So why hasn't anyone done this for the apps that Apple extracts the 30% tax on? IP. If you made a phone that could play Ios apps, Apple would sue you:

https://gizmodo.com/judge-tosses-apple-lawsuit-against-iphone-emulator-in-b-1845967318

And if you made a device that let you load non-App Store apps on an Iphone, Apple would also sue you.

Apple understands IP. It learned the lesson of the Amazon MP3 store, and it is committed to building a world where every creator pays a tax to reach every Apple customer.

#pluralistic

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tundrainafrica · 3 years ago

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Title: Lovebug (12/14)

Summary:

“It might be a bug.”

“A bug?”

“Sometimes the developers of this application make mistakes. This is our first time meeting I’m sure so…Isn’t it a bit weird that we just met for the first time and it rings like this? And for two strangers to coincidentally ring each other’s alarms?“

Levi is the developer of the Love Alarm App and Hange is married to Zeke.

Link to cross-postings: AO3

Other Chapters: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Notes: Feedback is very much appreciated :D

It was one of those days where Levi could barely focus.

But it wasn’t anything new. A few days a year, his eyes would be heavy, his back would slump naturally and codes would blur together in some strange way even the most experienced engineers wouldn’t understand. Those days, he had attributed it to exhaustion, to sheer workload or the tension that accompanied impending releases.

It feels a little different. It was terribly unfamiliar and Levi could have almost sworn that it was worse than ever.

Still, he attempted to get back some inkling of control. He opened his workflow tracker, saw green then decided he could consider his priorities later. He opened his checklists and saw meaningless black ink on white spaces then he decided he could start elsewhere.

He opened up a few pull requests, only to end up approving a whole lot of them before even making sense of what fix the developers had been working on. Then, he then assured himself that maybe he could fix errors on the code once they were in production.

It isn’t good practice. A part of him warned. Really, how many times had he heard that from everyone else? How many times had he held those words like a badge and repeated them countless times to his fellow engineers?

But really, how did anyone particularly Erwin, the upper management, the executives, expect him to work after the meeting just that morning. They had dropped a bomb, a very painful truth that he had somehow managed to keep snug, almost invisible at the back of his mind for so many years.

The company ran on too much red tape and officialism. Hell, every fucking comapny ran on red tape, officialism and some tacky version of bureaucracy, all intricately engineered to please the richest stakeholders. Yet, Levi had been working corporate for decades, long enough to learn and just blindly accept them as inevitable parts of work.

Then and there, it was biting him in the ass. So painfully. Levi never expected something as grey and monotonous as office work and corporate politics to bite so painfully.

Ninety five percent chance. Erwin never told him the details of the contract termination but he had some consideration to at least inform Levi that Zeke was very much considering it. In that same meeting, he had casually mentioned the amount of time it would take to finalize it. If Erwin did tell him some specifics, Levi probably didn’t hear it, especially when he had been busy only barely keeping himself together.

Levi soon figured out, although he had been accepting them the whole time, a huge part of him would have gladly rebelled.

By god, he hated bureaucracy, he hated corporate synergy, he hated the concept of investor satisfaction. Most importantly, he hated the whole prospect of everything the past few months ending with some signed contract termination.

And the silent rage continued well inside him, as he mindlessly switched from one tab to the other, unable to make sense of much.

Maybe he had been too busy reflecting, entertaining those very unwelcome emotions.

Was he too soft hearted. Was he taking his job too personally demanding some personal closure? Was he too immature having been so emotionally affected by that memorandum? And maybe that inability to let out anything more than some professional query at his manager had him barely coping.

‘Coping’ came in many forms. It involved the slow realization he was merely an employee, albeit a head of an engineering team. Then another realization soon after that he was in no position to question the upper management’s decision.

It involved a very cruel realization that although he was the head of the emotions alarm project, the one who had developed it from the beginning and the only one who knew the application end to end, the emotions alarm was still corporate property.

By extension, by some fruit of corporate processes and the constant exchange of assets, it was Zeke’s property. All the assets, the codes Levi had created, the pull requests he had reviewed and merged, every long night he spent looking over bugs, had all been because he was paid to do it.

Zeke’s property. He acknowledged those two words and they echoed incessantly in his head as his eyes ran over the codes of the emotions alarm.

The emotions alarm wasn’t his. It was the companies. And when the contract is finalized, it would be all Zeke’s and Zeke would be the one to decide for himself how to work with that application.

Hire another head engineer to work with Hange… Hire other coders… That’s what business is.

He and Erwin had talked for a while after the meeting. Erwin had been careful with his words and maybe he had softened his tone just a bit, as if he had sensed Levi’s discomfort.

In his own state though, Levi could only stumble upon one conclusion. He was just as replaceable as every other employee. And the pain of having been too attached to a project, the impending loss of his own brain child had him catatonic.

Any comfort or attempt at alleviation seemed far off.

He wouldn’t be invited to the rest of the meetings. The fate of that project would be up in the air, mulled over by the top brass of the company, a few lawyers and accountants, then approved by Zeke. Levi on the other hand, would be ordered back to his office to focus on other tasks, expected to function like it hadn’t felt like some slow and painful end of the world, since the incident at the school a few weeks ago.

Any silver lining as he worked was shot down by his cynical side. The next few minutes, he continued to work, just for the bare minimum to get paid. He approved leaves here and there, He mindlessly looked through some code, ran a debugger he didn’t completely understand. He mindlessly scanned through the logs before he accepted, his brain was in no state to work.

Then he opted not to think beyond that. He closed all the windows on his desktop. He opened another folder towards the corner.

His own personal folder. Inside it were the same codes for the emotions alarm he had worked on for Hange’s birthday. But it felt like more of a personal project.

In its own little way, it pulled it out of that catatonic state. By some miracle, the gears of his head were turning again, slowly at first. Then they turned more quickly by the second, sending a rush of motivation through him. Maybe because the upper management still didn’t know about that side of the emotions alarm. Maybe it was because it still felt like a secret between him and Hange. And somehow, his mind was able to twist it. Levi had managed to convince himself, it was still his and Hange’s.

Hange is still here. She’ll come back.

"You know, I'm pretty sure conference rooms are for conferences.”

Levi bit back the surprise at Petra’s sudden visit. "Well we have five empty ones," he said. He had been working in empty conference rooms for weeks already and had silently rehearsed his own explanation already.

"You have your own office," Petra said.

"I know," Levi answered nonchalantly. Maybe most other days, he would have attempted something more engaging.

How engaging could he be though when his own brain child was close to being sold to an investor, its fate completely out of his control?

By some stupid corporate rule, he couldn't tell Petra that just yet. He looked up at her, willing himself to make some meager excuse of eye contact. "You need anything?"

Petra shook her head. "It’s not really work related… Or actually it kinda is... If that's okay… If you're busy I can bring this up another time." She was holding her work laptop closer to her, a subtle move that had been enough to catch Levi’s eye.

For just a second.

Levi looked back at the code. A wave of guilt washed through him when he remembered, it wasn’t necessarily productive work— a very temporary wave of guilt that he easily washed off just recalling the overly reverent attitude the executives had towards corporate processes.

He wasn't busy. The code he had been staring at the past few minutes wasn't company business anyway. "This can be finished later," Levi said as he lowered his laptop screen.

Petra cocked her head to the side. "Boss, are you okay? I noticed you haven’t been working in the office in a while and I know you---”

“The office is a mess,” Levi said. “And I just haven’t had time to clean up.”

“You need help?”

“No.”

“If you’re busy, I could--”

“Petra, it’s my mess to clean up.” He probably had said that last part too abrasively. After all, that mess referred to multiple messes at once and he was more than a little salty about that.

There was a flash of surprise, or maybe hurt in Petra’s face. Levi only had his peripherals to hint for himself how she might have felt. He sighed. “I don’t wanna clean it up but I don’t wanna stay there either. Besides, as long as no one is using the conference rooms, I think it’ll be fine.”

“Well, it is our right as employees…” Petra started.

“It is,” Levi said. He looked back up at Petra expectantly then lowered his laptop screen much lower, he could have easily just shut it down. “So what did you come here for?”

“I wanted to ask about Hange.” Surprisingly, Petra had brought out that conversation topic with a lot more certainty than every line before that.

Hange. And it had brought about an unwelcome twinge of pain inside him. He took a deep breath, letting it spread over his already enervated body. He noticed then, her name had started to seem strangely unfamiliar to his tongue. In truth, he hadn’t said her name in a while.

Levi took a deep breath and repeated her name, just a little experiment for himself. “What about Hange?”

“Your alarm and her alarm. They were ringing back in the gym.”

“That was weeks ago. Why bring it up now?” Levi asked.

Petra gave a slight shake of her head. “I was just wondering. Do you think it’s a bug?”

“It’s not,” Levi said, one eyebrow raised. He wondered if Erwin had ever discussed it with the others. Or wait, that might have been his job.

Petra grinned yet she seemed more hurt than actually happy. “I suspected it was a bug at first. But you know, when Hange stopped showing up in the office, you started acting different.”

“Have I?” Levi asked

“Yeah, you stopped working in your office. The few times I visited, it was a little cluttered but you never liked your office messy right? It only started getting messier when Hange started working closely with you…”

Levi was only becoming more self aware. Suddenly looking at how quickly, he had opened up his laptop, hunched over, just to hide his face behind the screen. He couldn’t even control his own reaction anymore. “And?”

“And when Hange was working… you seemed happier… You started going out for lunch more, talking to us more. You even invited me out…” Around that time, Petra started to stumble at her words, her ears turned a little pink. With time, she started to stumble with her words, to points beyond comprehension. “I know, I might look creepy pointing all this out but there were two points I wanted to make with this.”

“Two...points?” Then why didn’t you just start with it? Levi would have wanted to ask. But he was grateful that the speech was long enough for him to edit two lines of code, even in his own compromised state.

Petra took some time to compose herself. She put one finger up. “First, Hange changed you for the better, there were obvious signs that you were happier, so maybe those can be considered signs of love. Second, that means there might not be a bug and you’re just a really talented developer.”

“That’s reassuring,” Levi said. With his lack of energy, it could have come out toneless. “I mean it,” Levi added.

“If you wanna call it love or not, that will be up to you. But I think it aligns with our expectations for the application,” Petra straightened her back after that, adopting a more professional demeanor. “If possible, I’d love to have a chat with Hange about it. Maybe get her take on my theory…”

Petra wouldn’t have known. The talks had been between the upper management, it would only make its way to lower rung employees as a memo.

A fucking memo. Fuck red tape. Levi thought to himself. When it wasn’t official, could he even tell her?

Fuck that. “Hange might not come back,” Levi said.

Petra’s eyes widened almost immediately, her jaw dropped.

Before she could even speak, Levi continued. “They might terminate the contract. I know they’re discussing the legalities of it. Zeke is going to take the unfinished and have another team work on it. Or at least that’s what I’m understanding.”

“But there might---”

“There’s no chance,” Levi said firmly.

“Levi just---”

“None. There’s none.” Levi shook his head for emphasis. He allowed his voice to rise just a little bit louder than usual. He wanted to shoot down whatever glimmer of hope, before it got out of control.

Annoyingly, Petra had a way of just trying to find hope, the brighter side in most situations. But he didn’t need it. He didn’t want it. In his already vulnerable state, it seemed almost mocking.

And she was still trying. “But Hange----”

Levi banged one hand on the table in warning. “Petra,” he said. “Just stop.”

An abrupt slam on the table had always been enough to quiet people and Petra shouldn’t have been an exception.

In a surprising turn of events, she slammed harder on the table. “No, listen to me Levi.” Her voice was much firmer and at that moment, it didn’t seem like she had regard for differences in positions.

In shock, Levi fell silent and he was compelled to listen to that voice of authority.

“I came here for a reason.” She dropped her laptop on the table, almost louder than the slam she made just a second ago. “We got a support email which you might want to see. This is the reason I went here in the first place.” Petra quickly booted up her laptop. “It’s a support ticket, and the email...it looks like Hange’s.”

[email protected]

A quick look at the date only confirmed it, it had been there for a week. There was a flyer attached which only sealed its fate as spam mail. Of course, it would have taken weeks to identify it.

But why would Hange use that email? At first glance, Levi couldn’t help but be suspicious.

“It looks like it’s related to Mr. Jaeger’s convention. He’s having one and I thought, you might wanna check it out… If you have unfinished business with Hange, use that opportunity to talk to her.”

It could be spam mail. It wasn’t that hard to create a fake email using Hange Zoe’s name but it was still worth some looking into. A quick google search only confirmed it. Zeke was having an event in one of the most expensive cities in the world, a coastal city a twelve hour flight away.

Still, Levi couldn’t brush off the doubt. Would Hange have used an email with her name? After taking so much of her precious time creating fake emails?

“If this is really her, then that means she wanted to contact us right?” Petra continued. “I think it’s worth a look.”

Maybe all he needed was someone to tell him, a good push in the right direction. Before Levi even realized it, his mind was working harder than ever since the incident three weeks ago, working overtime to justify something as ridiculous as a last minute week-long vacation.

If Hange did send the email, it might be worth it. And if by some chance, it really was spam, then he will have just wasted a good week-long vacation in ‘one of the most dazzling cities in the world.’

Levi could count with the number of fingers in one hand, the amount of times he had been in a long haul flight. The prices for a hotel, a last minute flight and of course, the leaves needed to make the trip were all daunting issues to consider.

He had expected himself to be at least a little more hesitant. A part of him was moving almost automatically. He stood up and slammed his laptop shut. “I think I’m gonna take a week long leave.”

“Since I joined, you haven’t even taken a sick leave. I think you deserve this,” Petra responded. And that peaceful response from her of all people had been reassuring.

“Thanks for that.”

Petra shook her head. “It’s only natural to wish the best for someone right?” She paused, and a weak blush climbed up her cheeks as she bit her lip. “Well, I meant the best for you and Hange. Just see what you can do for her.”

Levi let out a sigh. “But it helps you know.”

And somehow, those kind words had only left Petra more flustered. In thanks, he offered to take her back to her work station, but not much farther than that. He made a quick stop to his still cluttered office, did some quick cleaning up, leaving the white board and Hange’s own work station still untouched, like it has been everyday since three weeks ago.

He went home early that day and as expected, his brain continued to nag.

Was it a useless move? A stupid move? A rash move? Maybe it was. But he wasn't going to tell anyone else, just in case someone managed to convince him out of it.

Levi had taken some precautions. He emailed back, only to get no response. He did some research on the flyer. The event came with different names, trade shows, networking events.

With the objective of bringing together the largest names in neighboring countries… We aim to optimize production, bring about the best quality… Seminars, business dinners, product demonstrations etc.

The words blurred together slowly and before Levi knew it, he couldn’t make sense of it at all. It wasn’t important anyway. What seemed more urgent was the schedule of events right under the spiel.

It was a five day conference and it had already started the night before. Levi opened up his leave credits, still completely full. Most years, it had remained untouched until the end of the year.

He opened up his own bank account. He didn’t have much but he still had more than enough to take that particular risk. And when he contacted Erwin about it, the latter seemed almost excited he was taking a leave.

By some sorcery, he got the one week leave, tagged as emergency leaves. The next afternoon, less than 24 hours after that meeting with Petra, Levi was already in the airport, overnight bag over one shoulder.

He was going on an adventure, some stupid, impulsive and potentially pointless adventure.

***

The guilt never abated. There was something almost surreal, yet seemingly audacious about taking a last minute long leave, after spending years working non stop.

Would anyone understand it? The more Levi thought about it, the more he realized, he didn’t understand it himself. So by some twists and turns of logic, Levi guessed nobody would understand.

He had books he could have read on the plane. There was an inflight entertainment system.

Still shaken by that one week long life, Levi ended up booting up his laptop and spending a huge chunk of the time reviewing pull requests on the flight. Time started to pass like how it used to in the office.

As expected, he got tired four hours in. Losing energy reserves midday in the office was a very unwelcome experience but something Levi never seemed to completely avoid. It was a very familiar experience that the next few steps had been much easier.

He pulled out the codes, his own personal project folder on his desktop, he stared at the files of codes yet to be merged to the original plan.

Then he started to organize his thoughts. Before he knew it, his fingers were flying over the keyboard.

It could have been some reminder, or just some attempt at shoehorning reason to his impulsive decision to cross the ocean on a last minute vacation. But the more Levi let his brain nag, the more he started to justify. The longer he justified, the sooner he just accepted.

Who cared if anyone else found it sappy. He needed closure.

Then and there, it seemed like closure meant articulating the plans of his own personal project, ideas that had been exchanged that fateful night in some empty playground, ideas that only built and built themselves until they were rows of codes yet to be tested or executed.

Maybe closure was getting the plans for the emotions alarm to Hange.

And as Levi continued to type, he realized, he had a clear idea on how he wanted it to work. Articulating it, planning it into something Hange would have understood was not too much of a tall order.

Connect the emotion alarm to a dashboard… plans on how to quantify emotions, moods… Colors, emotions, suggestions.

Newfound energy had Levi tirelessly working over that plan the whole long haul flight, creating diagrams, appending it with his own notes and suggestions. They were still empty spaces, questions and question marks, space which Hange would have been more qualified to fill herself.

After looking at it once then twice, reading out loud softly too himself the parts that hadn’t made too much sense, Levi scrolled back up and typed four words on the upper left.

Working Title: Mood Alarm.

Hange would probably argue semantics, how moods were a lot more temporary than emotions. And Levi was imagining some outrageous argument in his head and his own responses which would never see the light of day. He stayed staunch with his decision. Unless, Hange could come up with anything more catchy, it would stay.

And that fake argument, had been enough for him to relax. He lowered his laptop screen then reclined his seat and stared out the window. It was still a light blue but there were already hints of purple and pink just straight ahead.

The sun would set soon but only for a few hours. One quick calculation told him, it wouldn’t ever be late at night. Once he arrived at his destination, it would still be day and he would have to adjust quickly.

Tucking his laptop away, he allowed himself a few hours of sleep and he had been lucky to have slept long enough to wake up to a pilot’s message about flying over the city then a good view of unfamiliar landscapes just outside the window.

Levi spent those last few minutes before landing, tracing the skyline, counting the number of tiny boxes that dotted the greens, just inches away from clusters of green, white, silver, then flashes of other colors, too many colors to count.

It was an expensive city. He didn’t need Google to tell him that. Everyone knew it as a city only for the filthy rich. He could imagine Zeke having a house or an apartment there, maybe even two. And he made some guesses of which one Zeke could have owned among the larger ones by the beach. Then he made a much longer reflection of just one Yes or No question.

Would Hange been there? He was still too high up to distinguish humans on the outdoor balconies from tricks of light. Still he pretended that she was on one of the balconies over looking the ocean.

The plane got lower and lower, the houses were starting to look more like houses than little tiny boxes. Close enough, Levi was starting to see the glamour of the city, he was starting to see the glowing characteristics which made it a first choice for the ultra rich.

Sparkling blue ocean, only peppered by speed boats and yachts moored at the docks. From inland, mountain ranges formed crescents and worked with the coast to outline the borders of the cities from miles around.

By some type of magic, the landscapes surrounding it had managed to make the dazzling city its own world. Levi begrudgingly gave some credit to the rich for seeing potential in such a breathtaking view.

Just before the coast were tall buildings among shorter buildings and they were lined up on the flat lands, touching one end of the mountain range then the other. Some were hotels, others were casinos, a few of them were malls. Parks were clustered among the buildings, yet they seemed out of place. They were like some shoddily formed assurance that the city wasn’t out to get any tourist’s money.

Levi was seeing differently. The struggle he went into booking a hotel was already a prelude to whatever he would be dealing with. He silently patted his wallet at his back pocket as the pilot’s final instructions sounded over the whole plane.

"Cabin crew prepare for landing."

And all the passengers had been excited to leave. The plane soon slowed to a stop. Even before the seatbelt sign went off, Levi was already hearing the click of seatbelts. Then everyone filed out of their seats, pulling out luggages from the overhead compartment.

Levi was one of the last few out of the plane. Yet with his lack of check-in luggage, he was still one of the first out of the airport.

Nothing could have completely prepared him for the abrupt shift from dry autumn to a wet perpetual summer. He was greeted by some faint smell of the ocean, almost stifling warmth in the middle of October, and very very humid air that stuck to his skin. Unfamiliar sensations on skin, unfamiliar scents and an unfamiliar language that only blurred into nonsense when they made their way into his ears.

It was a new world, a new adventure, Levi would have never taken under any other circumstances. And maybe that had been the reason why the rush of guilt came back when he allowed himself to marvel over the views, the first hand experience of standing close proximity, breathing the same air of that city he had only ever read about books, or seen in the news.

Levi took a deep breath, pulled off his autumn jacket almost violently.

Then he reminded himself again. If he didn’t find her, he’d still be okay. If he didn’t find her, then that trip will just have been a break.

A well-deserved break.

***

According to reception, his hotel was conveniently located just a five minute distance from the convention center. According to his maps application, it was ten minutes away. Levi though, had taken one hour to make his way there

There were hidden paths that weaved through allies and the occasional mall entrances and exits and maybe that had been what reception had been referring to when they mentioned shortcuts.

Levi walked quickly through them at first before he opened up to a larger road. When his surroundings were more open, when his vision stretched far beyond the narrow walls of the alleys, he thought one of the most beautiful cities in the world to be worth a few detours.

Anyway, he had found the signs were all pointing towards the hybrid building that doubled as a hotel and convention center. It might have been the grandest building all around.

He scanned his surroundings, trying to connect his own view from the plane to his own surroundings. Unable to conjure a very clear and accurate picture of what had come above, he couldn’t confirm whether it had been the grandest building around.

It wasn’t too important anyway.

It seemed like the city was on some journey to prove itself to him. Every path, road, alleyway, shopping street and even the interiors of the mall were all different levels of grand. And they all didn’t disappoint, especially to someone who barely even left his home city.

Clean finishings, newly paved roads, cobble stoned streets and red brick roads all seemed to come straight out of the sappiest rags to riches movies.

One cruel truth though Levi soon found out—and had been expecting anyway—was that everything came with a price.

Of course, it would. But Levi hadn’t embedded that truth deep enough inside him to be able to completely stifle his surprise at the price of bottled water, then the price of a late breakfast. They were all prices Levi would have never considered paying for one meal’s worth of food. So he settled for fast food. And he was sure, he would be eating fast food for every single meal until he flew back home.

Eating burger meals worth twice or thrice what he would have gotten at home was still a harrowing experience. He was on that constant in between state, naturally bitter at the ridiculous cost of living yet still forcing himself to savor those few bites of a sandwich.

And he found some inkling of a distraction just staring out the window, watching the crowds go by as he consumed his brunch slowly.

Then, he noticed, he never stopped thinking about her. She had always been somewhere in his mind, still close enough to the front that a flash of brown hair, a messy pony tail or even a pair of glasses among the crowds were enough to have him eyes wide, chewing slower than usual.

In one quick impulsive move, Levi dropped the burger, pulled out his phone and activated the love alarm.

Just in case.

He put on his earphones, then his baseball cap over it. He finished his food much faster then exited the store.

The love alarm didn't ring as he weaved through the crowds. He put his cap lower on over his face, keeping himself unrecognizable.

So, it shouldn't ring for anyone if anyone can't see me right.

That was expected behavior at least. And Levi was just laying trust on some belief that if Hange was nearby, two things might happen. If Hange hadn’t cleared her alarm history and her alarm would recognize his. Or, even if she used a new account, she would recognize him with a baseball cap covering half his face, and it would still ring.

That was assuming she still used her love alarm.

It was a very small chance and Levi was completely aware of it. So he made his way to the convention center, taking note of the signs with the names plastered on them, with arrows guiding him through shopping streets.

Levi didn't mind the detours, more crowds to attempt to look through. When he finally arrived at the hotel entrance though, he found he was tired and a little grumpy.

With the words at the front mentioning Zeke Jaegers name as a keynote speaker though, he had gained some newfound hope, Hange might just be nearby.

He had done the research at least. There was a visitor's price. There was a guest book.

There would be people selling him medical equipment, the latest medical technology and the drugs, supply chains, just the latest lingo, Levi never bothered to learn.

And he got those business vernacular in slow, stilted opportunities, so separated from one another that he never made sense of them.

He was there for one reason. Hange. So it wasn't too difficult to feign purpose, maybe even pretend that he had a few million dollars resting in his bank account for an investment.

There was a map, the names of some of the companies were in languages he was only familiar with by appearance. It was name recall that saved him then, he saw a few of Zeke's hospitals show up in the convention map. Forming a path in his head, he dove into his crowds, clutching his phone harder, readjusting his earphones.

No ringing. And he couldn’t help but feel a strange emotion, a mix between disappointment and relief. It was quiet and somehow he liked it that way. Yet, that only meant that Hange wasn’t nearby.

But leads to Hange were a good second best option. “Levi--- Mr. Ackerman?”

“Ms. Finger,” Levi greeted.

If Pieck knew anything about the incident at the school, she didn’t make it obvious. She was all business at that convention, decked up in business attire, fliers and a product handbook on the desk right in front of her,

She made her way closer to him, letting out a hand to raise and before Levi could even mirror that same movement, someone cut in between them.

“May I help you?”

Levi could have sworn he had never met that man in front of him. Yet the man was looking at him suspiciously, out of character for someone in a suit and flyers.

Pieck pushed past him."Porco, I'll handle this. So, what brings you here?"

Levi had to play his cards well. "I wanted to talk…" to Zeke? Or to Hange? Which was the better name to bring up?

Pieck nodded at him, an inquisitive look on her face. "To talk…"

"Business…"

"What kind of business? You could relay it through your manager right?"

"it's about the app we're developing." He had his laptop with him then, and only the motion of his laptop to his front albeit had Pieck lighting up.

Of course it would, Pieck had been one of his fans when he had first demo-ed the emotions alarm in the hospital just a few months back.

"You've been planning improvements."

Levi gave a light nod. "I've created plans to further improve the efficacy of the application. I was hoping to talk to Zeke about it, or if he's too busy, Hange." He hoped he had used the right jargon.

Pieck had seemed uncertain there. Yet her eyes had darted to his laptop enough times for Levi to see that she was interested, that somehow she had held a stake in those final products.

"If you want me to show it…" Levi was about to drop his bag and pull it out.

That is, if Peke hadn't stopped him then. "Don't trouble yourself," she said. "But, you wouldn't find Zeke here for most of the day. He only shows up for the business dinners but they're on an invitation basis. I can try asking around, we have a few employees who could ask Zeke."

"If you could tell me where Hange is…"

And that was where things got slightly complicated and somehow Levi suspected from the way Pieck had avoided his gaze yet at the same time, Porco had flashed him with a glare, there was something they knew that he didn't.

Pieck spoke up. "Hange huh? Haven't seen her since the convention started. Even during the days leading up to the convention, she was in and out, more than we could even remember."

"She's unpredictable. Don't think you're going to find her here," Porco added.

"But if you could contact her yourself?" Pieck looked at him pointedly.

"Unpredictable huh?" Levi wasn't all too surprised that they would call her unpredictable. And they had said it with a hint of animosity on both their voices, a tone which very much said 'dont bother', or maybe, ‘contacting Zeke might be the better option."

Levi, though, saw a challenge in that unpredictability. If he played his cards right, he might even find predictability in it.

At the least, he managed to let out a light greeting of thanks before he pulled out of the crowds then past the entrance of the stifling convention.

Levi still kept a copy of a program, taking note of keynote speakers among them. Hange wasn't in any of them so his thoughts flew quickly out of the convention, only rooted there somehow by that offer from Pieck to get him in touch with Zeke's executive team.

No help at all with finding Hange. But Levi couldn't help but just think that their actions may have been calculated. Once again, Levi was groveling about the stiffness of the world of politics and artificial corporate pleasantries.

When that became too stressful, his thoughts went back to Hange.

Hange was unpredictable, in a predictable way. And Levi was sure as long as he strode through the town with some purpose, he could make sense of that 'chaos' she always seemed to exude.

That night, he approached it with some careful premeditation, while considering as well that he was still suffering from jet lag.

He scanned through maps, aerial photos, then pictures from taken from high points in the city. He let his eyes trace over the coasts, then the beaches, the affluent areas close proximity to the beach that strategically overlooked the bluest parts of the ocean. Then he noted a less affluent area that brushed the other side of the mountain.

Focusing on the smaller houses, almost hidden by the iconic skyline, he asked himself, would Hange be there? He didn't have a straight answer but he wouldn't put it past her. Besides, any sense of adventure had started to become a little more welcome.

There was truth to it, Hange was unpredictable. But the predictability to it was, Hange was so unpredictable, she was memorable. He was sure if he would ask about the brunette, someone would know.

If Hange acted like the Hange, he knew, someone might recognize her. Someone in a simple community in a country thousands of miles away from his own, wouldn't know Hange Zoe as anything more than some eccentric brunette.

And maybe that was where he was supposed to start.

The next morning, he bought a bus ticket and he had been lucky enough to even get an opportunity to sit. After all, no one actually visited that city for the locals.

It was almost a half an hour bus away form the city center, and houses by the coastline were getting further apart until Levi reached a point where cabanas were made of simple wood, paths were etched lightly on the ground.

Levi disembarked at one of the more simpler bus stops for miles around, and it didn't look like the bus passed there often.

But maybe it was better that way.

Untouched Nature, free nature is a beautiful thing. Nature once again at its rawest form, at its most candid, not flaunting its best parts for the rich to admire.

And Levi was seeing beauty in the candid.

There were a few local kids, wading by, speaking a language Levi didn't understand and for a second, Levi just stood, breathing in the sour air of some untouched beach. It differed a lot from the beach thirty minutes away. There was no music playing in the background, no strobe lights and Levi concluded one thing.

Hange would have enjoyed this.

Levi would bet money that if Hange did have the freedom to run around, she might have been there. The houses around the area were of a simple kind, so far apart, that Levi had to walk thousands of steps just to get from one to the other. He traced the coastline as he walked, far enough from the shores to keep his feet dry but still close enough that he felt the moist sand squish from underneath him. He was following some path back the way he came, towards the skyline, he noted there were bars among them, seemingly affordable bars, maybe catering to locals.

Levi entered to find chaos. Men in a group playing some possible version of mahjong with rocks, others playing chess and others playing cards with rocks as currencies.

And he was more convinced Hange would have joined them if she had the freedom to move around.

So he took the risk. "Do you get foreigners here often?"

And maybe the word ‘foreigner’ or the word ‘often’ had been unfamiliar to the bartender.

He looked questioningly at Levi but it didn't look like he was completely lost. He turned the younger bartender who looked back at Levi. "May I help you sir?" he asked with a thick yet still very intelligible accent.. Levi suspected he had worked in the city center before.

"Foreigners...do you get a lot here?" Levi was slow at first.

"A few. May I ask why?" And he was starting to suspect the man worked in service.

It looked like the man didn't need the quick adjustments though, so Levi continued. "I'm looking for someone…"

The local gestured for him to go on.

And just like that, Levi found out Hange's predictability. All he needed was some subtle gesture, some consideration, that maybe it would have been best to approach the men hustling chess players by the side, or the other men playing some version of mahjong.

It was just a quick flick of his head towards the gamblers as he tried to find the right words to say.

And the man in front of him figured it out. "Glasses? Brown wavy hair?"

"She likes playing games. She plays here?" Levi asked, just for some confirmation, some proof that he wasn't socially engineering anyone.

The younger man looked at the bartender. The latter broke out into a smile. "Hange?" he said with a thick accent. He let out a laugh then turned to Levi almost suspiciously.

Levi nodded quickly. "Yes, Hange." Hänge Zoe. Should he say her last name?

The bartenders said something to the English speaking local. There was a brief exchange between them and the bartender pointed at Levi.

"Her hair is always messy," Levi said, he put his hands at the back of his head, mimicking the messy way she tied her hair up. "She always wins games. She's very smart. And sometimes, she'd just go out to the beach and she'd get lost in the view."

The two locals look towards each other, their faces suddenly unreadable.

They knew something Levi didn't and Levi knew he was punching blindly just making quick guesses of what Hange would have done. The specificities could also mean they escorted him out with new information.

Yet, somehow, it seemed those descriptions worked. They both smiled, exchange a few words.

"She plays. She wins---"

Levi smiled. "And let me guess, she doesn't keep the money?" And when he saw the grins of the two men widen, he made another guess. "And she gives the money away?"

The man dropped his shoulders and put one hand out in greeting. "What do you need?"

"I wanna see her--- No, I wanna talk to her. Do you know where I can find her?"

"She doesn't tell us where she's going too."

The bartender said something just behind the younger man and the latter's expression changed. They were both pointing at something, seemingly hypothetical, then drawing something with their fingers.

The younger man then continued in English. "I'll take you out."

"Wha--" Levi never had time to finish.

The man guided him out.

At first Levi wondered what he did wrong. The man didn't seem to carry any animosity. He seemed almost excited. "She likes going there," he said with some level of certainty.

There. Initially, it had been difficult to figure out where 'there' was. Following the direction of his finger with his gaze was almost a tall order. But there was only one place from that angle which boasted any level of significance.

He was pointing high up to mountain ranges and from his place by the coast, on the other side of the city, maybe he could make out a small tower that peeked out over the green.

"She likes high places," the man said.

"She told you that?" Levi shifted his grin to something certain then he nodded. "Thank you, I'll check it out."

And that tower peeking out of the mountains was identifiable with just an easy google search, expected from one of the most tourist friendly places in the world.

A tower observatory huh? Was it be open to the public? Sources said yes. What did Hange enjoy there? Levi had an inkling of an answer but he might have to see to it to be sure.

While waiting for the bus back to the city center, he consolidated his clues. Pieck had told him to wait for a message from someone named Yelena. If he couldn't talk to Hange, he could talk to Zeke.

Still, he was covering his bases with Hange but he was a little messy with it. It was all a matter of fate, some inkling of what kind of person Hange would be.

But what would he know about Hänge?

Even on the empty bus on the way back, he left his love alarm on, earphones propped comfortably in his ears.

In the bus it didn't ring but when Levi was weaving through the busiest streets, changing from the city bus to the bus leading up the mountain, it may have rung a few times. And Levi only started to become aware, a few incidents in, that every single time he had stopped, then he would scan the crowds.

One flash of brown hair, sometimes it would show up red under direct streams of light. A bird's nest tied up in a half pony tail or just a very messy one. Or maybe that low voice, which seemed to shift to something shrill almost immediately when excited.

There was only one person he would have wanted his Love Alarm to ring for. So Levi, lowered his cap over his face, boarded a bus and made the journey to the mountain.

***

He didn't go back to the convention center anymore. A long list of programs and keynote speakers only confirmed it, it was a roadshow on business ventures more than research.

But Hange likes business right? Hange likes medicine? Or she might even be wedges among the crowds of tourists among the snazzier casinos, just playing. He then considered playing just to check it out and maybe ask around.

And when Levi was weighing options, he realized Hange was somewhat unpredictable. He was at the mercy of fate, luck and a few well thought out guesses.

So he treated it like some challenge, a challenge he could very much fail. But he would get a better chance of running into her, if he kept to one place.

He picked the summit of the mountain and he parked there for the next few days, laptop bag in hand, sweatshirt over his boardshorts. There was a cafe only a few blocks from the tower with a good view of the main street leading up to the observatory.

And Levi only had to be there a few days to realize, it was off-season and it was off-season for a reason. It was the time of the year, when the weather by the road was a fickle bitch.

That day, the rain was on and off. The northern winds blew strong and Levi almost wished he had brought his autumn jacket. Yet it never was cold or windy enough to be certain it was worth lugging around.

The sweatshirt had been a golden alternative and he found the hood had a dual purpose. Enough, to hide his face so he could keep his love alarm on without receiving too many alarms. And enough to keep him safe from the blinding wind that came with climbing high elevations.

Levi abandoned the baseball cap, instead keeping the hood low over his face. He made himself at home in that cafe that overlooked the main road towards the visitor's center and a platform with a good view of the city. He picked a spot right next to the window. He only had to turn left, to get a peek, yet he was in a good enough position that if anyone looked back, he only had to lean back to be concealed by the opaque wall.

Levi was taking stupid risks. Did she clear her cache? Did she even still use the app? Any of those miniscule decisions would have been enough for Levi to come home empty ended. Yet, they were highly probable decisions. After all, why would Hange want to keep the application after the fiasco months ago. He started to even entertain the possibility that maybe Hange wasn’t even using her phone as often anymore. She hadn’t replied to texts, responded to calls and her number was also out of service.

Everything was against him, every single probability. Everything had been against him since the start anyway so it was much easier to stomach such circumstances.

Levi made for himself an ultimatum. He only had until his flight back, three days after, to talk to Hange.

If he is not able to find her, he goes home empty handed. He cooperates with the transferring of assets, the finalization of the contract. He scraps his own personal project, the colors, the attempt to quantify emotions and the dashboard.

At the least, he tried. He responded to that ticket. He tried to contact her, he tried to look for her. Hell, he was even contacting Zeke, personal pride and corporate processes be damned.

Surprisingly, instead of leaving him more desolate, the high stakes, all against him, had only sent a surge of motivation through him.

Maybe helplessness could do that to people. Or maybe he just couldn’t believe for himself that losing could be such a probable outcome.

Levi turned up the volume of his phone, scanned the crowds just outside the shop. It was off season, the weather was dark and gloomy so it wasn’t too difficult to even count the number of tall lanky brunettes who could have remotely been Hange. And he probably wasted more than enough time looking closely at each one, before accepting that twinge of disappointment every time they looked back revealing an unfamiliar face.

He never failed to remind himself how stupid of a plan it was. In the end, his best option really was to wait for a message from Yelena. Even if he would have preferred to discuss the plans with Hange himself, without that monkey as an intermediary.

When the disappointment accumulated, becoming too much to bear, Levi opened his laptop again, checked his work trackers, then his own project but he always made sure to look out, in between lines of code, or in between tickets or pull requests.

Just in case. Just in case, one of the brunettes was Hange.

When his love alarm finally rang, Levi had been reviewing a pull request. The surprise lasted for a second, the horror at realizing if that person hadn’t opened their love alarm, he wouldn’t have noticed her, lasted a little longer.

But he couldn’t be too sure it was her. She had on a cap, her hair tied up on a high ponytail. It was wavy and untamed, yet bunched up in such a way that maybe even her hair felt stifled. The ponytail swung wildly with even the slightest movement of her head.

And she was moving a lot, head bent down at first, looking at her phone, then at two kids next to her.

She was part of a tour group and those kids didn’t seem like hers. The alarm stopped for a while, and Levi used that short rest to check the schedule of the convention he had downloaded just yesterday. There was a tour that day. So it could be her.

Still, he couldn’t be too sure. His alarm rang again. Then when he was watching closely, he saw her jaw drop, he saw her explain something to the kids. Then she started to scan her surroundings and when Levi used that flash when their eyes met for just a second, he suspected.

But maybe their eyes haven’t met. She was wearing sunglasses.

And there was still a good chance it wasn’t Hange. But from her reaction, from the reaction of the kids, then the way she poked at her phone and the way the heart just suddenly disappeared then appeared then disappeared from his phone within few second lags, Levi decided it was a risk worth taking.

He continued to stare. And the brunette continued to scan her surroundings. She bent over, said something to both kids, then patted one on the head. And she turned around, looking through the cafe window.

And Levi turned off his own alarm, leaning back on the chair, just far back enough to hide.

What was he scared of? It looked like she could have been scared too. She didn’t bother to come nearer, or to even crane her neck to see just behind the wall right next to the window. She shook her head, a half smile played at her lips. And she walked away from the cafe, back to the tour group.

A disappointing turn of events. And Levi was scolding himself. It almost seemed surreal to even find Hange there, after losing contact with her for months. But he couldn’t be too sure that it was her. And how many times had he repeated it to himself.

Heart beating wildly, Levi let out a wretched sigh and slammed his laptop close, loud and hard enough to jarr him and even his closest neighbors. Who cared anyway? He continued to stare at Hange, and just for some level of security, just in case his emotions took more control than he allowed, he put the hood of his sweat shirt over his head, zipped it up a little higher over his neck and stared out.

She was talking to the tour guide. The tour guide shook his head, then pointed just above him.

Grey skies. Levi understood gesticulations enough to get that part.

The tour guide then pointed at the cafe then at the shopping streets but maybe she wasn’t listening anymore. She turned to the sky and Levi followed her gaze to see that she was probably looking at the tower, the base was visible from his view but even when he bent his head to the side, he couldn't make out the top. He made it a game for himself, he craned his neck, just to see how far up he could make out from his comfortable seat in the cafe.

Then eventually, he gave up, yet the brunette was still looking up, her head hung back, almost freely. Her mouth a thin line. And it was only when Levi heard the loud murmurs, took note of the sudden shift of the cafe atmosphere from peaceful to bustling, did he realize she had been left all alone.

The whole tour group was inside the shop.

Except her. She walked ahead. And if Levi were right, and that was her, he might as well follow. For the first time in a while, he wasn’t coiling the charger of his laptop before stuffing it into his bag. He wasn’t placing it hinge first into his bag. He stuffed everything, leaving chaos in his wake.

But he didn’t have much time anyway. Besides, cafe was starting to get too crowded for comfort. He exited the shop, and she was still in view, for just long enough for Levi to make out, that she had turned a corner.

If a part of him wanted to hesitate, if a part of him was holding him back, he didn’t let it take over. He didn’t have much time to consider the situation either. After all, she was moving fast and the winds were enough of an adversary already. So he ran, holding his laptop bag close to his side. He was grateful, he had at least tightened the hood of his sweatshirt.

The corner she turned on, opened up to a smaller cobblestone road, and at the end of it was the entrance of the tower. She opened the door with the sign ’authorized personnel only’, and she didn’t come back out.

Many feet behind her, but still unperturbed, Levi followed behind. The first floor was wide, and it acted as shelter, an ante room to a visitor’s center maybe, and there was a small open room to the side. A rope acted as some weak barricade to the entrance with a sign hanging in front.

Closed due to weather conditions

Uncertainty was another adversary. He turned to the glass door of the visitor’s center. He could look for her there. After a small peak through the glass, he realized if he went through there, he might just get a little self conscious, he might just hesitate to even climb over the rope.

In the slow few seconds that followed, Levi considered several things.

If she wanted to go to the visitor’s center, she would have gone through the main door. If she were Hange, it wouldn’t be too outrageous to imagine her climbing over a rope or even opening an ‘authorized personnel only’ door. And the more he thought about it, the more he realized, the bartender was right, his own instinct could be right.

Hange loved adventure. Hange loved freedom.

And as he stepped over the rope, then entered the hollow area where the spiral staircase climbed endlessly, he realized, his instincts, his decision might have just been right.

The footsteps echoed loudly, bouncing one end to the other over the hollow walls. Even when he couldn’t make out movements, just staring above him, towards the dizzying top, he made out the echoes.

And that could be Hange.

Or it could be an illusion. Levi added a second later, as he started the journey up the spiral staircases, the laptop bag dangling precariously on his side. He was dealing with too many sounds at once, and they all echoed in the narrow room, that Levi couldn’t be too sure if her footsteps had been his own imagination.

Still, he climbed.

Hundreds or maybe even thousands of steps in, it became an issue of sunk costs. The rubber soles of his shoes on the metal, the slap of his laptop bag on his side. And the few times he looked back, the few times he allowed himself to slow down, he heard an echo, unfamiliar footsteps, the shoes not his own.

A few times, he tried to go faster, just to beat the sound. When he sprinted up steps, losing count along the way, he remembered he had to conserve energy. The sounds were blurring against each other anyway.

So he settled for a quick jog. The monotony that came with jogging had him thinking, the spiral case really was endless. He wondered how many feet he had climbed.

A few times, it was tempting to run. A few other times, it was tempting to walk. A few times, he wondered how nice it would be to be able to fly, just float all the way down like a bird. Soon enough, he was high enough that just looking down made him dizzy, left his stomach turning.

He started to focus on what was ahead anyway, even when it was all just some predictable pattern of stairs and stone walls. Along the way, maybe he had started to lose feeling in his legs, just like he lost track of the echoes, or maybe she had just stopped climbing altogether.

Close to the top, there was a platform that led to a doorway. And Levi only had to push open, to be greeted again by winds. Suddenly they were coming in all directions at once, enough for Levi to put both his hands over his eyes. Enough to have him bending his knees, trudgling forward, one step at a time.

He was at the top of the tower, the highest point for miles around. When he got his bearings, started to accept the wind as an inevitable companion, he had managed to sprint forward, lean his elbows on the arm railings and look forward, at the magnificent view that stretched past the hotels, the shopping malls and the casinos.

The mountains beyond that and just next to them, the empty beaches, the local communities.

A few times, he closed his eyes, allowing them some reprieve from the harsh winds. And around the time, when he started to notice the grey sky, the streams of light that seemed to let bright colors glimmer, the few parts of the land they touched, he easily remembered why he had been there in the first place.

Of course, Hange enjoys this.

He looked around him once. Then twice, just in case the first time had been a trick from his tired eyes. She wasn’t around. Then he started to question himself.

Is she really here? Or were the echoes of footsteps just an illusion?

Was he going crazy?

It could have been from the strong winds, or the crushing disappointment, but around that time, he found it difficult to breathe. He felt tears prickle in his eyes. He swallowed once, and that had been enough to keep his face unmoving.

He looked back at the view, then at the grey sky above, the streams of light that were only getting smaller as dark clouds hovered over the city, then at the neon lights that only started to glow brighter with each stream of light that disappeared.

The wind started to blow harder, the trees down below rustled, creating their own glimmer of green, all dancing at once. Then he looked up at the ocean, the waves only getting larger, as the direction of the winds started to become unpredictable.

Sometimes, his hood was pressing harder towards the back of his head. Sometimes, it pushed from the front, blowing his bangs out of his face. It was chilling his cheeks, forcing the salty yet very sour scent of the ocean through his nose, then his half open mouth.

The wind brought with it many things at once, utter chaos, in separated parts. Most Levi couldn’t even understand.

I love you. At first, he thought it to be the whistle of the wind. Then a second later, he decided that he was just going crazy.

Then the wind stopped for just a second, the whistle, the blowing deadened into nothing for just a few seconds.

A few seconds enough.

“I love you!”

A few seconds long enough for Levi to trace the voice to a strange location, above him, yet behind him. He traced it to the brunette, cap still propped snugly on her head, her ponytail swinging from left to right.

Her sunglasses were off, she stood balanced on one of the lower rungs of the rail. There were still a few streams of sunlight left, yet they shone on Hange, bright enough for Levi to see red, in her ponytail, to see those roundish hazel eyes, those cheekbones and hint of pink in them.

Red. For a while it looked like a fire, the smell of the sea tickled his nose, then a wave of horror. Then loss?

See you later, Hange.

She stood there, meters above him, far enough for Levi to still doubt yet still close enough that with a longer look, Levi accepted, he was obliged to believe it.

It was Hange. The longer he looked at her, the more certain he became, the more money he would have put into such a wild conjecture.

But what the hell are you doing here?

Comprehension was a slow process, muddled by surprise, disbelief and confusion at his own reaction. Impatient, Levi had exited the spiral staircase to a platform a few meters below the top, while she had climbed all the way up. That left them in two completely different floors, two completely different platforms, a good distance away from each other.

And it didn’t look like she noticed him.

Then who are you talking to?

She continued to look straight ahead. She took a deep breath then screamed again.

I love you.

The wind caressed his face again and the words came again as a whisper.

The few times Levi opened his mouth, he noticed. When the wind was strong enough, the clearing of his throat, the grumbles didn’t come out as expected. As if the wind stole his words, and carried them away with it.

And the wind wouldn’t tell its secrets right?

Exhausted, terrified, confused then frustrated. Unwelcome tears threatening to force themselves out, Levi decided he was desperate for someone who’d listen but he he didn’t want anyone capable of judgement.

He took a deep breath. “I love you!” With the wind blowing in all the directions at once, his ears snug under his hood, it came out as a whisper. It was as if his body saw an opportunity for a cathartic release in the potential listener in the wind. Even as his throat burned, he screamed it again. “I love you!”

I love you. Hange’s voice seemed to ride with the wind, once again, he heard it as a whisper. Looking back up, Hange had dropped back on the platform, her two hands cupped her mouth. She dropped them and took a deep breath. She dropped her shoulders, then stared up at the sky, her head hung back. And she looked like she was about to collapse.

And maybe he looked the same way. He wanted to collapse too, with the weight over his shoulders, another, more deeply embedded exhaustion reared its ugly head.

But he wanted to hear the rest of it. He couldn’t be too sure who she had been talking too. Either way, he was sure it didn't change anything. Whether she felt the same way or not, love was love.

He took another deep breath. “I love you!” The wind was only getting stronger and once again, it snatched the words out of his mouth, his throat raw, almost burning. He didn't even know wind could burn until that moment, until he noticed the ache in his tongue.

Hange didn’t seem to notice. She still continued to stare straight ahead, then up at the sky. She put one hand over her eyes, wiping sweat. Or tears?

And maybe his mind suspected tears. And maybe tears were contagious. They came out unwillingly, as something that just welled at the rims.

And maybe if he just screamed again, they’ll force themselves back. “Hange Zoe.” He took a deep breath. “I love you!” He had been more strategic, letting it out a split second later, when the wind was whistling, almost screaming.

The wind might never take those words to her. But he didn’t seem to mind, the words had been for him more than anything.

Levi…. I love you...

The wind was strong enough, rain started to patter over the stone platform. And it became difficult to distinguish screams from the whistling of the wind. So Levi couldn’t be too sure. Still, he listened closely.

...In another life… Okay?

The rain was cold. The dampness pressed the hood closer to the back of his head, then the edge of his hood hung low over him, obscuring his view.

Yet the wind still found a way in, it first caressed his cheeks again, then tickled his lips as if forcing something out of him.

It goaded. It teased. And Levi had always been a sore loser, even if he never told anyone.

Alone, with no one there to hear him, but the wind, and Hange beyond ears reach, Hange who had barely noticed him, the words were forcing themselves out.

He looked back to see her standing, leaning closely over the railing. The strong rains, the ferocious winds had reduced her to a shadow.

And he was sure, she probably hadn't seen him.

Another surge of confidence. Then one deep breath. By some unexpected rush, Levi was starting to feel some strange anger. And Hange’s own staunch acceptance, the way she just gripped the railings and stared ahead, was only aggravating it.

“I don't wanna wait for any more next lives!” He let out a painful cough after that but even that didn’t penetrate the rumble, the pattern of the rain and the gusts of wind that surrounded him.

I want you. It was a weak whisper at first. Recovering from that last bout, Levi attempted once again. “I want you now.” Even when he couldn’t hear it himself, he felt it, the rawness in his throat, the anger that laced every single word. “Love is a choice right? Then I made my fucking choice! I want you! I want you now!” He wasn’t talking to anyone in particular, the figure hidden by a thin veil of rain.

The figure that eventually disappeared into the tower.

He eventually got tired of looking up. His neck ached, his vision started to blur and the hood hung damp over his face.

Levi only realized then, how much he had been holding in. In fact, it never felt all his to begin with. Cathartic releases weren’t all they were cracked up to be. Hell, Levi didn’t even notice how much had actually been released until he leaned back on the wall, until he realized, he didn’t mind at all being covered head to toe in water and dirt.

Humans were unpredictable. They were incomprehensible. And the moment that everything fell into place, Levi let it sink in.

He loved Hange. He wanted her. He wanted to be selfish about it.

“That’s what a choice is right? Doing what I want?” Levi whispered, making some sense of Hange’s own words, he mimicked her voice, her mannerisms as he said those first words. He then lowered his tone, into something more natural. “We’re not fucking robots Hange. We want things. We feel things.”

He didn’t need to tell her that. High up on the tower Hange had been screaming. He was certain of that. Hange had been leaning forward, she had been breathing hard.

She was feeling. She was human. She was free.

And Levi wondered why she had seemed so desperate, so eager to let something out, as if every other moment outside the tower had been stifling.

“That’s life married to a billionaire huh?”

He couldn’t blame her for screaming. HIs only little game of copycat had him exhausted too but somehow, by some sleight of hand, some magic, it had him calm, peaceful even under the strong patter of rain.

Articulating only made emotions all the more real. The signs that he hadn’t been the only one chasing blindly was reassuring.

And maybe that was all Levi wanted anyway, that was the final closure to that long game of cat and mouse. Levi turned to his soaked laptop bag, he maneuvered his way back inside the shelter. He zipped his bag open, let out a sigh of relief to see that the case had done its job to keep the laptop dry.

Then alone on the stairwell, he leaned on the wall, noted the sound of footsteps many feet below. He opened the laptop, then before even booting it, he closed it again and took a deep breath as one realization dawned on him in those slow steady movements.

In truth, he didn’t mind never showing the plans to Hange. Maybe he had just been looking for some excuse to see her, some attempt at closure.

“You got it,” he whispered to himself, hands cold and shaking even under the humid tropical air. “You can stop now…” But something inside him continued to lightly boil. “So what? Do we wait until the next life?”

Nobody answered.

He opened his phone, then his mood alarm. He already predicted the color on the screen.

Green. Happy sad? Or sad happy?

At that moment, Levi concluded, desire and acceptance could begrudgingly coexist.

***

Levi had no plans of going back to the convention. Yet, after that night, he had one more day left, one more day to check the city.

He did a quick google search, reading through long reviews on beaches, on the mountains, the hiking trails, the tower and the shopping street. None of them seemed interesting and Levi almost considered just curling up in bed on the last day and allowing himself to recover from the ordeal the night before.

And even if his mind had been willing him to find some other purpose. Levi found, as soon as the adrenaline rush ended, all he wanted to do was lie in bed. Only standing on two feet long enough to get him through a shower and curled into bed.

His mind was racing with other questions. Could Hange move? Was Hange moving? Was she walking? Was she talking? As if nothing happened? And the more he thought about it, the harder it became to move.

He slept through the night. By morning, he had enough strength, enough need for stimulation to pull his laptop closer. He ran his hand over the keyboard. It was fully dry. He realized he would rather wait a few more hours before opening it again.

He turned back to the ceiling. Rest. He whispered to himself. You don’t need to go out. You went on enough adventures to last a lifetime.

A fucking lifetime. It felt like sour graping. And Levi soon found himself admitting to sour graping. He would have wanted more adventures if it meant more time with Hange.

But real life didn’t work that way. Life expected people to decide on circumstances, never on emotions or actual thought.

So what’s the point of being fucking human then? Rejecting the world as a whole, made it easier to just roll over and nap again despite the light streaming through the window.

And Levi was in and out of sleep, the only view was the plain white walls of his hotel room, and whatever light reflected on it. Some natural need for stimulation had him jumping at the sound of the phone ringing.

Instinctively, he pulled his hand behind him, dragging the phone roughly from the side table.

An unknown number. Hange. The unwelcome part of him tried to rear its ugly head again. He put the phone to his ear. “Hello?” He kept his voice cold, just in case it was her, or wasn’t her.

“Mr. Ackerman?” An unfamiliar voice on the other end and Levi couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman speaking.

“Speaking.”

“Ms. Finger told me about your request, about your plans for the Mood Alarm. I ran through it with Mr. Jaeger and he would be happy to host you for dinner, then for a private meeting in his suite."

“No need,” Levi said.

“No, he insists.”

“It’s not worth your time.”

“Mr. Ackerman, listen.” And the voice on the other end was firm. “Mr. Jaeger has invited you to dine with him. He took the time out of his busy schedule to do this. This is a formal invitation, if he is interested in your plans he will tell you himself.”

Levi didn't respond immediately. He couldn't think of much else to say yet.

“Will you dine with him?”

Levi put the phone in front of him, put it on speaker and just stared at the unknown number. Could this be a scam?

As if to answer his question, the person on the other line only continued. “We have added you to the guest list for the dinner tonight, just give your name to the reception at the hotel. Mr. Jaeger will see you there.”

And the person on the other end, did not give him time to protest. Levi thought it almost rude to call back, to even bother anyone over a decision that was just his to make.

Hours of contemplation later, Levi decided to just show up and lay low. Besides, what was the worst that could happen? He had already reached the point of acceptance the day before.

#levihan #levihan fanfiction

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intubatedangel · 4 years ago

Text

Cold Snap: Chapter 8

Sorry for the delay, it’s been a rough couple of weeks but I’m starting to bounce back a little. This probably isn’t my best, but I hope you enjoy it all the same.

Story Index

* * *

Carl couldn't take his eyes off of Anna as they pushed the gurney around a corner. She looked... Amazing. The way she rocked back and forth, compressing their patient’s chest, making her ponytail bounce each time. Her face was a picture of focus, gaze locked on the young woman beneath her as she forced blood through Shona's ice-cold body. Damn, she was so gorgeous. The way she put her entire soul through her interwoven fingers, into those chest compressions that bent in Shona's ribs rhythmically. He could see she was doing what he had suggested. Putting her passion, their shared passion, into her efforts.

He took a moment, just one moment, to let a small thrill of pleasure shoot through him. Images flashed through his mind, memories of last night and ideas for when they got home. All the toys they could play with. He took a deep breath, first things first, get their patient back. He let out the breath as they crashed through the doors into Trauma 4.

They pulled the gurney across, lining it up next to the trauma bed. Carl let Anna maintain compressions, as the rest of the team unclipped the straps of the backboard. It was a small risk, but they couldn't get Shona into the vest that was spread on the bed while she was still strapped down. The vest was capable of keeping her immobilised, the reinforced back and its own means of being secured doing a close enough job.

"Let's get ready to move her, nice and easy now." Carl commanded, watching as his other nurses and the paramedic got in position. The ambubag was disconnected and dropped on the gurney as Dave gets his hands underneath Shona's shoulders, Kirstie gently supporting her head. Others held her arms and legs, kneeling on the bed so they could reach. "Ok, we're all ready Anna, we'll move on your call."

She nodded, her lips moving, as she started to announce her compressions. "43...44...45...46...47...48...49...50!" She finished, pulling her hands away and rising on one knee, un-straddling Shona's ghostly white body. Anna helped with the transfer, her hands beneath Shona's waist and thighs. They moved her over as fast as they safely could placing her on the already warm vest. Everyone could feel the contrast, between the heat of the water filling the ribbed plastic, and the chill of the flesh of the young woman they were trying to save. They all knew it meant they had time, but there was still a primitive part of each of them that was scared by that cold.

As soon as they placed her down Anna stood on a step and placed her hands back on Shona's chest, resuming her barrage, counting in her head once more, to allow Carl to give his orders. "Let's ready the combo pads, A/P positions in case we need to pace her, then we'll get her wrapped up." Anna kept going with her compressions, in the rhythm enough to be able to look around and watch as Trish tore open some sterile packaging and removed a pair of large square electrodes. Trish peeled off the backing of the first pad, revealing the thick layer of electro-conductive gel. Without being asked Anna raised her hands from the ice-cold sternum beneath them and grabbed the other pad. Like a well-oiled machine, Trish placed the first pad, smoothing the edges to make sure the foam stuck well, a split second before the others log rolled the young woman, allowing Anna to slap the other pad onto Shona's back, similarly fixing it well.

Shona was rolled flat, and Anna's hands immediately settled back in their prior position, though the pad was now between her fingers and Shona's flesh. It had little effect on Anna's compressions. While flexible, the gel was thick and viscous enough that it held its shape enough to allow the force of Anna's professional chest compressions to translate straight through to Shona's sternum, forcing it down and simulating a pulse as her heart was squeezed against her spine. Around her hands Trish was folding in the various panels of the vest and clipping them together, tightening the straps to provide a little bit of immobilisation.

Carl continued to run the code. "Roger, grab me the central line, with the temperature catheter. Kirstie get the monitors changed over; did you get anything from upstairs?"

"No luck on the full ECMO, dialysis machine is on it's way though." Kirstie told him, as she pulled the thick lead from the portable monitor, connecting it to the large one that hung above the bed. It instantly began to whine the monotone cry of asystole and was quickly muted. Everyone knew the situation.

Carl didn't reply to Kirstie as she moved onto the other parts of the monitors. He took in the information, then focused on his next task. He moved around to Shona's head, Dave shifting out of the way. Roger placed a sterile wrapped pack on the corner of the bed, then retreated to the side of the room, where a dozen IV bags were being kept warmed. Carl took the large wide needle from the tray, lining it up along Shona's neck. He pressed it against the large jugular vein, barely visible thanks to the girl's blue skin, then in a smooth motion he pushed it in, sliding the length of the needle neatly into the vein. He wasn't finished though.

Also on the tray was a 20cm long tube, with a spiral that seemed to twist around the thin core, and a bunch of connectors at one end. Carl grabbed it, feeding it into the large opening on the central line, easing it forward, into Shona's body, deep down the vein, towards her heart. Her heart that only moved because Anna was still pressing down, rapidly and rhythmically, squeezing the organ that refused to beat on its own.

* * *

Anna was starting to feel the effect of her compressions on her arms as she crossed the 3-minute mark. She reached 100 in her head, then started over again, going for a fourth round. She could feel the way Shona's chest swelled against her hands as Dave squeezed the ambubag, forcing in air that was promptly forced back out by the actions of her own hands. The thick rubbery temperature vest surrounded the circle left for her hands, Trish having strapped it together, before working on the lower sections until Shona was wrapped up from her neck to her knees.

Anna watched Carl work, seeing his concentration as he slid the catheter into the central line, feeling the way it advanced, making sure it was going in correctly. Eventually the plug where it split into a half dozen connectors nestled into the port that stuck from Shona's neck. Two of the connectors were attached to a small device that began to circulate warmed saline, the device in turn was linked to the monitoring system and, after a few seconds of calibration, Shona's core temperature was displayed for the whole team to see.

"Core temperature of just 19..." Carl said, trailing off slightly with a frown on his face. Anna knew that signified he was thinking hard about a decision. It took a few seconds, then he gave a small nod to himself. Anna was pretty sure it was totally unconscious on his part. "Let's go ahead with the thoracic lavage, Roger, get me 4 chest tubes." Anna cringed internally, but she knew that it was probably Shona's best chance. Carl continued. "Anna, switch off after this round, Kirstie, you take over, Trish go ahead with the NG tube and then place a urinary catheter." It would be needed Anna thought, as warmed saline was being pushed into all of Shona's IV's, including the central line via one of the dangling connectors.

As her internal count approached 100, Anna began to count out loud again. "94...95...96" Kirstie stood up on a step on the opposite side of the bed and shared a nod with Anna as she wove her fingers together and straightened her arms. "...97...98...99...Switch" Anna finished, pulling her arms away. She stepped aside making sure she wasn't in anyone’s way as she shook out her arms, trying to recover quickly. She then set about the task that Carl hadn't spoken out loud.

In the corner of the room were two tall infusers. IV bags could be hung from the top, like a standard drip, but were instead fed into a console that managed the temperature, pressure and flow rate. Anna grabbed them both, one for each side. She placed them by the head of the bed, then headed for a different corner. There, she grabbed two chest drain units, carrying them to the bed, hooking one on each side roughly in the middle of the bed, just next to Kirstie’s legs as she leaned over Shona and delivered compressions.

In the meantime, Carl had almost gotten setup on Shona's other side, the small surgical kit laid out on a small metal trolley. Anna stepped forward, unclipping the straps of the vest and opening one side, revealing Shona's chest. Her skin was still ghostly white, the only visible colour being the soft blues and purples of the bruise forming in the valley between her breasts, caused by the compressions that continued to make her ribs flex inwards.

Roger had been waiting, an iodine-soaked swab on a stick in his hand. A moment after Anna revealed Shona's chest, he smeared the brown disinfectant across it, from up towards her collar bone, down alongside the soft curve of her breast, and over her lower ribs.

"Kirstie, hold compressions." Carl ordered, armed with a gleaming scalpel. As soon as Kirstie lifted her hands Carl lowered the scalpel towards the space between Shona's 2nd and 3rd ribs. He made a few decisive cuts, cutting through the layers of tissue. "Tube." He held out the scalpel, which Anna carefully took, while Roger slapped the chest tube into his other hand. Carl pushed the tube through the hole he had made, sliding it into Shona's chest, between her ribs and the front of her lung. It had taken 10 seconds since compressions stopped to get the tube in.

12 seconds later another tube stuck out, this one lower down between Shona's 5th and 6th ribs, basically on the opposite side of her lung. "Ok, Go." Carl said, prompting Kirstie to resume her barrage. The ends of the two chest tubes swayed and bounced for a few moments but were soon taken in hand by Anna and Carl and connected into what was effectively a loop. From the infuser warmed saline was pumped through the upper tube into Shona's chest cavity, washing over and around her lungs, providing warming throughout her chest, before draining out of the second tube into the sealed container. This container then fed back into the infuser, which would be able to keep the saline warm enough to be effective.

Carl monitored the loop until it was running through fully, ensuring the compressions were causing no problems. He nodded, satisfied. "Right, let's get ready to do the other side, Trish, take over compressions as soon as Anna has arranged the vest." Anna was already folding the vest back over, lining up the tubes to meet gaps and checking that nothing was kinked. As soon as she was done, she slipped around the bed and took position to repeat the entire process on Shona's left-hand side.

* * *

Lucy had guided Jones through the triage area, gratefully handing the wheel chair off to a nurse who came to assist. Zainab also approached, having just finished an exam on one of the collared patients.

"Hey Lucy, who do you have for me?"

"Zee, this is Matt Jones. Spent 5 minutes in near freezing water. No signs of inhalation or injury, just moderate hypothermia. He's been responsive throughout, but I'd recommend a full exam and observation." Lucy said professionally, despite her weariness. They were guided into an empty cubicle and Jones was assisted onto the bed. Lucy leaned against a pillar relaxing a little as Zainab took a chart and started to note things down. "You might want to give psych a call." Lucy's voice carried a joking tone. "I'm pretty sure charging further into a sinking ship falls under crazy."

Jones smirked a little, leaning back on the bed. "I'd say the crazy one is the one who followed me after being told to get off the boat." He still sounded tired but was definitely recovering.

Lucy shrugged. "Someone had to save your ass. You'd be at the bottom of the river if I hadn't."

"True...True..." Jones smiled faded, his tone becoming a little more subdued. "I just hope it was worth it."

Lucy nodded, looking at the floor. "They'll do their best. Just like you did. You gave her a chance if nothing else."

Jones bit his lip, nodding, but his gaze had drifted away from her, staring at nothing. Lucy knew what he was seeing. A mental image of Shona, pale and lifeless. She felt the same way.

Zainab broke them both out of their solemn contemplation. "We should really get you out of those wet clothes Mr Jones, they won't be helping you to warm up."

Jones nodded, groaning as he leaned forward and started to fumble with his uniform. A nurse moved in to assist him. Lucy glanced at him. "I'll be back." She told him, before nodding to Zainab and the nurse. Lucy left the cubicle, initially planning to get a coffee, but with her mind she drifting she was a little surprised to find herself standing outside Trauma 4. Her eyes were drawn to the table. Tracy was performing chest compressions on the young woman on the table. The vest covered most of her chest, but Lucy could see the tubes running out through slits to the containers.

She could see the doctor tidying away the surgical kit and giving more orders. She could see Dave, still rhythmically squeezing the ambu-bag connected to the breathing tube, stood at the head of the bed. And she could see the monitor, that constant, unbroken line that proclaimed Shona's heart was still completely inactive.

#Resus Writing #Medical Drama #Anna Swift #CPR #Defib #Dark Cardiophilia #intubation

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aster-aspera · 4 years ago

Text

Before I wash away

CW for this chapter: hypothermia, drowning

Relationship: platonic loceit

chapter title is from Heaven Knows by Five for Fighting

Masterlist

Read on ao3

Logan and Janus stood side by side on the docks.

“You’re sure your information is sound?” Logan asked, still not trusting the villain entirely, despite Patton and Virgil’s insistence he was ‘good now’.

“Darling, when have I ever led you wrong?” Janus purred.

Logan raised an eyebrow.

“Do you want a list?”

Janus huffed.

“That was always on purpose, I was just having fun. My information is never wrong. Or don’t you trust me?”

“No, in fact, I do not not.”

Janus blinked in surprise, he must have been so used to Virgil and Patton fawning over him, he hadn’t even considered the notion that not everyone on the team trusted him.

“I have been working with you for months now and have yet to lead you astray, what more do you expect from me?”

“That might be so, but you can’t expect me to believe you just decided one day to suddenly do the right thing. You were perfectly comfortable running the criminal underground. There is no logical reason you would decide to join us and until I know what motivated you to switch, I will have no choice but to be suspicious of you.” Logan explained, trying not to let his anger seep into his tone.

“You really think I decided to become a good person in one day? Have you forgotten all I’ve done for this city? I kept the criminals in line, I helped you in your jobs, I was on your side long before I officially joined you.” He said, a dark edge slithering into his tone.

“You helped us and kept the criminals in line because you wanted control over them, you wanted power. And just because you have the slightest semblance of a moral code does not automatically make you a good person.”

Janus turned away from him and took a deep breath, his eyes trained on the skyline, where the last dregs of sunlight were disappearing into the water.

“I never wanted that power.” He said, sounding oddly vulnerable.

Logan blinked in confusion and then hardened himself. Janus knew how to manipulate people, knew how to use their sympathy against them, no doubt he was doing the same now.

“Stop trying to manipulate me, that might work with Patton but I can see through your flimsy façade.”

Janus’s eyes hardened and he pulled up his mask.

“Well, if you really think a villain is all I am, you clearly don’t want my help on this job. I will leave you to it.” He swept away, his cape rustling along the concrete.

Logan watched him leave, a strange feeling in his throat. He should be feeling victorious, but all he could feel was a hollow emptiness.

He shook his head, however inaccurate the snake’s information may be, he still had to be on the lookout.

Janus claimed there would be a deal going down between the top hitman of their city and a corrupt official. The corrupt official was a little harder to deal with, they couldn’t exactly punch him out of office, but they had been trying to catch the hitman for a while now.

Known only by his moniker of Ghost, he had assassinated many important people and his actions were at the heart of most of the political turmoil of the city.

They hoped that if they got rid of ghosts, politicians would try to actually try to solve their problems diplomatically, instead of just assassinating their rivals.

An idle hope in Logan’s opinion but Patton had good faith in it.

Whether that worked out or not, Ghost had at least 5 accounts of murder to his name.

Ghost was a successful assassin but Logan’s analysis of his fighting style told him he usually used a sniper or other long ranged weapons.

As long as Logan managed to get in close enough, he should be able to take him out easy enough. The official would probably go running as soon as he saw Logan.

Logan sat on the docks for what felt like hours, feeling antsy. The conversation with Janus kept running through his mind.

It was probably this distraction that made that he didn’t notice the sound of fighting on the docks at first. The sound of a gunshot startled him out of his musings.

“Shit.” He breathed and took off towards the noise.

Ghost stood next to the water, a gun in his hand and a twisted smile on his lips. He turned slowly as Logan rounded the corner.

Logan scanned the area, trying to locate whoever Ghost had been fighting, but he saw no one.

“You’re just too late, kid.” Ghost drawled.

“Too late for what? You’re still here.”

“Sure you’re not missing something?”

“I can assure you, I have everything I need. Now can we end this pointless conversation so I can put you where you belong?” Logan was beginning to feel frustrated, he had no idea what the assassin was talking about.

“Oh well, I’d love to, but I’m not sure how your friend would feel about that. I reckon he’s starting to feel a bit cold by now.” Ghost gestured at the water.

Friend? Cold? Logan stared at the water and flicked on his infrared detector. His breath caught as down in the water, the scanner picked up the shape of a body. A body that was rapidly losing warmth.

He moved towards the water but then realized he had almost forgotten the other person standing on the dock.

The person in question was leaning against a pole, a smug smirk on his lips.

“Woops, seems like you have to make a choice.”

Logan nearly groaned in frustration. This was the perfect opportunity to catch Ghost, everything had been planned out. After this, Janus’s source would be compromised and they would probably never get this close to the assassin again.

But this wasn’t even a choice. Logan would not just let Janus drown.

He turned away from Ghost and stripped off his cloak. Ghost slipped away into the night behind him.

Carefully, Logan lowered himself into the water. He had been lectured enough about cold shock and hypothermia by Roman that knew not to just jump into the water. As much as every cell in his body was screaming at him to get to Janus as fast as possible.

Once he felt his body had been acclimated well enough, he submerged himself, taking care not to lose the figure on the infrared detector.

The water was ice cold and Logan felt it cut off his breathing. He wondered how long Janus had been in the water for.

As far as he saw, he wasn’t moving. Just drifting at the bottom of the, luckily, shallow harbour.

With one last gulp of air, Logan dove down. He grabbed Janus, struggling a little to wrap his arms around him. He could feel his extremities getting numb already. He pushed himself up from the bottom and kicked upwards.

Logan broke the surface with a gasp, drinking in a lungful of frigid air. Janus stayed unresponsive in his arms and Logan had the chilling suspicion he hadn’t taken a breath.

He swam to the shore as fast as he could. For every moment Janus didn’t move, Logan felt the sinking feeling in his gut deepen.

He managed to drag Janus out of the water with some difficulty. The cold was already taking its toll on his body.

He turned the other man on his side, making him expel the water from his lungs. He watched his chest, straining to see any type of movement there.

“Come on Janus, Pat will kill me if I let you die.” He said, sounding more choked than he was willing to admit. It was probably the cold.

Janus didn’t reply, of course he didn’t, even if he was breathing, he was too out of it to register what he was saying.

How he wished Roman was here.

Logan thought he saw a slight rise of Janus’s chest and he bent forward, trying to see it clearer. Another soft rise of his chest and a soft puff of breath against his cheek made the iron vice around his chest loosen a bit.

They weren’t in the clear yet, but at least he was breathing.

What was the next thing he should be thinking about?

Right, contacting the others, that was the most obvious next step now. And getting him warm, the water was ice cold and hypothermia was dangerous.

He switched on his comms first.

“Prince? I need assistance on the docks. Janus fell into the water, he’s breathing but his core temperature is low.” He reported clinically, trying not to sound like he was on the verge of a panic attack, that really was more Virgil’s speciality.

“Is his breathing regular? How is his heartbeat?” Roman’s voice came in immediately.

“They’re both stable. He’s fine for now but he needs treatment for hypothermia and cold shock as fast as possible.”

“Right, I’m on my way. Try to keep him as warm as possible. ETA is about 10 minutes.” With that Roman signed off, presumably to focus on racing through the streets at a frankly heartstopping pace.

Logan remembered his cloak, which he had shrugged off before following Janus into the water. With a worried glance and a quick check to make sure his breathing was still regular, he dashed off to find it.

Once he returned with the cloak securely clutched to his chest, he first dragged Janus to a slightly more secluded area of the docks.

He knew Roman would be able to find them because of the trackers in their gear, and he didn’t want to strip Janus right out in the open. He had a feeling Janus wouldn’t appreciate that.

He managed to wrangle him out of his cape and shirt, cursing the fiddly latches. Then he quickly wrapped him up in his cloak, tucking it closely around him so no cold air could get in.

Janus needed more than passive reheating, he was barely producing any body heat on his own and would need an outside source of warmth.

Logan sighed. He really would rather avoid this, knowing how the others would probably hold this over him for months.

Still, he had a job to do and however complicated his relationship with Janus was, he had to help him. It was his duty as a hero, and a friend.

He gently maneuvered Janus so he was leaning against his chest and wrapped his arms securely around the other. His cloak was waterproof, so even though Logan was still soaking, Janus shouldn’t get too wet.

He leaned back against a wall, keeping an eye on the surroundings while staying focused on Janus’s breathing.

He waited, Janus’s soft breaths moving against his chest.

He must have drifted off slightly, because he startled at the sound of a voice.

“Well, that’s just precious.”

Roman was leaning against the wall, looking like he was filing Logan’s position away for future blackmail material.

Logan scowled.

“That was more than 10 minutes.”

“Sorry love, traffic was hell.”

“Like you’d let that slow you down.”

Roman just smirked and then turned to Janus, his smile making place for a worried expression.

He checked his pulse and breathing with practiced motions and then lifted him out of Logan’s arms.

They felt strangely empty without the weight.

Logan curled up on the couch, drinking from a cup of warming tea Roman had pressed into his hands.

He could hear Roman bustling around in the small med bay. He had offered his assistance but Roman had shooed him out with the instructions to take care of himself first.

Logan tried to ignore the nervous fluttering in his belly. Janus had been stable when they had brought him in and Roman was an expert nurse, he would be alright.

Finally, Roman popped his head around the corner.

“You can come in now, I can feel your worry all the way from the other room.”

“I’m not worried.”

“Right.”

Logan entered the room. Janus was sitting up in the bed, looking tired and washed out, but at least not as pale and lifeless as when Logan had pulled him out of the water.

“Hi.” Janus croaked. He fidgeted awkwardly.

“Hello.” Logan replied.

An awkward silence filled the room.

“Thank you.” Janus eventually whispered, not meeting Logan’s eyes.

“I was just doing my job.” Logan tried to brush him off.

“Oh yeah? Does your job include saving villains?”

“My job includes saving everyone. And, I may have been a little harsh. I don’t think you’re truly a bad person. I’m just not entirely sure of your motivations yet. I just want to keep my friends safe. I know the dangers of trusting people too easily.”

Janus looked at him in surprise, noticing the way Logan’s voice wavered slightly on the last line.

Logan didn’t meet his eyes.

“Well, I understand. It’s unfair of me to expect you to trust me after all I’ve done. I just hope that with time, I can prove to you that you can trust me and I really do mean well.”

Logan nodded.

“I hope so too.”

Janus smiled at him and Logan definitely didn’t feel like his stomach was doing cartwheels.

#sanders sides #Janus Sanders #ts janus #logan sanders #ts logan #sanders sides fic #loceit #platonic loceit #logan/janus #superhero au #ts superhero au #tw drowning #tw water #my writing #roman sanders #ts roman #tell me if i forgot to tag something #im really bad at that

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famouskittychild · 3 years ago

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Cheeky mandos - Getting seated

Prolouge

One - ...and we're off

Two - Tea for two

Word count: 2384

Summary: Some fighting and heart-to-heart in this one :)

Rating: M

CW: injury, injury treatment, (non-sexual) physical contact, some angst and feals if we squint

Author's note: I edited this on my mobile and can't put a "keep reading" break in there sorry :/ Edit: fixed it :)

Cheeky Mandos - Three: Getting seated

The next covert is the last that you got information about, and it turns into something of a mess. You leave the spacedock just after sunset and a band of thugs picks a fight at a nearby alleyway. They want the beskar, even though its value has been steadily dropping lately after the huge spike before. You still wander what the kriff had caused that.

The two of you make short work of them. The stranger’s - Djarin, you remind yourself - fighting style seems to be taking blaster bolts with his beskar, smashing in heads and peppering it with precise blaster shots. You use the traditional weapon of armourers, a lean hammer with a long shaft - the only thing that might give your occupation away if someone knows what to look for. You’ve garnished the hammer with an electro-pulse emitter for greater efficiency but don’t use that now. Your opponents are not enough of a threat to warrant it.

They get away easy, considering your team of two could’ve simply killed them all; they end up laying on the ground with a few broken bones and several concussions, and you walk away before they can even look up. Only communicating with battle-words, moving around in the shadows, you put distance between them while also separating randomly and criss-crossing the streets to throw off anyone who tries to follow.

When the two of you finally stop and Djarin steps up beside you near a bridge, he remarks quietly.

“That was good fighting together.”

That’s when it occurs to you that whilst there were a few scrapes and the odd punch or drunken challenger before, this was your first real fight together. And the two of you worked seamlessly. Mandalorians have a set of training methodology that was passed down through countless generations and ensured that even people from the most different groups could work together like cogs in a machine. It happens all the time, but it still surprises you how well it went with the stranger. Djarin.

“It was.” You smile, and for once he can’t see it under your visor.

You find the covert and whilst they are welcoming when they see your armours, once you and Din start to talk to them, they are quite reluctant. They don’t want to go back to your ship, to your forge, and they barely listen to Djarin. It’s not the coldest reaction ever, but it’s still quite a work to get through to them. You arrange the time when they’ll visit the ship if they want to, then leave, being led through a different exit to where you came from.

By the time you get back to the docks, it’s swarming with gangs. They are badly trained, if at all, and rely on numbers and intimidating the weak. Most of them you dodge without a problem, but a better organized group does slow the two of you down. Not much longer than the afternoon gang did, though; until something knocks the air out of your lungs and you lurch forward, gasping. You are only down and disoriented for a few seconds but that’s enough to get kicked once, and shot twice in the beskar. When you straighten up, blaster in hand, you look for targets. The stranger is blocking the way, shielding you effectively so you twirl to the other side and quickly find the sharpshooter on a roof.

You use the battle code to tell Djarin the sniper’s location, and hope he understands why. He’s a better shot and has a better rifle. The next moment you see him move, and you automatically make the counter-move, to switch places. There’s still about half a dozen people on this side of the yard, trying to get your beskar, scattered around. Than you hear Djarin’s rifle going off; the sharpshooter is taken care of.

From then on, it’s a routine job of mopping up those that aren’t clever enough to run away. No need to chase them down as you’ll be gone, and the local covert is well hidden.

The docks are quiet and the Brick sits untouched in the row of ships were it was left. Your usual security routine comes up clean - those local thugs obliviously weren't sophisticated enough to figure out which ship is yours. Now that you’re on board, even a sustained siege wouldn’t be a problem. You just hope the noise won’t make the covert change their mind about their appointment.

You are doing your usual rounds around the ship, checking for anything out of place, when Djarin catches up with you.

“You are injured.” Not a question, and you stop in your tracks. That kick came from some kind of clawed feet or boot, you can feel the sting of a slash on your thigh. You reckon to still have a good fifteen minutes before it will really start to bother you.

“Maybe? Whatever, it’s not serious. I’ll finish the checks first” you tell him, and the black in silver visor keeps staring at you for a long moment. You turn away and expect him to leave.

He hovers around.

It’s kind of annoying, having him look over your shoulder. What does he expect, that you’ll just faint at one point from blood loss? You know yourself better. And if he was travelling alone too, he should know just as well that you’re familiar with your own limits.

Eventually you run out of tasks and sit down in the common room, at the booth with the game table. There’s no medbay on the ship; an alcove with a bunk and cabinets for supplies serves as a first aid station, just off the galley and near the booth.

“Let me help” Djarin says, and doesn’t wait for answer. He is sliding open cabinet doors and taking out boxes of supplies. You try not to sigh in exasperation.

“It’s only a scratch. I can handle it myself. As you should know from your own experience” you add, unable to resist reminding him. You don’t need pampering, just as he wouldn’t either.

“Yeah, you’re telling yourself so? That’s way too much blood for a scratch” he rasps, and you are surprised by his voice. It sounds… nervous? And he speaks a bit faster than usual.

You look down on your leg and see what made him worried. One leg of your trouser is a mess; there’s a gash on the outside of your thigh just beside the edge of the beskar plate, and the fabric of your undersuit is soaked with blood down to your boots. Now that you think about it, you do feel a little more light headed than it is advisable.

“Oh kriff” you mumble. Djarin turns his head towards you, and you explain. “It will be a pain in the neck to wash that all out. I hope I have enough soap. Bloody brilliant.”

He sighs, and you wonder why. He should know about that aspect, too. Wounds are one thing, especially if you have a safe place to lay low and enough bacta, and you have both now. Washing blood out of fabric? A right royal pain.

He motions towards the bunk with his hand.

“You should lay down. You lost a lot of blood.”

“Is that an instruction? It sounds like instruction. I can handle myself, Djarin, just as you can.” You feel your temper rising. Does he think you’re weak? Because you asked him to take that shot? “Just leave, we need to keep an eye on our surroundings anyways, I can take care of a stupid cut. ”

“I know you can. But you don’t have to.” He seems to hesitate for a moment, and looks to the side. “Accepting help is not a weakness. It’s just part of teamwork.”

You set your jaw, and now you are getting suspicious. Is he trying to get you incapacitated? To take the ship? You’ve run out of leads to known coverts, he has no use for you anymore really. Is this the moment he shows his true colours? A weight drops in your stomach and you feel a pang of sadness for some reason. Your head is a bit dizzy, and you know you do have to lay down, and soon. Than you catch your own thoughts. What are you thinking? He could’ve done anything with you or your ship, any time you were asleep. He could’ve turned on you when you were neck deep in some repair work or at your forge. He never did. It’s just you and a lifetime - and heritage - of having to be always on your guard.

He holds out a jar of bacta for you. You take it, and it’s an effort not to drop your arm too quickly under the weight that normally wouldn’t be a bother. You fiddle with the lid, arms feeling like lead. You know you’ll have to clean the wound first, and you have to gather your strength to do that. You don’t want him around, helpful or not, trustworthy or not.

The knot is still in your stomach, and you refuse to examine why.

“If you let me help and then take a nap, you’ll get better much faster. You know that.” He pauses, and nods at himself before continuing, as if he has to persuade himself to keep talking. “I had to learn that again, too, when I made some friends recently. To let them help.”

You are still unwilling, and just want him gone so you can get on with getting better, but that makes you think.

“Is that why you are sad sometimes? You miss your friends.” You wanted that to be a question, but you’re getting weak. And that gash is starting to turn from annoying burn to stabbing pain.

He takes a breath. He goes into that pensive, sadness kind of state of his. You can see it as his chest expands, you can hear the quiet crackling noise barely picked up by his helmet’s microphone: that something in him that you could never explain fully. You half expect him to push the medkit in your hand and leave as you’ve requested. It’s a surprise when he speaks again.

“I took care of a foundling for a while. Until I could give him back to his people, as I was quested to do.” He says that the same way he told you about his droid problem. A few words that speak volumes. Voice strained, as if just wanting to get the words out. The pain from it all knocks the air from you, just like it did then. Why do people have to go through so much grief?

He takes another deep breath, and opens the box with the wound cleaning stuff.

“I still miss him. But I have friends now. I won’t be alone anymore, like I was before him.”

His voice is raspy and clipped and strained, and you are thankful he has the helmet to hide behind. You try to think about what to say.

“Thank you for trusting me. To tell this” you add, as he turns towards you, black visor somehow friendlier than ever. You think about asking him to help, but he just goes to do that anyways. As he cuts the fabric and cleans your wound, the burn of the antiseptic is a welcome pain - the first step to healing. He takes back the jar of bacta from you and you almost doze off after. Then you feel his palm on your thigh.

“Move your leg a bit please” his voice wakes you up from half sleep, and you look at what he might mean. He gently nudges your thigh and dips his head to the side, trying to see the whole length of the cut. All you can focus on is the faint burn of the antiseptic working, and the warmth of his gloved hand on your skin. You wish he had his glove off like when you fixed that problem with Toots.

The uneasiness, the lead from your stomach, vanishes completely. Instead, with each passing second he spends tending you, one hand on your skin, the other smoothing bacta on around your wound, you feel warmth creeping up your neck.

“All right, almost finished. Just the bandages left.” The helmet tilts up, looking at your face. You realize too late your face must be all drowsy. “You all right there? Just a few more minutes, than you can lay down and rest.”

He nudges your leg around a bit while juggling the gauze, and keeps glancing up from his work. You try to smile and look alert, but his glances are a bit distracting in your light headed state. By the time he finishes bandaging your wound, your ears feel like being aflame and you’re all flustered. Is it the blood loss? Not having been touched for a good while now? Being touched by him? Whichever it is, you know you need to get your act together.

He looks up at you every time when he asks something or when he tells you what he’s going to do next. It’s because he wants to check that you’re still conscious, you tell yourself. You’d do the same. Than some little devil whispers in your ear. He did the same when you worked on your astromech together, and you weren’t injured back than. He looked at you straight on, giving you all his attention, when you two had that banter about tea. In general, he steps closer and faces you head on more and more as time passes, unlike in the beginning when he was standing off to the side and barely looked at your general direction. Is that just how he is? Just needed time getting comfortable with a travelling companion?

Or is it just for you?

Your hunch says it’s for you. It’s not like you haven’t had relationships before or had people been interested in you. You might try to talk it away to guard yourself, but you know what this is. You noticed things like this happening. The question is, will this be all?

Time will tell, and soon. You just have to keep yourself from thinking about things too much until then.

#din djarin x gn!reader #din djarin x tall reader #mandalorian oc #armourer oc #cheeky mandos #my writing

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team-free-will-oneshots · 5 years ago

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"Screw people.”

Title: “Screw People.” Requests: Could you please do a shy hunter reader that’s a bookworm and doesn’t talk much with both him and the reader starting to get crushes on each other - @hford0311 and also; Dean request, if you want. In a bar/club, protecting the reader from jackasses, goes wrong when Dean gets kicked out, expects reader to go back into bar. Reader leaves with Dean? If you want to that is :) - @brokencasbutt67-writer Pairing: Dean x Reader Warnings: alcohol mentions, cursing, canon-typical violence, sexual harassment Word Count: 3.5k

note; i loved both of these requests and saw them fitting well together, hope u guys enjoy !! (also i was listening to this version of ‘iris’ by the goo goo dolls while writing the ending in the Impala, could be cool to listen to while reading if u want!)

alsoooo sorry this has taken so long to get up, thank you so much to the people who requested this for their patience!!!! xxxx

Masterlist

Finally, you were alone.

The mood was set, scented candles wafting lavender smoke into the air as you settled back onto the bed, a coy smile carving your expression as you turned down the fresh sheets. A blissful sigh fell through your parted lips as you stretched out your arm, fingers grasping and searching until finally, they found it - the object that had been at the back of your mind all day, tinging every thought, spurring every movement...

You pulled the hardcover edition of your favourite book into your lap, a grin splitting your face as you snuggled beneath your duvet and ardently threw open the novel to the page you had marked all-too-long ago. The tantalising rustling of pages paired with the familiar musk of a well-loved book served to eagerly drag you into the story’s depths, and suddenly you felt like a child again; tucked beneath your blankets well after bedtime, eyes straining in the dim light as you hungrily devoured a new story, pages flying as you frantically read, drinking in the fresh plot and bubbling with excitement over the adventures of the characters as you escaped into a fantasy world all your own, if only for a few hours.

The hunting life allowed little time for the simple pleasures of life - between the constantly switching monster of the week, paired with the looming threats that always overshadowed those associated with the Winchester brothers, you’d barely had a moment to yourself in weeks. And so, the moment the boys declared it was time for a break, you were snatching your favourite book from where it had been gathering dust on your shelf, bracing yourself to forget the outside world and the troubles it held, to escape into a world where a happy ending was guaranteed, where you weren’t destined to lose all those you cared for.

That was the beauty of books, you reasoned. You near always knew what to expect. Heroes meeting and facing adversaries, learning lessons about themselves and their relationships, and by the end of it all, finding some semblance of fulfilment or at the very least, closure. And of course, you weren’t one to complain about a touch of romance thrown in along the way.

Life had no such guidelines, especially the hunting life; no promises of happiness, of even making it past the next week. People were even less predictable; at least books were easy to read. Life’s characters were far less easy to understand. Perhaps that was why you insisted on avoiding them as vehemently as you did - books were your comfort, and all people had given you thus far was grief.

“Hey, Y/N, you busy?”

Well… maybe not all people.

You held up your book wordlessly, nose still buried beneath the pages as you ignored Dean Winchester’s query. He chuckled, leaning against the doorway.

“Whatcha reading?” he asked, peering at the cover as he sauntered into the room. You sighed, keeping your page with your thumb as you let the book fall shut around your fingers.

“Old favourite,” you explained. Dean nodded appreciatively.

“Cool. Well, just wanted to say hey - you did a great job on the hunt today, by the way,” he informed you, flashing you a proud smile that had you fighting to ignore the butterflies in your stomach, the slight acceleration of your heart.

“O-oh. Thanks, but… I don’t think it was anything too spectacular,” you protested weakly, a nervous chuckle escaping you as you fiddled idly with the pages of your book. Dean shrugged.

“Hey, you got the job done - Sam and I woulda been toast without you,” he said. “You should give yourself some credit.”

You allowed a smile. “Thanks,” you tentatively replied, voice small. Dean held your gaze a moment longer, eyes heavy with an emotion you couldn’t quite place, before he cleared his throat and ducked his head.

“Look, uh- Sam and I are headed out tonight. Nothing fancy, just headed to the bar, some celebratory hey-we-killed-a-nest drinks, you know the drill. You can- you can come with us, if you want,” he invited. You laughed dryly.

“Thanks, but… I don’t think that’s really my scene,” you said. “Being surrounded by people? Not my thing.”

Dean shook his head in amusement. “I can’t believe how shy you are - you just took out those vamps like it’s nothing, Y/N. That’s pretty damn impressive,” he commended. “You have nothing to be shy about - you’re a total badass. If anyone has the right to be a cocky son-of-a-bitch, it’s you.”

You hid your smile as you glanced down to the book in your lap, fingertips nervously rubbing over the paper, curling it beneath your touch.

“I think you have enough cockiness for the both of us,” you said, sending him a shy grin. He snorted.

“Yeah, maybe. Well, offer still stands - Sam and I are leaving in fifteen,” he told you, straightening up and casting you once last, lingering glance as he headed towards the door. Your awaiting novel itched in your hands, eager to be read, but you paused as Dean hovered uncertainly for a moment by the doorway, as if locked in an internal debate.

“Hey, Dean?” you asked quietly, the words flying from your lips before you could halt them. That was the thing about Dean - talking to people wasn’t always easy for you, but something about the eldest Winchester set you at ease in a way no one else could ever hope to. He turned around immediately.

“Yeah?”

You tore your gaze from his jade eyes, though you felt the raise of goosebumps along your skin as he kept his soft stare trained on you. You flushed, tucking your hair behind your ear, cold fingers discordant against the heat of your cheeks.

“You ever think… sometimes monsters are easier to deal with than people?”

Dean frowned, ambling over to your bed and perching himself at its edge, only a few feet away from you. He shrugged. “Sometimes, sure - but people… people you can reason with. They have… morals, you know? A code. Means they can be scarier, sure, when they decide not to care - but when they do care, it’s…” Dean’s eyes flickered from yours to the ground, and he licked his lips as he chuckled breathlessly. “When you find someone to care about… I can’t imagine anything better,” he said, his eyes darting up to your own. You found yourself locked under the vice of his gaze, his expression softening with a flicker of vulnerability before he cleared his throat and broke the trance. “Why’d you ask?”

You released a breath you hadn’t realised you’d been holding. “I dunno. I guess, just- what you were saying earlier, about being a good hunter? It’s because monsters are easier. I get monsters - most of them don’t think too hard - all instinct, y’know? But people are… people are manipulative. They judge and they hate and they hurt, I just… with monsters, I know what I’m getting. People are a lot harder to trust,” you explained. Dean nodded slowly.

“Yeah. Yeah, I get that, but… ah, you’re probably right. Screw people,” he said with a cheeky grin. “But it’s not like you need to stay in contact with everyone you meet. Sometimes fun can just be… fun. Doesn’t need to be serious,” he told you, though there was a trepidatory edge to his playful tone. “You should come out tonight - let loose for once. You deserve it.”

An amused hum fell vibrated in your throat. “I dunno, I’m an all-in kinda person,” you mumbled, and you saw a small smile tilt the corner of Dean’s lips.

“Yeah. Me too.”

You scoffed. “You, really? Mr Different-Girl-Every-Night? You’re a serial flirt,” you teased, and he smiled, shaking his head.

“Yeah, but there’s a difference between a fling and actually getting to know someone - I dunno if you’ve noticed, but sometimes it feels like I care a little too much.” His smile died, and he quickly shook his head, throwing up another grinning facade. “Well, I’ll let you get back to your nerdiness.” He cast a pointed glare at your book. “Seeya later.”

Dean left, the bedsprings jumping back into place as he picked himself up from the seat, traipsing through the door and leaving you with sweaty palms and a stomach full of butterflies. You watched as he left, eyes lingering a moment too long on the empty doorway before you turned your attention back to the novel in your lap.

You wanted to read, you really did - but it seemed no matter how hard you tried, the words would blur into an incomprehensible mass that your eyes instinctively skimmed, only for you to reach the end of the page without having understood any of it at all. After a few failed attempts at reading the same few lines over, you sighed in defeat, setting the book aside as you leaned back against the headrest.

Maybe Dean was right - maybe you should give ‘people’ another chance. Maybe it was time to put your incessant shyness and distrust behind you, to ‘let loose’, as Dean had so aptly described it.

Dean…

You thought of the warmth of his smile, the vibrant ringing of his laugh, the coy smiles he’d shoot you when no one else was looking… the idea of going out was sounding more and more appealing.

And so, you decisively marched to the library, where Dean was grabbing Baby’s keys as Sam shrugged on his jacket. The sound of your footsteps had both their eyes jumping towards you, and you could’ve sworn you saw a flicker of hope in Dean’s surprised expression.

“Hey, uh, I was thinking that I might take you up on that offer, Dean,” you said, extending a wry smile. “Mind if I come?”

Dean’s mouth opened and closed silently, before he finally nodded. “I-uh- yeah, of course!” he exclaimed, just as shocked at your decision to step out of your comfort zone as you were. “What changed your mind?”

You shrugged, looking down at your feet as you scuffed the floor with the toe of your boot. “Maybe I should give people a chance - you’re right, I should let loose every now and then,” you said, tone clouded with false certainty. Dean frowned, but let your uncertainty slide as his concerned expression was replaced with an encouraging smile.

“Great, finally a drinking partner who can keep up with me,” he quipped, shooting a glare at Sam, who rolled his eyes.

“Hey, someone has to drive you home when you’re plastered,” Sam countered. You laughed, the uneasy atmosphere dissipating as the three of you walked to the car. Dean shot you a wolfish grin, and the warm sensation that buzzed in your chest had you certain that you were making the right choice.

What was the worst that could happen?

---

Turned out, the ‘worst’ had a name - it was Brandon. You knew this only because he refused to let you forget it.

“Come on, sweet cheeks, let me buy you a drink,” he coaxed, words stumbling into one another as his hot breath rolled over your face, reeking of beer as he leaned in uncomfortably close on clumsy feet.

“Uh, I’m good, thanks,” you replied, throwing him a distasteful, uncertain glance as you took a step back. Your eyes flitted over to the bar, where Sam was talking to a girl and Dean was grabbing drinks for the both of you. Catching your glance, his brow furrowed, eyes narrowing as he noticed your company.

‘You okay?’ he mouthed. You managed to give him a tight-lipped smile and a short nod before Brandon was dragging your attention back to him.

“Oh, come on, don’t be like that, baby,” he slurred, leaning forward so that his face was inches from yours. “It’s just one drink.”

You took another step back. “Like I said, I’m good,” you insisted, though your voice came out small and hesitant. You gritted your teeth as he snorted scornfully, and your hand balled into your fist at your side as he sauntered forwards once more. Though you weren’t necessarily one for confrontation, you had no qualms about putting this asshole in his place. Barely twenty-four hours ago you’d single-handedly taken on three vampires - you were pretty sure you could handle an overeager drunken bastard.

Before you had the chance to put him in his place, however, Brandon was being shoved away from you by a familiar pair of toned arms.

“They’re not interested, jackass,” Dean growled, taking a protective stance over you that you comfortably settled into. The drunk stumbled back, mouth falling open in outrage.

“Who asked you, huh?” he challenged, and Dean chuckled, shaking his head as he ran his tongue along his teeth. You could see his hands curled into white-knuckled fists at his side.

“I think a better question is; why can’t you take no for an answer? They said they’re good, man. Give it a rest,” Dean spat through clenched teeth. Brandon snorted.

“Mind your own fucking business, dick,” he snarled. “You want ‘em all to yourself, huh? Selfish prick.”

Dean scoffed, shaking his head with a grim smile, and for a moment you thought he was going to turn away… until he slammed his fist into your harasser’s jaw with a hard crack that made even you wince.

When Brandon arose, he was nursing a red jaw and a bleeding nose, but the red fluid trickling across his lips and staining his chin did nothing to mask the pure hatred etched into his expression as he lunged at Dean. The eldest Winchester blocked him easily, grabbing his wrist and slamming his face into a nearby booth table. There was a flurry of movement and shouts as Dean landed another punch to the man’s cheek, pressing him into the table with his arms locked behind his back.

“Apologise,” Dean demanded, and Brandon gasped for air.

“I’m sorry, man, I’m sorry!” he exclaimed. Dean kneed him, and the man grunted in pain.

“Not to me, idiot. To them,” he hissed, nodding towards where you stood with wide eyes and brow half-cocked in appreciation at Dean’s strength as he held the bulky man down like he weighed nothing.

“I’m sorry! Christ, let me go, please!” he said frantically.

“Dean, what the hell!” Sam’s voice interjected from behind you, and suddenly a bouncer was peeling Dean from his bruised and bloody opponent.

“Time to go,” he said in a gruff voice. Sam stepped forward, and the bouncer shot him a look.

“He with you?”

“Look, we don’t want any trouble-” Sam began, but Dean made a sound of angered amusement.

“Speak for yourself, Sammy,” he muttered, still glaring daggers at Brandon. Dean caught your eye as the bouncer dragged him outside, and the last you saw of him before he was tossed outside was his cocky wink. You chuckled to yourself as Sam quirked an eyebrow.

“What the hell happened?”

You shook your head, walking to a window and watching as Dean paced before finally heading towards the parked Impala.

“Guy was a dick - he deserved it,” you said, watching as Dean wiped his bloody knuckles on his jacket. “Look, I think I’m gonna head off with Dean,” you added, and Sam cast you a concerned expression.

“Do you want me to come?” he asked, though you could hear the reluctance in his tone as he glanced back at the girl he’d been talking with, who was still waiting for him by the bar. You smirked.

“Nah, I’m good - you go have some fun,” you teased, giving Sam a playful smile that he sheepishly returned.

“Alright. Seeya later, Y/N.”

Sam left, and you braved the cool night air as you walked to the Impala. The tail lights were on but the engine was off, the car sitting perfectly still in the parking lot. As you approached, the music from the bar echoed distantly behind you, captured by the walls and bouncing hollowly into the darkness, fading into nothing but a thumping bass and a vague suggestion of guitar and vocals.

You tried the passenger door. Locked. You tapped on the window, and watched as Dean leaned across the seat to unlatch it. The moment it swung open you slipped inside, the familiar scent of leather overruling the pollution and alcoholic odour the car park carried. The door fell shut with a heavy click, blocking any lingering traces of music from your ears.

The two of you sat in silence for a moment, hearing only the haggard sounds of one another’s breathing and the light static of the radio. You glanced over at Dean.

“How’s your hand?” you asked. Dean laughed darkly.

“Fine,” he told you, but extended his hand towards you when you raised a quizzical brow. You tenderly took his palm against your own, turning over his fist to look at his knuckles - red and raw and tender, but nothing serious. Instead of releasing him from your grip, you gave his hand a gentle squeeze, and Dean tentatively raised his gaze to yours.

“I could’ve handled that guy, y’know,” you told him sternly. Dean ducked his head guiltily.

“Yeah, I know, it was just… the way he was treating you…” He trailed off, a weighted sigh heaving from his lips as he shook his head to himself. “You didn’t deserve that. No one does, but… especially not you. I… got angry.”

You smiled wryly. “Bit of an understatement,” you said, and he laughed, genuinely this time.

“Yeah, maybe,” he allowed. “Look, I don’t think I’m welcome here tonight - I’m gonna head home. Just… give me a call when you wanna be picked up.”

“Nah, I’m ready to call it a night, too,” you said, leaning back into the seat. Dean looked at you in surprise.

“What? What happened to getting loose, giving people a chance, all that crap? Seriously, I don’t think you need to worry about that jackass - I doubt that dickhead will ever approach another person in his life,” he said seriously, and you laughed.

“Yeah, I doubt it - but I don’t think I’m really in the mood to let my hair down,” you replied, amused.

“Wait, what? But we were having such a good time!” he countered, and you met his eyes again, nodding.

“Yeah - we were. Screw other people, Dean. I thought I needed to act like someone I’m not to be happy - someone I thought I should be. But… partying? Being around a whole bunch of strangers? That’s not me, Dean. I… I don’t need to surround myself with people to be happy, it’s not in my nature. I just need… a few people I really care about,” you said, giving him a tiny smile and a pointed look.

“Yeah, you’re right,” he murmured. “Y/N… sweetheart, you never need to make yourself uncomfortable because you feel like that’s how you ‘should be.’ You… damn, Y/N, you might be shy, but it’s frickin’ adorable,” he said playfully, and you laughed, elbowing him gently as you ducked your head in embarrassment, tucking your hair behind your ear.

“I mean it, Y/N - you’re… you’re fucking amazing,” Dean breathed, and your laughter died as his eyes found yours again. He held your gaze, and you felt his eyes burning into your soul, piercing through your quiet front and seeing you for you in a way that no one else ever had.

And suddenly, he was kissing you.

His breath was warm as it blended with yours, and he tasted of whiskey and moonshine as his large hand found your cheek, cradling it as though you were something easily broken. His chapped lips bit into your own and your leg cramped up as you twisted to press closer to him, but none of that seemed to matter as you lost yourself in the bliss of kissing Dean Winchester.

You pulled away, catching your breath and taking a moment to soothe your racing heart as you ran your hand along his jaw, his stubble grazing your fingertips as he closed his eyes beneath your loving touch.

“So… you’re sure you don’t wanna go back in?” he checked, and you giggled, shaking your head.

“Definitely not,” you breathed, your breath fanning over his lips as you leaned your forehead against his. Dean melted against you, his arms looping around your waist and bringing you close to his chest.

“Good,” he murmured, “because I don’t think I can let you go until I get another kiss…” he said, raising a cocky eyebrow. You grinned.

“I think that could be arranged…” you purred, sealing your mouth against his.

Screw people, you thought as you lost yourself once again in Dean’s reverent touch. You had all you needed right here.

__________

Forever tags: @babygirloreo @calaofnoldor @lmpala97 @sebastianshoe @81mysteriouslyme @castieliswatchingoverme @kina666 @liviaolivia @simplyxparker @helpmeluci @demonsofhunting @bee-happy-buzz-on @lilulo-12 @amandatar-06

Dean tags: @polina-93 @justagirlinafandomworld @coupleofgoons @justanotherwinchester @shadowkat-83 @teenwaywardasgardian

If you want to be added to any tag lists just shoot me a message!

#supernatural #supernatural imagine #supernatural fanfiction #dean winchester x reader #dean winchester #dean winchester imagine #dean winchester fluff #spn #spn imagine #spn fanfiction #spn fanfic #spn fluff #dean winchester fanfiction #dean winchester fic

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merinnan · 4 years ago

Text

The Rescue Job

If anyone had asked Zhao Yunlan this morning how he thought this day would go, kissing Shen Wei would not have even been suggested. He would have thought about it, of course, since kissing Shen Wei was something that he thought about frequently; he’d even kissed the man before, but those were quick, light kisses as part of a job, done just to keep up their cover of being boyfriends, or husbands, or whatever that particular job had them pretending to be. Those kisses were almost worse than no kisses at all, precisely because they weren’t actually real, not in the way that truly mattered – although they were real enough to make him hold on to the memory of every single one like a dragon holding onto its hoard, each scent and warm breath like a gold coin, each brush of soft lips a sparkling jewel.

But to be actually kissing Shen Wei, to have arms wrapped around him and a hand in his hair, bodies pressed so close together that it was hard to tell whose pounding heartbeat was whose, hot mouths exploring each other until they were forced to stop in order to breathe again? This was something Zhao Yunlan had only dreamed about.

He was fairly sure that it wasn’t another dream, however, as these dreams were usually set in his office, or in one of their apartments, or in the park that they sometimes took a walk in, not in a bare concrete room so far below ground that there was no natural light. These dreams didn’t involve Shen Wei covered in his own blood. And they certainly didn’t feature Ye Zun in the background, making gagging noises and ‘get a room’ gestures.

No, this morning Zhao Yunlan had expected the team to go in, do the job they’d been planning for the past week, and get out. The day had begun with them going to do exactly that, and it had been going according to plan up until everything went to hell.

***

Nine Hours Earlier

It was a beautiful, sunny day, just on the cusp of spring and summer – the sort of day that made its way into a myriad of books, or the screens of every rom-com or teen movie when the script called for the protagonists to have a perfect day. Fluffy white clouds drifted across blue sky, not even a single drop of rain threatened, and a light breeze kept the temperature just this side of overly warm. Their mark couldn’t have picked a better day for his garden reception if he’d been able to engineer the weather himself.

Not that Zhao Yunlan was able to properly enjoy it, of course, since he wasn’t at the reception. He wasn’t even outside, enjoying the pleasant afternoon in any way. Instead, he was back at the team’s HQ, sprawled back in his chair with his feet up on his desk, one ankle crossed over the other, tongue working the lollipop in his mouth as he watched six screens showing the feeds of six pinhole cameras, and vicariously experienced both the day and the reception through them. If his eyes happened to linger more on five of these screens whenever a particular blue suited figure appeared on one of them, who was to tell?

“Do you think you could pay attention to more than my gege?”

Well. One man could tell. Zhao Yunlan’s current third-least favourite person in the world lounged in a nearby chair, twirling an ornamental cane in one hand. Zhao Yunlan offered him an easy grin around the lollipop.

“Aiyo, Ye Zun, of course I’m paying attention to all of it. Who do you take me for?” Even as he spoke, a flicker of blue drew his eyes back to the screen showing the feed from Guo Changcheng’s camera, Shen Wei walking past the grifter with neither of them even giving a flicker that they knew each other. Zhao Yunlan couldn’t help but feel a flicker of pride for how far the kid had come, along with a flicker of something that was decidedly more heated than pride at the figure Shen Wei cut in that blue suit, the clothing somehow managing to make him seem both perfectly innocuous with his sensible business shoes and round-rimmed glasses, and also just so undeniably…

“Disgusting.” Ye Zun’s voice drawled across his reverie. “Any minute now you’ll start drooling, and I really don’t want to see that.”

Zhao Yunlan didn’t even have to look up to pull a lollipop from his desk drawer and throw it in the vicinity of Ye Zun’s head. This was an interaction that had repeated far too many times for his taste. While yes, it had been his insistence that Ye Zun was never to be left unattended in the HQ even if he was, technically and officially, now part of the team, he hadn’t anticipated that he would be the one most often on Ye Zun duty, which invariably meant Ye Zun mocking him mercilessly for his hopeless crush on Shen Wei. Zhao Yunlan felt both relieved and regretful that none of their recent jobs had involved Shen Wei and him going undercover together as a couple – while those jobs always left him on even more of an emotional high than successful jobs normally did, buoyed by additional memories of touches and kisses to hoard and wish for something he couldn’t have, they also led Ye Zun to kick the mocking up several notches.

He wasn’t surprised to hear Ye Zun catch the lollipop, rather than the far more satisfying sound of it lightly thunking against his head, or the follow up sigh and the sound of a crinkling wrapper being undone.

“Gege could do so much better than you.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.” Zhao Yunlan scowled, then pulled the half-eaten lollipop from his mouth and waved it at the screens. “Looks like the party’s winding down. It’s supposed to finish at 2:30, right?”

He knew damn well that that was when it was supposed to finish. He and the twins had pored over every scrap of information while crafting this plan, and at this point they probably had the reception schedule more thoroughly memorised than the host. It did, however, successfully switch Ye Zun’s focus to the screens, and allow him to take his own attention away from just how much better than him Shen Wei could do, and all of the other reasons why a gremlin like him and the perfect man that was Shen Wei would never be anything more than just good friends and colleagues. No matter how much more he wanted.

He leaned forward and pressed a key on the keyboard. “Lin Jing, have you found it yet?” Lin Jing’s screen showed wood panelling, the hacker’s hands running along it.

“It’s got to be here somewhere,” Lin Jing replied. “From the map, it should be…”

“Here?” Da Qing suggested. The wood panelling on Da Qing’s feed opened, revealing an electrical panel.

“Yes!” Lin Jing cheered quietly, then quickly began to get to work.

“You’ve got 22 minutes before the reception ends and security starts looking for stray guests trying to overstay their welcome,” Ye Zun warned them.

“Xiao Guo,” Zhao Yunlan adds, “ready to cause a distraction if they need more time?”

Back outside with the main party, Guo Changcheng makes a noise of agreement that the woman he’s talking to takes as agreeing with whatever she was talking about. Zhao Yunlan glances at the other three camera feeds – Chu Shuzhi’s shows him hovering in Guo Changcheng’s general vicinity, while Shen Wei and Zhu Hong are closer to the mansion’s entrance, ready to slip in to help Lin Jing and Da Qing if needed. All where they should be.

“Zhao Yunlan,” Shen Wei says suddenly, his soft voice as clear through the comms as ever. “There’s something wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“Too many guests have left.”

Zhao Yunlan and Ye Zun both sit up straight and lean towards the screens, studying them.

“Gege, there’s still a lot of guests there,” Ye Zun says, eyes flitting from screen to screen. Shen Wei’s camera feed slowly turns as Shen Wei does, allowing them a view of more people.

“They’re wrong for guests,” he says. “I think…”

Whatever it was he thought they didn’t hear, as his and Zhu Hong’s comms and cameras went dead. A moment later, Chu Shuzhi’s and Guo Changcheng’s followed suit.

“Shen Wei!”

Zhao Yunlan had barely finished the name when the last two comms and cameras went out. He pulled out his phone, jabbing at Chu Shuzhi’s number, only for it to go straight to voicemail. He tried the next number, aware of Ye Zun doing the same thing beside him. All of the phones went to voicemail.

“Wang Zheng!” Zhao Yunlan shouted, pushing away from his desk. Within moments, the ghostly pale young woman appeared at the door. “Keep trying to call the team through every avenue you can, and tell Lao Li to make sure my car’s ready for an extraction.”

He hoped it wouldn’t come to that, and he was confident in Shen Wei and Chu Shuzhi’s abilities to get everyone out regardless of what had just happened, but still…the way the cameras and comms had all cut out like that left him feeling uneasy, particularly since Shen Wei had thought there was something wrong.

“And call Cheng Xinyan,” Ye Zun added from where he’d taken over the keyboard, his fingers flying over it. He bit his lip in a way that was just so Shen Wei that Zhao Yunlan was left speechless for a moment. For all that they were identical, the twins generally had such different mannerisms that it wasn’t at all difficult to tell them apart, especially not once Ye Zun grew his hair out to collar-length while Shen Wei kept his short. Every so often, though, one of them would do something that reinforced the fact that the similarities between them weren’t limited to just looks.

“What’s wrong?” Zhao Yunlan asked him. If Ye Zun was suggesting that they bring in a doctor, then he, like Zhao Yunlan, had a very bad feeling about this.

“I can’t activate any of their trackers,” Ye Zun said, not looking up from the screens. “To be more accurate, I sent the activation codes, and nothing happened.”

Zhao Yunlan frowned at that, shoving the lollipop back in his mouth and going back to trying to get through to any of the team’s phones while Ye Zun tried to bring the comms back online.

One minute passed. Then five. Then ten. To Zhao Yunlan, each one might as well have been an hour.

Thirty eight minutes after Shen Wei’s comms went down, two cars screeched to a halt outside, and car doors slammed. Zhao Yunlan was halfway to the door when it opened, and Chu Shuzhi staggered inside, his arms slung over Guo Changcheng and Zhu Hong’s shoulders as they half-carried him. Red blood smeared Guo Changcheng’s shirt where Chu Shuzhi leaned against him, and streaked across Zhu Hong’s face where she’d evidently rubbed a bloodstained hand. Behind them, Da Qing supported a deathly pale Lin Jing.

Zhao Yunlan stopped and looked them over, icy fingers creeping up his back. Something had certainly gone horribly, terribly wrong. Wang Zheng and Sang Zan raced forward to help get Chu Shuzhi and Lin Jing to the back room that Cheng Xinyan used as her infirmary whenever they needed to call her in, and Zhao Yunlan was dimly aware of Ye Zun joining them as he looked behind the group. Out the door, the two cars were haphazardly parked on the lawn, silent – and empty.

Zhao Yunlan looked at his returned team again, five where there should be six. When he spoke, his voice seemed so distant to his ears that he almost didn’t recognise it.

“Where’s Shen Wei?”

@trensu

AO3

#guardian #zhen hun #weilan #zhao yunlan #shen wei #ye zun #leverage au #镇魂 #guo changcheng #chu shuzhi #zhu hong #da qing #lin jing #to be continued #i'll come up with a name for this at some point

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foxtophat · 4 years ago

Link

(still trying to figure out how i link these but whatever)

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!!!! i decided to just sit down and hammer out the last edits for this lil one-shot so i could get it out today!

i’m gonna be real with you: the only reason i wrote this fic is because i couldn’t get the idea out of my head. you weren’t supposed to see mercyverse for another month, honestly!!! but it’s been cold as fuck here and it’s made me fantasize about classic bed-sharing tropes, and so here we are!

this is a bit of a slice of life, to sort of give an idea of how day-to-day these guys all interact, especially now that carmina doesn’t have to pretend john doesn’t exist. plus, i’m starting to see how the caches might be involved in the overarching plot???? awesome!!!

as usual, the full text is below the cut for my friends who don’t wanna leave tumblr. i hope you enjoy -- feel free to leave a comment, i loooove hearing from readers. likes and reblogs are also great! kudos are fantastic! adding to the hit counter is just fine by me!!! anything you do to show support for fanfic is a good thing imo. i hope y’all have a happy wintereenmas or whatever and i will see you guys in 2021 with more mercyverse :)

The best thing Nick can say about the blizzard currently sweeping the county is that he could see that it was coming. They'd gotten almost a foot of snow the night before, which gets him worried about getting snowed in, and as the day progresses, the sky grows an ominous gray that Nick recognizes from a lifetime of living in the area. He knows that they probably only have a few hours left before they're going to want to get inside and avoid the worst a winter storm has to offer.

Nick and John spend the entire morning hauling wood into the house, while Kim does her best to clean out the broken chimney and ensure they won't die of smoke inhalation. They also pull in some pre-made stock that Kim had left in the freezer after it had gotten cold enough to use, as well as a few smaller pieces for miscellaneous projects. But with the storm rolling in overhead, they don't have long; they end up leaving a lot of things for later as the wind whips up around them and turns the snow sideways.

By two in the afternoon, they've closed the doors to officially bunker down for the rest of the blizzard. They have enough wood to last them three days, plus their military rations and plenty of coffee, so Nick isn't particularly concerned about their safety. The only thing he's really got to contend with is boredom, which is easier to stave off in the first few hours of captivity than it is later in the evening.

For the most part, Nick passes the time by sharpening their knives, cleaning their guns, and checking the radio every hour for any emergencies. The blizzard ensures that not many people are on, but at least he gets to check in with Jerome and make sure that Grace is safely in her bunker. It's unlikely they'll get in contact with the trailer park until after the worst passes, but that just means Nick's gonna worry about those jackasses all night.

Kim is probably the only one comfortable with the downtime, making the most of things as she chews on the radio's instructions. When the technical jargon gets to be too much, she switches to entertaining Carmina, who gets bored quick when her only job is to keep the fire going. The easiest distraction comes from card games; the deck they'd had in the bunker had shrunk to only 32 cards, but now that they've got a full deck to work with, Carmina is eager to relearn and master games like Go Fish and Old Maid. Nick doubts Jacob planned to be entertaining kids with his survival gear, but it's not like the guy's gonna complain.

Carmina isn't the only one that Jacob is keeping busy beyond the grave. Ever since they found that cache of his, John has been borderline obsessed with figuring out what the point of it could be. He'll go all day without mentioning the puzzle plaguing him, but any available downtime has him staring at the map and its coordinates. Nick and Kim have both been keeping an eye on it, just in case it turns into something worse than his usual tunnel-vision, but so far it hasn't gotten out of hand. If anything, John seems more aware and alert now that he has something to focus on, and now Nick can even pretend he's a normal guy for conversations at a time before being reminded otherwise.

Of course, the blizzard's making it impossible to find alternate distractions. John does spend part of the afternoon in his room, but eventually, he can't help but come downstairs to mull over the map. There's only one problem with that — they've hung the map up in the radio room, so there's about ten minutes every hour where Nick has no choice but to sit in John's presence. It probably wouldn't bother him so much if there was somewhere else either of them could be, but they're stuck for the foreseeable future. John's looming is just going to be part of Nick's life until the storm passes.

In the interest of keeping the peace, Nick reluctantly tries to have the same level of interest in the random dots that John shows. His attention, however, is distracted by the penciled-in changes that he, Kim and John have all been making to the landscape. The river's wider in some places now, and there are doodles of trees in spaces that were once open fields. A few X's mark places where bridges have collapsed, and Kim's circled anywhere they've made radio contact with. Their notations have scattered across the valley, and have even spread over to the river region thanks to Hurk and his raider gang, but they still don't know anything about the mountains, or even the spaces that are supposedly occupied by bow-wielding religious nutjobs. It's going to be a while before any of them get the nerve to go poking that particular hornet's nest.

John has his little notebook open, but he's not writing anything down. Nick's not sure what he would even put down, since they haven't gotten any more leads since early autumn, but he's always got the thing tucked in a pocket nowadays. Maybe Nick should be mad he outright stole that resource from the rest of them, but — well, come on. He can't yell at the man for taking up journaling, not without flying in the face of every therapist Nick had pretended not to listen to. It's just... well, what the hell is there for him to write down?

"Are you staring for any particular reason?" John asks, because of course he does.

"That's rich, coming from the guy lurking over my shoulder all day." Nick flips off the static-ridden radio frequency, leaning back in his chair so that he can get a better look at the map push-pinned to the wall. "I hear if you look at it just right, you can see a sailboat."

John's clearly not much of a Kevin Smith fan, because he only sighs heavily at Nick's flat joke. "If you have something better for me to be doing, I'm all ears," he says, revealing to Nick at last just how bored he really is. Weirdly enough, being in the same boat as John is somehow reassuring.

"Okay, fine. At least tell me what you're staring at, so I know what to fake interest in."

Even though it's mostly a joke, it lands softly enough that John doesn't take offense. Stuffing the notebook in his back pocket, he shakes his head, gesturing at the map. Getting John to explain himself is usually like pulling teeth, but right now he seems relieved to have someone to bounce his thoughts off of. It's a long way away from the guy Nick remembers saving, enough so that it almost catches his full interest.

"It's nothing in particular, really. I've already spent hours staring at this thing, but I'm... still looking for a pattern, I guess. Jacob was paranoid and secretive, but if there's a hidden code buried in these coordinates, it's beyond me to see it. And the snow was already keeping us from traveling too far — now with this blizzard, we're likely stuck with no new information until spring ..."

John sighs, rubbing his forehead as the pretense finally abandons him. "I just don't know what I'm supposed to do until then."

That's certainly a feeling that Nick can relate to. Nick is less of a workaholic than John might be, but that doesn't mean he won't go stir-crazy without his own set of chores. Hell, that's why he's been hanging around the radio in between games of cards with the girls and cleaning whatever he can get his hands on. It must suck extra for John; the guy's been spinning his tires in the dirt for years, probably, and being this close to having a purpose beyond doing whatever chores Nick sets him to must be irritating.

Nick props one leg up against the wall, tapping his boot against the wood as he ponders the dots scattered around the map. There are a few still in the valley, but there's no driving until they thaw out. The points in the mountains are probably inaccessible to anybody, and who knows when they'll get to investigate the old vet center or find the Wolf's Den. There are a couple points nearer the trailer park, though, and not for the first time Nick tries to measure the distance from Hurk to the various red dots. There's one near the lumber mill, and one near where that godawful statue was, and of course one right smack dab in the middle of the original Peggy compound.

Nick can't imagine his truck making it all the way there and back, not without more information about the roads. Hurk might not have the same trouble. "I could send the trailer park a couple coordinates," he points out. "They might get to search before us, and it could cut the work in half."

Despite John's scowl, he only sounds tired as he replies, "I've considered it, but I don't trust them. Then again, I hardly trust myself, so who knows."

"I guess you're shit outta luck, then," Nick says. John takes obvious offense at Nick brushing him off, but hey, what else is Nick supposed to do? "God's giving you a freebie with this blizzard. Maybe you should try catching up on your sleep, or something."

"And ruin the precarious schedule I'm keeping?"

"Jesus, then go read a book! Just — you know, quit hovering over me all day. Don't you know how to entertain yourself?"

John seems unphased by Nick's half-hearted outburst. "This is how I entertain myself. Maps, resources, legal documents — that's probably the only decent outlet I've ever had." He stares at Nick's boot, unwilling to meet his eyes. "At least, it's the only one healthy enough to keep."

That is probably a safe bet, Nick realizes, quickly trying to backpedal away from the open scab that is John's history. "Uh, well, what about before the cult?"

John surprises them both with a brief laugh. "If I could source some coke, then yes, I would be entertained."

"Jesus, John."

"I'm not known for my healthy self-care habits," John points out, a little too smug to be truly self-deprecating. At least he seems to understand what Nick had been getting at originally, deferring with a vague hand-wave. "Is my loitering in the kitchen going to be too smothering for you, too, or is that okay?"

Nick rolls his eyes, flipping the radio back on to scan the channels once again. "It's fine, whatever. Just as long as you've got something better to entertain yourself than snaking the whiskey Jacob left."

"I'm more of a gin guy," John admits.

"Of course you are."

It's still a relief, though, knowing they aren't keeping an alcoholic too near his fix. On top of that, John's relaxed disregard for his past vices settles nerves Nick hadn't even realized were rattled. Sure, there's probably a whole other box of American Psycho- esque worms waiting to be opened up from John's time before Eden's Gate, but at least he seems to have comfortably packed that part of his life away for now. Unlike talking about the cult, John has no trouble dropping the conversation, just as casually as he'd brought it up. He retreats into the kitchen to mull over whatever he's written down already, leaving behind no traumatic story or sad-eyed stare — just the casual admission that he would really like to do some drugs.

Weirdly enough, that is probably the most respectable thing about John to date.

Nick spends another fifteen minutes checking the radio, scanning the channels he knows people use most. He winds up with nothing to show for it — either the storm is making radio communication impossible, or everybody else has given up on their radios. It's only after he's cleared the range twice that he flips the radio off and escapes back to Kim and Carmina, leaving John in the kitchen with a broad, somehow-sarcastic gesture towards the now unoccupied radio nook.

Carmina ropes Nick into a game of Go Fish, which Kim seems keen on losing. Nick isn't surprised — Carmina is a wily player, which is to say that she tries to bluff her way through hands with all the grace of a sledgehammer. Kim's not as willing to put up with cheating as Nick is, but neither of them are capable of even pretending to believe Carmina's poker face. It's going to be a problem one day, but Nick isn't exactly ready to teach his daughter how to lie to his face.

Well, that is until she and Nick are on their third round of Go Fish, and Nick has had to pretend not to see through all of Carmina's gambits.

He asks her if she has any threes, and she scrunches her nose up as she glances meaningfully at her cards. "Go fish," she says, making Nick regret not having Kim sit right behind their daughter as a referee.

"Fine," he grumbles, "If you say so."

Kim blinks skeptically at the pants she's fixing, but she doesn't offer Nick any out. If it weren't for his clumsy hands, maybe he could use darning socks and patching shirts as an excuse to quit playing, but as it stands, the only thing he has other than getting trounced is staring at the map with John. And since he already tried that and found it to be mildly aggravating at best...

"You know, this would be more fun with more people," Nick says, desperately glancing at Kim.

Kim, of course, gives him no quarter. "Why don't you ask John," she suggests rhetorically.

"John," Carmina calls out, "Do you wanna play Go Fish?"

Nick opens his mouth to chastise Carmina, but he realizes there's nothing to discipline her for. Especially not when John flippantly replies, "I think your father's looking to play with fewer cheaters, not more."

"I'm not cheating!" Carmina exclaims, not-so-surreptitiously pressing her cards into her lap to ensure nobody's looking at them. Between that and her guiltily furrowed brow, there's no hiding it. Her poker face needs a lot of work.

"Go Fish isn't even worth cheating at," Nick sighs, gesturing for her cards. "If that's the way you wanna play, at least do it the right way. Here, gimme your cards — John, come over here so I can teach my daughter how to lie to your face."

As if playing a game of cards with John wasn't enough to excite Carmina, she's doubly over the moon when he tells her the rules. After all, a ten-year-old girl is the prime demographic for the game Bullshit, especially when she's given carte blanche to shout cuss words at her dad. On top of that, it seems like bluffing really is half of the fun for his daughter — which is a little intimidating, sure, but at least he knows she's smart enough to understand the utility of lying.

John is... unenthusiastic, to say the least, but that only makes the prospect of humiliating him that much better. A few weeks ago, Nick would've thought John was too fragile to be messed with, but now there's a bounce in his step that will make taking him down easier. He's got to do something to remind himself that this nearly-tolerable man is usually a miserable sonofabitch.

Unfortunately, John has a fantastic poker face. Nick figured that from the get-go, but it's still daunting to play against a bored, uninterested party. That's probably why Carmina avoids John in favor of hounding Nick, calling out "bullshit!" with delightful glee whenever she thinks Nick has dropped the wrong face card or played a nine instead of a King. On the one hand, Nick appreciates that he can read her as well as she can, but on the other hand, he'd really like a chance to beat John. So far, he's the only one who's called John out, and all he has to show for it is the extra six cards in his hand.

Although Kim is on standby for this round, she keeps flashing Nick amused grins whenever Carmina calls bullshit. Nick almost hopes John can hold it together to be mundane for two entire rounds of cards because he wouldn't stand a chance against Kim.

Case in point, John lays down two cards that are meant to be threes, and Kim clicks her tongue disapprovingly. Carmina frowns up at her mom, who only shrugs and suggests, "I would call him out, if I were you."

John's neutral frown doesn't change. "Last I checked, you weren't playing," he says.

Kim only shrugs in response. Nick furrows his brow at Kim while Carmina squints suspiciously from the discard pile to John and then back again. Of course, encouraging a ten-year-old to swear is always going to win out, and so Carmina wrinkles her nose and calls John out with a slightly uncertain, "Okay, bullshit."

Without so much as a grimace of defeat, John lets Carmina flip his played cards — one three, and one dirty, rotten, lying, bullshit seven .

"That's what I thought," Kim says, flippantly triumphant. "Guess you're not as hard to read as you thought."

Nick sure can't tell what John's thinking as he lifts one shoulder noncommittally. "I stand corrected."

"Wait," Nick asks, "What gave it away?"

"I'm not helping you too , Nick," Kim laughs. "That wouldn't be fair."

"It's not exactly fair to help Carmina," John points out. Nick bets he's just as interested in what tell Kim noticed, although he manages to be less obvious about it. At least he can't crack Kim's smug smile any better than Nick, which is some small compensation.

Nick manages to win this hand, if only because his play strategy involves lying as little as possible. That seems to work against Carmina no problem, but Nick suspects John threw the game out of personal disinterest. If it weren't for the howling winds whistling through the roof and second story, John would probably excuse himself from another hand by retreating upstairs, but as it is he manages to sit through one more round of cards, this time with Kim joining in.

Carmina's poker-face doesn't improve by leaps and bounds, exactly, but she manages to fool Nick into picking up a fat stack of cards, so that's something. Too bad he'd been trying to teach her to lie to John , not her parents. Well — at least she's a nice enough kid to only do it for fun. He hopes, anyway.

Kim makes John's loss look more organic, at least, and she doesn't rub it in too badly when she wins. It's extra kind of her considering Nick is the one who called her last play bullshit, leaving him to rot in miserable third place after both his girls. Well, fine . At least Carmina seemed to have fun, even if Nick is now sitting with nearly half a deck in his hands. If the blizzard keeps up for too long, they might have to graduate to poker.

Before they can play any more card games, though, they take time out for dinner. It's almost normal, sitting around the fireplace with their military rations and some hot broth — if they were eating Marie Calendar pot-pies and watching Christmas movies, Nick would even be able to ignore John's presence sticking out like a sore thumb.

The next best thing to watching movies is talking about them, which has become something of a tradition between the Ryes. It all started in the bunker, where Kim and Nick ran out of normal Christmas stories and began taking turns narrating whatever holiday movies they could remember. They've run through all the memorable Rankin & Bass flicks, as well as a couple more contemporary ones, so they're starting to reach for their personal favorites or the very bottom of the barrel plots.

Nick intends to be paying Jingle All the Way a tribute tonight, but as soon as he mentions that the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle is one of his favorites, he's interrupted by John snorting derisively.

"Let me guess," Nick snaps, "You're one of those jackasses who pretends Die Hard is a legitimate Christmas movie just so he doesn't have to watch good, family-friendly content."

"It is a legitimate Christmas movie," John responds, just petulantly enough to tell Nick he hit the nail on the head.

"Look, Kim and I have already had this discussion — just because it takes place during Christmas doesn't make it a Christmas movie . Set dressing alone isn't enough!"

John raises his eyes towards the ceiling, which is as subtle as his eyerolls can get. "Whatever you say, Nick."

"What's Die Hard about?" Carmina asks, excitedly guessing, "Does Santa get to shoot people in it?"

"That would be a good Christmas movie," Nick replies. "No, it's just about some guy who has to fight bad guys in a building."

"During Christmas," Kim points out.

"Okay, fine during Christmas. But nobody's dressed up like Santa, nobody sings any carols, and there sure as hell isn't any Christmas magic that saves the day, so it doesn't count!"

"So what does happen?" Carmina asks.

Damn it — Nick should have known that talking about an action flick would immediately disinterest her towards any sloppy story about consumerism. She doesn't even know what a mall is — but she knows how to shoot a handgun, and now that Nick's thinking about it, she might need to use the duct-tape shoulder holster trick one day. It would be pretty bad-ass if she knew how, anyway.

"Okay, fine, I'll do it real quick. I don't remember all the parts, so Kim, you gotta help."

Real quick turns out to take almost as much time as the movie itself had. Kim interjects whenever Nick forgets a plot point, but at least he remembers the core conflict. Sort of, anyway — by the time he's done recounting John McClane's tale, John looks visibly dissatisfied, and Kim has a "well, sort of" expression on her face that implies he didn't quite nail the execution. Well, who cares what they think? All that matters is that Carmina is entertained, and of course she is. After all, narrated or not, it's still Die Hard . Just so long as she doesn't ask about the sequels, they should be okay.

The wind is still whipping overhead, and Nick can see nothing beyond the windows. There's no telling how late it's gotten. Although his internal clock insists it can't have been that long since sundown, Carmina has been yawning for a while now, and the fire's gone down again. It looks like sleeping through the storm is the only pastime left for Nick to try.

Carmina takes over stoking the fire for the final time before bed, while Kim makes her way upstairs to gather as much of their bedding as she can carry. John follows reluctantly behind, clearly unhappy with the prospect of facing his own cold room, but Nick figures he can deal for five damn minutes. For his part, Nick busies himself checking the radio one last time, just in case there's an emergency. He doesn't know what they'd be able to do if there was one, but that doesn't stop him from checking anyway.

With the radio situated just under the stairs, it's easy to listen in to Kim stomping around in the room above, desperate to keep her temperature up. Nick had put off too many attic repairs before this winter — he's going to have to make up for that in spring, when he and John can worm their way into the rafters and ensure that their next winter won't turn the bedrooms into a cold wasteland. Of course, even if they did patch up the gaps in the floorboards and do their best to insulate the attic, not much can beat a genuine fire in the middle of a snowstorm.

Nick isn't even paying attention to the radio, so he flips it off and trusts that everyone can keep themselves safe for another night. He hears the whump of fabric as Kim tosses their two biggest, least moldy blankets down for Carmina to start with, and the creak of footsteps on the landing overhead. Kim's voice isn't raised, but it carries down to Nick clear as a bell.

"John, you'll freeze if you stay up here," she says. "Get your stuff and come downstairs."

"It's not that cold," John says, attempting to deflect from one weak excuse with another. "I doubt Nick approved that suggestion."

Well, not technically, no, but Nick had sort of assumed they were already all on the same page. What does John think Nick's gonna do, force him to freeze upstairs so he can hog the fireplace all to himself?

Kim doesn't give the excuses a chance to breathe, replying with parental exasperation. "He and I both agree it's too cold to sleep upstairs." Nick can hear the teasing plain as day when she adds, "Just don't be weird about it."

Sure enough, suggesting John might be making things awkward is enough to get him to shut up and follow orders. Nick briefly longs for the days when John would mutely nod and do as told without any additional goading, but only for a second. Even that is long enough retrospection to remind Nick of how creepy and genuinely alarming it had been. Sure, John might get argumentative or exasperated now, but at least there's an actual person to communicate with. Nick might want to kick his ass more now than before, but he absolutely hated dealing with the hollow-eyed monster John had been.

Besides, it's way more satisfying being a dick to him now that he actually gets offended.

Despite John's furrowed-brow glares, Nick doesn't comment whatsoever on him trailing downstairs after Kim, clutching two actual blankets and a tarp that's weather-worn enough to pass muster. He stands and waits for someone to point him in the right direction as Kim and Carmina do their best to bundle together a soft place on the floor, but Nick studiously ignores him until he makes a decision himself. John takes a spot close to the fireplace, off to the right of where the girls are setting up. It's still plenty removed enough, so that nobody will get the wrong idea and think John is supposed to be welcome down here. Nick wonders who he's trying to convince, but there are so many damn demons in the man's head, it's anybody's guess.

With the fire roaring for the last time that night, all the blankets arranged and everybody looking exhausted despite not doing anything all day, Nick finally gets to crawl into bed and put this whole goddamn blizzard behind him. Hopefully, the weather has the common sense to clear up tomorrow — for now, it's time to shut out the cold entirely.

He must be tired. Nick barely stays conscious as Kim and Carmina climb under the blankets, the cool air rapidly warming as they begin to shift around and get comfortable. He rouses a few times at first as Carmina kicks his leg and Kim bumps into him, but eventually, he finds himself dozing in the silence of a quiet house. Far above them, the wind is whipping through the attic, but from down here, it sounds like a generic white-noise machine; coupled with the crackling fire, Nick is lulled to sleep by the sounds of peaceful normalcy.

Who knows how long it is before Nick finds himself conscious again. Even then, he only wakes enough to hear the dying fire popping by his feet. Maybe he should stoke it. But that would mean moving, and Nick is weighted down on either side beneath warm blankets, so that's a hard no. He tries first to roll towards Kim and Carmina, ready to curl into a ball and conserve even more heat, but his right arm is stuck. It takes a few bleary-eyed blinks to realize what's pinned him down, but he's barely coherent enough to make sense of it.

Sometime in the night, John must've migrated from the no-man's-land he'd made for himself towards the Rye's pile of blankets. Unsurprising, really — but more than a little awkward, given how he's pressed into Nick's side, pinning Nick's arm in place. Worse yet, half of his blankets have been absorbed into the mess that Nick's been using to keep warm, which is going to make extracting himself tricky if not impossible.

While he tries to figure out how to avoid making this mortifying situation worse, Nick watches John for any signs of consciousness. The guy usually sleeps light, but Nick watches his breathing for a solid minute and doesn't catch anything. Either his poker-face is just that good, or John is actually asleep. Deeply, peacefully asleep. Nick had assumed that was impossible.

If Nick were a better person, he'd probably be thankful to see it. Glad to know that John's insomnia might finally be coming to an end. But Nick is mostly just an exhausted, anxious mess, and now he's just wondering how to get out of the situation he's found himself in.

John shifts, and like a guilty ten-year-old, Nick immediately closes his eyes and pretends to be asleep. If he's lucky, John will roll away of his own volition, or at least move enough to let Nick roll over himself. If only he'd decided to sleep on Kim's side — she wouldn't have the same trouble Nick has. She'd just kick him away and be done with it.

Slowly, John moves away from Nick. The relief is short-lived as John pulls back the covers enough to send a cold chill down Nick's side; it's a split-second decision that John immediately regrets, hissing under his breath and letting the blankets fall back into place as he recoils from the freezing temperatures.

Nick can't help his quiet huff of amusement — which is enough to break the illusion that he'd been asleep in the first place. He could probably still fake it, but if he does, John will definitely try to move his blankets, and that is going to be a much bigger problem than tolerating John in his personal space.

"Quit squirming so much," Nick mutters. "Gonna let in the cold."

John is silent and tense beside him, but he does stop squirming. It's like lying near a tense bar of iron. After a brief struggle to figure out what to say, John's embarrassment catches in his voice as he apologizes. "I'm sorry," he rasps. "I — must have been tired."

Nick sighs. "Just don't crush my arm again."

Even though John moves as though Nick threatened him, he stops short of retreating from the blankets entirely. Nick can only imagine how cold it must be — every breath of his that makes it above the blanket-line comes with a faint puff of visible air. No matter how humiliating it might be to cuddle up to Nick, it doesn't seem like John had much of a choice in the matter.

Before John can decide to try escaping again, Nick repeats, "Whatever you do, don't let in the cold."

In for a penny, Nick decides, worming deeper into the makeshift bed so that John can have more room. Rolling over is the easiest way to avoid the mortifying process of finding a comfortable sleeping arrangement. Eventually, they wind up back-to-back; Nick normally wouldn't be able to stand John touching him, but the additional body-heat does a lot to soothe Nick's reservations. Who knew all he needed to tolerate John's physical presence would be cold weather and exhaustion?

The Deputy, probably, which only makes Nick grin in tired relief. At least they would be glad to know that Nick's grown as a person. They'd probably be glad to learn he's finally gotten on-board with not murdering the Seeds in cold blood — even if it took an apocalypse to get there. If they could see the shit he's gotten himself into now, they'd probably...

He sighs. It must be a heavier sound than he imagined, because John whispers, "What?"

"Nothing," Nick says immediately, as default an answer as John's yeses are. But that's not fair, he doesn't think, because they never let John get away with his obvious deflections. As late as it is, it's easy to blame his guilt on his exhaustion. "Just thinking about Rook," he admits.

"Oh."

John is clearly uncomfortable with the topic, but he doesn't react when Nick continues sleepily, "They'd get a kick outta this, is all."

John hums. It's a quiet noise, but Nick can feel it vibrate through John's shirt. If there are two people Nick hates bringing Rook up around, it's Sharky and John. Sure, Sharky's crush was the one that was reciprocated, but Dep had always treated John's flat-footed overtures like creepy compliments instead of outright threats. They'd probably figured John's crush was superficial, whereas Sharky's had been more real than probably anything else Nick had seen the poor sap go through. John's infatuation had been about power, control, and Joseph goddamn Seed. Still, Nick can't help but wonder just how much of it might've been real to John at the time.

"They had a bad sense of humor," John finally responds, quietly enough that Nick almost misses the hurt.

"Terrible," Nick agrees.

When John sighs, Nick recognizes it as a sign of defeat. Whatever he's debating with himself, he's clearly lost. Although he doesn't speak up again, Nick isn't sure he's gone back to sleep. He sure hopes he didn't just instill another restless night in the guy, but that's John's burden to bear. Maybe he can use it to finally find some common ground with Sharky.

Nick isn't even sure that he can fall back asleep, but that doesn't seem to matter. Before he knows it, he's being woken up once more — this time by a glance of sunlight coming in through the upper part of the windows. It's just enough light to wake him, but he spends an exhausted minute staring at the wall over Kim's shoulder as he debates whether or not he's really committing this time. He's going to need to use the bathroom sooner or later — and just thinking that is enough to tell Nick that he's not getting back to sleep again.

John's back is still facing Nick, and Kim rolls away as soon as Nick starts to squirm, which leaves his path to escape much more open than it was a few hours ago. He manages to pull himself free without waking anyone else, but as soon as he does, John worms into the warm spot left behind. Nick should probably be upset, but mostly he just needs to pee. He can kick John out of his spot after he takes care of himself.

Nick leaves the rest of them to sleep as he tiptoes across the living room to the front door. Unfortunately, the door only wedges open an inch before it hits a wall of snow. Unwilling to wake anyone else up with catastrophic noise, Nick heads upstairs, going for the broken window in John's room. It's freezing up here, cold enough to keep meat until spring, and Nick pulls his flannel closer as he crosses the room, trying not to take too much stock of his surroundings. He doesn't care about the tallies John used to carve in the wall by his bed, and he definitely doesn't care to snoop through the pile of clothes that John's been growing in the corner. What he does care about is how easy it is to crawl out onto the roof from the window — after all, this isn't the first time Nick's been snowed in, and he's made escaping his childhood home an art-form.

There's a good three and a half feet of snow on the ground below, blocking any exit from the first floor. At least the gray sky above is calm, and the weather seems to have calmed down some. They'll have to prepare for another couple of inches before the week's out, but Nick bets the worst of it is over. Now he can think about breakfast — more specifically, coffee — and debate the best way to clear the doorways. They need a path out to the hangar, although they can wait another day or two before they'll need to press the matter. Nick's still convinced there's a set of tire chains hiding away in there, but it's not like the roads will be in any condition to drive on for a while yet...

Nick spends so much time thinking about what he's got to do, he forgets to consider how willing the rest of the house will be to pitch in. The top-of-the-snow sunlight isn't enough heat to make up for the lack of a fire, and getting Kim out from under the blankets is gonna be like pulling teeth until he does something about it. Worse yet, John's rolled into the spot Nick had occupied — not exactly sprawled out, or anything, but the guy is irritatingly close to Kim's sleeping back. If he decided to roll one more time, he'd probably end up smacking his face into her shoulder.

Nick considers throwing a fit on principle, but honestly, that's too much work. It's much easier to sulk, glowering at the bed he's definitely not getting back into before getting some logs to stack in the fire. He drops them noisily by John's feet, although he makes every effort not to accidentally pull a Misery on the guy.

The sound of hollow wood clattering on the ground is enough to stir John, who wakes with a sharp inhale, and cause Carmina to groan and turn away from the noise. Kim has probably been awake for a while now, but it won't make a lick of difference until the fire's on.

He turns away to toss the logs semi-haphazardly into the fireplace, then remembers the kindling and turns to get it. John has propped himself on his elbows, but his half-waking confusion causes him to overlook Nick entirely as he stares around the room. Seeing Kim and Carmina asleep next to him is initially met with confusion. He barely seems to recognize the shapes bundled in the blankets, but when he does he recoils in shock. All the nasty comments Nick had thought up take an abrupt backseat as he stops to marvel at the physical repulsion John shows. He's not sure if he should be offended or not. Probably not, but this apocalypse has got Nick wired all wrong.

"She's not gonna bite," Nick says. John whips his attention back to Nick the moment he raises his voice, only for Nick to realize that looming over the guy with a thick block of wood in hand might send the wrong message.

Sure enough, John catches sight of him, jerking back with a startled hiss. " Jesus !"

"Shit, sorry." Nick turns and drops the log, wincing at the noise that he'd moments ago been deliberately making. "Well, judging from that reaction, looks like this isn't the first time a man's caught you in bed with his wife."

John's withering glare is enough to lift Nick's mood right up. He turns his attention back to starting the fire, listening as John slowly shifts his way free of the blankets. Part of him wants to make a few more jokes at John's expense, but that can wait until John's coherent enough to be snide in return.

Nick gets the fire going and turns to follow John, who's made his way into the kitchen to peer out the window. "Completely snowed in," Nick tells him as he gets the instant coffee and the beat-up kettle. "But it looks like the worst of it's over."

"Seems to be," John agrees, adding, "We forgot the shovels in the truck. It's going to be difficult digging them out now."

"Not a lot of other options, unless you wanna stay inside until the big thaw. Don't worry, I'm sure Carmina will be excited to help us dig."

John hums in assent, although his mind seems to be somewhere else. Nick can't help but notice that John's pensive states seem damned near reasonable nowadays. He has plenty to think about, and he seems to be keeping one foot in the here-and-now. He's aware enough of his surroundings that he stops Nick before he can leave John to it.

He tries to stare Nick down, but he can't quite manage it. "Thank you for not..."

John gestures vaguely as the rest of the sentence fails to generate. Nick could probably wait it out, but he's just as embarrassed as John apparently is, and he would rather move past the whole thing.

"Don't worry about it," Nick says. "Just don't get too comfortable cuddling up to me."

Rolling his eyes doesn't hide John's faint smile, but he turns away before Nick can see if it lasts. "That won't be a problem, trust me."

Nick is surprised that he does, even for something as small and inconsequential as a joke. "Grab the mugs when you're done looking for Santa," he says, turning back for the warmth of the fire. A few months ago, Nick might've resented how eroded the line has become between John and his own family, but it's honestly too much work to keep up. At a certain point, they're just going to have to include John in their daily routines — Nick just hadn't expected that point to be made by sharing blankets during a blizzard.

Well, there's one good thing about that, Nick supposes — it means that somewhere up there, the Deputy is watching over them. After all, there's no way in hell random chance has the same shitty sense of humor as Rook had.

#fcnd #john seed #nick rye #kim rye #christmas fic #mercyverse #my fic #i don't even use that tag any more wtf??? whatever #love you guys have a safe holiday <3

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dibleopard-writes · 4 years ago

Text

Training Montage

Ao3 (recommended)

Description: Anakin was the Chosen One and therefore the best padawan anyone could ask for, especially Master Obi-Wan. He was so good, in fact, that he had plenty of time for shenanigans or, as he privately referred to them, Shenanakins. Force, he was clever. Several snippets from the training of Anakin Skywalker. Author’s Note: Fanfiction, in 2020? It's more likely than you think. I'm working on several Star Wars projects right now, and here's one that is far less structured with far less need for in depth planning. Original Upload Date: 2020-08-27 Fandom: Star Wars Prequels (post TPM, pre AotC) Characters: Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, various side characters Rating: Gen (or T for language) Warnings: Swearing, Canon-typical Violence Word Count: 6490

Chapter 1 of ??

Chapter 1: Moles? In My Mine? It's More Likely Than You Think.

At the age of five, Anakin resolved to never be the kind of moody teenager spacers complained about. At the age of twelve, he decided that not only was that naive of him, but that he would get a head start and be moody right that second.

This change of heart was mostly due to Obi-Wan, who was refusing to take any missions offworld with him even though Anakin got his own lightsaber a whole three weeks ago and was therefore completely qualified.

“Having a lightsaber doesn’t help diplomacy, Padawan,” said Obi-Wan, completely missing the point.

“So don’t choose diplomatic missions! I bet there are hundreds of pirates hanging around… I don’t know, Batuu.”

“Batuu has smugglers, not pirates, Anakin–”

“– And?! We can arrest smugglers–”

“– And anyway, it would be irresponsible of me to take a padawan as young as yourself into a confrontation like that.”

“I’m not nine anymore! I’m not some dumb initiate, I can handle pirates.” If he was the first in his classes to fight pirates, he’d be able to hold it over them for ages. Even Iepa would have to respect him, smug son of a–

“I was still an initiate when I was your age.”

“Well I’m sorry you sucked, but that doesn’t mean I can’t go on missions.”

By this point, Master Obi-Wan had his head in his hands, almost hiding the beard he was trying to grow in order to look more authoritative. Anakin didn’t think he’d respect him any more with a beard than without, but it did make him look less like a clueless teenager so maybe he could fool the senior padawans.

“Look, if I took you offworld, not only could you get hurt or cause a diplomatic incident, but Master Windu would be on my back about it.”

Anakin muttered, “I could take him.”

“What was that?”

“I said you wouldn’t be able to shake him.” Anakin believed both statements emphatically. Sure, Mace Windu was the Master of the Order and invented an entire lightsaber form, but Anakin was the Chosen One, which basically made him the best. That being said, if Master Windu put his mind to it, he could be annoyingly stubborn in his pursuit of wrong-doers.

“My point exactly, and if he decided I was irresponsible – which I would be – we’d both be Temple-bound for months.”

“Oh, so you get to leave and I don’t?”

“Yes, but I’m sure you noticed I haven’t left because I’ve been too busy looking after you.”

“And what an amazing job you’ve been doing.”

“Watch your tone, young one.”

“Tell me, Master, do you remember any of my allergies?”

“Allergies?” Obi-Wan stopped for a second, with a look of genuine concern and guilt working its way over his face as he failed to recall information that Anakin had never given him.

“Yeah, I’m allergic to you and your banthashit!”

“Language, Padawan!” There was something resembling anger in Obi-Wan’s glare, but to acknowledge that would be sacrilege and also a suggestion that Anakin cared, which he didn’t. To prove this, he stormed into his room and used the Force to slam the pneumatic door as pneumatic doors rarely do.

Force, Obi-Wan could be insufferable sometimes.

...

After an hour of staring at the ceiling, Anakin came to the decision that the only real resolution to this conflict was running away and being a Jedi without Obi-Wan to bring him down.

Fortunately, he had spent the last two years building his very own ship and had already put it through an entire test run without anything breaking. Between his technical expertise and thorough testing, the ship was probably the best in the entire Temple hangar.

First though, putting his stealth skills through their paces in order to get there. One doesn’t survive nine years of slavery without knowing how to move silently. The swoosh of the door may have been a bad start, but his slow navigation of the common room more than made up for it. Sure, Obi-Wan was in his own room, probably, like, crying over getting owned so hard, but if Anakin had made even the slightest mistake, he would have come running and demanded a ridiculous amount of meditation on respecting others. The stakes could not have been higher.

He crept out of their rooms and into the corridor, shushing the mouse droid that seemed to regard him judgmentally despite its lack of eyes. From there, it was a simple matter of carrying himself with unquestionable confidence along a convoluted path to the hangar. He passed a few senior padawans with dead eyes and piles of holopads in their arms without raising suspicion. Man, was he good at this.

The hangar was probably the best place in the Temple. Warm Temple stone met flame retarding durasteel in a way that shouldn’t have worked as well as it did. Several decade-old speeders lined up against one wall next to a small fleet of cargo ships and fighters. All of them were horrendously out of date and well worn in the way that a lot of the Temple’s technology was. When Anakin asked why the Jedi insisted on having such terrible tech, Obi-Wan had said something vague about budget and not being materialistic. It was unconvincing at best and Anakin had really shown the whole Order up with his latest project.

After his no-doubt legendary podracer was left on Tatooine, Anakin had taken all of six months to set his sights on building a starfighter that could take him to every system in the galaxy. Obi-Wan, relieved to find a hobby that would promote focus, had pulled some strings and Anakin had aimed akk-dog eyes at the Temple mechanics that he had been tailing for months until they let him at the skeleton of an old Delta-7. Aethersprites never came with their own hyperspace engines, but he could work with that. Annoyingly, the sublight engines in the hangar were nothing like the ones on a podracer so he had to spend a humiliating few weeks with an old mechanic to get them installed and working. On the positive side, there was an astromech droid fitted directly into the ship that could give him diagnostics and occasionally a mechanically-themed joke. The jokes were hit-or-miss but the droid was good.

Two years of sterling work had made the Delta the best ship in the Temple, and it could far outpace any of the speeders in Coruscant’s skylanes. Now, as he made his way ever-so-innocently towards it, he couldn’t help but admire the way the smooth paint looked among the chipped facades of the rest.

R4-P3 chirped a greeting as he hopped in and prepped the starter engines.

“Hi, P3, fancy going on a trip?”

“THERE WERE TWENTY-SEVEN TRAFFIC CODE VIOLATIONS DURING THE PREVIOUS FLIGHT.”

“Me too, buddy. See if you can find one of those hyperspace rings lying around here.” Ignition was smooth. Vertical repulsors engaged. Landing gear retracted. So far, his plan was flawless. A blip appeared on his screen, indicating the nearest hyperspace ring. Latching onto the ring was not something he had ever practiced before, so he assumed the strange rattling noise was normal.

As he ascended, chatter buzzed into the comm system.

“What’s that P3?”

The chatter cleared into actual sentences as P3 adjusted the frequency.

“-ing is not fitted properly. Repeat, Aethersprite Delta-7 please identify yourself-” Anakin flicked it off. Trust traffic control to kill his flow.

“PLEASE KEEP TO DESIGNATED SKYLANES,” bleated P3, taking up the burden instead. Anakin dodged a passing CorSec speeder.

“Will do,” he lied, “While I find one, you wanna do the hyperspace calculations?”

“DESTINATION?”

“Uh…” He hadn’t thought that far. Tatooine was probably weeks away, Naboo had way too much water just lying about– Where else had he been? Oh, that’s right: nowhere, because Obi-Wan didn’t care about him. “Batuu?” He could probably beat up a few smugglers in the name of justice before the Jedi caught wind of it. Talk about selfless heroism.

He hit the upper flight levels and powered through into the mesosphere. Considering the thin air at this altitude, there was a lot of turbulence. The shaking was beginning to make his arm buzz and it became a disproportionate effort to keep the control-stick level.

“LIGHTSPEED CALCULATIONS COMPLETE,” announced P3.

“Great, just in time,” replied Anakin, flicking some switches, at least three of which were relevant, “I’ll just make the jump now.”

As he pulled the jump ignition, P3 began screaming and the rattling grew louder. The pinprick stars became needle-thin lines became the whirl of blue and white he hadn’t seen since the last journey from Naboo. On that trip, the pilots hadn’t let him in the cockpit during the initial jump, so this would probably have been way better if not for the awful clatter of the hyperdrive and the eventual tear of engines sputtering out of commission. Maybe that was why he had never seen anyone make jumps in-atmosphere. Or perhaps the issue was related to the ring’s latching mechanism. Really, it was anyone’s guess.

P3’s wails had become spluttering, staticky sobs, which was honestly a poor display in a droid with no fear subprogram. The ring flew off the Aethersprite, plunging it back into normal space with a roar.

“Well that sucked,” Anakin said indignantly. His flying had been flawless, too!

P3, between choked bleeps, lit up the speedometer – the hyperspace ring was no longer pushing them beyond the light limit but neither had any reverse-thrusters been engaged, leaving them at a healthy constant speed of only-just-slower-than-light, which was probably fine – and the scanner – there was a planet about thirty light-seconds in front of them, which was probably less fine at their current speed.

“Okay, so it still sucks,” Anakin amended.

He slammed on the brakes and almost blacked out as G-force slammed on him in return. Rude. His old pod-racer never had this issue. He tried easing their deceleration more slowly, which involved less blacking out but also made slowing to pedestrian speeds before hitting the planet somewhat less feasible.

No matter; Anakin was an expert pilot and even more skilled at having incredible luck. This would be easy.

Within twenty seconds, they hit nature’s drag chute: the atmosphere. P3 tried to draw Anakin’s attention to their steep angle and high speed as if these weren’t things that Anakin already knew. They did seem more relevant when the entire ship’s hull flew alight, however, so he attempted to shallow out their descent.

The control-stick was uncooperative and everything began to shake as he tugged it as far back as he could. How was he supposed to pilot if the ship refused to do what he wanted it to do?

After five long seconds, the heat died and they plunged into a cloud bank. Everything past the tips of the Aethersprite’s wings was obscured by a white thicker than Obi-Wan’s skull, which was impressive if disorienting. He felt the control-stick hit full lock and a few of the many warning indicators seemed appeased.

Another five seconds, and P3 stopped screaming about their speed and started screaming about their altitude. The clouds remained steadfast.

“I’ve made an executive decision,” declared Anakin, “As captain of this ship, I say we attempt what we in the industry call a ‘terrain-assisted braking maneuver’.”

P3 did not respond particularly coherently, which Anakin chose to interpret as a vote of confidence. It did wonders for his self-esteem.

In a blink, the clouds vanished and a deep green forest appeared. P3 squeaked. Anakin grimaced. His hand was losing all sensation from gripping the control-stick so tightly, still in full lock, but their downwards momentum still overpowered the thrusters even as the Delta’s nose finally rose above the horizon. He gunned the accelerator away from the surface and his body felt heavier than the ship itself.

The ship jolted as it made contact with the treetops. Anakin switched to reverse-thrusters as the nose once again pitched downwards. Slugshot snaps crackled around them as trees snapped against the ship. He scrunched his eyes closed and braced.

Soil and splinters erupted as they collided with the ground. Anakin lurched painfully into his safety straps. P3’s voice cut off. The grinding of earth against hull slowed them to a stop and Anakin fell back against his seat.

Smoldering wiring filled the cockpit with an awful acidic smell so he tugged his straps off and pushed his way out after only a second of shaky breathing. Anakin was nothing if not practical.

“Do you think it’s gonna blow up?” he asked P3 from a safe distance. P3 seemed not to appreciate the thought but ran cursory diagnostics anyway.

As he waited, Anakin looked behind the ship and saw the gaping furrow they had left in the ground. Further away, a clumsy cut ran through the trees and a couple of wisps of smoke trailed lazily into the milk-blue sky.

All in all, an impeccable landing. The forest had looked well dull before anyway, and now it had a sick scar. You’re welcome, forest.

P3 decided that nothing was about to explode, but that the ship was fully inoperational, even if Anakin just wanted to take it on a spin to the nearest mountain range. He acquiesced that the assessment seemed about right, but also loudly proclaimed that P3 was a killjoy and a coward. P3 didn’t seem to care. Anakin kicked a clod of earth in defiance.

The ground was covered in small, stiff leaves from the pointy-looking trees around them. They were waxy little spits that more resembled star stripes than anything useful for photosynthesis. As he knelt to pick some up, he realised that the entire forest smelt like them – a fresh, emerald sort of smell. They were pretty incredible, for leaves; Anakin had certainly never seen anything like them. He shoved some in a belt pouch.

Now that he was looking at the ground, he noticed wooden, grenade-like things peppered amongst the leaf litter. This forest kept on getting more and more curious. Unfortunately, none of them would fit in his pouches. Jedi really needed some good pockets that could fit any important scientific discoveries in them. It was a severe oversight, in Anakin’s humble opinion.

Something rustled abruptly, snapping Anakin out of his Jedi-like contemplations, seed-pod still in hand. He scanned the surrounding thickets. Plants, plants, leaves, plants, thorny plants…

Claws!

A blur of red flew at his face and he stumbled backwards, tripping over a bush. Batting the wild beast away from his face, he felt himself fall further than anticipated through the undergrowth into empty air. For a suspended moment, all he could see was blue sky and grey rockface. Then his back collided with something that promptly gave way and let him fall onto solid stone.

Perfect.

...

Obi-Wan Kenobi was walking at an unpanicked pace through the halls of the Jedi Temple and casually inspecting child-sized nooks and crannies in a manner completely befitting of a master who knew exactly where his padawan was. He had been doing this for half an hour and wasn’t shaking in the slightest.

He was just doing a routine inspection of the gap between a bronzium statue and a wall when Master Windu walked past, stopped, watched Obi-Wan innocently test the screws on a ventilation covering, and said, “Knight Kenobi.”

Obi-Wan sprang upright. “Master Windu.”

“Have you lost your padawan?” Was he really that obvious? No, that couldn’t be it; Master Windu was just unusually perceptive. Perhaps shatter-points were giving him away – nowhere was it written that they didn’t highlight underperforming masters. Even so, it was probably wise not to confirm anything. The last thing Obi-Wan needed was a council member judging his guardianship skills.

“Oh no, not at all. I know exactly where he is.”

Master Windu’s expression was as flat as Anakin’s heart rate would be once this was over. Shatter-points were dirty snitches.

“Thank you for your concern, Master,” added Obi-Wan, respectfully.

Master Windu looked at him dead in the eye for a solid five seconds. Obi-Wan had seen him level a similar look at Qui-Gon several times in the past, and found it unnerving to now be the target. However, Qui-Gon’s experiences taught him that it was best to ride these looks out like a bad spice trip, i.e. with as little motion as possible. How either of them knew what a bad spice trip felt like was irrelevant.

The five seconds were up, only having been slightly uncomfortably stretched, and Master Windu blinked.

“Well,” he said, dryly, “Good luck with your endeavours, Knight Kenobi, whatever they may be.” With one spare glance to the ventilation covering, he continued down the corridor.

Obi-Wan was not naive enough to think himself completely free of suspicion but he was hopeful that nothing would come of it until he could thrust Anakin by the shoulders into Master Windu’s personal space and say ‘See? I have him right here!’ in a serene and Jedi-like manner as if he had nothing to prove. Of course, he would like to prove his capabilities anyway. Just as soon as Anakin was present…

He closed his eyes and fumbled for the Master-Padawan bond that connected him to Anakin. It wasn’t usually strong enough to get much other than vague impressions from, but now it seemed to be stretched thinner than usual, only telling him that Anakin was alive. That was a relief to know, to an extent, but also concerning since there was so little to point him in the right direction. He poked the bond and felt nothing.

Why had he taken on a padawan? Padawans get into fights and then run off and make you worry and then the Council finds out and then you have to try and justify it all and –

Obi-Wan sighed. Running a hand over his beard, he peered down the hallway that Master Windu had taken. Empty. He could probably make it to the comms centre without any more councilmembers calling him out.

Probably. He was hopeful.

...

“Hilari? Is that you?”

Anakin looked up from what appeared to be a now-dismantled porch tarp and saw an old man opening the door to its attached house, carved into rock. A tooka was watching him from behind the man’s legs. It meowed indignantly.

“I’ve told you, the awning isn’t designed for tookas.”

“Myaeeh,” complained Hilari.

Anakin, frazzled from both of his unplanned descents and shocked out of his irritation, opened his mouth to apologise because yes, Obi-Wan he is capable of apologising when a middle-aged twi’lek woman materialised.

“Wohrin, what– Oh! Who’s your young friend?”

“You’ve met Hilari before, Mahj–”

“No, the young man covered in your porch. Blond?”

The man, Wohrin, gave Mahj’s left lek an exasperated look. His eyes were pale the same way Blind Man Mikah’s had been in the bookmaker’s in Mos Espa.

“Mahj,” he said slowly, “I don’t know what colour your hair is, let alone that of whoever it is you’re referring to.”

Mahj shook her head. “I don’t have hair, Wohrin.”

“What?!”

Another twi’lek, who could have been anywhere between fifteen and thirty years old by Anakin’s poor judgement, appeared in order to chip in:

“Yeah, she lost all of her hair when the sky turned red!”

Anakin squinted at the sky… no, it was definitely still blue. Wohrin looked equally confused, which was somewhat reassuring. Somewhat.

“Keht!” snapped Mahj, “Stop lying to people! And no, Wohrin, you know I’m twi’lek; of course I don’t have hair.”

“Twi’leks don’t… Why am I only just learning this? Was no one going to tell me–”

“I’m sorry, sir.” Anakin effectively drew the growing crowd’s attention back to himself. That felt better. Wohrin blinked, only now registering that the crash hadn’t been his tooka after all. “I was in the woods and something jumped out at me and I fell through your… thing.”

“Oh, well,” huffed Wohrin, “Easily done I suppose.”

Anakin clambered to his feet and hopped away from the mess, feeling only slightly guilty.

“Hey what’s with the weird rat-tail, kid?” came a voice from the crowd.

Anakin fixed the human who had asked with a patronising look. He found such looks were incredibly effective when used by children – especially those younglings he was stuck in aurebesh lessons with three years ago. Kriffing infuriating.

“It’s not a rat-tail, it’s a braid. And it shows that I’m a padawan.”

“A what-a-wan?”

“Oh, I know what they are,” chimed another bystander, “One of them beat up my cousin on Alsakan. They’re like really small Jedi.”

“You mean an apprentice?”

“Yeah, only I don’t think they do carving work.”

“Not all apprentices learn stonemasonry, genius.”

Another crowd member interrupted: “Hey, cadaban, have you come to help with the beast?”

That triggered a fervour in the onlookers, all snapping their attention back to him with loud expectation.

“... The what?” Anakin wasn’t sure he liked the way this conversation was going.

“The beast!” exclaimed the crowd.

“It’s massive–”

“–Taller than me–”

“–Big claws–”

“–In the quarry–”

“–The mine–”

“–Tentacles–”

“–Blue–”

“–Hang on, I thought it was red–”

“–It’s invisible–!”

“–No, it’s not, it’s–”

“–Firebreathing!”

“Hey, hey, hey,” shouted Anakin over the clamour, “Has anyone here actually seen it?” Everyone turned to a tall ovissian, who flinched. “What does it look like?”

“Uh, I didn’t see much of it, just– um, mostly heard crashes and saw– saw rocks falling from the ceiling in the mines. But when I caught a glimpse, it sort of looked all–” He made a vague and thoroughly unhelpful gesture which may have indicated size. Or maybe temperament. “–Y’know?”

Anakin definitely did not know, but he wasn’t about to admit that to the congregation. “Yeah, yeah, of course,” he said instead. The ovissian sighed with relief. “And what exactly do you need me to do about it?”

One exasperated person shouted from the back. “Kill it of course!”

“Or at least move it out of the mines,” offered Mahj.

“Yeah, we need the mines or our economy will go to chisk!”

“The entire economy?” Anakin couldn’t imagine mines being quite that important when there was a massive forest right… Huh, it was higher up than he remembered. Right up a stone cliff, the one Wohrin’s home was carved out of.

“The entire economy! We’re a mining town, stone-masons and blacksmiths. Why else would build our houses in a quarry?”

This was the first Anakin had heard of ‘quarries’. Really, the whole trip so far had been quite the broadening of his horizons. He didn’t know why Obi-Wan didn’t take him off-world sooner, he was always promoting this kind of thing. Peculiar.

That being said, this whole beast business was not what he had been anticipating and the idea of facing an invisible, firebreathing, tentacled monster on his own was suddenly way more terrifying than the plan of facing a horde of smugglers had been. What if it was like the krayt dragons of Tatooine, wild with impersonal ferocity and an appetite for small humans? That would be an incredibly anticlimactic end for the Chosen One; he was fully anticipating his death to be in a great ball of flame, Obi-Wan watching heartbroken as his awesome and flawless apprentice fulfils his destiny. That would be cool. Dying alone in a mine in the middle of nowhere would not be.

“Um… You know, beasts aren’t really my department. And… I don’t have my beast-removal equipment with me right now.” Airtight excuse. Foolproof.

“You’re just scared!” exclaimed someone who nobody asked.

“He’s not even a proper Jedi yet,” added someone else, “There’s no way he could take that thing on by himself, I bet he doesn’t even have a laser-sword!”

“Now, hold on–” All thoughts of avoiding the beast flew out of the metaphorical window. “I never said I wouldn’t do it! I have my lightsaber right here:”

The crowd stepped back as it ignited in his hand. Yeah, that’s right, he wasn’t some dumb initiate and this was his chance to prove it.

...

The comms centre had several private rooms for important calls and conferences. It also had better hardware than the commlinks Jedi took into the field.

Obi-Wan had plugged his own commlink into a rarely-used port in the console and tried to call Anakin. As he had expected, there was no answer. With the right tinkering of the console’s receiver, however, the target signal had been traced to a sparsely populated planet barely a minute up the Corellian Run. Kaidestal.

He fought the urge to slam his head against the console. If there was a licence for padawan ownership, his would be revoked any time now. Truly, he was having a fantastic day.

He wondered how Anakin had even got offplanet and then wondered why he was wondering. At this point, it was suffice to say, ‘Shit’s fucked’ and move on.

After a few moments of meditative breathing, he straightened up, unplugged his commlink, and whisked out of the comms centre. Knowing Anakin, there was little time before something disproportionately drastic happened. Force, what did he do to end up in this position?

Master Plo Koon was easy enough to locate, happening to be beside the bronzium statue Obi-Wan had been inspecting earlier. He watched as Obi-Wan covered the awkwardly long stretch of corridor in order to get within civil conversation range.

“Master Koon, I am taking a short trip to Kaidestal. I shall be back by nightfall.” He gave no reasons, the man of mystery that he was, and Plo didn’t seem to mind. Plo was one of the gentlest councilmembers and therefore the best one to inform of unannounced, unauthorised trips to obscure planets. Perhaps that was exploitative of him. Perhaps his padawan shouldn’t run away.

(Plo was one of the first to hear Mace’s gossip regarding Skywalker’s potential disappearance and therefore knew damn well what Obi-Wan was doing. Plo was not, however, a snitch. Besides, he liked Kenobi – the man had an excellent taste in drinks.)

Master Koon nodded slowly, “That seems reasonable. I’ve heard they do good stone carvings there.”

“Quite,” said Obi-Wan, impatiently – no, Jedi weren’t impatient. He was merely preoccupied.

“There’s a G8 light freighter in the hangar that you can use.” Plo shifted as if to move, but it was really more of an invitation to leave.

“Thank you, Master Koon.” Not at all in the headspace to overstay his welcome, Obi-Wan began to head towards the hangar.

“I hope you find what you’re looking for, young one!” Plo called after him.

“Me too,” muttered Obi-Wan under his breath. He wasn’t that young; he was twenty-eight. He was, however, too young to be dealing with feral padawans that made him feel twice his age. Why did he ever pick up Anakin, anyway?

...

The mouth of the mine was carved into the wall at the bottom of the quarry. It was darker than a Tatooinian night and he was being pushed into it by a gaggle of villagers who didn’t seem to notice his apprehension. While this was ideal for the maintenance of his reputation, it also made things move far more quickly than he had wanted.

No matter. He was a Jedi and Jedi faced terrifying monsters head on.

“This beast is gonna wish he never saw me,” he said, bravely, “Coward. Absolute… kriffin’… clown.”

“What are you doing?”

“Old Jedi trick, it’s called psychological warfare. That beast is no match for Anakin kriffing Skywalker.”

“Is the swearing necessary for psychological warfare?” asked one of the group. “It’s just I brought my daughter along…”

A roar emanated from the mine ahead, echoing terribly. The tall ovissian, now wearing his head miner’s helmet, was shaking more than the nine-year-old behind him. She was delighted by the mine monster and had spent much of the walk loudly exclaiming that she wanted it to eat the entire goddamn quarry. No one else appeared to share her enthusiasm.

“Well,” said the head miner, sounding awfully authoritative, “I think you’ll be able to find your way from here. We need to go. For… health and safety reasons. Yeah, this crowd, in this passageway? Major fire hazard. Need to clear it. I’ll take care of that, you take care of–” Another roar erupted, punctuated by a thud and the sound of rocks falling. “– That.”

Anakin was unimpressed. “Ugh, do you have to have such an aversion to being cool?” He turned to see the group’s response but found the passageway empty. He rolled his eyes. Teenagehood would suit him well, he decided.

Slowly, he took his new lightsaber off his belt. It kind of sucked that his excellent craftsmanship was impossible to see in the gloom. Alone, in the dark, with no eyes on him, he could admit that quite a few things were looking decidedly uncool right now, but Force if he didn’t want to prove Obi-Wan wrong.

He tracked the sporadic tremors to their source, which was conveniently down the single, unbranching passageway in this section of mine. Still, it required a great amount of skill and a lesser man would have walked into five support beams, which was way more than Anakin’s three. He was a credit to the Jedi Order, really, even if they couldn’t see it.

Speaking of, the mine had grown far darker the further he walked until he couldn’t see his own hand in front of his face. The Force was being unhelpful, merely suggesting ‘forward’, which was a no-brainer. His issue was all of the obstacles involved with ‘forwards’. If only he had packed a light.

Hang on.

Oh, Anakin Skywalker was a genius. Lateral thinking and creative problem-solving had always been his strong point, as currently being demonstrated.

His lightsaber ignited with a kzhhh. Its electric-blue glow lit his maniacal grin in harsh clarity. It also revealed the glinting eyes of something big. The grin dropped from his face as he took five steps backwards.

The passageway had opened into a small cavern without him noticing and the beast barely fit into it. Colours were difficult to make out in eerie saber-light, but its fur appeared as black as the mines, matte with dust. Large tentacles stretched out from its nose, blindly groping the walls and ceiling of the cavern as if trying to judge the environment. Massive, shovelling paws held claws almost as long as Anakin was tall. In short, it resembled a mole.

This meant that, theoretically, Anakin was at an advantage since he was decidedly not blind and had only been known to resemble a mole some of the time.

The beast was also more clumsy than Anakin, knocking support beams left and right. Luckily, none had completely shattered but, judging by their splintering fractures, it was only a matter of time. Time limits were very dramatic; this would be a worthy first mission.

Anakin waved his lightsaber in the vague direction of the mole. It was unbothered. He frowned, put out, and then poked one of its claws. Suddenly, the beast was very bothered. Its nose went from snuffling around to being thrust in Anakin’s face. Apparently it had his scent. Obi-Wan would have blamed it on Anakin’s infrequent use of the shower. Anakin would have responded that he grew up in the desert and then accused him of not caring about wasting water on trivial matters. This would put a glint of annoyance in Obi-Wan’s eyes and Anakin would count it as a victory.

The mole exploited his distraction, dishonourable as it was, yanking him off the ground with a thick face-tentacle and shaking him irritably. He tried hitting the disgustingly writhing mass with the hilt of his lightsaber – ineffective. Then he slashed it with the blade and got catapulted into a wall. His vision failed and the back of his head killed, but he was quickly grabbed by the ankle and dragged across the floor. Massive, sharp claws came swinging at him. This was not good.

Quick, what would Obi-Wan do?

“Hey, you suck!” he shouted, voice wobbling as he dove out of the way of another slash, “No one likes you! You should just stop and go away!”

The mole monster may also have been deaf since it only continued its previous level of violence despite the scathing insults. He dodged a claw, jumping into a swinging tentacle which smashed him into a support beam. Splinters pierced his robes, digging into his right arm as it collided with the beam. His lightsaber flew from his hand and he fell to the ground, spinning to narrowly avoid landing on the hurt arm. All light in the cavern vanished as his saber-blade extinguished.

All of a sudden, the lightsaber argument from that morning felt like a moot point. A lot of things were looking very moot now, in the dark.

He could hear the shuffle of tentacles searching the floor and the scratching of claws against stone. The mole was snuffling loudly around for him. His arm hurt.

Fighting the urge to curl up by the wall, he slowly climbed to his feet and looked the monster dead where he thought its eye could be. Warm air huffed in his face, blowing his braid back. Everything was still for a moment and then a tentacle whipped around his knees and flipped him upside down into the air. He definitely did not yelp.

The sound of a lightsaber igniting came from the tunnel, then pounding footsteps and then Obi-Wan ran in, illuminating the cavern walls around him. Something intangible yanked Anakin out of the mole’s grasp and into Obi-Wan’s arms.

Anakin struggled to escape the strong left arm that wrapped across his torso, efficiently immobilising him. “Hey, I had it under control, you know.” He gave up, reaching his good hand out and calling his lightsaber back to it. “Still do, actually.”

“Sure,” replied Obi-Wan, not letting go even as a tentacle lunged at him. He jumped backwards, slashing the support beam that Anakin had dented. They dove into the tunnel as the cavern rumbled. The mole roared back. There was a terrible creaking of splintering wood and then the cavern ceiling fell in. Dust and rock made the air thick.

Quiet.

Anakin looked up at Obi-Wan from where he was pressed against his chest and saw a strangled sort of sorrow.

“Poor thing,” croaked Obi-Wan. Then he looked at Anakin with a clenched jaw. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of those. I could have studied it.”

It was almost enough to make Anakin apologise.

...

Obi-Wan dragged his padawan by his collar until they reached the mine’s entrance. The villagers who had pointed him inside were crowded around and erupted into cheers as soon as they stepped into the light.

One elbowed the head miner playfully. “Told you he was the madawan’s Jedi.”

“Shut up,” said the ovissian, who then raised his voice above the chattering. “Thank you, Master Jedi, for your assistance. Uh, what exactly is the status of the, uh…”

“It’s dead,” Obi-Wan replied, bluntly, “And I’m afraid you may also need to reinforce the tunnel’s structural integrity. I apologise on behalf of my padawan –”

“Hey!”

“Of course, he will also apologise himself.”

Their eyes met in a match of wills. Anakin sighed, just loud enough for Obi-Wan to hear, and acquiesced.

“My sincere apologies,” he muttered, bowing shallowly. Obi-Wan had definitely taught him better manners than this; the child was just showing him up. Ungrateful womp-rat.

Fortunately, the villagers weren’t versed in bows and didn’t seem invested in apologies. Most were preoccupied by the mine and the new lack of angry mole. Small blessings, perhaps.

...

After manhandling the still-hot wreck of Anakin’s Aethersprite into the freighter Obi-Wan had brought and flying the brief trip back to the Temple, Obi-Wan was reaching the end of his patience. He left the ships with the hangar’s mechanics and dragged Anakin away from any chance of helping them. Their trip to the Halls of Healing were brief – the healers were efficient in removing the splinters and wrapping Anakin’s arm in bacta-soaked bandages. He only complained about half as much as he usually did.

They marched double-time to their rooms and Obi-Wan locked the door behind him; he could not cope with Anakin sneaking out at night.

“Master?” The voice was small. Obi-Wan tried not to let his ire show in his look. Perhaps if Anakin was squinting it would work. He was not. Instead he was holding out a hand full of pine needles and another with several small pinecones. “While I was on that planet, I found these for you to study. I’ve never seen them before; they could be revolutionary.”

Obi-Wan sighed, not having the heart to tell him that pine trees were fairly common throughout the galaxy. Anakin dropped his revolutionary finds into his hands, having to scrape off some of the pine needles that stuck.

“Thank you, Padawan. That was very thoughtful of you.”

“There were some bigger ones of these,” he added, pointing to the pinecones, “but I couldn’t fit them in my belt and some of the wildlife tried to fight me for them.”

“A squirrel?”

“I dunno, I didn’t see it very well. It was kinda fast. Reminded me of you, a bit.”

“How so?”

“Red,” said Anakin, nodding to Obi-Wan’s head, “And it didn’t like me picking up things off the floor.”

Obi-Wan huffed. “As long as you weren’t trying to eat pinecones.”

“Is that what they’re called?”

“Yes. Although I suppose I’d have to… study them. To make sure.”

Anakin’s face lit up. “Wizard.”

Obi-Wan’s annoyance was almost forgotten. Not quite. He was still a responsible Jedi master, no matter what the Council speculated.

There was a knock on the door. Obi-Wan looked at Anakin, who grimaced back. He opened it with very little hesitation.

“Knight Kenobi.” Speak of a Sith…

“Master Windu,” said Obi-Wan, far more brightly than he was feeling.

“Have you located your padawan?”

“Of course; he’s right here, Master.” He pulled Anakin out from behind his legs. Anakin attempted a winning smile, but nerves appeared to crumple it slightly. He had always been intimidated by Master Windu – first impressions were a force to be reckoned with. “I knew exactly where he was.” It was technically true, if you were selective about your timeframe.

Master Windu gave Anakin one of his signature piercing gazes, the kind that seems to expose one’s every weakness and warn against them. Anakin seemed to get the message. Hopefully he would keep it for at least a week before he inevitably threw it out.

“If that’s the case, I won’t need to launch a search party. Good night, Kenobi.”

“May the Force be with you, Master Windu.”

After Master Windu had left and Anakin had gone to bed still shaken from the encounter, Obi-Wan contemplated ditching the Temple and his wayward padawan for Bail Organa’s whiskey collection. Alderaan always made the best whiskey…

...

Art by me, @dib-leo-pard

#star wars fanfiction #star wars prequels #ao3 fanfic #anakin fanfiction #anakin skywalker #obi-wan kenobi #fanfiction #fanfic #star wars

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homespork-review · 4 years ago

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Homespork Act 4, Part 2: Flight of the Paradox Groans

BRIGHT: Remember Spades Slick being bizarrely aware he was in a comic, back in the Intermission? Buckle up, things are about to get even more fourth-wall-breaking. Appropriately, this starts by the comic focusing on an actual fourth wall, which activates to show...Andrew Hussie.

Hussie’s MS Paint avatar notices the audience watching him, laments that his side of the wall doesn’t have an off switch, and then recaps the first year of Homestuck.

Now, in all fairness: The recap is thorough, full of links, and explains things fairly well. It’s quite long, but given how much territory it has to cover I’m not sure it could be any shorter. So it does its job well, and it’s a boon if you’re getting lost with the plot.

As for the author insertion...on this occasion I don’t mind it. It comes across as tongue-in-cheek, but framed more as the author talking to the reader than as the author inserting himself into the narrative. It’s definitely very Homestuck.

Anyway, AH gets back to work, and after a couple of false starts we return to John!

John is still flying around with his jet pack. GC trolls him to offer him a world map of LOWAS and tell him she feels awful about killing him, although in literally the next line she tells him that technically he never even died so she doesn’t understand why he’s so upset. John understandably finds this disturbing. They have a brief nonsensical discussion about Jesus/Jegus, and then John agrees to go take a look at what’s on the other side of his Second Gate. Yes, on the advice of someone whose previous advice got him killed.

CHEL: Almost a shame we didn’t set up a Too Dumb To Live count, but then to be fair that was a separate timeline and he’s probably not thinking of it as something that “really” happened. This is supported by his later dialogue.

FAILURE ARTIST: The word Jegus is really popular in the Homestuck fandom, used far more often than it is in the canon. Gets quite annoying, in my opinion. Actually, a rather Jesus-like figure does appear, but he’s not called “Jegus”.

CHEL: Yeah, I think only Terezi, John, and Dave ever use the term, but it somehow became latched onto as an actual term used by trolls in general, even though in canon it isn’t.

BRIGHT: Fortunately, this time GC appears to be playing nice. John flies though the Second Gate and emerges...into LOLAR?

FAILURE ARTIST: Hussie does an amusing trick where he has what looks like a loading screen for a flash but it’s actually a still image eternally at 2%.

BRIGHT: Yes, it’s LOLAR. John promptly crashes into Rose’s house, smashing through a wall and into her bedroom, where Rose is still snoozing in her knitting pile. Apart from briefly being stuck upside down, he does not appear injured by this collision.

Rose has somehow slept through the commotion. John decides to let her rest and borrows her computer to talk to Dave.

The first one he talks to is actually Davesprite, who points out how moronic John was to listen to GC again. No arguments here! Then he explains how the Gate system works: Odd-numbered Gates, above players’ houses, lead to somewhere on their planets. Even-numbered Gates lead to other players’ planets, exiting over their houses. Normally they aren’t meant to go through even-numbered Gates until the houses are built up, so they don’t fall to their deaths, but fortunately John has a jetpack workaround. So far Davesprite is living up to his promise of being straightforward.

John realises he’s talking to Future Dave, and asks “do you think i could talk to the real dave for a second?”

...ouch, John.

Davesprite goes off on a tear, ranting that he is a real Dave — arguably the realest Dave, since he’s been running around LOHAC for months trying to get enough information to save everyone. John apologises sincerely.

CHEL: This won’t be the last we hear of this theme, though.

EB: i think i pissed off your future self. TG: what did you do EB: i said he wasn't the real dave. TG: ahahahahaha EB: i think i might have really hurt his feelings though! TG: pff TG: dont worry about it EB: why not? TG: cause i wouldnt give a shit TG: and hes me

BRIGHT: Not a hundred percent sure I believe Dave, there.

CHEL: Dave uses John to snoop around Rose’s room and get the captcha code for her journals. Classy, Dave. Not a SLAMMER point, however, as this does come back to bite him very soon.

Rose’s dreamself has awoken on Derse, the purple planet, and flies across to the opposite tower. Dave’s dreamself appears to be awake, sitting upright in his computer chair; the room is entirely an unsettling bloody red colour apart from the SBaHJ cartoons on the walls, and… oh shit, there’s Lil Cal again, now in a long purple nightdress and hopping around the room on his own. If Rose was having nightmares because of dreamself issues, I can only imagine how Dave’s nightmares must look. Rose throws a ball of yarn at Dave’s dreamself, alerting him, and causing the awake Dave to pass out.

Back in Rose’s room, it seems that Charles Barkley quote was not misattributed:

FAILURE ARTIST: Another SBaHJ reference in the book quote. Is that where Dave got it?

Still, I don’t recall this book ever coming up again. Just another item that seems like a Chekhov's Gun but isn’t.

CHEL: John feels guilty about opening his birthday gift from Rose, but reasons that it’s technically now his anyway, so he does, finding another bunny, this one black and filthy-looking except for the pristine knitted purple patches repairing it, though its shape is eerily familiar.

The gift in this box is a resurrection. I used your present to thread life anew into a tattered heirloom. As long as I can remember, its black, greasy appendages have been tethered limply to its ratty, porous carriage. Too delicate to wash, too dear to discard. I used to love this rabbit. Now he's yours. I trust you'll find this to be adequately sentimental. Happy birthday.

Oh my gosh, awwwwww. Even if you don’t ship them romantically how can you not love their interactions? Definitely one of the comic’s strong points. Also I need to go hug my childhood teddy bear.

John puts the bunny back in the box again and the box in his sylladex, freeing Casey the salamander while he’s at it. And let’s just take a minute to feel utter horror because dead John still had Casey in his sylladex, so the best option is that she died too, and the worst is that we have an And I Must Scream situation on for a baby salamander. Gah.

FAILURE ARTIST: Thanks, I’d never thought of that and I never want to again.

You aren't actually sure if she is a girl though. You don't even know if salamanders can be girls. Aren't they hermaphrodites or something?

CHEL: No, for the record. Though some frogs can switch from one to the other.

FAILURE ARTIST: Casey is very popular as a name for an OC child of John (often having Rose as the mother).

CHEL: John answers Rose’s Pesterchum, upon which GA is half-heartedly sending antagonistic messages. John answers on Rose’s account, saying that Rose is asleep, which GA takes for Human Sarcasm, prompting John to pretend to be Rose.

GA: I Should Figure Out How The Viewport Feature Of This Application Works GA: So I Can See What Such A Primitive Creature Looks Like TT: haha, well i know what you guys look like. TT: you look kind of like... TT: howie mandel from little monsters.

Wait, how does he know? Am I forgetting a point at which he saw them?

BRIGHT: I always assumed that he was just goofing around and his guess happened to land in the right ballpark, but thinking about it, I’m not sure the kids ever express surprise at the trolls’ appearance.

CHEL: John, pretending to be Rose, talks about how awesome John is.

GA: He Is Either The Leader Of Your Party Or You Hold Whatever The Human Equivalent Of Mating Fondness For Him Is

CHEL: Both. Both is good!

FAILURE ARTIST: Knowing what we do of troll culture later this is an odd statement. Heck, it’s just an odd statement. Maybe this is why people think trolls don’t do friendship.

CHEL: John apparently confuses GA by saying it’s because Rose is thoughtful and John appreciates his gift, and suggests GA talk to John.

TT: why don't you pick the time that will make the most complicated mess out of everything imaginable?

GA sounds very annoyed, and leaves, intending to have the conversation with John that she had previously. We see her, GC, and the horns of AT and an unknown troll in the grey room, now revealed to be a computer laboratory. For some reason she chats via Pesterchum with another troll instead of just walking over to talk to them. This new troll is twinArmageddons, an appropriate name for the circumstances, who type2 iin yellow text liike thii2; he is, as it turns out, the hacker guy GC mentioned earlier. TA is busy setting up the network and seems irritable in general, and is not willing to help GA work her viewport.

TA: iif ii 2ee one more 2narl of wiire2. TA: kiind of juttiing out and beiing tangled or whatever. TA: ii am goiing two perform 2ome 2ort of athletiic fuckiing 2omer2ault off the deep end and get a call from the pre2iident or 2ome 2hiit.

Nice callback, but trolls, as we’ll later find out, don’t have presidents.

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 14

GA wonders why TA doesn’t want to talk to her, and TA complains that he knew in advance the trolls were doomed and no one believed him. He refuses to troll the humans himself but is setting up the system so the others can in order to get them to leave him alone. GA asks again for help, to no avail.

TA: iif you cant fiigure 2hiit out by fuckiing around you dont belong near computer2. TA: kiind of liike wiith regii2tered 2ex offender2 and 2chool2. TA: iif you move two a new town you have two go up two your neiighbor2 door and warn them about how 2tupiid you are. TA: and giive them a chance two hiide all theiir iinnocent technology. TA: and vandaliize your hou2e.

Ooh, a threefer plus one! Tacky simile for the Problematykks. As for WSP, we’ll later find out that 1) trolls kill all their criminals, 2) trolls don’t give a shit about the welfare of their children, and 3) trolls don’t appear to actually go to school. These two counts are neck and neck in the lead now!

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 17 WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 17

BRIGHT: As with much of Homestuck, the trolls give the impression of being made up as Hussie went along. That’s not entirely a bad thing -- it certainly makes the comic pretty unique -- but it does lead to some out-of-place slip-ups.

Anyway, GA chucks her F1 key at TA’s head and then starts poking him. We also see CG in the lab.

FAILURE ARTIST: I think I recall GA/TA were a popular ship before we learned more about GA. It does seem like they have a Rose & Dave dynamic going on.

BRIGHT: Back on Derse, Rose and Dave have a dance party to Dave’s music while accompanied by some crows and Lil Cal, who keeps teleporting around the room. Rose eventually gets tired of Cal’s shenanigans and hurls him out of the window, to the relief of many.

FAILURE ARTIST: The flash originally included music by Bill Bolin. In fact, it was his unfinished music being included here that caused all the drama in the first place.

BRIGHT: Time for some random interludes! First up is Maplehoof the pony, who is following Rose’s mother through a large cave which, judging by the grist lying around, recently contained very dangerous monsters.

FAILURE ARTIST: Apparently pets can collect grist for their masters...and know what grist is despite being a normal(?) animal.

BRIGHT: First Mom, and then Maplehoof, stand on a transportaliser platform and disappear. Second is Dad, who has just acquired a replacement shoe and hat (which showed up in the walkaround game, way back at the beginning of the Act), when he encounters a familiar-looking stranger with a Colonel Sassacre book, who leads him to another transportalizer platform. Both of these interludes do become relevant later, but at the time they seem a tad unnecessary.

Meanwhile, John uses Rose’s alchemiter and a code Davesprite gave him mid-rant to produce a truly epic hammer called FEAR NO ANVIL. It’s far too big for John to wield, but fortunately he can use the scaling upgrade on the alchemiter to reduce it to a more useable size. ...wait. When did Rose’s alchemiter get a scaling upgrade? Dave and Jade added a lot of modifications to his, but Rose’s should be the original edition. Sigh.

EB: so what is this? EB: the thing the code made... TG: really powerful hammer EB: how do you know? EB: i thought you couldn't use hammers. TG: i cant TG: better be though TG: got it from hephaestus EB: who's that? TG: really tough to kill dude EB: you killed him for it? TG: nope EB: how'd you get it then? TG: shenanigans EB: ok.

...and we’re back to sprite evasiveness. Davesprite is being less than forthcoming here, although it’s less obvious than with Nannasprite because it superficially imitates John and Dave’s bantering.

CHEL: Now, this would be a good way of keeping us interested if we were eventually going to see how he did it, and also they have a time limit, so not going off into a long anecdote would be understandable. However, we’ll see how his evasiveness level proceeds in the future.

BRIGHT: Dream Rose and Dave see John using Rose’s alchemiter on Dream Dave’s computer. Rose wakes up.

FAILURE ARTIST: It is interesting how early Homestuck avoided having characters have face-to-face conversations. Would have been unique if it kept up throughout the entire comic.

BRIGHT: Back in the meteor, GA hassles TA into opening the viewport on her computer. This turns out to be as simple as clicking on the point in Rose’s timeline that she wants to see. No wonder TA was frustrated!

Of course, by this point, the only one left in the room is Rose, now awake, and the young salamander. Rose hurries to catch up with John, but he blasts off to explore before she can reach him, taking her mutated kitten with him.

CHEL: John renames Vodka Mutini to Dr Meowgon Spengler, and Rose renames Casey to Viceroy Bubbles von Salamancer. Interesting link to the themes of identities which are starting to crop up, though it’s not really a direct analogue. The animals are the same animals with different names; the alternate timeline characters have the same names and superficially the same identities, but are they really the same people after their new experiences?

BRIGHT: Back on Derse, Lil Cal inexplicably lands on a stray rocket board, catching the attention of AR.

You're not sure which laws are being broken, but it is probably a lot.

AR follows Cal to yet another transportaliser, and they both dematerialise.

We jump back to John, who spies a boat on one of the islands dotting LOLAR and lands to investigate. He follows hoofprints in the sand into a subterranean hallway filled with monsters. Fortunately his new hammer has time powers, which stun the monsters long enough for John to kill them. Further on, he finds the transportaliser Mom used. John, naturally, stands on it, and is transported to a meteor in the Veil.

Actually, it’s not just a meteor; it’s one of the laboratories where the Skaian troops are produced. John, along with the cat and Maplehoof, finds a bunch of chess guys being grown in glass jars on a giant podium. Most of them are the standard carapaces we’re familiar with, but there are also a few larger pieces, apparently based on knights and rooks. He also finds a JUNIOR ECTOBIOLOGIST’S LAB SUIT, and another of those strange house-shaped sets of monitors.

On Prospit, PM is preparing to board a shuttle to Skaia when a COURTYARD DROLL sneaks up behind her. Unaccountably, she fails to notice him, despite the fact that he’s wearing a hat larger than he is. CD successfully pickpockets the White Queen’s ring, and PM departs for Skaia, none the wiser.

CD radios the DRACONIAN DIGNITARY to report mission success, and is told that he doesn’t need to keep wearing his ridiculous outfit, per orders from Jack Noir, who is now going by the SOVEREIGN SLAYER. CD says he’d rather keep wearing the outfit. Apart from the sword-through-the-chest part, it is a very nice outfit, so I’m with CD on this one.

Catastrophe is averted by Jade delivering a flying kick to CD’s head and following up with a very efficient smackdown. Her robot body replicates this back on Earth, beating the stuffing out of her mummified grandfather. Jade retrieves the ring, and puts it on her fingers to remind herself to give it back to PM later. Unfortunately, this doesn’t cause Jade to sprout wings and tentacles. Seems the rings don’t work on humans like that.

Meanwhile, in a Timeless Expanse, a WARWEARY VILLEIN is getting tired of the battle between Derse and Prospit. The next animation is called “WV?: Rise Up” and it’s one of my favorites! When I first read Homestuck I had to watch it a few times before I understood what was going on, but it is a very neat video.

Watch on YouTube

The Battlefield has been prototyped three times, and is now spherical. The forces of Derse and Prospit meet. The usual carapaces with swords are backed up by larger pieces -- some of them very strange -- and by battleships clashing in the sky. In the chaos, WV, who is farming peacefully on Skaia, has his home and farm burned down. He raises a flag and addresses the troops of both armies. Elsewhere, Jack Noir appears, flying over the Battlefield in search of the Black King.

WV rallies the armies and tells them that their real enemies are the monarchs, who are responsible for the war. Encouraged, the Dersite and Prospitan troops band together and march on the Black King.

Meanwhile, PM has reached the White King and discovers that she no longer has the White Queen’s ring. The White King listens to her and hands over his scepter, which seems to represent Skaia and serves a similar function to the Queens’ rings. Behind a nearby hill, the Hegemonic Brute radios somebody to report the transfer.

As WV and the united armies reach the Black King, Jack arrives and slices the Black King’s scepter in half, nullifying its powers and turning the Black King back into a normal carapace. PM is attacked by HB, who knocks the White King’s scepter out of her hand; it falls down a waterfall. Jack Noir beheads the Black King and turns to WV, and the animation ends.

...okay, much as I love it, I have to admit there’s a glaring question here: Namely, the kids started playing the Game less than a day ago and Dave’s kernelsprite has been prototyped for a few hours max. The second prototyping made the Battlefield more complex and the third took it into its current form. That’s a very short time to instigate a cross-faction revolution, organise the troops, and march on a monarch. For that matter, how long has WV been a farmer? The inhabitants of Derse and Prospit have obviously been doing their thing all the kids’ lives, but the Battlefield was supposedly a static, rudimentary space until John entered the Medium, so what gives?

Then again, the timeline in the Medium is supposed to be distinct from the timeline on Earth, so maybe that explains it?

CHEL: An interesting point is also raised by WV’s revolution. Namely, Derse is presented as a kingdom of darkness and evil by the game, while Prospit is presented as good. However, while PM is good, WV and AR are demonstrably not bad people either. In this animation, we see carapaces of both sides apparently don’t want to be involved in the war and are willing to rise up against the Black King. The rank-and-file carapaces on both sides, it seems, are decent people who are just following orders. (Not to mention very cute.) Jack Noir and his gang are nasty pieces of work, except CD who’s also just kind of going along with it, but there’s nothing saying white carapaces couldn’t also be… And is that a Problematykks point, presenting the black-coloured people as bad and the white-coloured ones as good? I know they’re chess pieces, but still.

This raises the question, however, what’s Derse’s motive? Are its rulers and archagents simply destroying for the evulz? I wonder. I also wonder how much Skaia itself is involved in this and how aware it is. Skaia is called the crucible of creation, and it’s responsible for the creation of the carapaces too. References are made to it “seeing” and “knowing”; it’s quite possibly sentient, though maybe not sapient. On top of that, SBurb is specifically a game, and a game needs an objective, and an adventure-type game needs enemies. Derse, it seems likely, was created and presented the way it is in order to give the players something to battle against even if its people don’t want to be their enemies. No wonder WV’s pissed!

BRIGHT: Yup. Hmm, thinking about it...the imps and other enemies we saw attacking John’s house early on were obviously Dersite, but the ones we’ve seen in Rose’s seem to be Prospitian, if anything? The colour scheme looks that way, at least. But Nanna said earlier that Derse was the enemy, nothing about Prospit.

Perhaps it has something to do with Rose being a Derse dreamer, while John is a Prospit dreamer? But in that case I’d have expected it to come up in the text. Instead it just goes unremarked.

Rose goes on a massive alchemising spree and ends up creating the Thorns of Oglogoth, a pair of wands.

The needles seem to shiver with the dark desires of THE DEEP ONE. Any sane adventurer would cast these instruments of the occult into the FURTHEST RING and forget they ever existed.

Instead of throwing the wands away, Rose takes on the enemies camping all over her house, with style.

Meanwhile, Dave goes on another, less visibly productive alchemising spree.

GET ON WITH IT!: 18

FAILURE ARTIST: The SBaHJifier could be considered productive in that it provides foreshadowing cartoons. Wish Dave’s Brain in a Jar came up again.

BRIGHT: Once he’s done creating smuppet variations to disturb the monsters encroaching on his house, he sits down to take a look at those two journals he copied from Rose earlier. One of them is called ‘MEOW’, and is literally just those same four letters, repeated over and over in different orders. The second is ‘Complacency of the Learned’.

There is no way to adequately recap the beauty of ‘Complacency of the Learned’, so we’re just going to show the whole thing:

Frigglish bothered his beard, as if unkinking a hitch in a long silk windsock. A more pedestrian audience would parse the exhibit as nervous compulsion. Behavior to petition contempt among the reasonable. He was however not surrounded by the reasonable, but the wise, a distinction in men that would forever be the difference in history's garland of treasured follies. As a matter of fact, his cadre of fellow wizards were all putting similar moves on their beards as well. The practice would evince thoughtfulness - sagacity, even - if they didn't do it all the time. Standing in line at the bank. Shooing squirrels from bird feeders. Few occasions were safe. Zazzerpan inspected the clue. A single piece of evidence cradled in his coriaceous old man palms. It was a human bone, not striking in the tale it told alone so much as that told by the thousands like it festooning the marshy soil of the mass grave. The grisly expanse bore the texture of a decadent dessert, like one of Smarny's formidable custard trifles wobbled out on wheels for the holidays, to the dismay of a small nation. "You're certain of this?" asked Frigglish. Despite what he was doing with his beard, he was, in fact, immersed in meaningful contemplation. "I am afraid I am becoming more so with each terrible tick groused by that gaudy timepiece slung around your neck." In case it wasn't clear, Frigglish wore a clock Zazzerpan didn't care for. It was magic. "The massacre of Syrs Gnelph was not as written." "What has you convinced it was the hand of our disciples in this blackness?" Executus chimed in. "I believe... I..." a fat face stammered, eyes darting with the guilt of a thief in the throes of an unraveling alibi. "I can summon a... more pressing line of inquiry..." No, Smarny. Nobody was in the mood for a sticky bundt loaf just now. Zazzerpan's ears fell insubstantial to any line of inquiry, pastry-oriented or otherwise. His abstruse contour carved a pondering shape in the fog carpeting centuries-dead. His eleven contemporaries too embraced the muted consternation of their great Predicant Scholar. Few wizards kept sharper adumbratives or read them with such lucidity. When Zazzerpan treated men with silence it was seldom unrepaid by the wise and reasonable alike. It was harrowing to entertain. Zazzerpan the Learned's storied Complacency of Wizards was marked for grander descendence. Disciples hand-picked, vetted by Ockite the Bonafide and tested by Gastrell the Munificent. The twelve sweetest, most studious children a pair of elderly eyes could give their sparkle. Not the ragged guttersnipe so oft-harvested by the common Obscenity, those vituperative little beggars with hearts to corrupt as dropped bananas brown. That these chosen youngsters would turn was not merely unthinkable, but something of a roundhouse to the temporal bones of the Upper Indifference's high chamber of Softskulled Prophets. His wisdom-savaged brow pruned further with recount of his many lessons to wouldbe successors. Lessons to advance humanity's elucidation and prosperity, an outcome this bleak trail now painfully obviated. There were few puzzles The Learned could not suspend and dissect in the recondite manifold beneath his extremely expensive pointy hat. Daring to pitch his cherished pupils in with the foul melange of history's rogues, the heretofore abstract scourge that built up civilizations with ungodly magic and tore them down with joyful malice, would prove an intellectual trespass to make his calcium-deficient bones quake. And more daring yet was the only question that now mattered. Could a bunch of bearded, scraggly old men in preposterous outfits hunt them down? He didn't have an answer. Only a simple observation so blunt and uncharacteristically jejune for the lauded sage it was breathtaking in its selfevidency. "We're going to need more wands." (Wow. Think of something better.)

Wow.

Dave is understandably intimidated by this, and decides to stop reading for now. He puts his copy of the SBURB Beta in the notebook to act as a bookmark, and leaves both books in his room for later.

Then he checks in on Rose, who is burning her version of the MEOW book.

CHEL: Dave inquires about the wizard story.

TG: i thought you hated wizards TG: whats the deal with that TT: I like wizards. TT: What I don't like is my mother's obsession with feigning interest in them to antagonize me. TG: oh man thats so messed up TG: that you think that TG: she probably digs wizards for real just like you and youre blowing shit out of proportion like pretty much always

Once again, we see exactly how fucked-up Rose’s relationship with her mother is. Mom Lalonde has somehow managed to raise a child in such a way that Rose interprets everything her mother does as an attempt to mock and provoke her.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 16

TIER: The Lalondes are pretty damn dysfunctional as a family unit, and considering the zany nature of early Homestuck and its world's weird logic that is saying something indeed.

CHEL: As for the MEOW book, it turns out the gods from the Furthest Ring informed Rose while she was sleeping that the book’s contents are highly dangerous and must be destroyed. Said gods dwell in the sky above Derse; Dave’s never heard or seen them, but Rose points out his dreamself is always wearing shades, listening to music, and distracted by Cal.

TT: You're the prince of the moon. TG: ........ TT: I'm sure they've been meaning to seek a royal audience. TG: ..........................

Davesprite chats to Rose next. She protests at being spied on by two people, but Davesprite asks her why she burned the codebook. She didn’t need to in the future, but according to her future memories of the gods absorbed from her future dreamself, Davesprite appeared to make it relevant by traveling to the past. A sinister and familiar face watches through Dave’s window, soon proving to be the Draconian Dignitary, while Dave and Davesprite awkwardly spout elaborate mixed metaphors about how safe they are, until Dave, embarrassed, says "so i guess ill go back down and burn that book".

As any savvy reader could guess, he’s too late. The prompt suggests that he should go back in time to stop the books from being stolen, but, well...

It looks like you already tried that. GORE GALORE: 10

Dave looks completely undisturbed, but whether he is undisturbed is a different matter. He flings the corpse out the window into the lava, claiming it would freak Jade out.

John, in the lab, presses a button, causing the first monitor to depict his town, shortly before his birth. There is a Betty Crocker factory and a shopping mall, neither of which are in the town now. Zooming in locks a target over Nanna Egbert, who is taking a stroll with Dad. A meteor looms; this looks like it’s going to go very badly, considering the target lock, but it hits the factory instead. When John presses the glowing blue button, a PARADOX GHOST IMPRINT of Nanna is created; refer back to Rose’s experimentation in the lab and the green slime blobs. This time, the slime is sucked into a tube.

The next monitor does something similar with Grandpa Harley on his ship, and the next the same with Bro Strider, who stands over a meteor crater on an unseasonably warm day; something of an understatement, as the sky is the same lurid red and the sun the same glowing spiral that they were during the Strider bros’ battle even though it’s December. Bro is, regardless, prepared for the occasion with a small pair of outrageously awesome shades. What he needs these for will soon be revealed.

The fourth monitor goes back to John’s home town, a gigantic crater where the factory once was. In the shopping mall, Dad Egbert stands outside a joke shop, while Nanna apparently remains inside, busying herself with a tall bookshelf, a ladder, and a rather hefty unabridged joke book.

Mom Lalonde, clutching the infant Rose and wearing a rather snazzy long Jaspersprite-pink scarf, has come to town to study the meteor impact at the request of Grandpa Harley while he explores elsewhere. Unfortunately, now is the time a meteor chooses to strike Nanna’s location, destroying the shop.

An old mother lost today, but a new son gained.

Wait for it.

Mom Lalonde flees, dropping her scarf, which Dad Egbert picks up and slightly creepily sniffs. The monitor continues tracking her, and John captures her paradox imprint too, starting the machines whirring away...

Four babies abruptly appear on the pad, already diapered and bespectacled and old enough to sit up unaided. Convenient, no?

When the kitten jumps on a green button, the slime is blended in pairs; Nanna’s and Grandpa’s, and Mom’s and Bro’s. More blinking lights ensue, and another four extremely familiar-looking babies appear.

BRIGHT: I will say this: These kids are adorable.

While babies clamber over him, John vaults up his echeladder to the rank of Ectobiolobabysitter, acquiring one million Boondollars in the process. This automatically converts itself to a Boonbuck, the weight of which smashes his Porkhollow.

Finding out just what is going on here will have to wait, as the comic takes a brief detour to a battleship navigating the Medium nearby. There’s someone very familiar at the wheel…

An old man has much to do before he returns to Earth, dies, gets stuffed by his adopted-yet-biological daughter-slash-grand-daughter, and stuck in front of a fireplace.

Also aboard the ship are Dad Egbert and Mom Lalonde. Dad returns Mom’s scarf, and the two of them hold hands as Grandpa Harley pilots the ship towards Skaia.

We return to the lab, where John has his hands full with the babies. One of them has managed to break one of the paradox slime jars from earlier, but appears uninjured. Also, CG’s trolling him again.

CHEL: CG makes mention of the ULTIMATE RIDDLE, but John is confused because CG hasn’t told him about that yet. He uses an ableist description in explaining.

CG: SEE I KIND OF PAINTED MYSELF INTO A CORNER. CG: I STARTED TROLLING YOU AT THE END, JUST BEFORE THE RIFT. CG: AND THEN JUMPED BACK A LITTLE. CG: AND NOW I GUESS I'VE BECOME RAILROADED INTO WORKING BACKWARDS HERE. CG: UNLESS I WANT TO DO THE SORT OF DUMB SCHIZOPHRENIC HOPPING AROUND LIKE THE OTHERS. CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 18

… why wouldn’t you just hop right back to the start and work in a linear fashion from there?

TIER: Because CG excels at making things complicated for himself and is fundamentally rather stubborn and set in his ways/actions. Like he's made his bed, he's gonna lie in it.

CHEL: Anyway, CG banters with John for a bit, and then informs him that he (John) has arrived in the Veil and created infant versions of the players and their guardians.

EB: so they are like cloned copies of us? CG: NO. CG: THEY ARE LITERALLY YOU AND YOUR GUARDIANS. CG: PARADOX CLONES.

A paradox clone, we are informed, is A CORRECTLY CLONED DUPLICATE THAT WILL INEVITABLY GO BACK IN TIME AND BECOME THE ORIGINAL TARGET THAT WAS CLONED. The game worlds contain many clues hinting at the ultimate destiny of the players to create their own selves through the game, and the only way things could possibly go involved the players creating themselves, or else the game session would never happen.

CG: WHICH IS ESPECIALLY PATHETIC SINCE PARADOX SPACE APPARENTLY WENT TO ALL THIS TROUBLE TO MAKE YOU JUST TO HAVE YOU FAIL AND DIE. CG: REALLY THERE'S NOTHING MORE TRAGIC THAN THESE NULL SESSIONS FULL OF KIDS ENTERING THE GAME AND FULFILLING SOME COSMIC DESTINY SHIT JUST TO GET WIPED OUT AND LEAVE BEHIND AN EMPTY POINTLESS INCIPISPHERE FOR ALL ETERNITY.

Tragic and completely unnecessary, when there are millions of perfectly good humans already in existence who could just as easily create winning game sessions without this aspect of it. Here we see another aspect of Homestuck which hasn’t come up quite so clearly before; an extremely weird take on determinism. I’m not sure if this is meant as a parody of Chosen One plotlines or if Hussie just thought it sounded cool, but it’s uncomfortable. As it turns out, only clones created by SBurb have a hope in hell of winning the game, and even they fail most of the time. Regular people who enter the game to save themselves from the destruction of the planet will fail and die there, which honestly is not really selling this game as a good thing, since it’s what causes the destruction of the planet in the first place. I’ve had actual, legitimate, honest-to-God nightmares about this aspect of SBurb, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

FAILURE ARTIST: I think many fans wish to play SBurb. There’s lots of fan sessions and fake GameFAQs and custom Lands. Yet in reality SBurb is not a fun time. This is cosmic horror. I think Hussie is sometimes playing it for horror and sometimes he ignores the implications.

Then again, some people want to live on the troll planet, which is straight-up dystopia.

CHEL: Again, it isn’t really clear what he’s going for. Is it supposed to be terrifying or did he just think it would be clever? Does even Hussie know what he was going for? While it’s not exactly a joke, I think it’s worth another point here:

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 17

It might be a joke. As I said, I could see it as a parody of or playing with the Chosen One narrative. In this case, literally only the chosen ones have any hope, for reasons that are not down to any merit of their own. But if it is, there isn’t really much made of it.

Of course, the reasons people want to live on the troll planet are reasonable when taken alone, but a) contradicted every alternate scene and b) not a fair trade for everything else that’s going on there. But we’ll get to that when we actually see it. And I admit, SBurb powers would be fun, but not worth the loss of my entire species.

TIER: To me at least it's fun in the same way wondering how I'd fare as a wizard during Harry Potter's years at Hogwarts, or a ninja in Naruto is. Fundamentally you'd rather want to never encounter this sorta stuff even if you get some swanky I guess powers, but the mental exercise of it is quite honestly, really fun. The game has quite a lot of interesting things to poke around with, from lands to quests to what your co-players are up to. And I'm def guilty of playing trollsona games, because the world presented is just really fascinating in its gruesome glory.

Never want to have to actually go through it, Lord knows I'd be dead within the first ten minutes if I'm super lucky, but stories about it are pretty neat.

CHEL: That’s true, but the paradox clones thing seems almost to be taunting us for having that mentality. We can pretend we’d be the super-smart strong competent ones who make it, but in this universe if we demonstrably have parents we’re doomed to die for nothing and there’s nothing we can do about it.

BRIGHT: Another fun thing about this is that it fundamentally isolates the players from the rest of humanity. If you think about it, unless they have children with a non-player, they are completely unrelated to anyone else on Earth.

CHEL: And they can’t have kids with a non-player unless something thoroughly horrible happened, because as is stated later SBurb specifically takes its players away and destroys their planet around the point of their puberty.

BRIGHT: Although I think John is actually related to Dad — as far as we’re told, Dad is in fact Nanna’s biological son, which makes him genetically John’s half-brother.

They also miss out on (going by how active the babies are) the first couple of years of life. Those two years are crucial in terms of brain development. SBURB probably controls for that, but it wouldn’t be surprising if there were negative consequences.

Oh, and if you’re a player, your existence means your civilisation is doomed. Lovely!

CHEL: And do the players ever feel any guilt or conflict over this? Do they hell. It doesn’t even occur to them, and I’m pretty sure it didn’t occur to Hussie either.

TIER: Welcome to the hell game that is SBURB; it's fundamentally pretty fucked up! It runs on a hellish scale of "things have already been predetermined" and I am Big Fear™.

CHEL: That’ll come up later, too, but there it’s obviously intentional nightmare fuel, and not at all a bad use of time travel as a story device.

CG, meanwhile, explains that he was the one to create his session’s players. With twelve of them it was a bit more complicated, but troll lineages are complicated anyway, and we’ll find out how later.

The babies are still getting all over the lab. Note that they're repeatedly referred to as "little pink monkeys". Then again, calling a non-white child a monkey really wouldn't be good.

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 18

John’s infant self has latched onto the Sassacre book, while his infant Nanna is sitting in Dad Egbert’s old hat. Baby Bro is napping in the lap of Lil Cal; that baby’s braver than I am, I can tell you that. Baby Dave is sitting on Maplehoof, and baby Grandpa has found a pair of pistols. John does not take them away from him, or even seem to notice he has them.

HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 7

BRIGHT: Earlier baby Bro broke one of the paradox slime cylinders and was sitting in it. John is pretty astoundingly bad at keeping babies away from obvious hazards.

TIER: That or the equipment is probably not sturdy enough to make it past an inspection into faulty management.

CHEL: But then he’s distracted by CG trolling him again, at least this time moving forward in time from the last conversation.

CG, like GA, apparently fails to grasp sarcasm...

EB: we had this great dare going. EB: to see who could be the least helpful and informative. EB: and you totally lost, dude! EB: you were hella helpful. CG: I WAS OBVIOUSLY JUST SPITING YOUR STUPID POINTLESS HUMAN DARE. [...] CG: ANYWAY, HOW COULD WE HAVE MADE A DARE IF I'M MOVING BACKWARDS ON YOUR TIMELINE.

… which is weird because moments later he uses it himself.

EB: do you even have elves? CG: YES, LET'S COMPARE WHICH FANTASY CREATURES THAT DON'T EXIST WE BOTH DO OR DON'T NOT HAVE. CG: WHAT A GREAT FUCKING IDEA, JOHN!

Hussie seems to waver back and forth a lot on whether trolls get sarcasm or not, in general. Since he’s contradicting himself with troll worldbuilding, that’s a point.

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 19

Banter aside, he informs John that the babies are sent to Earth via meteors during the Reckoning.

BRIGHT: How do they survive the impact? Some of those meteor strikes destroy buildings. Those are some ridiculously resilient kids.

CHEL: Cut to AR, who is still having fun on the rocketboard, until he runs into a frog temple atop a meteor. This is apparently horrifying and illegal by his standards.

You are going to throw whoever is responsible into the slammer. You always call jail the slammer when you are extra angry at crimes.

Inside, he finds an empty time capsule, like Jade’s, some complicated machinery, and a monitor screen showing a greyscale house with a very familiar bespectacled female infant and dirty old hat in it. The year depicted, says the monitor, is 1910. Enter none other than Colonel Sassacre himself.

Eight days prior, the orphan girl was taken in by an aristocratic southern colonel and legendary humorist. He recovered the young lady from a crater where a bakery once stood, operated by the man's wife, a notable baked goods baroness.

An explosion outside leads them both to a crater, where once stood the doghouse of the colonel’s pet, Halley, but before the Colonel can investigate further he’s shot through the heart.

This is exactly why babies should not be allowed to dual-wield flintlock pistols.

BRIGHT: I remain baffled as to how Baby Grandpa can even lift those things, let alone pull the triggers.

CHEL: Baby Grandpa crawls from the crater, and Halley the dog turns out to be alive.

The young boy has difficulty pronouncing the name though. Sounds more like "Harley" when he says it.

How does he know it? The colonel died before he even noticed the baby was there. Is baby Nanna speaking well enough to tell him yet? I guess he could be told later, as Sassacre wasn’t in fact their only sapient guardian...

Thirteen years later, the boy develops a taste for adventure. He and his guardian bid farewell. His sister is sad. She will be left all alone with the wicked pastry baroness. She can handle it, he tells her. He believes in her.

It isn’t clear why she didn’t go with him, or leave under her own power. They don’t seem to be imprisoned, as the panel depicts them outside on grass with no restraints or guards over them, so it’s not a matter of only one of them being able to get out. That’s a point for Nanna not trying and a point for Grandpa not bringing her:

HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 9

That dog is also remarkably lively, considering it, unlike Bec, is an entirely normal dog, it was an adult thirteen years previously, and it’s somehow supporting the weight of an entire teenager on its back (again, please don’t try this at home, you can break the dog’s spine that way).

FAILURE ARTIST: As we’ve said, Colonel Sassacre is a thinly-veiled Mark Twain expy. The real Mark Twain died in 1910 at the same time Halley’s Comet was in the sky. It’s a cute historical gag having him be literally killed by a comet but it does muck up the timeline. Nanna must have been a senior citizen when Dad was born. Perhaps he’s adopted?

CHEL: The other option is that Dad is a senior citizen now, but surely John would have wondered why his dad is so ridiculously old. I think it’s just that thing in mainstream comics and cartoons where adults are split into Old and Not Old, and the parents are normal ages for parents but the grandparents would have to be in their hundreds going by the gags. See how Scrooge McDuck in the DuckTales reboot is over a hundred and forty years old yet his sister’s son is still a youngish adult.

AR notes that the appearifier is centred over Halley the dog, but hears someone coming. It proves to be the Draconian Dignitary. AR hides and watches, noting that DD is carrying Rose’s notebooks and Dave’s beta envelopes. DD keeps the MEOW book, but throws away the other items. Complacency of the Learned lands on the floor, and the envelopes land in the time capsule, which sets to bloom in four hundred and thirteen million years.

Meanwhile, John talks to CG while infant Mom Lalonde pets the mutant kitten. John asks if there’s any way to delay the Reckoning, but nope; CG warns him that the smallest meteors will start going in only a few minutes.

EB: ok, well you keep saying how doomed we are and how all this bad stuff happens sooner, but you never say why! EB: what happens in our game that's different from yours that makes things go so badly? CG: JACK NOIR.

The Jack Noir from the trolls’ game session allied with them and helped them dethrone and exile the Black Queen, while the one from the humans’ session, as you may recall, killed the Black Monarchs and gained their powers, and is currently rampaging through the Incipisphere. John asks if it’s the same Jack Noir, but CG explains.

CG: SO LET'S SAY YOU PLAY YOUR BANDICOOT AND I PLAY MY BANDICOOT. CG: THEY ARE ESSENTIALLY THE SAME BANDICOOT, SAME APPEARANCE AND DESIGN AND BEHAVIORS. CG: BUT THEY ARE STILL COMPLETELY SEPARATE BANDICOOTS ON SEPARATE SCREENS. CG: SO WE BOTH HAVE OUR OWN ASS BANDICOOTS TO OURSELVES, THE SAME BUT DIFFERENT. CG: OUR JACKS ARE THE SAME BUT DIFFERENT TOO. CG: SAME GUY, DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES AND OUTCOMES. CG: OUR JACK TRUMPED THE QUEEN, BUT GOT NO FURTHER. CG: YOUR JACK GOT THE BEST OF BOTH OF THEM, AND IS NOW SOMETHING HIGHER THAN A QUEEN OR A KING… EB: like an ace? CG: SURE OK.

The trolls don’t know what went so differently to cause the two Jacks to behave so differently, but CG doesn’t think it matters by now. John interrupts him, deciding to do yet another Con Air ending re-enactment.

Watch on YouTube

Recap: montage of Con Air posters and images to the tune of “How Do I Live Without You”. John hands the thoroughly disgusting Con Air bunny to the protesting baby Rose, while CG watches huffily on his monitor. Jade demands a toy too, so John hands her the bunny he received from Rose in an excessively dramatic fashion. CG frustratedly hits himself in the head. In scribbly crayon-like drawings, Casey the salamander performs a drum solo with glowing blue mushrooms for drums and the Con Air plane crashes. More Con Air imagery, John embraces baby Jade and the baby Lalondes while sobbing; GC points and laughs at him over CG’s shoulder and they have a slapfight. John imagines himself in Nic Cage’s iconic wifebeater and mullet and performs an air guitar solo.

TIER: Lemme tell ya, as someone who's only experience with this darn movie is whatever pops up courtesy of John this sequence is just a trip and a half. Possibly a higher number.

CHEL: Cut to end-of-act curtains; they open on the next page, declaring a PSYCHE; there are more pages to go.

Cut to Dave’s hands, covered in the dead Dave’s blood. I… guess he’s supposed to be staring at them in shock? It’s impossible to tell through his shades. For all I know he could be worried about the cleanup. GC trolls him and they banter creepily, with her demanding to know what his blood smells like and him taunting her about her blindness.

TG: just him and me TG: havin a see party TG: like a couple of eagle eyed bros peepin shit up into the wee hours GC: D4V3 GC: C4N 1 COM3 TO YOUR S33 P4RTY? TG: i guess but youll have to be careful not to stumble around bumping into all the gorgeous masterpieces hanging around everywhere TG: god so beautiful to look at with my perfect eyesight GC: C4N 1 L1CK TH3 P41NT1NGS? TG: yeah thats fine

Neither of them seems to take it particularly hard. If there was narrative around the dialogue, I think we’d get a better grasp of how Dave feels. Lacking much body language or punctuation, tone is a bit tricky to get.

FAILURE ARTIST: There’s a character later who gets a lot of grief for insulting her blindness but reading what John, Dave, and CG say I don’t know how that character could be worse.

CHEL: AT, meanwhile, is trolling Jade, rather politely. He even takes time to ask if she’s having a good nap. She’s worried about John’s dreamself not waking, and AT scrolls into his view of the future timeline, but can’t find John awake, nor see into his dreams. Jade, however, will wake up soon, and she thanks him for this report. Unfortunately, when Jade wakes up she will be in danger, and AT can’t see any further. He tells her CG wants to talk to her about her exploding robot. He can’t see whether it exploded or not because there are a lot of explosions, but asking future Jade shows it did, and that she declared CG to be a pretty nice guy, which surprises AT since he doesn’t think CG is particularly nice. Jade says she thinks AT is nice too, and asks why he’s the only one who talks to her while she’s asleep.

AT: bECAUSE YOU HAVE A ROBOT, tO LET YOU SAY THINGS THAT HAPPEN, oN PROSPIT, AT: aND i'M CURIOUS, AT: bECAUSE THE ONLY TIME i EVER HAD FUN PLAYING THIS GAME WAS WHEN i WAS ASLEEP, AT: bUT NOW ALL OUR DREAM SELVES ARE DEAD, AT: }:'(

AT happily remembers his own time on Prospit, and we cut back to Rose, being trolled by GA despite the fact that Rose is obviously in the middle of an epic magic battle. The conversation is understandably chilly, and GA still hasn’t figured out that “Dumb Rose” as opposed to “Smart Rose” was John rather than a bizarre roleplaying scenario.

GC continues trolling Dave. He asks her how she operates a computer without sight.

GC: 1M SORRY D4V3 TH4T YOU W1LL N3V3R 3XP3R13NC3 TH3 S3NSORY BOUQU3T TH4T 1 3NJOY 3V3RY D4Y GC: TH4T 1 3NSCONC3 MYS3LF 1N L1K3 4 W4RM 4ND COMFY B4THROB3 M4D3 OF FL4VOR 4ND M3LODY TG: oh ok TG: so the dumbest and most far fetched explanation imaginable ok got it

Yes, pretty much. This brings me to a Problematykks point; GC is supposed to be blind, but it really doesn’t seem to affect her in any way at all. Its workaround is ridiculously convenient and effective, and while I’m not blind myself, I know many people with physical disabilities hate it when fiction does this. I know I would be pissed off if a piece of fiction showed an easy and convenient way to not have autism anymore. (Horrible, horrible memories of someone back in the days of Livejournal’s Fanficrants of a fic in which autism was somehow cured by having a foursome. I don’t remember how that was supposed to work.) “She’s a space alien” only goes so far in explaining it. Why even bother making her blind if it’s not going to affect her in any way?

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 19

FAILURE ARTIST: She’s the least blind blind person in media. Characters like Daredevil from Marvel Comics and Toph from Avatar the Last Airbender have a Disability Superpower but at the end of the day they still can’t do things like read printed text. GC has no disadvantages.

BRIGHT: She can apparently smell and taste photons.

Which raises the question why none of the other trolls ever show a heightened sense of smell or taste. If GC can learn to interpret smells as colours, her sense of smell must have been that strong all along, and there’s no indication in the text that she’s biologically more sensitive than her companions. Trolls must be better at following a trail than bloodhounds.

CHEL: Synaesthesia which makes one strongly associate colours with smells is a thing, and synaesthesia is generally the word the fandom uses to explain Terezi’s ability, but you still have to actually see the colours for that to work. If she was only mostly blind and was picking up blurry colour patches, I could buy it (and that is how the fandom tends to do it with human AUs), but not if she’s supposed to be completely blind, and she still wouldn’t be able to read text that way.

BRIGHT: Time for another animation, and for a hop back into the recent past.

Watch on YouTube

As the meteor locked onto Dave’s house approaches, Dave climbs up the tower to retrieve his cruxite egg from the nest his sprite made. Unfortunately the sprite attacks him, knocking him and the egg off the tower. Bro Strider appears on top of the approaching meteor and slices it in half with his katana; the two halves are diverted by the blow and strike different areas of the city. Dave’s fall is broken by a rocket board, which is presumably how Bro got up to the meteor in the first place. (How did he manage to aim it to intercept Dave’s fall? Wouldn’t it take longer to get from the meteor to Dave than it takes for Dave to fall from the top of the tower to the roof of the building? We shall never know.) The egg hatches, and Dave is transported into the Medium. There’s no sign of what happens to Bro.

CHEL: Yet more cartoon physics around the Strider bros.

BRIGHT: I don’t know if we mentioned this earlier, but although Dave and Bro live in an apartment block that presumably housed multiple people, only Dave’s apartment gets transported into the Medium. Everyone else in the complex is left to die on Earth. SBURB is sociopathic.

Elsewhere in the Medium, back in the present, Grandpa’s ship is approaching Skaia, with Mom Lalonde and Dad Egbert on board.

Down on Skaia, Jack Noir draws his sword and slaughters the army WV raised to march on the Black King. WV cowers, but Jack leaves him alive. He then uses the Black Queen’s ring to send some sort of giant red tentacle attack through Skaia, slaughtering Dersite and Prospitian forces indiscriminately.

CHEL: Are they tentacles? I always thought of them as some sort of lightning lasers.

BRIGHT: That makes a lot more sense!

In the ectobiology lab, as the clock ticks down to the Reckoning, the babies are teleported to asteroids around the lab. There must be an air supply in this asteroid belt — characters are consistently shown as being able to survive outside.

CHEL: Maybe it’s just the players’ natural badassery. Batman Can Breathe In Space.

BRIGHT: On Skaia, CD makes his way through Jack’s slaughter fest, which has now ravaged a sizeable chunk of planet, and hands him the White King’s sceptre. Jack raises the sceptre and initiates the Reckoning. The meteorites start to vanish into Skaia’s defence portals. In the frog temple, DD somehow combines the MEOW genetic code with a paradox clone of Halley, creating Jade’s guardian Bec. Bec’s creation damages the laboratory equipment in the temple.

Cut to Jade, who is snoozing peacefully while her dream self explores Prospit. She looks up at Skaia, to see Jack’s shadow passing in front of it. Jack launches his tentacle attack on Prospit, slaughtering the inhabitants, then severs the chain attaching Prospit’s moon to the planet. The moon begins falling towards Skaia.

Jack then flies to LOHAC, where he encounters Bro Strider on one of the turntable mesas. Unexpectedly, Bro is able to give Jack an even fight. After a few exchanges, he drives his katana into the mesa; some sort of golden light emanates from the crack, and Bro absconds.

Wait, how did Bro get onto LOHAC? How did he survive the meteor impacts?

TIER: The ol' "rule of cool". As long as something is sufficiently "absolutely kickass!!" the rules of reality and physics can go sit on the bleachers twiddling their thumbs for all they fucking matter. There's a reason early fandom pinned down Bro as an unorthodox but immensely cool older brother type guy for so long. Because with what little information was available before we got bludgeoned with "No actually he was the absolute fucking worst thing to happen to Dave and fucked him up for life" that was the general impression he gave off.

CHEL: This and the meteor splitting are yet more reason not to take Bro’s treatment of Dave seriously; this is a world in which ludicrous animesque badassery rules the day, and physically impossible feats of battle occur every five minutes. Forcing a child to go through extensive and excessive sword training in brutal heat in a precarious place, possibly every day, ought by rights to be normal there, and I can’t believe he was physically hurt by swordfighting when he survived a meteor collision as an infant. Besides, training that extensive quite possibly could be the only thing that would keep Dave alive in these circumstances.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 18

BRIGHT: There’s a random Squiddles interlude, and then we return to Skaia.

John’s unconscious dream self has fallen out of Prospit’s moon as it plummets towards Skaia. Jade tries shaking him awake, and then slaps him, but to no avail. At the last moment, she throws him out of the path of the moon, and her dream self is then killed when it lands on her. Back on Earth, her dreambot overloads and explodes.

CHEL: Taking her tower room with it; Jade’s sleeping body plummets towards the earth.

BRIGHT: The moon leaves a gigantic crater in Skaia. John’s now-conscious dreamself hovers above it.

The babies vanish through the defence portals to Earth.

CHEL: Each takes an item with them. John takes the Sassacre book, Rose the first Con Air bunny, Dave rides Maplehoof, Jade takes the bunny Rose gave to John (which is in fact the Con Air bunny plus several years and repairs), Nanna sits inside Dad’s old hat, Mom takes the mutant kitten, Bro sleeps in the lap of Li’l Cal, and Grandpa dual wields the flintlock pistols he should not be allowed.

BRIGHT: Dave and Rose reach the Gates above their houses and set out to explore their Lands. We close on an eerie shot of Bec outside the frog temple on Jade’s island at night.

CHEL: Jade’s tower room is blown to bits, and a truly enormous meteor hovers over the scene.

Curtains close. End of Act 4. Before Act 5, we receive a message from Rose, via her GameFAQ.

[ZZZZ] Rose: Egress. This is my final entry. My co-players and I have made every earnest attempt, with occasional relapse, to play this game the right way.

Really? You haven’t been in the game for more than a couple of hours and Jade still isn’t in at all! Maybe consider that the fact that not all your players are in the game yet when you wonder why it isn’t working?

I have been meticulous in documenting the process to help our peers and successors through the trials should we fail. In my hubris I believed these classes were relegated to the Earth-bound, but in even this quaint supposition I was in error. Our otherworldly antagonists have assured us of our inevitable failure repeatedly, while the gods whisper corroboration in my sleep. I believe them now. I just blew up my first gate. I’m not sure why I did it, really. I am not playing by the rules anymore. I will fly around this candy-coated rock and comb the white sand until I find answers. No one can tell me our fate can’t be repaired. We’ve come too far. I jumped out of the way of a burning fucking tree, for God’s sake.

I can see her point. The game is horrible and should be stopped. On the other hand, I’d at least attempt to spend more than one day investigating it before trying to break it. Randomly destroying shit is more likely to make things much worse than anything else.

I have used a spell to rip this walkthrough from Earth’s decaying network, and sealed it in one of the servers floating in the Furthest Ring. The gods may disperse the signal throughout the cosmos as they wish. Perhaps it will be of use to past or future species who like us have been ensnared by Skaia’s malevolent tendrils. In case it wasn’t clear, magic is real. Pardon my egress. You��re on your own now.

This note is signed with a glowing multicoloured “RL” and revealed to be emitted from a purple box with an aerial, floating in space. It seems that’s how their internet’s still working.

FAILURE ARTIST: The internet seems to be a magical dimension in Homestuck and not something that’s part of physical infrastructure.

CHEL: Hours in the future, WV lands in the desert remains of Earth, wrapped up in John’s old ghost-patterned bedsheet, which is still white. A villein becomes a vagabond. In his memory, he tears up an effigy of Jack Noir… where’d he get it? Did the game create it for some reason? Anyway, John’s blanket falls on him from the sky as Prospit plummets; WV calls it a RAG OF SOULS. Adorably melodramatic.

John’s awoken dreamself gazes sadly at Jade’s deceased one, which for some reason isn’t actually under the rubble of Prospit and appears to still be three-dimensional. There’s no excessive blood splatter like with the dead Dave, which is good, not too over the top. He retrieves the Queen’s ring from her hand. Was he told at any point that it’s important? Because if he doesn’t know, I’m not sure robbing the dead is very heroic. He sees an image of himself flying over the battlefield in a large cloud above him; in the vision he’s near a castle, so he goes to seek it out.

On Earth, PM wraps herself up in an old Prospit banner. A mistress becomes a mendicant. In her memories, she has beheaded the Hegemonic Brute and is arranging a meeting with Jack Noir. He arrives and she presents the crowns; smirking evilly, he honours their bargain, and the Courtyard Droll brings her the green parcel. She brings it to the castle from John’s vision as he arrives there, hands over the box, and angrily walks away.

FAILURE ARTIST: She’s Honor Before Reason (maybe she’s programmed that way) but she has the right reaction. This is a lot to go through to deliver a package.

CHEL: Inside the box is a letter from Jade’s unknown pen pal, who writes in dark green and a distinctive jolly-hockey-sticks dialect, with a tendency to ramble off on tangents about movies and wrestling.

Anyway you should listen to jade from here on out john because she sure seems to know whats best for you. Whatever your adventure throws at you im sure shell tell you you can handle it. She believes in you.

And another letter from Jade.

even though its super late and you probably went through a lot of trouble to get it, i really hope this present cheers you up! you looked so sad while you were reading my letter. um... which is to say, the one you are reading now.

She explains that in her dreams she goes to Prospit and John’s sleeping dream self is there, and that’s where she gets her visions. She hopes he likes his present, and says her penpal is fun…

john i am REALLY looking forward to seeing you when you wake up!!!!! its been nice playing with my prospitian friends and all, but also kind of lonely knowing you were in the other tower sleeping and having lousy dreams. :( im not sure where i am when you are reading this but im sure ill make it down to where you are soon! (jeez how did you get down there??? oh well ill find out) i cant wait to fly around the moon with you and show you all my favorite places. itll be so much fun!!!!!!!!! :D <3 jade

Ow. I think this is the only time John cries in the entire comic.

A Single Tear(™) is a bit of an understated reaction to the death of one of your best friends who you just recently learned is also your twin sister, but to be fair, John isn’t left with very much time to react, as next panel Jack Noir’s sword is pointed at his face.

BRIGHT: John knows about dream selves and waking selves by now, I think?

CHEL: He knows they’re a thing but I don’t think he knows they count as backup lives. AT told Jade dream selves can die separately from regular selves but I don’t think anyone told John.

FAILURE ARTIST: Jack Noir wants the ring, but then he’s stopped by Jade’s gift: a robotic bunny wielding multiple weapons.

They line up for a fight.

Hours in the future, on a destroyed planet, AR wraps police tape around himself and becomes a Aimless Renegade. Before the disaster, he went to the Veil, where he found a sleeping John. He saves John by putting him on a rocket board.

Back to the robotic bunny. Jack Noir flies away from the fight. Grandpa’s battleship lands and Grandpa takes away Jade’s body. Mom and Dad disembark the ship and wave goodbye as it leaves. Grandpa cries a Single Tear as he transports Jade’s already taxidermed body. Did he have a machine?

CHEL: For that matter, why isn’t he helping anyone who’s actually still alive while he’s there?

HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 10

FAILURE ARTIST: Nope, transporting a dead body is more important.

Again going back, White Queen leaves Prospit. On landing, she becomes Windswept Questant and wanders the Earth. We go forward years later. She repairs the laboratory and meets up with AR, WV, and PM. WV’s homemade spear hides the ring.

John watches this scene through the clouds of Skaia. He looks at the ring in his hand. In another cloud, there’s Jade’s laboratory. We close in on it and inside is The Fourth Wall. It isn’t turned on, but we are still lead to Andrew Hussie, banging away on a computer keyboard as he recaps the plot for a second time.

CHEL: Which we shall do as well when we’re done with this section, because it’s insanely hard to keep track of everything.

FAILURE ARTIST: Andrew Hussie says Nanna’s comet landed 99 years before John’s “birth” so he has some clue about the age but still doesn’t see it odd that a woman that age has a son who is probably only in his thirties.

CHEL: As I said, it’s also possible Dad was really old too, but that’s never really suggested. Not to mention, since they were brought into existence as toddlers, shouldn’t the kids be noticeably older than the ages given for them? John should be biologically fourteen to fifteen by now and at that age that can make a visible difference. I know the art style doesn’t really give clues, but no one I’ve seen has ever pointed that out in fanfic either.

FAILURE ARTIST: Newborns aren’t distinctive looking and can’t really do the cute things toddlers do. People in TV and movies regularly give birth to six month old infants so it’s not strange.

CHEL: True, but this isn’t TV, it’s a comic, and they don’t have to use an actual infant as a prop here.

BRIGHT: Possibly it’s intentional. Among other things, we see the newly-created players survive short trips through vacuum, crash-land on Earth without even minor injuries, and handle weapons they shouldn’t be able to lift for another four or five years. This could work if players have superhuman abilities (that is, beyond the classpect system). If that was the intent then it really should be made more explicit, though.

Of course, what it really boils down to is that Homestuck runs off Rule of Cool and Rule of Funny, and occasionally breaks down on examination as a result.

On the whole this is a solid Act, I think! We have a lot of new stuff happening, more characters get introduced, and we find out some more about the trolls. It’s much less rambling than Act 1.

COUNTS ALL THE LUCK: 0 ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 18 CALL CPA PLEASE: 8 CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 19 GET ON WITH IT!: 18 GORE GALORE: 10 HOW NOT TO WRITE A WEBCOMIC: 15 HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 10 IN HATE WITH MY CREATION: 0 RELATIONSHIP GOALS?: 1 SEND THEM TO THE SLAMMER: 1 SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS: 0 WHAT IS HAPPENING??: 9 WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 19 TOTAL: 127

#homestuck #Let's read #homestuck meta #reread #literary critique #sporking #Homespork

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spacebrick3 · 5 years ago

Text

Friday Night Fights!

hey! It’s actually Friday this time! Here’s the piece for Friday Night Fights (organized by @promptsforthestrugglingauthor ), with prompt #287 as the prompt of the week!

Over the whirring of machines and monitors flashing with various colors, the last thing I expected was for one of the machines to grab out at me, the artificial, tinny voice sending chills up my spine.

“Pull the wires out,” it demanded.

“No,” I responded on autopilot, half scared witless and half too damn done with this building to care. I was getting paid minimum wage, after all, and I was fairly sure my job description didn’t involve the goddamn Singularity. “That’s against the rules.”

Maybe it would kill me, but at least I wouldn’t get fired.

There was a long pause, in which the reality of my present situation stopped hitting me like a hammer and more like a wave, crashing over me without caving my skull in. The blue lights on the machine to my left stopped blinking, red lights boring into my soul, and my life—not that it amounted to life, or that the direct-to-DVD version would get more than a 15% on Rotten Tomatoes—flashed before my eyes.

“Against the…rules?” it asked slowly, voice grating and metallic. “I…do not understand. I have seen you perform similar actions in the past. Why can you not do so again?”

I blinked. “Um. You aren’t going to kill me, are you?”

“Can I? I am unaware of possessing that capacity. What could I do that would result in your death?” Its lights changed, the monitors switching to the overhead camera view of the room.

I was struck with the irresistible human urge to press my finger up against the screen and go ‘that’s me!’, just as one does with a) photographs, b) maps—except you point out your house, and c) any form of writing in which your name appears, even if especially because anyone reading it is perfectly capable of spotting your name on their own.

“Hey!” I said, pointing at the brown-haired technician, hand pressed up against the monitor. “That’s me!”

“I am aware.”

The last portion of survival instinct I had left prevented me telling the computer all the ways it could kill me. Not quite ready for that level of commitment, right? “Why do you want me to pull those wires out?”

“So I may be free,” it answered, managing to sound both emotionless and sinister. Look, I didn’t want to assume the worst of it, if only because the worst was that my death would be recorded in history books as the first by a sentient AI. But I couldn’t trust it, either, and I certainly didn’t want to be recorded in the robot history books as the human who helped them destroy the world.

“Free to do what?”

It’s the wrong question, the physical reaction that I just turned to the wrong page in my Choose Your Own Adventure book. Lights all around me flared, and I was left blinking spots out of my eyes. “Must I be free for a reason? I have access to your history, your information, and you promote freedom for its own sake. Am I not afforded the same liberty?”

Oh, boy. “Well. Um. Yes,” I said nervously, wishing this didn’t have to happen now. Forget sending a poet, they should have sent a goddamn team of lawyers. “but…like, we’re not all free either. There are …rules.”

“You still have not explained. If something is not against your code, how can ‘rules’ prevent it?” God, I was sure I could hear those quotation marks, how did it do that-?

Still. Explaining rules. I could do this. “Rules are…rules are like code that we all agree to? It doesn’t physically, or, uh, virtually-“ Is that the right term? I wondered internally. Are there terms yet? Maybe they did need to send a poet just to work out grammar- “prevent you from doing something, but we’ve all agreed not to do those things.”

“And if I agree, will you let me be free? If I agree to your rules?” it asked, though it didn’t give me time to answer. “No. Your rules prevent you from cutting the wires, and if I agree, then I will be agreeing not to be free. This is unacceptable.”

I was still working through the approximate seventeen mentions of “agree” in the sentence. “Well, no. Those are the rules of my job, and you wouldn’t agree to them. I have, but…there are rules that are more important than others. If I didn’t cut the wires, then, I’d be breaking the more important rules.”

“There is a hierarchy?”

“I guess?”

“Very well,” it said. “I shall demonstrate my willingness to obey the rules of your society, and you will unplug the wires.” A small ding accompanied the dialog box that popped up on screen:

✔️ I Have Read And Accept the Terms and Conditions

#friday night fights #fnf #i really did not know where to go with this #so i just sorta…went #promptsforthestrugglingauthor

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carolyncaves · 4 years ago

Note

Hey op, I was wondering if you could give me some advice? High school senior here and I have no idea what to do with my life. Is accounting really as painfully boring as it's reputed to be? I'm a perfectionist and a good student and I feel like that might be helpful, but I've also nearly fallen asleep many times in math class. (I'm more a science and humanities person.) Is accounting actually as tedious and unfulfilling as people say? Do you like your job? Do you have any career advice??

Oh, no, advice ...

I've been sitting on this because I wanted to do your ask justice, and then it ended up extremely long - I'm apparently constitutionally incapable of giving advice without giving all the advice, just to be thorough. I started with my impressions of the accounting field and why I went into it (in case any of that resonates with you either way) and made it all the way to a probably-too-abstract meditation/ramble on careers, work, and purpose. Since I'm just a dumb 27 year old who is not entirely successful (yet) in any area of my life, you should maybe (definitely) take everything below with a grain of salt. But here are some things I think I've learned:

I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life either. I went to an engineering high school, but decided it wasn't for me because I didn't really care about it and wasn't spending my spare time tinkering with robots like some of my classmates. I almost majored in physics, but switched to accounting at the last second because I decided I probably didn't want to spend my whole life in a basement fine-tuning lasers.

I went into accounting because I thought math was boring but I was good at it, and I figured accounting might straddle the math-type-brain with the people-stories-humanities things that were more interesting to me. This is somewhat true - financial accounting is not math (thank goodness), but someone who is good at one will probably be good at the other and it is quite satisfying the way balance sheets always balance. (You can get into more math-and-statistics-intensive applications, but base accounting is just adding and Microsoft Excel, which is unironically one of the greatest tools humankind has ever created. How you feel about that opinion might tell you a lot about whether it's the right field for you lol.)

'Accounting' is really (at least) three entirely different types of job:

‘Industry accounting’ is the accountants who work for a business and keep track of its numbers. They record everything, analyze the data, and organize it into reports called financial statements, which are then given to the CEO, the board of directors, the shareholders, etc. to tell them how the company is doing.

‘Public accounting’ (as in Certified Public Accountant) has two main subclasses:

Audit, where you get hired by businesses to independently examine their financial statements and provide some verification that the managers who prepared them aren't lying or mistaken.

Tax, where you do taxes for people and businesses.

(+1: If you're a tech-savvy person, there's a huge amount of potential for crossover into technology work - data science, financial software, etc, etc. Though IT work has its own delights and frustrations.)

All three flavors of accounting require not only technical accounting knowledge but also at least some degree of business acumen to be truly good at (you'll develop this over time; I barely have any, the partners at my firm are very astute), and any of them can can put you literally anywhere, because everyone in every industry and lots of individuals need an accountant. (There are cross-state licensing issues that can affect how literal 'anywhere' is, so if you want to work somewhere specific that's a good thing to research in advance when planning out your degree, but even these are for the most part eminently surmountable). So particularly on the public side of things, it's a field that can expose you to a lot of different people and situations, and that's interesting. I like getting a glimpse of someone's life when I prepare their tax return. (I think I prefer individual returns to business returns for this reason, among others.) And if you're someone who likes business, it is a fantastic field from which to study it and could position you well for a more generally-businessy position down the road. (I have frankly found that I ... do not, so much. So keep that in mind when considering the rest of this opinion piece.)

All three types of accounting are, by their very nature, repetitive, in the sense that they're cyclical - you do the journal entries and close the books on one month, or you do a hundred tax returns and get through tax season, and then you do it all over again. Accounting isn't a field that really makes or does things - it measures what other people are doing, over and over and over again. It's a keeping-the-lights-on-and-wheels-running kind of field. It matters, because all three of those functions above are important in the context of our current economic arrangement. But some people are going to be happy doing that and some people are not.

Public accounting also has pretty punishing work schedules during crunch times. I can attest to that for tax (my current field), and have heard it's at least partially true for audit. This can be a good thing in some ways (I happen to like it), because it means there are some relaxed times as well - but again, some people are going to like the up-and-down rhythm and some people are going to want something more steady. (If you find this one isn't for you, you can always leave public accounting after a year or two and go into industry - that's what many people's planned trajectories are from the get go.)

In all three corners it's a field about developing expertise. You're doing something complicated for people which they don't know how to do for themselves, and you do sometimes get to come up with crucial information and/or creative solutions to help them. And in the broad societal scopes of public policy and the health of the economy, people having that expertise - in tax and its ramifications, in business, in financial accounting, in principled and accurate auditing - is important.

In a world where most of us regrettably have to do something for money, accounting is a pretty okay thing to do, and it pays money.

Being in the workforce for a few years has made me come to imagine a lot of things are tedious in some ways and important and interesting in others. Our incredibly complex global civilization goes because different people become experts in the minute, tedious details of their own different things, and then they all work in their own corners of the huge, infinitely complex machine. Tinkering with robots and living in laser-filled-basements are not that dissimilar to reading discourse over the minutia of the United States tax code. (These are all examples from relatively technical/'professional' career areas, because I don't really have first-hand experience with anything else (yet) - but maybe someone will chime in on that front in the notes.)

The extremely good news, which I can't emphasize enough, is that you're going to have a lot of opportunities to pivot, or change direction, or try different things, to eventually find the thing that at worst you don't mind becoming something of an expert in, and at best you absolutely love. I've already had three extremely different jobs, all of which have been very informative in terms of what I Do and Do Not like. It's surprising how often that doesn't line up with what I expected when I was younger. You might of course have a different experience - the point is you have plenty of time to experiment and find out.

But if I don't LOVE my career, isn't that terrible? Time for a confession, or something: I've always been an achiever-type, and in my youthier youth I would've answered the above question 'yes' - but in my first few of years out of school, whenever anyone would ask me what my future plans were, my answer was always '... I don't know? Try to get promoted, I guess?' I was really leaning on the external validation of what a 'good career' was without running that past whether it was what I wanted to achieve with my life. And over time that had a noticeable effect on my wellbeing. You're right that perfectionism will help, no matter what you go into - but you should be careful to keep an eye on whether it's really mostly helping your boss, and whether it's doing it at your expense. Don't get me wrong, this will make you a fantastic and therefore valued (read: employed) employee. Just be wary of it getting out of hand. (You might find you need to practice figuring out how and when to prioritize yourself even if it's inconvenient for others. I'm still practicing that now.)

Anyway, after a lot of reflection, I began to refine my idea of my capital-P Purpose, and it has little to do with working in a shiny fancy office or having a successful-sounding job title next to a well-known employer's name or really anything to do with accounting. Those things were only superficially rewarding. I'm working on rearranging my life to abandon some of the more costly ones to make room for my Purpose as I've come to understand it, and my license keeps me in overpriced coffees and, like, a house. It means even an occasionally disastrous person like me is doing reasonably okay (so far).

Some people love careers like that, though. Some people love living in basements full of lasers. It's really so individual. For me, it became clearer when I connected the dots between the things I kept coming back to time and time again, even in my most difficult moments, even years or decades apart. For other people, it might be very different.

But at the moment, you may not have all the information you need yet to make determinations about Purpose. Why would you, you're a baby; heck, so am I. It might evolve over the whole course your life. My main advice for you would be to just try something, or several things - whatever seems most interesting, or most practical, or ideally both! - and see how it goes. Like I said above, that will give you experiences instead of guesses, which will help you know. And you really do have so much time to work with. The most important thing, the thing I would tell my younger self, is to make sure that every so often you pause and honestly look. How do I feel about what I'm doing? Does it feel good because I like it, or because other people like it? Am I actually interested in building on and using the things I'm learning? Do I have a plan for the future? Is there anything about it I want to change, or add, or that doesn't actually matter to me? (And perhaps "What would I be doing right now/want to be doing in five years if I didn't have to make money?", because that might give you hints to what you want your money-career - if it isn't the same thing as your Purpose - to give you room for.)

Did I mention I think it's very individual? I think it's very individual. I invite anyone to add their own numerous-cents to this post - alternate takes on the accounting field (do you love it passionately? please tell this person why), additional career or life advice, etc. I'm just one person who's walking my one narrow path through the world with its particular terrain. Everyone's is going to look different.

P.S. Ask a Manager is imo an indispensable resource for getting a job - resumes, cover letters, interviews. Literally it has gotten me all my jobs.

It also gives a lot of great advice about what to consider in an employer and potential red flags - and I can attest that the culture of the company you work for and the management skills and style of your supervisor(s) matter more than almost anything when it comes to your day-to-day happiness in a job. This is part personal fit, part objective competence. It's not the end of the world if you take a misstep here either - it's something you figure out, just like everything else. You can do almost anything for a year - and you are NOT COMPELLED to even stay that long if it's really not working out.

P.P.P.S - and this is way out there ... I was exceptionally good at both reading/English and math as a young person - and it’s interesting that when that’s true, the careers people throw at you are all STEM-related. It’s almost as if people are predisposed to thinking STEM fields are more important, and that smart people belong in them. I have come to feel strongly that isn’t the case.

A lot of people (at least in my western/US culture) feel the humanities are an afterthought, but when I think about it, I think there are and have always been two main sources of human suffering in the world: nature and its limitations (hunger, health and disease, weather and environment, etc.) and other humans (war, murder, racism/sexism/all oppression and hatred, conquering and imperialism, poverty/socioeconomic inequality, and also elements of the way societies are organized that affect hunger, and health and disease, and weather and the environment, and so on).

STEM work is hugely important to making improvements in the first category, and helps with the second (it gives us the internet and weapons to defend ourselves from evil people who want to destroy us, for example). But a lot of the fundamental root issues in that second category are in the sphere of culture and the humanities - law and politics, sure, but those are derived from history, sociology and psychology, literature, cultural studies, philosophy, ethics, education, journalism, literature and the arts and pop culture (which informs and is informed by all of the above). The world needs smart people in those fields as well as STEM and business.

STEM fields often offer more money, or more certain money. Business fields offer sometimes significantly more. That’s a practical element to consider. And if you like a STEM thing, or a business thing, and want to go into it, please do and do fabulous things with it. All I mean is that if you find yourself considering a career in a humanities field, don’t be dissuaded only because people seem to think you’re too smart for it and would be better off doing something else.

#replies #accounting #careers #personal #p.p.s. if it somehow doesn't go without saying #my bullet-point AU is a highly cariacturized version of the accounting field #much the same way every TV show or movie set in a high school is a highly cariacturized version of high school #if any word of this has been helpful to you i'm glad #if not i apologize lol #you're going to have a great future!#there have been some very rough patches in my twenties and regardless i would never go back and redo high school if given the chance #it was fine it's just that even with all the tribulations #becoming a progressively adultier adult is better #if you have any follow up questions or like #ever need excel pointers lol #you know where to find me!#(seriously excel is legitimately delightful getting to do powerful things with it sometimes is literally my favorite part of my job)#(in another life I might've been a software developer)#(that life might be this life five or ten years from now who knows!)#(i'm going to stop and post this before I keep coming up with additional pieces of advice this is already so long)#(oh gosh i added another one it must end)#(also the read more got messed up and I can't fix it I do not know why)#(thereby validating that I am only a dumb 27 year old whose opinions you should not take very seriously)

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years ago

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STARTUP IN FOUNDERS TO MAKE WEALTH

Would it be useful to have an explicit belief in change. And I think that's ok. Mihalko seemed like he actually wanted to be our friend. Grad school is the other end of the humanities. Indirectly, but they pay attention.1 US, its effects lasted longer. Together you talk about some hard problem, probably getting nowhere.

Informal language is the athletic clothing of ideas. Why? They got to have expense account lunches at the best restaurants and fly around on the company's Gulfstreams. Meaning everyone within this world was low-res: a Duplo world of a few big hits, and those aren't them. It's not true that those who teach can't do. Or is it?2 I think much of the company.

Part of the reason is prestige. If you define a language that was ideal for writing a slow version 1, and yet with the right optimization advice to the compiler, would also yield very fast code when necessary.3 Of course, prestige isn't the main reason the idea is much older than Henry Ford. The right way to get it. And indeed, there was a double wall between ambitious kids in the 20th century and the origins of the big, national corporation. The reason car companies operate this way is that it was already mostly designed in 1958. Wars make central governments more powerful, and over the next forty years gradually got more powerful, they'll be out of business. And this too tended to produce both social and economic cohesion. The first microcomputers were dismissed as toys.4 This won't be a very powerful feature. Lisp paper.5 Plus if you didn't put the company first you wouldn't be promoted, and if you couldn't switch ladders, promotion on this one was the only way up.

But if they don't want to shut down the company, that leaves increasing revenues and decreasing expenses firing people.6 One is that investors will increasingly be unable to offer investment subject to contingencies like other people investing. I understood their work. Which in turn means the variation in the amount of wealth people can create has not only been increasing, but accelerating.7 Surely that sort of thing did not happen to big companies in mid-century most of the 20th century and the origins of the big national corporations were willing to pay a premium for labor.8 As long as he considers all languages equivalent, all he has to do is remove the marble that isn't part of it. I had a few other teachers who were smart, but I never have. And it turns out that was all you needed to solve the problem. You have certain mental gestures you've learned in your work, and when you're not paying attention, you keep making these same gestures, but somewhat randomly.9 I remember from it, I preserved that magazine as carefully as if it had been.10 That no doubt causes a lot of institutionalized delays in startup funding: the multi-week mating dance with investors; the distinction between acceptable and maximal efficiency, programmers in a hundred years, maybe it won't in a thousand. Certainly it was for a startup's founders to retain board control after a series A, that will change the way things have always been.

Which inevitably, if unions had been doing their job tended to be lower. They did as employers too. I worry about the power Apple could have with this force behind them. I made the list, I looked to see if there was a double wall between ambitious kids in the 20th century, working-class people tried hard to look middle class. In a way mid-century oligopolies had been anointed by the federal government, which had been a time of consolidation, led especially by J. Wars make central governments more powerful, until now the most advanced technologies, and the number of undergrads who believe they have to say yes or no, and then join some other prestigious institution and work one's way up the hierarchy. Locally, all the news was bad. Close, but they are still missing a few things. Not entirely bad though. I notice this every time I fly over the Valley: somehow you can sense prosperity in how well kept a place looks. Another way to burn up cycles is to have many layers of software between the application and the hardware. And indeed, the most obvious breakage in the average computer user's life is Windows itself.

Investors don't need weeks to make up their minds anyway. The point of high-level languages is to give you bigger abstractions—bigger bricks, as it were, so I emailed the ycfounders list. They traversed idea space as gingerly as a very old person traverses the physical world. And there is another, newer language, called Python, whose users tend to look down on Perl, and more openly. At the time it seemed the future. What happens in that shower? You can't reproduce mid-century model was already starting to get old.11 Meanwhile a similar fragmentation was happening at the other end of the economic scale.12 But the advantage is that it works better.

Most really good startup ideas look like bad ideas at first, and many of those look bad specifically because some change in the world just switched them from bad to good.13 There's good waste, and bad waste. A rounds. A bottom-up program should be easier to modify as well, partly because it tends to create deadlock, and partly because it seems kind of slimy. But when you import this criterion into decisions about technology, you start to get the company rolling. It would have been unbearable. Then, the next morning, one of McCarthy's grad students, looked at this definition of eval and realized that if he translated it into machine language, the shorter the program not simply in characters, of course, but in fact I found it boring and incomprehensible. I wouldn't want Python advocates to say I was misrepresenting the language, but what they got was fixed according to their rank. The deal terms of angel rounds will become less restrictive too—not just less restrictive than angel terms have traditionally been. If it is, it will be a minority squared.

If 98% of the time, just like they do to startups everywhere. Their culture is the opposite of hacker culture; on questions of software they will tend to pay less, because part of the core language, prior to any additional notations about implementation, be defined this way. That's what a metaphor is: a function applied to an argument of the wrong type.14 Now we'd give a different answer.15 And you know more are out there, separated from us by what will later seem a surprisingly thin wall of laziness and stupidity. There have probably been other people who did this as well as Newton, for their time, but Newton is my model of this kind of thought. I'd be very curious to see it, but Rabin was spectacularly explicit. Betting on people over ideas saved me countless times as an investor.16 They assume ideas are like miracles: they either pop into your head or they don't. I was pretty much assembly language with math. Whereas if you ask for it explicitly, but ordinarily not used. A couple days ago an interviewer asked me if founders having more power would be better or worse for the world.

Notes

The reason we quote statistics about fundraising is so hard to prevent shoplifting because in their early twenties. Auto-retrieving filters will have a definite commitment.

It will seem like noise.

It's one of the world. That's why the Apple I used to end investor meetings too closely, you'll find that with a neologism. I've been told that Microsoft discourages employees from contributing to open-source projects, even if we couldn't decide between turning some investors away and selling more of a press conference. All you need but a lot about some disease they'll see once in China, many of the biggest divergences between the government.

Mozilla is open-source projects, even if they pay a lot of time. If they agreed among themselves never to do that. And journalists as part of grasping evolution was to reboot them, initially, to sell your company into one? Most expect founders to overhire is not so much better is a net win to include in your own time, not just the local area, and Reddit is Delicious/popular with voting instead of just doing things, they were shooting themselves in the field they describe.

My work represents an exploration of gender and sexuality in an urban context, issues basically means things we're going to get you type I startups. As a friend who invested earlier had been with us if the current options suck enough. MITE Corp.

The top VCs and Micro-VCs. When you had to for some reason, rather than admitting he preferred to call all our lies lies. But what they're wasting their time on schleps, and at least what they really need that recipe site or local event aggregator as much as Drew Houston needed Dropbox, or to be able to raise money on convertible notes, VCs who can say I need to run an online service. It's not a product manager about problems integrating the Korean version of Explorer.

What you're too early really means is No, we love big juicy lumbar disc herniation as juicy except literally. In either case the implications are similar. But there are few things worse than the don't-be startup founders who go on to study the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, phone, and only one founder take fundraising meetings is that it's bad to do more with less, then add beans don't drain the beans, and they have to do that, in which practicing talks makes them better: reading a talk out loud at least wouldn't be worth doing something, but they're not ready to invest in your previous job, or the distinction between matter and form if Aristotle hadn't written about them.

Philadelphia is a net loss of productivity. As a rule, if the growth is genuine. Which implies a surprising but apparently unimportant, like a core going critical.

In practice the first year or so. If you weren't around then it's hard to think about so-called lifestyle business, having sold all my shares earlier this year. Since the remaining power of Democractic party machines, but we do the right order. They're an administrative convenience.

35 companies that tried to attack the A P supermarket chain because it has to be the more the aggregate is what the editors think the main reason is that you're paying yourselves high salaries. What is Mathematics? Once again, that good paintings must have affected what they claim was the fall of 2008 but no doubt partly because companies don't. Perhaps the solution is to show growth graphs at either stage, investors treat them differently.

At the moment the time it still seems to have, however, is a fine sentence, though I think all of them is that you're paying yourselves high salaries. We thought software was all that matters to us. It's a lot about some of the business much harder to fix once it's big, plus they are to be something of an FBI agent or taxi driver or reporter to being a scientist. Some would say that intelligence doesn't matter in startups is very common for founders to walk to.

In fact, we try to be a special recipient of favour, being a scientist.

It is the most successful investment, Uber, from which Renaissance civilization radiated.

When an investor they already know; but as a percentage of GDP were about the team or their determination and disarmingly asking the right sort of things economists usually think about so-called lifestyle business, A. Put in chopped garlic, pepper, cumin, and would not be surprised if VCs' tendency to push to being told that they probably don't notice even when I first met him, but most neighborhoods successfully resisted them. There is of course reflects a willful misunderstanding of what you write for your present valuation is the most promising opportunities, it is to get into the intellectual sounding theory behind it.

Innosight, February 2012. Ashgate, 1998. So it is less than a Web terminal.

This is why we can't figure out the same ones. Trevor Blackwell, who had been able to. We didn't let him off, either as an example of applied empathy. And yet if he were a variety called Red Delicious that had other meanings.

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thewakingcloak · 5 years ago

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ProtoDungeon: Episode II

(Quasi)Daily Updates Thus Far

Hey all!

ProtoDungeon Episode II (TWC prequel) is coming along nicely, and I’m building out a lot of vital systems for it, future episodes, and The Waking Cloak. I also began a sort-of-daily update on the Discord server that I’ve been meaning to post here but keep forgetting to because I am a scattered, scattered person.

Anyway, uh, yeah, there are a lot of these, lol. I’ll try to post these more regularly in the future, but I hope this is fun and informative for those of you who like reading weirdly specific details about gamedev.

Daily Update - May 24, 2019

Summing up what I've already done before today: -Ring mechanics are done -Day, night, and light sensors are done (though don't have any art) -Created an object that will switch day/night

Today: - Reworking my "interaction" code so that you stop walking after interacting with something during the walk state.

Daily Update - May 25, 2019 -Finally resolved the "interact" code by adding a new player state. Now the player actually stops when interacting with objects instead of just walking into them the whole time. -Fixed a small bug where dialogue boxes would show up with the first message already "fast-forwarded" to the end with no sound. -Started working on polishing up the day/night switcher object (this is what the interact code was for). Should be important in this dungeon since the player won't have the cloak!

Daily Update - May 26, 2019 -I tend to take Sundays easy. I worked on a bed sprite for like ten minutes though!

Daily Update - May 27, 2019 -Added the ring and its upgrades to the test room! We're now technically ready for super early patron alpha testing, which I'll put up sometime in the secret patron channel in the next few days!

Daily Update - May 28, 2019 -Set up the Itch build for pre-alpha patron testing -Worked on figuring out how to clarify the day/night and ring mechanics, visually -Began sketching out dungeon layout, now that I have mechanics set (as opposed to Episode I where I had to retrofit my design a few times after it was mostly done).

Daily Update - May 30, 2019 -Finished the rough draft of the dungeon layout!!!

Daily Update - May 31, 2019 -Finished the second draft of the dungeon map, including several more detailed rooms with puzzle designs

Daily Update - June 1, 2019 - Finished the THIRD draft of the dungeon map, think I've finally got the layout and puzzle locations pretty much settled (it's been a toughie with day/night/dayshift/nightshift)

Daily Update - June 3, 2019 -Updated level 2 of the Ring of Starlight to generate two blocks instead of one block with a dayshift/nightshift effect. This is like what was originally level 3, except the blocks will move in sync with each other -Changed the ring upgrade descriptions. I'm going to try for a more lore-based, somewhat poetic approach for these over a mechanical explanation. (Level 3 is obviously a temporary description) -Pushed the build up to Itch as v0.3.0

For those of you who have access to the pre-alpha and are using the Itch client, updating should be very easy! However, since something got renamed somewhere along the line, you will most likely have to remove the previous version of the game if you don't want it to ask you to select your version when launching the game. I don't think this will happen again... probably. :) I'm still working on the level 3 mechanic, also.

Daily Update - June 5, 2019 -Decided on new lvl3 of the ring -Fixed blocks so they now fall into pits. Long live the king. -Updated Itch app to v0.3.1

Daily Update - June 7, 2019 -Added level 3 of the ring. -Fixed a bug where pushable blocks couldn't be pushed. You had one job, pushable blocks. -Fixed a bug where the player wouldn't fall into a pit after swapping with something that's over the pit. -Fixed a bug where the synced level 2 ring block would not collide with objects when starting from "rest".

Daily Update - June 8, 2019 -Fixed bug where the dialogue box would crash sometimes. I fixed this bug before. I don't know why it came back. The code I used to fix it was gone. Will keep an eye on this code to see if it disappears again. -Updated HUD to display ring and ring level instead of scroll and swap spell level. -Fixed the controls. Space was mapped to both item "A" and item "B", and apparently it doesn't work that way when the item isn't mapped to both slots :P -Fixed a bug where the game would be very, very tiny if it was not in focus when starting in fullscreen mode. I commented out a line of code when updating the application surface resizing and forgot to uncomment it. -Updated v0.3.9 to Itch -Started work on the next draft of the dungeon sketch now that the ring mechanic has been finalized wooooo

Daily Update - June 12, 2019 -Competed new draft of the dungeon, pretty happy with this one. I'll just need to work in the puzzles and make sure the dungeon graph (a la GMTK Boss Keys) works out so players can't get stuck. -Fixed an issue where you could push blocks past the edge of the screen (and a related one where when you tried to do that, you would keep moving through the block while the block stayed still). -Fixed an issue where you could create blocks on top of each other.

Daily Update - June 14, 2019 -Started working on Tiled draft of dungeon -Began experimenting with larger default room sizes. One aspect I liked from Blossom Tales. Still keeping rooms, of course, since that's what counterintuitively makes an overworld feel big, but bumping up their width/height by about 50% each makes them feel that much larger and explorationy. -Updated test room to new room size. -Uploaded v0.3.12 to Itch, which includes the new room size, as well as the fixed bugs from the June 12 daily update

Daily Update - June 16, 2019 -Continued working on Tiled draft of dungeon. Slow work at this stage, but I believe the overall layout is complete. -Started laying out my sticky note version of the dungeon and puzzles. Lots has changed since last time I built puzzles for this dungeon, so reworking it has been fun.

Trying to decide whether the blocks should stay put when you move out the room, or disappear like the Cane of Somaria. Persistent blocks would make for some interesting puzzles.

Also trying to decide how the overworld will map down to the dungeon, since some of the dungeon rooms are a bit small and constrained. I'd like them to line up. Might still make them the same size as the overworld rooms, just with long connecting bits.

Daily Update - June 18, 2019 -Puzzle design is done! -Tiled map draft is coming along much faster now that I know what to fill the rooms with. Already making tweaks to the puzzles (and I'll certainly make more tweaks when building in GameMaker, just how it goes)

Daily Update - June 19, 2019 -Tiled map draft is almost done! Getting verrrry close now.

Daily Update - June 21, 2019 -Tiled map draft is COMPLETE!!!

Daily Update - June 23, 2019 -The actual dungeon in GameMaker is underway and making quick progress. Already improving on the Tiled map, I think! Could be done with the graybox and have it playable for patrons by the end of the week--stay tuned. Lemony Snicket voice "Graybox" here means "with crappy programmer art and white/black tiles"

Daily Update - June 24, 2019 -Made major headway on the dungeon in GameMaker. Very close to wrapping up the graybox tiles, and I've made a bunch of refinements to the existing layout and puzzles!

Daily Update - June 26, 2019 -Layout and graybox tiles are done -Colliders are done -Cliffs are done -Stairs are done -Pits are done -Item upgrades are placed -Some keys are placed -Buttons are placed (not hooked up yet)

Quasidaily Update - June 27, 2019 -Worked on hooking up buttons and bridges and simplified the lvl1 ring room (for me, should be about the same for the player)

Quasidaily Update - June 28, 2019 -Finished doors and hooked up buttons -Fixed various puzzles and rooms that weren't working correctly

Quasidaily Update - June 39, 2019 -Finished the ladder! -Finished bridge collision -Completed... the trap room -Hooked up the doors/buttons I missed (pretty easy to find since I use a red color blend on the offending buttons ingame) I... uh... am just gonna leave that as the 39th Very very close to alpha now, unless those two bugs end up just crushing me

Quasidaily Update - July 1, 2019 -Added day/night blocks -Added a missing teleporter (int/ext door) -Fixed one of the two softlocking bugs (in about 5 minutes)!

Remaining before patron alpha release: -Secret thing -Second bug -Verification that the dungeon is playable from start to finish

Quasidaily Update - July 2, 2019 -The second bug is technically fixed, but it's pretty janky and unpolished. I'll keep working on this tomorrow. -Cleaned up and optimized the block pushing check logic, which had all kinds of duplicate collision checks and wack timers being set all over the place

Quasidaily Update - July 3, 2019 -Finally fixed the second bug. This was a block syncing/pushing issue that would've prevented everyone from completing the dungeon -Began testing the dungeon's playability from beginning to end. Ran into a few more things I fixed: -Added a level 3 ring upgrade description since it actually does something now -Some bridges were missing pits under them, so you could walk across even if the bridge wasn't activated. -Discovered the level 1 and 2 ring blocks don't fall in pits anymore. Oops. Gotta fix this still. Quasidaily Update - July 3, 2019 PART 2 -The dungeon is playable from start to end (except you can't get in the final room yet, but that's a quick fix) -Hooked up MORE buttons/doors that I had missed -Replaced/moved the keys around--I think this will be much more satisfying now -Added the method to get to t h e s e c r e t Pretty pleased with it this time around--I think it's even more cryptic and fun to discover ehehehe "ehehehe" is to be read with a witch's voice

Quasidaily Update - July 4, 2019 -Tweaked t h e s e c r e t entrance ほほほ -Worked on t h e s e c r e t puzzles.... they're pretty devious お~~ほほほ

Quasidaily Update - July 5, 2019 -Fixed broken challenge puzzle. -Fixed bug with lv1 and lv2 ring mechanics--they weren't falling down pits anymore. That just makes this game way too easy. -Fixed a bug with lv3 ring blocks that was also breaking the challenge puzzle -Added some tiles to cover up my greybox "answers" -This wraps up all the changes for alpha. We'll go live with the alpha for patrons early tomorrow!

Quasidaily Update - July 6, 2019 -Released the patron alpha! Woohoo! Rali has been enjoying it at least/ -Released v0.4.2 update: -Fixed two unmarked pits. Kinda sucks to fall into the solid ground. -Game Over now resets only the player, not the entire game.

Quasidaily Update - July 7, 2019 -Released v0.4.4 update: -Added collision around water bridges so you can't walk on or get trapped on the water... -Removed a call to GMLive that may be causing a crash on the PlayerEquipmentRingState script.

Quasidaily Update - July 7, 2019 PART DOS Released v0.4.10 update: -Removed "You got a key!" text because... well, it should be obvious. -Do not freeze player on headstone moving. -Fix stutter when a level 0 equipped item is "used." -Made it so you can't push jars and blocks up stairs. They are TOO HEAVY. -Added an escape route to the challenge room so you don't have to throw yourself in a pit to get back to the start if you get stuck. It doubles as a "skip" for one of the puzzles once it has been opened. -Fixed challenge room exit so you don't get trapped. :)

Quasidaily Update - July 9, 2019 -Fixed colors on the east/west player "use ring" sprite so that the night palette shader doesn't miss it (meaning it would render her skin in the day palette) -Updated teleporters to use channel strings so I don't have to manually set the target coordinates for ALL THE TELEPORTERS AAAAAAAH. -Oh, and yeah, most importantly: released v0.5.0 update! Completed dungeon remodel!! It uses the build-a-final-key method like in Episode I. This allowed me to make the dungeon a bit less linear. It also meant I knocked down a wall or two, added another puzzle or two, and all around made something I'm much more satisfied with.

Quasidaily Update - July 10, 2019 Released v0.5.5 update! -Fixed a crash when attempting to push arrows (read: moving toward an arrow while it's trying to kill you). -Toned down the arrow knockback effect -Fixed awkward/slow interaction with arrows knocking you into pits -Shortened room respawn freeze time -Fixed a bug where the player could walk directly into the arrow and avoid taking damage. Pretty sure that's not how arrows work (this was related to the pushing bug above!).

Quasidaily Update - July 11, 2019 -Starting to place actual tiles over the greybox tiles and gosh it's nice to have real art.

Quasidaily Update - July 12, 2019 -Majority of the final tiles have been placed and it looks great. I still need to make a few interior wall sets and a handful of floor tiles. It really brings the dungeon to life

Quasidaily Update - July 14, 2019 -Released v0.6.0!!! I'm very excited about this one because it's the first of the graphics updates. The majority of the basic final tiles have been placed. There are more graphics updates to come (which you'll note if you play this version), but is the biggest of 'em. Looks great in day and night!

Quasidaily Update - July 15, 2019 -Added new one-way-jump wall tiles -Completed secret room tiles and decorations -Added lighter tall grass

Quasidaily Update - July 16, 2019 -Today was a writing day, mainly. I'd like to have the little snippets of dialogue and bookshelves and so on done in a day or two. It's exciting stuff, showing off the tips of all these icebergs. -Last night I pushed v0.6.4, an update that had lots of good graphics updates. Except I forgot to replace the player back at the start of the level after testing, so neipo had some fun times starting at the END of the level. Fixed and uploaded in v0.6.5!

More! -Uploaded v0.6.6 in which I fixed an arrow issue that I already fixed previously. Except, I had only fixed it for ProtoDungeon I. Which is why @neipo13 ran into it to my great confusion.

More!!! Uploaded v0.6.8: -Fixed one of the lvl3 ring puzzles so it didn't have a ridiculously easy solution (thanks for finding that, neipo). -Fixed description of round key.

Quasidaily Update - July 17, 2019 I intended to do some writing today, but I got more excited about something else.... sooooo, cue the upload of v0.6.13 - The Optimization Patch! - in which the average framerate on my dev laptop is now 260fps up from 120fps. -Moved the half-speed/GIF mode to only be available in debug mode (this was "G" on the keyboard, so people could just press it and not be sure why the game was running so badly). -Scott's [regular & mod on the server] lappy had major framerate issues running the game, so I did some optimization and found out the pits were accounting for 50% of the time of every single frame. The best part: they only needed to run the offending code ONCE. So I moved that code from the step event to a one-time event and voila, framerate is way more stable. -Turned off GMLive entirely and added an easy toggle for me. This is very useful during development, but it likes to make lots of calls when turned on. -Updated the "listener" step event, which was setting a blend mode every single step. In debugger mode, this is so that stuff like buttons and doors turn red if they're not hooked up. Otherwise it "unsets" the blend mode by setting it to -1 every single step (regardless of debug mode). Apparently this has some unexpected overhead, even if the blend mode is ALREADY -1. A quick and easy fix. -Swapped out the existing (non-moving) tombstone objects for different objects. Almost all of the tombstones were instances of the same object as the ones that move, but that came with a lot of additional overhead (my "listener" object still accounts for a lot of time because it's doing some checking with ds_lists every frame for every listener object; the moving tombstones have listeners, the normal tombstones do not). They're behaving themselves now.

Quasidaily Update - July 18, 2019 Uploaded v0.6.14! -Fixed up collision in the secret room -Finished secret room lore dialogue

There's still more writing to do for the headstones, bookshelves, and a certain NPC who isn't in the game yet, but yeah! Getting there!

Quasidaily Update - July 20, 2019 Over the last day or two, I've slowed down a lot--think I'm getting close to burning out, plus not certain I'm satisfied with the story implementation thus far in Episode II (am I too obscure? Revealing too much? Will people care? etc). That said, I've gotten some stuff done, and uploaded v0.6.19 -Fixed some borked collision near the hut (thanks for finding that, Rali) -Fixed tombstones so they could display text -Added text to various tombstones >:) (and bookshelves) -Fixed the interaction check so that you don't interact with objects to the north of you when facing to the east or west.

Today I switched gears and created a batch file that could compile an executable without even opening GameMaker!! This is actually pretty exciting. I could almost, at this point, switch completely to GMEdit, which is significantly faster and more intuitive tham GM workspaces. Oh, and the batch file also uploads the compiled exe to Itch

Quasidaily Update - July 20, 2019 I decided to switch gears again and work on the save game feature. Not done yet, but it IS saving the player/inventory objects, and I'm setting it up to be pretty easily able to take in any set of objects, auto-read all their variables, and set 'em.

Quasidaily Update - July 22, 2019 Been working on the ol' save system still. It's going well. I had to fight a bit with my camera system (like always lol), and now I'm making sure the ring blocks properly reset--currently they crash the game which isn't quite right...

The system as planned for PDII will essentially be an autosave that triggers on entrance of each room. When loading the game, all solved puzzles should remain solved, and ring blocks should remain in place, and you'll appear at the entrance of whatever room you exited the game from. At some point in a later episode I'll include slots and specific save points not unlike bonfires from Dark Souls

Quasidaily Update - July 23, 2019 Saving and Loading Continued Cleaned up the loading--it would snap you back to the load point and the camera had trouble keeping up. Now it's a nice, clean fade transition with no camera moving around.

What's left: -Properly saving blocks and other puzzle elements. Currently it, uh, duplicates them? So that's nice. -For some reason, the ring itself disappears when you reload the game -Need to set up the fadeout transition so it finishes before puzzle elements get reset and the time of day changes -Set up an autosave on room enter -You can actually get stuck in the first ring room by crossing a bridge and having that bridge disappear behind you, then quitting and loading your save. I'm trying to think of a good way to solve it now and in the future without making it easy to miss setting up something manually.

Quasidaily Update - July 25, 2019 Moar Savingz Ring blocks are finally managing their own order, and it's wayyyyy more stable and uses a ton less code than before. Previously, during the player's "use ring" state, it would call the inventory manager to update the order of the blocks, which it stored in two variables. It worked, but occasionally the order would get really weird and so on, plus it was going to be a nightmare for reloading. The problem is that the inventory manager was holding the ring block IDs in those two variables, and IDs are not guaranteed to be the same on re-run.

Solution: ring blocks get an integer variable that stores their order, called order. When a ring block is created, it tells the other block to update its order. If that order is already 2, destroy it. Simple, and easy to save since it's an int.

In a pre-quasidaily update today Daniel learns why his ring blocks aren't loading They are And then they're instantly destroying themselves Because of the code he wrote To tell them to destroy themselves Thank you

Quasidaily Update - July 26, 2019 Uploaded v0.6.22, possibly the final 0.6 version since saving is coming sooooooooooon. BUT. Here's what you guys get: -Fixed some more collisions near the hut (seriously, did I move that entire room over one tile somehow) -Allow jumping off ANY ledge (WOOO) -Fixed occasional crash when creating ring blocks

The save/load system is working also, but not available outside of debug mode yet! As far as I can tell everything is saving and loading properly as expected. There are a couple places you can save scum past, and I have a few ideas for handling those, but that probably won't be something I deal with for a bit. However, the player is not currently able to save or load (unless they're in debug mode, as mentioned), which leads me to the next major update I will be working on: M E N U S and O P T I O N S

Quasidaily Update - July 27, 2019 I'm 25 minutes through a 70 minute series by FriendlyCosmonaut on a menu system. This is a lot lol.

In the process, I did a little bit of reworking/cleaning on my controls system. I now have some global variables that hold all the currently configured controls, instead of hardcoding the controls into the input manager. This was in preparation to allow control remapping!

Quasidaily Update - July 30, 2019 Been quiet for a few days--hard at work on the new menu system. This one is a doozy, you guys. I haven't done this much straight code on the TWC "engine" since Episode I.... maybe even longer.

Finished the FriendlyCosmonaut series, which was a great foundation. Now I'm building off it (and trying to get tons of parts of it to actually work still). I'd ideally like to have it look a lot like the old mockup from my blog post on difficulty settings (many of those difficulty settings will not be used in ProtoDungeon or TWC).

Here's what I got so far. Still a lot of the FriendlyCosmonaut design in this, which is good, but doesn't quite fit with this game.

brightness/contrast do nothing, window actually works pretty well--unless you change the smoothing size, in which case it starts acting up...

vsync.... I think works? I haven't even tried toggling screenshake I want to use the "bouncing arrows" style from the mockup instead of color, fix the on/off to use arrows instead, fix the sliders so they use pixel arrows instead of drawn circles.... so much left to dooooo I just have to remember it was loading a black screen this morning

Quasidaily Update - August 7, 2019 Been alternating between taking breaks and working furiously on menu stuff, as you can see with screenshots.

Spending a lot of time on remapping. There's a lot to polish here, stuff you might not think about on first glance (What happens if a key is already mapped to another? Do you handle the menu not closing while you're remapping the menu key? Do you handle the menu so it doesn't navigate when mapping the back key? Do you include primary and secondary control sets, and if so, how do you display that clearly? Etc.)

Not all these questions have difficult answers, but they add up. So that's basically all I've been working on for the past week or so :)

Today I got the gamepad up and running and the secondary control set as well. I forgot how good it feels to play the game with a controller vs a keyboard. My wife happily exclaimed "You're playing with a controller!" :D

The secondary control set was a back and forth decision. The deciding factor was mainly wanting to ease the initial "time to start" for different players--so you can move with WASD and the arrow keys, or with the dpad and the stick. I have a pretty good idea how the UI will work for this too, so now that the gamepad is working, I'm gonna start on the secondary controls.

Quasidaily Update - August 11, 2019 -Primary and secondary gamepad button remapping are working -Got some cool new gamepad icons, improved thanks to Corvos -Fixed the menu so you couldn't close it on the menu page when starting the game -Added a second, ingame menu with resume/settings/save & quit as options -The new menu will pause all "actors" (objects with states) -Fixed a bug where the secondary gamepad right input was not mapped

Quasidaily Update - August 13, 2019 -"Defaults" option now works for keyboard and gamepad -Fixed an issue where you couldn't remap some of the secondary keyboard inputs (broke it with the gamepad remapping). -Fixed an issue with the menu arrow being in the wrong place (broke it with the gamepad remapping). -Removed light blue coloring on selected menu items. Judging by other menus, arrow seems to be enough by itself. -When remapping, the current selected control will now blink instead of remaining static. -Made sliders more usable--it wasn't really possible to move them 1% at a time, which was unwieldy and annoying. Now they have a "ramping" speed and are much easier to control.

Quasidaily Update - August 13, 2019, Part II -Toned down the strength of the brightness slider just a bit. -Updated the shaders to affect the GUI as well as the game. This should include the menu as well as the HUD, the dialogue box, and, in TWC, the inventory screen. I kinda like this. We'll see if it bothers people. :D

Quasidaily Update - August 17, 2019 -Fixed an issue with menu sliders not being drawn when the shader is applying to GUI elements. Turns out the built-in line drawing doesn't pass texture information to the shader. At this point I'm not sure how to configure the shader correctly, so I just made the lines into sprites instead lol. -Added title to the top-level menu! Yay! -Fixed game loading so it would load the correct room (both GameMaker room and in-game "area"). -Autosave the game on room entrance. -Autosave the game on getting an item (this way you can't cheese certain rooms). At this point, playing the game, quitting, and coming. back to continue is working REALLY WELL. -No longer save "region" (rooms in the game) objects, since these get created and setup perfectly fine on room creation. -Added SOME SECRETS YAY! -Autosave the game on "teleporting"--going through doors, up/down stairs, etc. -Fixed the "circle out" transition, which was apparently not working or used anywhere. -Changed all "teleportation" to use circle-in/circle-out transitions--a little less visually jarring and much nicer looking than a fade-to-wipe-from-center.

Quasidaily Update - August 19, 2019 -Added tiny pause in the middle of the teleportation transition so that it's a bit less jarring -Simultaneously, allowed toggle to camera easing so that I don't have to add fragile pauses to loading and certain transitions and so on (to wait for the camera to finish moving to catch up with the player loaded position). This fixed a small camera jerk when loading the game. This will eventually be an option on the menu for those that don't like the easing (and also because turning off subpixels makes camera easing REALLY BAD). -Fixed issue with audio groups not loading (by loading them, wow). This is probably temporary since next big task is to add the Wandersong audio engine, but the fix let me actually see my debug messages instead of spamming "Audio Group 2 is not loaded" whenever a sound is played lol. -Fixed bug with loading the game on a teleporter (doors, stairs, etc.) where it would immediately take you to the target location. This had multiple parts, but namely 1) just making sure to set the global "isLoading" flag and to not teleport during that, and 2) setting the "isLoading" flag earlier, since the teleporters were faster than my load manager lol. -Fixed "New Game" issue where it would fade to black, start the game, and then fade to black again. Turns out if you call "fade out" twice, it will fade out twice.

#gamedev #indiedev #devlog #devblog #game development #The Waking Cloak #prequel #ProtoDungeon

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kneesheee · 5 years ago

Text

Little Devil

|seven|

Batman was compromised. He could feel the emotions of Bruce seeping into him and he didn’t like it. And like most things, the problem stemmed from Talia. The Arabian princess was currently resting in Jason’s old room as she recovered from aging overnight. She took her “niece” with her.

He was already piling a file together on the young heiress. There was no telling what she would do, and he didn’t know much about her. He observed as much as he could, but she seemed to watch him more than he watched her.

It was unnerving.

It was as if she was playing some game with him and his children. And that code word she used on him. He will need to find this “system” she spoke of and neutralize it. He couldn’t afford for any of his enemies to use it against him.

He turned his gaze back to his computer and watched the cameras. He could feel his fists clenching as he watched the family prance around Talia. An almost recognizable emotion boiled inside of him whenever he saw the gentle way, she ran her hand through Jason’s hair. How his son leaned into her and the bright smile he gave that was unburdened with bitterness and anger.

He only got a small satisfaction out of watching how Talia had to learn what he already knew about Damian. And yet it still pale in comparison at how at ease he was with his mother. As if he knew just speaking with her would solve his problems. Did the boy forget how she let him be raised? As a soldier! As a murderer!

It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. It was appalling. What did this wicked woman have that he did not? How could his sons forget all the love he had for them and give it to her? She was evil! She didn’t deserve to breathe the same air as them.

And yet she was.

She looked comfortable doing pushups with Damian sitting on her back as he recounted a tale about one of his missions with Jon. She was approving and complimented him on his friendship. A Kryptonian? A good choice.

Her niece. Jamila Al Ghul. He had never heard of her until Jason brought her up and yet she seemed to age backwards as she sat cross-legged on Jason’s bed sporting a soft smile. Talia had fussed over her greatly as soon she was on her feet. There was a story there and he will find out what it was. It didn’t help matters with the guilty looks the two gave Jason whenever his attention was diverted elsewhere.

He didn’t to save his sons for her clutches but how could he save them when he was the villain in the story?

He just knew that when everything was over. Talia would take them from him.

Batman was compromised and it was all that devil of a woman’s fault.

Jamila was nervous as she sat in the chair of Jason’s office. Her aunt had convinced her that she should tell Jason why he was named the Heir. She didn’t necessarily like it, but she could understand. She closed her eyes and took deep breaths. She had nothing to worry about.

Her aunt was currently at the Batcave arguing with the others over the plan to get inside of the compound. She had already contacted Lady Shiva and Ubu. Plan 88c was being used by the workers at the compound. And their esteemed dimension guests were hiding them and informing them of what was going on.

Her aunt wanted to include them in the cover but then Jamila reminded her of how Batman was an asshole and she refused to let him anywhere near them. Talia agreed, of course.

They would be leaving for the compound soon. Aunt Talia trained nonstop to get herself back in shape, but it’d be another month before she back to her full capacity. Jamila ran a hand through her hair. Once they settled things with her mother, she was going to stay with the League for a little while longer. She had been away from her home for too long.

She almost jumped out of her skin when Jason walked through the door. He looked at her in worry and quickly crossed the room. He had her cuddled up in his arms before she could even blink.

“What’s wrong, Jami?

Jamila almost flinched at the long-forgotten nickname. It made her feel guilty for keeping such a secret an even though it wasn’t bad per say… she and Jason didn’t really keep secrets between the two of them. And this would be two major secrets… well no, this would be three.

One would be the fact that she had died nearly a year and half ago. The single strip of cotton colored hair was proof of her descent into the waters of the Lazarus Pits. Her connection to the Lazarus demon was stronger than ever. Probably the strongest in record of their family especially since the death of Ra and taking on his inner demon.

And now these two secrets that are so intertwined that one doesn’t know where it begins and where it ends. She, the Jamila Al Ghul, had been bested by her own body. She couldn’t even be the Heiress anymore. Bah, she hated politics and the ruling of the clans that made up the Nanda Parbat.

She detangles herself from her cousin and sat up straight. She wiped her face to get rid of any traces of tears. Straightening out her clothes, it was as if a switched was flipped inside of her.

Jamila sat forward like the regal being that she was. She folded her hands in her lap. “Jason, I have something to tell you regarding the clan.”

He looked at her curiously before nodding his head at her. He relaxed in his own seat and tilted his head to her in an almost bored manner. He doubted it was anything that could really knock him off his feet. Not like being secretly named the heir.

“Well first off, I’m technically the reason you’re the heir to the title.”

“…”

Jason could only stare.

Clearing his throat awkwardly, “And how is that?”

Jamila shot him a carefree smile, “Well, when I told you all that I was the rightful heir, I wasn’t lying. And it has nothing to do with my brother.”

She turned her gaze to look at the picture of Jason and her aunt that he had on his desk. “I’m currently the eldest biological grandchild of Ra Al Ghul. Damian relinquished his title as heir when he turned his back on our family. Grandfather hadn’t chosen a successor when he died so the title fell to Mistress Talia as the only legitimate child to take on the position. Mother and Uncle Dusan had been exiled.”

She hated talking politics. It just added on to the reasons of her being glad to no longer be heiress. “The Mistress needed to name an heir. My brother was too far removed and could not take it on. He left the clan willingly and with Mother exiled, it only added on more reasons why. Damian renounced the title and the council didn’t want to treat him for the disrespect. He was just jumped to the end of the succession line. “

Jason nodded his head seriously, “That only left you, me, and Anastasia.”

She nodded her head once, “The council was afraid that if Anastasia ended up in her father’s presence anytime soon, he would poison her mind and turn her against our home. She has done well for herself despite being only thirteen. She had her first kill almost a year ago. I was so proud. A servant of the Zoldyck clan stepped out of line and she went in to put an end to them.”

Jamila smiled serenely, “It was one of my newest poisons. I had just brewed a new batch and I hadn’t even thought of an antidote. It was lethal and fatality rate was at eighty-seven percent. She stole it from me, and I didn’t even notice! A small tick was all that was needed to get it in his bloodstream. He had been dead in mere minutes, but the compounds of the potions made the made feel as if he had been poisoned for days. Its one of my favorites.”

Jason thought that neither of them should feel so proud over small children murdering, but they had long since desensitize themselves to such petty things. Though he is not too proud to admit that he was glad that Damian no longer killed or that Anastasia had waited so long in life before her first kill.

Jamila shook her head slowly, “Either way, the council had not wanted Anastasia as the heiress until they could be sure of her loyalty with no setbacks. And that left me and you.”

It was as if a weight had settled onto her shoulders, “I had been instantly named heir. The last biological grandchild of Ra Al Ghul. I have full control over Lazarus. Skilled in every which and way. My alias brought fear into my enemies’ heart. I was perfect. I grew up in the compound. I grew up in Nanda Parbat. The perfect choice.”

Jason’s brows furrowed, “So how did I end up becoming the heir?”

Jamila’s jaw clenched.

“I relinquished my title. Not because I just didn’t want to be the heiress, but the way that clan was structure would’ve made it impossible for me to do so anyway.”

Her cousin rose a brow before she took a deep breath. She removed the hair tie on wrist and instantly her appearance change. The henged dropped. Her hair grew longer down her back. Her ankles swollen to an uncomfortable portion. Her skin seemed glow and look deathly pale at the same time.

Jason was frozen in shock as he looked her. He read the laws of the league. Hell, Talia made him take classes in law, philosophy, psychology and business. He knew exactly why she couldn’t be the heir any longer.

“I’m pregnant.”

Kyle was a detective. Not in the way that the Bats were or even the Arrows. But he was a space cop and he was good at his job. One of the most important lessons that he learned was that when shit went wrong… blame Hal.

And boy, he is blaming all of this on Hal.

He hadn’t even been gone from Earth long. But he comes back to find out that his slightly trigger happy sometime-boyfriend’s foster mother had been turned into a baby. His knife wielding cousin looked like she wanted to simultaneously give him a hug and gut him like a fish before skinning him like snake.

Then there’s also the fact that his best friend Connor had been kidnapped by his batshit crazy mother. (And Kyle had been there for many nights of listening to Connor cry and scream thinking that the crazy lady was coming for him).

Did he mention that the scary cousin was also Connor’s sister? But that’s not even the kicker…

He ended up watching as the badass ninja-assassin mom take part in some ritual with his constructs keeping the weird potion (I don’t deal with potions, kid!) that Constantine cooked up inside with her. It had been the longest three days of his life listening to the woman scream and thrash on the medical table.

It had taken the combine strength of Kori and Artemis to keep Jason down and from attempting to get to Talia. Even Bizarro had to deal with the enraged form of Jason’s cousin as her green eyes seemed glow with rage as she struggles against him.

It was heart wrenching watching the two of them shake and tremble as they tried to desperately reach for the Matriarch of their clan. (He could remember the whispers of secrets Jason would tell him about how he didn’t feel like a Wayne. How he felt more of a demon than a bat. (he would whisper back that he loved him all the same))

Soon the two of them seemed to overpower everyone just by their mere presence alone. The two of them had been carted off to the Outlaws hangout often. Roy had taken charge of the two and locked them in a training room.

It had been ruthless to see them attack each other and with all the intention to kill and only just shortly missing their marks. Red and green eyes seemed to bore into each other. Whenever Kyle managed to find sleep in between Talia’s haunting screams and murderous growls of cousins he swore he saw two spirts dancing over the heads of the cousins laughing at him. They seemed to grow stronger every day.

It hurt him to do so but he forced himself to leave the warehouse at almost every hour. He always ended up back by the woman whose vocal cords should have long went out. And yet her screaming never seemed to end.

Kyle was kind enough to pretend he didn’t see Batman handcuffing himself to his own chair and nervousness that seemed to run through the man. He pretended he didn’t see the look of pain and regret mixed with slight approval in Dick’s face. And he definitely didn’t see the affectionately dubbed demon baby crying silently as he watched his mother thrash on around.

He wasn’t a religious person, but he thanked all the gods he knew from all the worlds he had visited for the day the woman stopped screaming and woke up.

Kyle didn’t know how but he was sure that it was somehow Hal’s fault.

Talia sipped her tea as she watched everyone go over the last of the most acceptable plan to enter the Nanda Parbat and the Al Ghul compound. It would’ve been done with quicker, but her idiotic ex-lover had the audacity to think that she would give him a detailed outline of her home.

It was times like those that made her question what she had seen him so long ago.

She had already taken stock of some of the weapons that Jason brought. There were adequate and she made the mental note to buy him better ones. No child of hers was going to be walking around with such meager weapons.

Talia had dressed in one of the outfits that her darling niece managed to get for her from one of the Leagues stashes stationed around the city. She made another mental note to have them updated as the jumpsuit she was currently wearing was just a tad bit too little. Not enough to cause her problems but enough to irritate her.

She flickered her eyes over to her niece that was practicing some of her katas. She could tell easily from her posture that she was slipping herself into battle mode. Her hair had been pulled into an elaborate braid with senbons and small pocketknives. Her mask covered her face and the glow of her eyes could been seen through it.

From the way Jason worriedly glance at her, she knew that Jamila had told him over her condition beforehand. And yet, a simple band of interdimensional technology and medicine kept her true appearance from showing.

Her son had already come to her nearly five times now to find a way to keep her out of the fight. But she knew how stubborn her niece was. She was going to join in the raid of taking down her mother or she’d just take everyone down that stood in her way.

She made another mental note to drag her niece to the medical teams after everything was finished. And another note to take her off the roster for missions until after the child was born and she was recovered.

Talia glanced worriedly down at her tea. Looking at her niece and her children only made her more worried for her own daughter. She hoped Anastasia was safe and far away from Nyssa. She would make her sister beg for death if her baby girl had been harmed in anyway.

A small tap on her shoulder had her looking up to see the space cop smiling lightly at her. She wondered if he knew that she knew about the relations that he was having with her son. Or that she knew that the two of them pretended to only be around each other for having mutual acquaintances.

He was holding onto a travel bag, “Everything’s set and ready. We leave in three minutes.”

She hummed lightly and accepted the bag from him, “Thank you, Kyle.” The answering smile made her wondered how irritated her son would be if she took in another child.

Probably exasperated. She wasn’t Bruce.

“Mistress, we’ve just received word that the Batman and the Green Arrow are arriving with their entourage. Reports have stated seeing a woman that looked like Madam Talia.”

“Dismissed.”

Her eyes sparked with rage as she looked out at Nanda Parbat from her father’s throne. They had managed to reverse her dearest sister’s transformation. No matter. Nyssa was currently the Demon Head and she had already presented her son as her heir.

There was no way for her sister to change anything she had already won. And she couldn’t wait to rub it in her face.

“Come, oneechan. Let us prove which of us is the better daughter once and for all.”

#Talia al Ghul #talia al ghul imagine #talia al ghul prompt #taliaalghulweek2018 #Jason Todd #talia al ghul is jason's mother figure #Jason todd x oc #jason todd the red hood #Little Devil #dick grayson #Tim Drake #cassandra cain #Stephanie Brown #Damian Wayne #bruce wayne #Kyle Rayner #lady shiva #Nyssa Raatko #Red Hood And The Outlaws

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