#its alien to refresh a tag and see new posts every single time

[astrumamasia]

when im in a popular fandom i feel like a fraud. theres like an imposter syndrome/guilt thing going on where im like… No… What…

People are… *twitches* POSTING??

frequently?? SO MUCH… CONTENT

and then i see the amount of works for a ship in the fandom on AO3 is in the hundreds or even ✨ thousands ✨ and i just start screaming internally

years of being in such dry and sparse fandoms has truly conditioned me to believe i deserve it. and that i dont deserve.. content

[marmolady]

Home, Sweet Home

Book/Series: Endless Summer

Main Pairings: Estela x MC/Taylor (f)

Summary: Post-ending. This follows on directly from my fic ‘Broken Chains’, but should be easily enough to ‘get’ without reading it first. Estela is returning home to her tio in San Trobida at last, bringing Taylor and Jake along with her. For Taylor, it is the beginning of a search for belonging outside of the only world she’s ever known.

Warnings: Coarse language

Word Count: 6345

Reviews and reblogs are hugely appreciated!

Tagging: @brightpinkpeppercorn @sceptilemasterr @bbaba-yagaa@edgydepressedchoicesthot @endlesssummerfan@blightarts @princessstellaris @acidsugar0 @taramitch96

Taylor jiggled her leg erratically, glancing as she did between the aeroplane window and Estela.

“You don’t have to be so nervous…” Estela leaned in to kiss her. “He’s gonna like you.  Just… don’t expect it overnight.”

Groaning, Taylor slumped deeper into her chair. “He’s gonna grill me to death.”

“Yup.”

She buried her head in her hands as Jake laughed beside her.

“You’re doomed, Princess…”

“Get off her, cabron; it’s you who’s gonna have to work for it. You’re not half as likeable.”

“Ouch.”

The pilot -not Jake, the competent one flying the plane- announced the beginning of their descent, and all at once, Taylor was not the only one with apprehension showing in her face.

“Hey…” she urged, taking Estela’s hand in her own. “Don’t look so worried; it’s not as if we’ve got that idiot flying us this time.”

“Wait- is this what I’ve got to look forward to? You two takin’ shots at me all day?”

Taylor smirked; poking fun at Jake was good for settling her own butterflies. “That and watching us make out… yeah. That’s pretty much what you’ve signed up for, Top Gun. Get used to it.”

Estela was quiet. She was excited to see her tio again, to see her home again, but it meant returning to an existence that belonged to someone who was no longer her. Would that closed-off, fatally single-minded person creep back up on her, taking her over and send her back into a hell of furious despair? Where did this new, healed Estela fit into the world she’d left behind? There was so much her tio didn’t know… so much she’d have to tell him…

A warm breath against her cheek, a fluttering kiss, and Estela was pulled from her thoughts.

“It’s… gonna be weird,” said Taylor gently, “but, like the best kind of weird. Which by now, I’m pretty sure is our specialty.” Putting on a brave face, she told herself resolutely that after everything she’d been through with Estela, going home should hardly constitute a challenge at all. They were going to be just fine.  

After a smooth landing that prompted another round of mocking Jake’s flying skills, the trio had to contend with passport checks; the part that Taylor- who’d been zapped into existence out of thin air- had been dreading. It seemed, however, that Vaanu was just as skilled at whipping up official documents as they were creating people, and she was nodded through security without a second glance. The trio finally emerged into the dingy, crowded airport with bags in tow, Jake trailing a few steps behind the two women who held hands for mutual support. As she spotted a grey-haired man waiting next to the barrier, Taylor let Estela’s hand go, and gave her a gentle nudge in the right direction.

Estela’s eyes met with those of the tall, grey-haired man, her beloved tio. Her breath caught in her throat. “Tio…” She lurched forward and let herself be captured in his arms, held with a loving intensity beyond anything she’d ever felt from him. It was as though he was back from the dead… and even as she felt those strong arms around her, she could barely accept that it was real.

“Oh, mija…” Nicolas took her face in his hands and stared at her, disbelieving, before kissing her on the forehead.

She cried, euphoric. After all this time, after all the worry she’d put him through, she was back home. “I can’t believe it’s you… I… I’m sorry.”

“My Estelita, you are home now.”

Hanging back beside Jake, Taylor had to dry her eyes. She’d risked everything for this moment, and it was worth it. Still, the nervousness that shook her body had reached fever pitch. With no relatives of her own, she needed Nicolas’ acceptance on a deep level. She felt Jake clap her on the shoulder.

“Come on, Princess, making friends with people is like your superpower. You won over Katniss in just a few days… and she was in full creepy loner mode. You’ll just knock him out with your magical friendship beams. Gotta put a patent on those, by the way.”

“That’s helping. Really,” Taylor responded, her voice dripping with sarcasm. It was true that she had an effortless way of getting along with people, but this wasn’t just people. This was her best shot at a family that she could always return home to.

Estela took her tio’s hand and led him to where Taylor and Jake waited for her. “I need you to meet someone…”

Seeing the tears in her wife’s eyes, Taylor’s first instinct was to reach out and hold her, but she instead mouthed a quick, “Are you okay?”. A tiny nod and a kiss to the side of her face gave her all the reassurance she needed.

“Tio, this is Taylor, my… my wife.” Estela’s face flushed with happiness and pride as she looked to the woman who made her heart soar. “Taylor, I’d like you to meet Tio Nicolas.”

Taylor could barely think over the sound of her heart pounding in her ears, but she collected herself enough to offer her hand and receive in return a firm handshake. “It means a lot to meet you at last,” she said, hoping her voice didn’t sound as shaky as it felt to her. “I know Estela loves and admires you so much.”

Scrutiny was clear in Nicolas’ eyes, but he nonetheless greeted her warmly. “It is clear you’ve made quite an impression yourself.”

Drawn into Estela’s arms, her safe place, Taylor immediately felt surer of herself. “We’ve been through a lot together,” she said simply.

Nicolas offered her a nod of acknowledgement before glancing to Jake, who’d held back a little. “So, you brought the pilot home?”

“She wore me down,” Jake said, and he held out his hand. This guy seemed all right; he had a definite no-nonsense air about him, which was hardly a surprise.

“Tio- Jake, Jake- Tio Nicolas.”

His eyes narrowed as he took Jake’s hand, but Nicolas shook it politely. “Dios, you can’t let her do that. Once you show that you’re weak, the upper hand is gone forever.”

“Ha. Don’ I know it.”

  In Nicolas’ car, a rust-bitten four-wheel-drive that had clearly seen better days, Taylor perched on the back seat with Jake, feeling it rocking ominously beneath her. She pulled at the seatbelt, but it wouldn’t come.

“Sorry, it’s a bit unstable,” said Estela, “but the two of you sitting on it should be enough weight to keep the back from collapsing.”

They drove out through the city, and with the windows down, their senses were assaulted by car horns blaring, the dirty scents of a developing urban landscape, the muggy air. It was an overload, so starkly different from anything Taylor had ever known. She took this new world in with wide eyes. It was bustling and busy, and beautiful, yet there was an undercurrent of danger; walls built high, windows barred, barbed wire atop every fence. There appeared to be no rules on the roads, with cars pulling in front of one another whenever the drivers saw fit. The loud honking of petulant road-users seemed never-ending.

Estela looked back to Taylor. “Are you okay?”

“I’m great… it’s amazing!”

“It’s home.”

The streets soon became less crowded, the roads quieter. Rainforest had been cleared for farmland, but Taylor saw glimpses of forest that reminded her of the tropics of La Huerta. They turned in to a sprawling compound, defended by armed guards and sharp wires overhanging the tall fences.

“Most people live in one of these,” Estela was saying. “It’s safer if you know who’s around. Even in here everyone is on their guard; when the war was going on, you never knew who you could trust.”

Nicolas nodded. “It is better now. Within the communities there is a sense of building something together. It is fragile, yes, but we have survived the worst.”

Jake was also taking in the surroundings with great curiosity. It had been hard to know what to expect- only rarely had he flown passengers to San Trobida, for most tourists were warned off. Warzones were not alien to him, but he’d not experienced the recovery that came afterwards.

A little while later, they pulled up near the beach, having opted for some fresh air after having been cooped up in the aeroplane. Home, Taylor and Jake had been told, was just a short walk away. A long day of travel, of harrowing goodbyes and new beginnings had taken its toll, and the three Catalysts were wrecked. The wind off the rough sea was wonderfully refreshing as they sat upon the sand, shoulder to shoulder.

Before Estela could truly relax, though, there were conversations that needed to be had.

“You don’t mind if I leave you for a little while?” She searched Taylor’s eyes, but she appeared to be taking everything in her stride. Her incredible Taylor… always rolling with whatever life threw her way.

“What-? No! No, of course not.” Taylor pulled her in for a delicate kiss and gave her an affirming squeeze. “There’s so much you’ve got to say to him; you need space to do that. I’m sure I’ll survive.”

Estela smiled appreciatively, and then rummaged in her pockets, pulling out a crinkled San Trobidan note. “Take this. If you keep walking to the river, there’ll be a place selling ice creams. Or I think there will be… it’s honestly been a while. But you should be able to find something if you’re hungry, okay? We’ll meet you both up that way when we’re done.”

“Cold desserts on a beautiful beach? Now I know I’ll somehow soldier on in your absence.” Taylor winked and tugged Estela back to her, just for a few moments more. Her expression became thoughtful, serious, and she saw it reflected in her lover’s eyes. “Take a deep breath…”

Letting Taylor guide her, Estela exhaled slowly. All that she had to tell her tio… it was not sunshine and rainbows. The devastation she’d felt when she discovered that it was a trusted friend who had mercilessly slaughtered her mother- Nicolas’ sister; she wished she could spare him the same heartbreak. She wished she could spare herself the pain of reliving it. And she had questions… had he known who her father was all along, or was it a secret even from him? If he didn’t know… would the revelation forever warp her in his eyes? The thought of what she’d been created from made Estela want to vomit. She couldn’t expect him to love her the same knowing whose blood coursed through her veins. And even beyond all that, how could she begin to explain Taylor?

Taylor cradled her wife’s face in her hands, stroking loose hair from her fearful eyes with gentle fingers. “…Estela…” she whispered. “I’m with you, my starlight. You’re strong enough for this.”

Though her eyes were determined, Estela’s breath shuddered as she reluctantly pulled away, wobbling slightly getting up on her feet. “Taylor… thank you. I’ll see you real soon. You’re good, cabron?”

“I can see a hammock, and a bar. I’m set.” He stood up and stretched, groaning dramatically, before giving her a playful shove which meant, his eye catching hers. It was something Jake had dreaded himself; the hard part of reuniting with family. As much as he desperately wished to go home, he couldn’t help but be silently glad he wasn’t the one having those conversations. Without saying another word, he knew she got the message; he was there for her.

Leaving their companions behind, uncle and niece walked side by side along the beach until they settled on a rocky outcrop, the foamy sea lapping at their feet.

Estela played with her hair. Where to even begin? “I guess this is easiest if I just go from when we landed on the island? I’ll get to the things that are important, but there’s so much… and you should know everything.”

“Whatever is comfortable,” said Nicolas, kindly. It was clear that his niece was happier within herself than she had been when he’d last seen her face, but knowing her purpose for going to La Huerta, that some of what she would recount would be difficult to share seemed inevitable. “In your own good time.”

“Right.” She bit her lip before beginning. “So, as we came in to land, we hit this storm…”

And she talked him through the eventful first weeks of her time on La Huerta; the deserted resort, her search for Rourke, the nature of the work being conducted on the island… and then the revelations that had brought her to her knees… the details of her mother’s murder… the truth about her own identity.

“…I just… I don’t understand why she didn’t tell me. My whole life, I thought she’d always be honest with me, that she could tell me everything. Didn’t I have a right to know I was…” Her voice cracked. “…his.” Hearing it out loud, Estela hunched up on herself, ashamed. “Did you… know?”

Nicolas grasped her shoulder tight and shook his head. “I didn’t know.” He stared out to sea, hurting for his niece. “I would not have kept it from you if I did. Your mom told me that you were unplanned and that the father was not interested; I didn’t need to know more than that. I’m sorry, mija.”

Unable to look at him, to see the disgust in her that would surely be on his face, Estela stared at her own hands as they wrung with anxiety.

“Estelita,” Nicolas’ hold on her shoulder became almost painful in his desperation to reassure her. “It has never mattered who your father was. You are you, not anything else. Look at me!”

Flinching, Estela’s gaze nervously darted to her tio’s face. There was no revulsion there… none at all. Her eyes closed as he stroked her cheek, smearing away the tear that ran down it.

“My little star. I could not be more proud of you. I love you.” He kissed her forehead. “No more tears.”

“I love you too. I’ve missed you so damn much.” Estela wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and slowly breathed out the tension that had built up in her body.

Nicolas gave a quiet and affectionate laugh. “I missed you. In your absence, I have gotten far too accustomed to winning arguments. It is almost tiresome.”

She hugged him. Despite the blood she carried within her like some festering disease, he saw her no differently. Deep down she’d known he would love her the same, but some fears had no care for reason. How could she have ever doubted?

“Tell me about your esposa. The mysterious lady from the crystals. I see that when you look at her, your face is like sunshine.”

Estela’s cheeks flushed pink. This was a side to her that her tio had never seen, and it felt strange -yet liberating- to share it with him.

“She was always… different. I’d got so used to everyone being fearful of me, it sorta threw me off when she wasn’t… like at all. She was just curious. From that first night on La Huerta, Taylor… just seemed to care about me, wanting nothing in return but my friendship. Not needing any explanations for what I was on the island for, she wanted to help.” She gave a dry laugh. “I don’t even remember the last time someone genuinely wanted to be my friend. Maybe when I was, what, six? Anyhow, my gut told me I could trust her. And I had, uh, feelings for her, and it freaked me the hell out…”

“Ah, our Estelita with her first crush… I wish I could have seen you trying to flirt…” Nicolas teased, earning a jab in the arm.

“Shut up! And I did not try to flirt. I actually did everything I could to avoid that; I couldn’t be distracted. But then I had to rescue her from a hangar about to explode, and then the dumbass went and got bitten by a snake and I was sucking on her neck and…”

Nicolas roared with laughter, while Estela’s face turned flaming red. She slapped him over the head several times.

“Tio!”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry! It just sounds like your worst nightmare.” He wiped tears from his eyes.

“It wasn’t my worst nightmare, but it shook me up. So, uh, we were preparing for the attack by the native people and stuff um… happened… between us.” She hastily cleared her throat as her face blushed even brighter. “And then I got it in my head… what I felt with her scared me, but it just might be, you know, worth it, if we could face the world together. I told her everything, and she should have freaked, she should have run away, but that wasn’t who she was… she wanted to be on my side. I wanted to be on hers. After that… I was with the other students, part of their group, and it was just the beginning…”

  “You know what’s weird?” Taylor was asking as she strolled along the unfamiliar beach.

Jake gave her a look. He’d known enough weird by now that it barely even registered. “Since this all started, better off askin’ what’s not weird.”

“Well, I guess that’s kind of it. There are people around. I don’t know them, and they’re not blue or green. It’s like… the real world. It’s just bizarre.” She glanced back the way they’d came. “I hope Estela’s all right; this talk’s got to be heavy.”

“Startin’ to sound like a broken record there, Princess. She’s fine. I’m sure she’ll put in a good word for you an’ all. C’mon, ice cream and a cold beer!”

The vendor huts along the beach reminded Taylor strongly of Colonnade Cove… then she remembered Estela commenting on the same. The thought made her smile to herself. Unlike Gurgi, these vendors had a well-developed sense of hospitality, with hammocks set up to entice beachgoers to stay and relax. When Taylor sank into one, tied up between two trees and hanging close enough to Jake’s that they could annoy one another with pokes and prods, she wondered how she’d ever find the energy to climb out again. As she licked her ice cream, she watched a group of children playing in the river that Estela had pointed out. Connecting a fast-moving flow into the choppy sea, the effect was a foaming watery playground that tugged the squealing kids off their feet with every step. The waters surrounding La Huerta had always been so placid -at least once Cetus was no longer around to influence things; San Trobida had a contrasting fierceness in its nature.

When she at last spotted Estela and Nicolas walking up to the beach, Taylor almost fell out of her hammock and ran, ignoring Jake’s laughing at her. Immediately swept up into Estela’s arms, she felt relief. Her wife’s eyes were red from the inevitable crying, but she seemed bright… happy.

“You missed me, then?”

“You left me with Jake. He convinced some guy to lend him his guitar… my ears are crying. Besides, I always miss you.”

Nicolas shook his head, laughing at them. “Dios! Not even an hour and we’ve got a Romeo and Juliet routine… Do you want some real food, or do you want to keep gazing into one another’s eyes?”

While Nicolas went to order an evening meal to share, Taylor and Estela headed to the shady trees overlooking the river, where Jake was waiting for them.

Estela could feel her wife waiting for her to speak.

“It was okay,” she said, “… I’m okay.” She leaned in for a kiss, and took Taylor’s hand in her own. “He knows about you. That you came from the prism energy that Mom was studying. I think I told him just about everything.” She saw the question in her eyes, the one that she would not push. “Tio didn’t know about Rourke. It was just… just Mom’s secret.”

Taylor stroked her cheek. “You look lighter in your face.”

“Now I’m not half expecting him to reject me, yeah. It was so stupid, but I needed to hear it from him that it didn’t change anything.”

“Anyone would be out of their mind not to love you to pieces…”

Estela rolled her eyes, but smiled. “Taylor… you’re so soft. They’re gonna eat you alive out here,” she joked.

“Rude. I have kicked your butt on more than one occasion…”

“…Shhhh! You don’t have to shout about it!” Estela laughed and went in for another kiss to shut her up, savouring the taste of Taylor’s slightly wind-chapped lips. When she reluctantly came away, she pressed her forehead against her love’s. “You’re not too overwhelmed by everything? It must be a shock to your system. It’s a shock to mine and I’ve lived here almost all my life…”

“I’m good, honest. It feels like a dream, and I think I’ll be absolutely wiped out by the time I get to bed, but it’s exciting. I can’t believe I’m here with you.” Taylor beamed, seeing pure happiness reflected in her wife’s face.

“I can’t believe it either.” Estela looked out onto her home, so much more beautiful for the time she’d spent away, and for the woman who now sat beside her. She exhaled, content. “All right, I’m gonna go get some drinks. Share a milkshake with me? The best in San Trobida.”

“That is not even a question. Thanks, love.”

“What about you? Don’t think I haven’t seen you eyeing up Tio’s rum.”

Jake rolled over and stretched out, falling onto his feet from the hammock. “Pretty sure a milkshake ain’t gonna cut it. Let’s see what ya’ve got that’s stronger.”

Taylor was soon joined by Nicolas, who sat upon a rock with his flask of rum, and met her eye with a scrutinising look.

“Hey, uh… thanks for dinner,” she said. “I didn’t even realise we haven’t eaten properly since breakfast.” Apparently, that gaze- the one that felt as though your soul was being stared right through- was a family trait. “Estela went to get drinks with Jake...” Her voice trailed off, and she tried not to wither under pressure.

Nicolas’ voice was sharp when he spoke. “She thinks a lot of you. That doesn’t happen very often. I need to hear it from you… what are your intentions with her?”

Taylor sat up straight, looking him dead in the eye. Forthcoming and direct to the point was the only approach to take; even if her stomach churned. This, she imagined, must be what going for a job interview was like… if the potential employer was a man capable of slicing her into pieces with a sword.

“Estela is… my world,” she said. “I want us to build a life together, side-by-side. I want to give her the future she deserves.”

“But what do you know of the future? You’ve never known anything else; I know what you are. What happens when you get out there in the world, and realise life would be easier without the baggage? You’re not trapped on the island any longer… you could walk away from her at any time.”

The questions rang like accusations, and Taylor felt herself get her back up, more than defensive… angry.

“I know she’s got baggage. I’ve got fucking baggage- I get it. But I know how damned privileged I am that she trusts me with every single part of her. That did not happen overnight- I earned that. And I will not hear an insinuation that I could ever, ever sacrifice her faith in me. When I say Estela means everything to me, I mean that she’s the first thing I think about when I wake up and the last thing before I go to sleep; I mean that she could offer me the slightest glance and it would be enough to give me the courage to fight an army; I mean that seeing her hurt is like a physical pain. Her heart is safe with me. Always.”

For several excruciatingly long moments, Nicolas held Taylor’s gaze in silence. Slowly, a crooked smile played on his mouth. “Well, you have a backbone to stand up for yourself, that’s something.”

“Do you think I’d be married to Estela if I didn’t? I’m nobody’s shrinking violet.”

The silver-haired man chuckled, but his sharp eyes retained the shadows of suspicion. “You’ll forgive me for being wary. My trust is not something I give easily.” He studied her, curious. She spoke with passion, and with the stories Estela had told him, it was hard to doubt that her word was true. To see his niece so happy… at peace within herself after all this time… he wanted to believe in this person who’d shown her the way. More than anything, he wanted this to be real, for the niece he’d so desperately tried to protect all her life.

“I understand,” Taylor said steadily, thankful that her outburst hadn’t backfired. “It’s been a long time that you’ve been the only person in her corner. After everything that’s happened… I guess I’d be protective too. I just hope you’ll see what she means to me.” She offered her hand, biting back her nerves. When Nicolas took it, a glint in his eye, she almost gave an outward sigh of relief. Of course, Estela was right; this wouldn’t happen instantly, but she now had faith that in time, it would fall into place. Acceptance. They were, after all, family now.

“I am looking forward to knowing you, mi sobrina en la ley.”

“Tio! No puedes interrogarla en cuanto me doy la vuelta!”

Nicolas just laughed as Estela stormed over, her eyes flashing dangerously. “Niña, ella está bien! We were just talking; my heart breaks that you don’t trust your old tio… Can I not get to know Esposita? She is my niece now, no?”

Seeing that Taylor was unruffled, the blazing fire left Estela’s eyes as quickly as it had come. The fact that her tio was already speaking of Taylor with a term of endearment was encouraging. She hmphed. “Maybe I’m a little protective…” She handed her wife an enormous milkshake, and realised that she too was laughing at her. “Hey! What’s your problem?”

“You can’t exactly jump on your tio for being excessively protective when you’re doing the same damn thing… and don’t you glower at me!”

Estela grumbled under her breath. “Might be a family trait.” Joking aside, that Taylor was not going to put up with nonsense from Nicolas would serve her well. He did not suffer fools, and he needed to know that she wouldn’t either. She felt her nuzzle close.

“You were right- this milkshake is amazing!”

Nicolas held out his rum to them. “Just a little… then it will be perfección.”

The sun slowly set on the San Trobidan beach, and the refreshing winds turned biting. Waiting for their dinner, the three friends barely felt it. In the shallows, Jake had been roped into sparring with Nicolas, who was providing ongoing critique on his performance as they jousted with heavy sticks, all set to the sound of giggling from the two tipsy women who watched them from the shore.

“Laugh it up, Katniss!” he yelled back to Estela over the wind, “You’ll get your turn. Much as I hate to be the one to tell your tio how sloppy you got…”

“Sloppy?”

“Ya heard right.”

“Coming from you? If ‘all over the place’ is a technique, you mastered it long ago, cara de pito!”

Jake sniggered, but had to re-focus quickly to avoid being clocked in the kneecaps. “My Spanish ain’t up to much, but I’m guessin’ that wasn’t friendly.”

“Ha! Friendly, it was not. But if you are so easily distracted, perhaps you are worthy of such a taunt.”

“Culo peludo!”

“That was not complimentary either, my friend. I am sorry- my sobrina, she has the manners of a burra.” Nicolas turned slightly to call out to her, easily keeping his opponent at bay as he did. Jake’s style was fast and furious, and that meant that he was now tiring. “Where did we go so wrong, Estelita?”

Shoulder to shoulder, Taylor and Estela shared their slightly boozy milkshake, holding one another close, and warm with mirth. Rhythmic beats pulsed out from the nearby stalls, and the air was filled with chatter as families gathered for dinner. It was… chaotically idyllic. And then, they’d kiss, and all else would fade into the background.

Then was the food. A steaming platter of tamales shared between four filled a rumbling void, all but inhaled the second it was set down upon the sand. Taylor tucked in gratefully, sitting almost on Estela’s lap, and gazed out to the stars that began to pepper the darkening sky. She wondered after the rest of her friends… they felt so far away. But here she was, full and contented, a breath away from her Estela, and with Jake coming along with them for the ride. A fresh start. Taylor felt herself slipping, leaning in just to remain upright. Still recovering from losing the alien part of herself, she tired easily, and the day had been long and eventful.

“…Taylor… carińa, you’re ready to go home?”

She nodded and reached up to stroke Estela’s face. “Are you?”

Estela’s smile was endlessly affectionate. “Ready as I’ll ever be. Come on, mi amor.”

  The house was small and plain, but backed onto a quiet and secluded stretch of beach just a short walk from where they’d left the car. As they approached, Taylor’s hand was grasped by Estela’s, prompting a supportive squeeze.

Nicolas pushed the door open. “Home, sweet home.”

It was just as Taylor had seen in the vision Vaanu had given Estela; simple but welcoming, hints of the lives lived there in pictures on the wall, books piled on shelves.

“Princess!” Jake hissed, tugging at her hair to get her attention. “Baby Katniss at two-o’clock!”

Taylor had to hold in a squeal as she spotted a photograph on the window ledge. A tiny Estela, surely less than two years old, reaching up for whoever it was who’d taken the picture. “Oh, sweet lord,” she said quietly, automatically reaching out to hug Estela’s arm. “I think my ovaries just exploded…”

“Yes, I was a baby once. Can we move on?”

Nicolas smirked. “Oh, Estelita… you don’t want to break out the baby album? All these years, your frowny old face never changes…”

Ignoring the taunt, Estela showed Jake to the spare room. Tentatively, she pushed the door, feeling her heart drumming violently against her ribs. It had been years since anyone had slept in that room. “So, uh, you can sleep here,” she said. “We’ve kept all the personal stuff safe out the way, so you can make yourself comfortable without worrying about disturbing anything.”

Jake made to step forward but hesitated. “Are you sure this is okay? I don’t mind the couch if this is uncomfortable for you. Honest, it would not bother me at all.”

Estela met her friend’s eyes, appreciating his deep care for her. “I invited you here because I want you here. You’re practically family; you sleep in a proper room.”

She let Jake pull her into a hug, lingering and heartfelt, before letting him settle in. Then there was Taylor’s hand on her arm.

“Estela, are you all right?”

“Fine. I swear, I’m fine.” She pressed a sweet kiss to Taylor’s lips. “I’ll just say goodnight to Tio, then we’ll go to bed, okay?”

A short while later, Taylor followed Estela into a small, boxy room, a single bed in the corner, and a distinct feeling of being untouched for quite some time.

“This is us…” Estela said, putting down their bags beside the bed. “…I know Jake’s is bigger, but I can’t sleep in that room. It’s….” She heaved a sigh. “You get it, right?”

With a kiss to her wife’s shoulder, Taylor wrapped her arms around her waist from behind, and buried her face in her hair. “Of course, love. If this is home for you, it’s home for me. It’s nice and cosy in here… just enough room for us.”

Stripping down to their underwear, the two women crashed out on the bed, lying side by side in the tight space. Exhaustion had crept up on Estela. The past day… everything that had happened, it was almost too much to process. It didn’t seem possible that the other Catalysts were now countless miles away, making their own way home. And that just outside her window was the San Trobida she’d said goodbye to when her mission for revenge took her to Hartfeld. Everything felt so… normal. All that she’d seen since she’d left… the end of the world, for crying out loud… it seemed to have left no mark. She lay on her bed, and it was as though she’d never been away, but for Taylor right beside her, stirring her senses without so much as a word or a touch. And yet, this new piece fit into the puzzle, creating a picture so beautiful.

Taylor struggled to keep her eyes open, even in her desperation to drink in every detail of this place, a place from a recollection or a wish, her love’s memories brought to life before her. The sheets were thin and worn, the mattress slightly hard. It was by no means the luxury Taylor had become accustomed to. But tucked up in that small room, she could feel Estela all around her, in the scent that lingered on every piece of fabric, in the select precious photos that adorned the nightstand and dresser, in the hard edges that belied the endlessly comforting warmth within. So far removed from the familiarity of La Huerta, she felt at home.

Estela noticed Taylor’s weary eyes land on the framed photograph nearest to the bed. One that tugged painfully at her heartstrings.

“That was just before she left,” she murmured. “Maybe… the day before? I kept it by my bed so it was the first thing I saw in the morning- not that I needed a reminder of what was taken from me, but to make sure I woke up fighting.” She sighed, sadly. “Tio used to take a lot of pictures of us. After this one it stopped. I didn’t feel anything worth looking back and remembering, and I don’t think he did either.”

Taylor took her hand and squeezed. The Estela in the photograph was not unlike the one she knew so well, but clearly younger, and with no long scar over her eye. Beneath the smile was something like apprehension, dread for the separation to come. Olivia Montoya was so like her daughter, perhaps lacking the same quiet fierceness, but there was great inner strength shining through her dark eyes.

“I wish I could have known her, to have her see me as a daughter,” she said wistfully.

“She really would have loved you. Everything you’ve done… giving yourself completely to care for the people you love… she’d be proud to have you as family.” Estela studied Taylor’s earnest face, now just an inch from her own. There was little she wouldn’t give to have just a single day with her as part of the family they should have had. She could imagine conversations; her mother would, of course, have been fascinated with Taylor, born as she was of the energy source she’d been dedicated to studying. For her part, Taylor would have relentlessly asked about Estela’s childhood, seeking the stories that only a mother would hold onto. It wasn’t to be, and the pain could never completely fade. What she had, though, what she saw in those sweet eyes, was a promise of happiness that grief could not temper. She drew her in, slowly brushing her lips against her Taylor’s, taking her time to let the soft caress grow deeper, harder, until the emotion behind it was too all-consuming to allow her to carry on. “I love you, Taylor…” she breathed.

“And I love you.”

Estela reached for Taylor’s phone on the nightstand. She played with it in her hands and felt her cheeks flush, self-conscious. “We should take a picture. I…uh… I want to… to live a life worth remembering… like before. To collect the memories again.

“So… right here, right now? Lying on your bed in our underwear? Not that you don’t look cute as heck…”

“Right now…” Estela rolled her hips so that she was pressed even closer to her wife. “With you, here, I’m… happy. In a way I don’t want to forget.”

“Yeah? I don’t want to forget this feeling either. Gimme that- you might be skilled when it’s life-or-death, but you can’t take a selfie for shit.”

Settling down to sleep, the two lovers removed what little clothing remained between them and snuggled close. Estela surrounded Taylor like a full-body shield; she was hers, and protected always. As Taylor’s eyelids grew ever heavier, she took a moment to glance at the photograph on her phone before giving in to slumber. She’d caught the moment she’d planted a kiss on Estela’s eye, having aimed for her cheek and missed as she fidgeted in front of the camera. Estela’s face was scrunched up with laughter; she honestly looked as though she hadn’t a care in the world. The image brought a fond smile to Taylor’s face. She closed her eyes and let herself be lulled to sleep by the feel of Estela’s chest rising and falling against her back, the rhythm of her heart, the gentle heat that radiated off her scarred skin. If these were the memories she’d build her new life from, she need never look forward with trepidation again. Her star… her Estela… she’d follow her anywhere.

[realityhelixcreates]

Lasabrjotr Chapter 19: It Was A Bad Idea

Chapters: 19/? Fandom: Thor (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe Rating: Teen And Up Warnings: Mentions of fear of sexual assault Relationships: Loki x Reader (Oops) Characters: Loki (Marvel), Reader, Brunnhilde, Thor, Additional Tags: Post-Endgame: Best Possible Ending (Canon-Divergent),  Ohhhh, now you fucked up!, Now you fucked up!, Now you fucked up!, You have fucked up now!, Now you have fucked up! Summary:  Loki fucks up.

The meetings weren’t as boring as advertised, but you thought that was mostly because you weren’t meeting with Asgardians, whom you didn’t understand, but with other humans.

These were Icelandic officials, come to talk about such important but mundane things as zoning laws, environmental policy, and judicial jurisdiction. Loki spoke English for you the entire time, and, surprisingly, all of the officials could also speak the language. It was so refreshing to be able to understand everyone in the room, and to be among other humans.

The differences between humans and Asgardians seemed slight on first glance, but spending so much time among them was making you familiar enough to notice. They were all taller on average, than the human average, and from the snippets you had learned, they were heavier too. Your theory was that their bones were made of something different than yours; that their muscles and organs were denser, and that contributed to their preternatural durability, speed, and strength. Their eyes seemed deeper than human eyes, the colors more saturated, they caught more light, and reflected it differently.

You learned a lot about geothermal energy during the meeting, and decided that it was amazing. You couldn’t help but wonder if American volcanoes could be harnessed in that way. Probably, but the battle with oil companies would be very vicious. That was probably why it hadn’t been done already.

These officials were unexpectedly eager to see that you were well, which you suspected was a good part of the reason Loki had dragged you along. It was more than likely that some of these people were reporting on you back to your government, or maybe just to the Avengers and their peripherals.

It made you feel important, but you didn’t like it very much.  It sure hadn't protected anyone from that murderer. And getting too much attention had never gone well for you.

Still, they were polite, and they didn’t stare at you, or make you feel as if you didn’t belong there, which was a pleasant change.

After the meeting, Loki took you to the kitchens, finally showing you where they actually were. The two of you left with a bowl of sliced fruit, and cups made of cow horns, filled with very sweet, very strong coffee.

“Did they have coffee on Asgard?” You asked.

“No. This is one of Earth’s grand inventions. Some of our people are going non-alcoholic, if you can believe that.”

‘Our’ people? “I can believe it. Earth has a lot of tasty things to offer. No doubt everyone will get to experience a lot of new flavors. Better watch your health though. Humans are kind of sugar-crazy.”

“Speaking of which, dinner will be a little late tonight. This-“ He held up the fruit bowl. “should see you through. We are going to go practice magic now, and I know you will need it.”

He wasn’t wrong. Practicing magic was exhausting in a way that was different from any other exhausting thing you had ever done. It was surprising how hard you could sweat when you technically weren’t doing anything physical.

“You should start an exercise regimen.” He suggested. “Since you are no longer ill, or injured. There is no scar?”

“Saldis said there wasn’t.”

“Very good.” He seemed proud about that, as if he had done anything. “Then yes, start exercising. It doesn’t have to be anything severe, but energy flows easier through a fit body.”

You made the mistake of looking him over when he said that, and he gave you an absolutely wicked grin. You drew back from him, from the little bits of fruit he was offering. Tempter. You could remember just how ‘fit’ he was from the bath. Terribly, enticingly ‘fit’.

But you couldn’t think like that. You couldn’t let yourself accept that. You couldn’t prove the killer right.

You still hadn’t had a bath. And now you were all sweaty and gross. Maybe you could squeeze one in before supper.

You started grabbing your own fruit from the bowl, to the seeming disappointment of your tutor. Let him be disappointed. You weren’t some pet, to be hand-fed.

Try as you might, you could not replicate the teleportation magic you had performed before; you couldn’t even come close. Loki told you not to worry about it, that it was a very tricky bit of magic to pull off, that you had probably only been able to do it because of the extreme duress you had been under. As if he understood!

Well, maybe he did. Maybe he really did know what it was like to feel helpless under the whims of someone who far outstripped him in power. To be in the clutches of someone so dangerous, and be unable to just go home.

Then why was he doing the same thing to you?

I couldn’t be that he didn’t know, could it? Surely he wasn’t so oblivious that he didn’t see your fear? He was just playing a game with you; you couldn’t lie to the god of lies, he had to know!

Then what was he waiting for?

Was he trying to drive you mad?

It was working.

                                                                     *****

“Are those new bedclothes?” Andsvarr asked. “They are very nice.”

“They certainly are.” Saldis held the long robe up, its silky flow catching the light. “Bespoke, for once. She’ll finally be getting some nice things, with this new court appointment. The ladies are excited to get to work. After all, how often have we gotten to outfit a mortal? Once, in the past thousand years? Everyone wants to get in on this opportunity.”

“Looking for a promotion?” Andsvarr teased.

“You know I am.”

“Well, I hope you get it. But will you be too high then, to dance with a simple guard?”

“Says the heir to a noble house.”

“When I stand here, I am the same as any recruit.”

Saldis snorted. “Fancy sentiment, from the personal guard of the Crown Prince’s quarters.”

He wilted a bit. “Aw, come on, Saldis. Everybody knows his Highness only chose me to pacify my father.”

“Then for once, his Highness’ careful plans have failed.”

Andsvarr scowled. “Everybody knows that too.”

“Now let me in, I have to deliver this before she comes back to sleep. And if you want to dance with me during Buridag,” She added, as he opened the door. “Then ask me in a less pathetic way.”

                                                                                     *****

You basked in the soft smoothness of your new pajamas with great satisfaction. Sure, they were green, like every other scrap of clothing you had worn in the past few months, but they were otherwise perfect. So soft. So smooth. So much nicer than your old dollar store set.

Your bathrobe was still here, and Loki most definitely was not. You could get a bath now if you wanted.

When you reached the door, however, there was a little sign hanging from the knob.

‘Out of Order’.

Out of order? What, did his Highness clog the drain with his perfect hair? You snatched the sign from the doorknob. There was something on the back. It was directions, hastily sketched, to the nearest back-up bath. It looked like it was in someone else’s quarters, just up the hall. Well, it seemed that if you wanted a scrub, this was where you needed to go.

You headed out, with a wave to Andsvarr, and ambled up the hall. There was another guard to get by, who stared down at you severely, until, curious to see what would happen, you showed him your branded hand. He examined it briefly, then nodded, and opened the door. He even gave you a small bow, which you awkwardly returned.

This place was fancy. Well-furnished in warm colors, it gave off an atmosphere of simultaneous coziness and importance. There were partially finished murals on the walls; three men, a few women, a man and a woman together, some landscapes…And the Avengers, idealized, appearing as Asgardian nobles, alongside Thor.

Were you in the kings’ rooms? Why on Earth would you be rerouted here over something so simple as a broken bathtub? Come to think of it, Loki had never led you up the hall from his rooms, only down, away from here. Probably because ‘here’ was very, extremely, exceptionally off-limits.  But the guard had let you in, and not even reluctantly. He must have had instructions to allow you in here.

It was kind of Thor, to indulge his brother like this, and to show you such special treatment. You didn’t talk to the king very often, usually only at the occasional group dinner you attended, and he was always polite. You couldn’t help but wonder though, if pity had something to do with it.

He had always been one of your favorite Avengers. So noble and strong, the deific alien, come to protect a world not his own, even from his own family, simply because it was the right thing to do. It had been easy to get caught up in the romance of it all.

Romance. Ha. Not for you. Not here. These people were an entirely different species, who would live nearly infinite lives. There was no one for you here. You also would likely not be leaving here either, so you’d better put any hopes for love on the back burner.

You couldn’t let yourself think of it. Not with the way Loki loomed large in your life, made your heart speed and your fear spike.

You stopped to examine a landscape featuring a colorful, glowing bridge, spanning an ocean out to a golden satellite. You had no idea what it was, but it was beautiful, and mysterious, and very alien. Just like…

You had to get a grip on yourself. Having a personal weapon should have helped, but the thing was so opulent and important. You weren’t that important. You didn’t want to be important. You didn’t want to be noticed, or famous, or thought about when you weren’t around. It had been like that, ever since the Event. You’d had your fill of being noticed then. It seemed like every single man left in existence had noticed you then, with their talk of ‘rebuilding the species’, when you couldn’t even scrounge up enough food to feed everyone who was left! They were a bunch of apocalypse fantasy enthusiasts with not a lick of sense between them, but they outnumbered you. One of them had even…

Bath. You were sweaty and smelly, and you wanted to stop being those things. You didn’t need to think about the past. You had enough to worry about in the future.

It didn’t take you long to find the bathroom; it was a solid wooden door with gold paint, and the design of a fish with a knotwork tail-just like the one in Loki’s rooms. Unlike that one, this one had a small antechamber where various towels and bathrobes were kept. Did Thor entertain guests here? In the bath?

That was definitely none of your business.

You stripped out of your sleeping gown, and wrapped up in one of the bathrobes. It was way too big for you, of course, but it was comfortable and soft, and you wriggled around in it just a little bit, enjoying the sensation on your skin.

You entered the bath proper through another painted door, and practically dashed to the tub, only skidding to a stop when you noticed that the spacious tub was occupied.

Loki, Thor, and Brunnhilde all looked at you blankly as you slipped, fell hard on your rear, your bathrobe flipping open. You screeched, and pulled it back around you, as Loki began to laugh.

Oh, no, no!

You scrambled to your feet and threw yourself at the door, only to find it locked. No, No!

“Come join us, dear.” Loki’s velvet words closed in behind you. “The water is lovely, and the company has only gotten better.”

“Loki, I don’t think…” Thor began.

“Did you lock the door?” Brunnhilde asked.

“Come take your proper place, _____.” Loki said, patting the water next to him. “It is time.”

Time? Time? Here? Now? In front of the Valkyrie? In front of his brother?

Evil. The God of Evil.

The door was locked. You were trapped, and all the terrible possibilities were right there in front of you now.

Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry.

Though the other two looked a bit confused, Loki was still beckoning you to the tub, still laughing.

Your fury finally rose to match your fear, and something in your mind went off. Fine. Finally. Finally this was happening, finally you could just get it over with and move on with your life!

You stripped the bathrobe off and threw it on the ground, glaring at the tub full of traitors with your arms spread, just daring them to say anything. You stayed where you were though; if Loki wanted you, he could damn well come out and get you.

But he didn’t. Why didn’t he come out and get you? He should be ravishing you right now, you were waiting…

But instead, both he and Thor went wide-eyed and very red, and pointedly looked away. Brunnhilde shrugged.

“Eh, not bad.” She said.

“Shut up.” You snarled, and she raised her eyebrows, leaning back against the edge of the tub. She glanced over at the two blushing men.

“Lookin’ at a lot of cowardice right now, little brother.” She said.

“Loki, what did you do?” Thor whispered.

“She wasn’t supposed to do that!” Loki whispered back. “She was just supposed to be embarrassed and cute.”

“Absolute idiots.” Brunnhilde muttered. “The half-blind and the fully blind.”

“Are you telling me this was another joke!?!” You practically screamed. The men flinched.

Rage burned in every inch of you. The God of Evil!

You stomped into the water, storming right up to Loki, who drew away until he hit the wall of the tub.

“Look at me.” You demanded. He hesitated. “Look at me!”

He very slowly turned his head, allowing his gaze to fall on you. You punched him full in the face.

Your fist flashed with light as it struck, and to everyone’s surprise, Loki rocked back from the impact. So you struck again. And again. And once more before Brunnhilde found her pity and pulled you away.

You burst into tears in her arms, months of fear and internal conflict pouring out. You were so lost in the misery that you didn’t even notice the brothers leave.

                                                                             *****

“I don’t even know what you thought to achieve, Loki.” Thor scolded. “They don’t do public bathing in her country!”

“Well how was I supposed to know? It’s not my fault her species is splintered into all these different nations and cultures! How does anyone keep it all straight?”

“You could have asked her.”

“That would have defeated the purpose.” Loki whined.

“And what was that? To humiliate her? To frighten her? Hadn’t we all agreed that something was wrong with her? Why would you do something to add so much stress on top of her like that?”

“She was supposed to demand to be let out. And then I would let her out, and bring her a gift later, and let her know that it’s okay to bathe with us.”

“Well, that’s not what happened, is it? She was furious, and I think that fury stemmed from fear. She was afraid of us, Loki. We have no idea the damage you’ve done here.”

“Oh, I do.” Brunnhilde interrupted, approaching with her arms crossed. “And it’s so much worse than you think.”

“Where is she?” Loki demanded. “Is she okay?”

“Oh, you care?” Brunnhilde asked. “She’s away. Somewhere else.”

“Please. Is she okay?”

“She was so distraught by this, that she struck you with magic. What do you think? Do you think she’s okay?”

Loki drooped. “No. I suppose not.”

“It’s not just this, you know.” Brunnhilde gestured towards the bathroom, the edge of steel growing in her voice. “It’s not just the prank, which, by the way, was basic and classless. I expect better from you.”

Loki drooped even further.

“What gift did you think you were going to give her, to make this all better?”

“Blue cloak of office.” Loki sulked. “It has our rune embroidered in knotwork on the back. Special trilobed brooch. Something nice.”

“You’re still gonna appoint her? You think she wants that? The attention? The responsibility? You think she wants to spend even more time with you, when you act like this? You think some shiny things are gonna make up for this?”

“It wasn’t that bad!” Loki protested. “She will forgive me. She is very agreeable.”

“You moron!” Brunnhilde scolded. “It isn’t agreeability, it’s survival! She’s afraid to say no to you. You’ve really got no idea, do you? Loki, she’s spent the last two months terrified that you are going to force yourself on her.”

It took a moment to sink in.

“What?” The shock bleached his features further. “I-I don’t do that! I’ve never done that!”

Thor, quiet and shrinking into the background, eyed him apprehensively.

“I know what you’re thinking brother, and the answer is still no.” Loki snapped. “No, not even with a mind-control device in my hand, and a hateful voice in my head. Not even then. I have never done such a thing. Why would she think that?”

“Oh, I don’t know, might have something to do with the massive power imbalance between you. You know, the huge amount of influence you hold over her life? How she doesn’t actually own anything of her own, how it all belongs to you, and how you could take it all away anytime you felt like it?”

“But I’m not going to do that!” Loki insisted. “Her things are hers. Providing for her is a part of my respons-“

“Where the hels were your ‘responsibilities’ back there in the bath?” Brunnhilde snarled. “How can she possibly trust you not to coerce her by holding these things over her head? Where does she sleep, if you kick her out of that empty little guardroom? How does she eat, what does she wear, if you choose to withdraw your beneficence? She wears your colors, our styles. She is surrounded by people to whom she cannot speak. She can’t practice any hobbies, or little things that bring her joy; she can’t even take a walk outside by herself! She uses your toiletries; she even smells like you. She’s been slowly losing her identity, while becoming more and more dependent on you for survival. Her greatest fear is that you will pressure her into bed with your control over all of the things that keep her alive.”

“But I’m not!” Loki protested. “I would never-!”

“She doesn’t know that! Not with you putting your hands on her all the time.”

“But…but that was for her health…”

“You touched her without asking. A lot. It built up. Norns she was trying to tell us this whole time, even if she didn’t understand it herself. The withdrawing. The temper flare-ups. She told us that everyone on her old forums was paranoid, and she told us she was one of them. We just didn’t pay attention to what she was saying.”

“Where is she?” Loki asked, just barely not pleading. “I have to do something. I have to fix this.”

The Valkyrie just shook her head. “Not right now, you don’t. She isn’t gonna want to see you again so soon. She’s going to need time before she can even begin to accept an apology. And you’d better give her one. Not just pretty things to wear, not platitudes or promises. You owe her a boon for all the nonsense you’ve put her through, and it had better be good!”

                                                                                   *****

You were still awake when Brunnhilde came to check on you, even though you had been exhausted by your outburst, and the magic you had expended. You were curled up in the corner of her bunk, blanket bundled around you, the occasional tear still dripping down your cheeks.

“Brought you a sandwich.” She said, setting the plate down on her little end table, and sitting down in her chair, opposite her bunk. “Made it myself. I have no idea what you like on a sandwich, so I tried to keep it simple.”

Your hand snaked out from under the blanket, and snatched the offering. You hadn’t gone to dinner.

“Now, you can stay here as long as you want, or, if you prefer, I can bunk you in with the other Valkyries.”

“I’m not a Valkyrie though.” You said miserably. “I don’t really know what I am now. I’m not a wizard, I can barely do magic. I’m not a baker anymore. Not Asgardian. Not Icelandic. I don’t even know if I’m still American; do they even want me back? I don’t know. Don’t know where to go from here. Maybe I can get a job on the outskirts of the city. That way, I’m not too far away, but not to close either.”

“If it means anything to you, he looked like he’d been stabbed when I told him.”

You groaned. “You told him?”

“Of course I did! He needed to know exactly how badly he’d fucked up. He was horrified at the very thought. Wanted to run right to you and beg forgiveness.”

You stayed quiet for a moment, eating your sandwich.

“I’m sorry.” You finally said.

“You don’t have anything to apologize for-“

“No, I’m sorry. I was wrong, wasn’t I? I should have said something a long time ago, if not to him then to you, or somebody. I was too scared. Confused. And this whole time, I was just getting worse and worse, and it didn't even have to happen. Now I've gone and accused him of something awful, and I hurt him.”

“That isn’t your fault.” Brunnhilde said. “He should have thought about this. How things might look to you, how his actions might make you feel. He shouldn’t have been losing his temper with you, and he shouldn’t have been playing tasteless pranks; he should have been paying attention. When Asgardian nobility decides to foster someone, that person becomes nobility themselves. Loki has experience in that. He’s really dropped the ball here. Don’t you go thinking this is all your fault. Loki had responsibilities to you, and he didn’t live up to them.”

“So…what now?”

“I’m not sure. I think it mostly depends on you; what you want to do. It should have been like that from the beginning. Like I said, you can stay here as long as you want, or we can find other housing for you.”

“It’s not true, is it? I was wrong, wasn’t I? The book said so many things I didn’t want to believe, but I didn’t know what was true.”

Brunnhilde tilted her head. “What book?”

“The mythology book Saldis gave me. It talked about all of you. It said frightening things, but the way he acted made me think it might be true…But it’s not?”

“It’s not. He was very adamant about that.”

“Then... I’ll go back. To my room. His room. Eventually. Not yet though, I don’t feel right. I’ve got to think about some things.” How to apologize, for one.

“You ought to sleep on it for now. Think about things tomorrow, when you’ve had a chance to clear your head.”

You nodded, and stretched out on the bunk. “I’ll try, okay?”

“You do that.” She said. “If you need me, I’ll be right outside.”

[guyinlovewitheremika]

your post has literally 0% ship-related content between Reiner/Bertolt and Levi/Erwin. please stop this ship tagging thing unless it's actual shipping. my xkit blacklists it automatically because i have posts of ships i don't ship disabled and it annoys me when it blocks things i like to see, but please DO NOT TAG it just because it has two of the characters in it. there's nothing shippy about it. 0% ship-related content. thanks

This is the post in question

Okay I’m sorry, but that’s not gonna work out.

First of all, about the issue whether or not the post features ship related content or not. Yes, character X and Z aren’t making out on screen, but it is still a fact that the images highlight the relationship between X and Z, by isolating them from a larger group and presenting them together, sharing an activity. What’s more, this is coming from an OFFICIAL source, aka the people in charge chose to highlight the relationship between X and Z. From a shippers standpoint, that’s huge. The importance of the specific relationship is given an emphasis through official sources, thus in turn validating the feelings of the shippers in question. 

Furthermore, do you consider your definition of what is shippy and what not to be a universal fandom rule? Do characters actively need to be doing the do for it to be shippy? Matter of fact is, the relationships between characters can be appreciated without it needing to be directly romantic/sexual (I suppose that’s what you’re referring to by “actual shipping”). People are allowed to be invested in a relationship of any shape or form. If I were to, hypothetically, write a meta piece on the canon relationship between say, Eren and Mikasa, without necessarily implying they want to make out under a tree any minute, it would be accepted for me to tag the ship, because ultimately, the shipnames are used for the sake of tagging one’s appreciation of a relationship. Granted, the big majority of the posts found there has romantic undertones, but its not exclusive! You’re free to interpret a relationship in any way you want to. People can “ship” characters platonically, or whatever. Your definition of what warrants a ship tag isn’t a universal guideline in fandom.

And if you think I’m just trying to shove my personal opinions on the matter in your face and make you accept them as universal truths, that’s not the case at all. Many of the “big, popular, accepted” blogs tag official art concerning the relationship between X and Z as a ship. Many of my followers do to. Everyone is allowed to tag and interpret things the way they want to. And though you personally may not agree that the pic features “actual shipping”, that is once again not a fandom wide rule we’re all forced to abide to. If you check the reblogs under the post, you’ll notice that many of them got tagged as rei/ber or eru/ri, despite the fact that they’re not “explicitly shippy” or whatever. People can interpret it the way they want. I can interpret it the way I want. And that’s just how it is. For many months now, I’ve tried my best to share all kinds of Attack on Titan related news, from promotional material, to updates on xyz, or newly released artwork, with the fandom. I happen to spend an absurd amount of time refreshing official sources and trying to share news with as many people as I can, because people want to see new content. Shippers greatly appreciate official content concerning the relationship of their preference, and if I get the opportunity, I gladly want to provide them with that. Hence the shiptag: a way to bring attention to new official stuff. And once again, people are entitled to interpret the artwork the way they want; the ships in question may not be my biggest OTPs, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy them. 

And here’s another thing: You are absolutely 100% entitled to blacklist a ship you’re not a fan of, I by no means want to deny you the right. But matter of fact is, when choosing to blacklist a ship, you need to acknowledge that you will be missing out on certain content. You may have your own definition of “actual shipping”, but please do acknowledge that this is not a fandom wide, universal viewpoint. Everyone is entitled to their own interpretation, and allowed to act according to it. You can’t expect to somehow enforce your own personal policy on me or the rest of the whole fandom. Things just don’t work that way. You’re the one who resorted to blacklist which, once again, you are totally fine to do so, but you need to realize that not everyone’s tagging system will be conform to that. You can’t control the whole fandom according to your personal viewpoints, especially if those aren’t conform to how the majority of the fandom works. I apologize if I’m starting to sound rude here, but you’re the one who accepted to see less content, and the fandom isn’t perfectly cut together for everyone. I already try my best to tag stuff appropriately. Stuff that is explicitly romantic usually doesn’t get character names. And things that aren’t necessarily explicit may get the shipname, but also character names, and, in the case of official things, also various tags for that (I did originally not feature my “s2 art” or “official art” tags on the post in question due to poor memory, if you had those highlighted and if this was the cause of this issue I apologize, but I’m human and mistakes happen). I already try my best to keep this organized to conform to as many people as I can, but it is COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE TO PLEASE EVERY SINGLE PERSON WITH THE TAGGING SYSTEM. I do my best but there are limits. I’m sorry you may miss out on some content or that you find this system “annoying”, but I’m not going to revamp my entire system and alienate many other followers for that. I mean, hell, it’s not like I’m shoving your NOTP in your face or anything.

And ultimately, what I interpret as shippy and what not, or how I tag the content on my blog is ultimately my decision, and mine alone. I’m sorry if it really doesn’t work out for you, but this system has worked well since day one, and is certainly not limited to my blog alone. 

This got long, I may have gotten a tidbit rude, but I really wanted to sort this out.

[sempiternalsandpitturtle]

7 steps to better blog title ideas

What is your content without a great name?

Coming up with blog title ideas is both an art and a science. There’s an art to playing with words to write catchy and creative titles – yet there’s a science to making sure those flashy headlines also get clicks and shares.

Here’s all you need to know about crafting the catchiest, sexiest and totally rank-worthy titles:

What’s in a title?

A great title is key for getting your content read and ranked.

The title is the first thing potential viewers see, which means it has to make a convincing case for the content. A good headline grabs attention while also giving readers the opportunity to identify the content and determine if they want to read more.

Typically your blog post title will serve as your title tag, which is one of the most important on-page SEO pieces of metadata that Google uses to determine what the page is about. They help your content climb the results list and work its way through the crowded social world to pop up on potential readers’ radars.

A killer title increases clickability, driving more viewers to your site. When the content is on par with the headline, it can encourage those viewers to become loyal readers and even customers.

1. Start with a Working Title

Sometimes a kick-ass title will hit you in the face immediately. It’s a great feeling, but it doesn’t happen often for most of us.

Instead, choose a topic and start with a working title. This will guide the direction of the piece, giving you the freedom to write the content before nailing the perfect title.

Say you’re writing about summer travel. Potential working titles could be:

“X summer travel destinations for families”

“How to save money on summer vacations”

“Plan an unforgettable summer vacation with these X essential tips”

Any of these working titles provide an angle that is specific enough to get you started, and you can tweak them after writing the piece without having to change anything drastic about the content to match the title – or vice versa.

2. Don’t bait and switch

While clickability is the goal, it doesn’t stop there. Never lie or embellish the title just to get clicks. Your content should always deliver on the title.

Once they click the link, readers will quickly realise if the title has very little to do with the content. The result is a huff, roll of the eyes and closed tab before they even register the name of the brand.

Set clear expectations with accurate titles. If the headline tells readers the article will show them three natural ways to zap away stubborn zits, they’ll expect to see a list style article with the numbers 1, 2 and 3 in the subheads. And, make sure your audience doesn’t have to click through a million pages to see each one.

Respect your audience’s time and experience. If you don’t fulfill the promises made in the title, readers won’t trust your content. While “Breaking news: Broccoli can cure cancer” is certainly an attention-grabbing title, readers will be annoyed if the article actually discusses several health benefits of eating broccoli. Yes, they made it to your blog, but they’re wondering why you had to get them so hyped just to disappoint. (Not good for encouraging them to return to your blog any time soon!)

3. Keep the audience in mind

While Google is one of your most avid and important readers, remember that you’re writing for people, too. After all, consumers are the ones engaging with the blog, products and services, as well as sharing the content they enjoy.

Keep your target audience in mind when writing blog titles. How old are they? What’s the average level of education? Are they a niche group? What’s their sense of humor? Are there buzzwords or industry-specific lingo that apply to them? What kind of articles do they engage with?

With a clear picture of your audience, you can deliver titles and content that have a higher chance of piquing their interest.

4. Optimise for success

Your keyword research will help you craft titles that perform well on social and in search.

Often, you’ll find that longer-tail keywords tend to have more manageable Keyword Difficulty scores, meaning the likelihood of your blog actually ranking well in SERPs relative to competitors is much higher.

And it’s still best practice to include your target keyword in your title (try your best, but don’t force it!).

Ensure the content on your page is primarily rooted in covering a single keyword as comprehensively as possible – you will naturally use semantically related terms as you write, which helps alert search engines to what your page is about and whether your title is true to the content.

5. Make it sexy

Once you have a solid understanding of your audience and keyword goals, you can work on adding some finesse to your working title.

Some tried-and-true methods to spice up your headlines include:

Alliteration – let it roll off the tongue.

Play on words and double meanings – you clever writer, you.

Active voice – be confident and energetic to engage readers.

Attractive adjectives – say no to “good” and yes to “brilliant”.

Trigger words – like “how,” “who” and “what”.

Using this stronger language also helps paint a more specific, accurate picture of the blog content. If you mention aliens in the post, “otherworldly” or “unbelievable” may be better alternatives for “good”.

Similarly, you can use language specific to the audience. If you’re writing an article for twenty- or thirty-something fashionistas about the comeback of ‘90s fashion, throw “as if” in the title and they’ll be eager to read your advice on refreshing their scrunchies and chokers.

It’s also a good idea to highlight the type of article in the title, such as:

How to talk to aliens

8 tips and tricks for talking to aliens

Understanding space language [infographic]

Use these sexy additions to make your titles as visual as possible, giving readers a clear and enticing idea of the fabulous content they’re about to get into.

6. What would a blogger do?

What else do the gurus do to come up with their wonderfully high-performing and attention-grabbing titles? They keep it short, sexy and interesting – and they don’t settle on the working title.

HubSpot even has the data to help you spice up your working titles. Words that drive viewers to click on headlines include:

Photo.

Who.

Amazing.

Need.

Length also plays into the success of a title. According to HubSpot’s research, 117 characters or fewer is best for social because it’s tweetable. For search, aim for 65 characters or less so the entire title appears in search results.

Another golden rule: Cap your title at 12 words maximum. Titles with too many words can be much harder for readers to quickly digest, increasing the chances that they’ll scroll past without bothering to click. You’ll also want to place your most important words at the beginning of the title to protect them from being cut off in email, social and search results.

Plus, think about your personal experience with blogs – which ones make you click? Use those titles for inspiration when crafting your own.

7. Are there idea generators available?

If you’re running low on creativity, you can lean on a few resources for inspiration.

HubSpot’s Blog Ideas Generator helps you brainstorm more interesting topics and working titles, which will lend themselves to sexier final titles.

The Blog Title Generator by SEOPressor uses your keywords to generate a list of catchy titles to choose from. You can use them verbatim or put your own creative spin on the options offered.

BlogAbout by Impact also offers a Blog Title Generator, which provides title ideas with blank spaces for you to fill in specific information pertaining to the blog post.

That being said – you won’t want to rely on these generators for every post. We believe in your ability to craft kick-ass titles, and so should you.

If you need a boost in confidence, run your title through the Headline Analyser from CoSchedule. This handy resource rates your title on its ability to perform. The good news is that you don’t have to score a 100 to feel good about your title. As long as you’re in the green (70+), you’re good to go.

For instance, if our targeted keyword for this post was “headlines”, here’s how a potential title would perform:

Scroll down for more analysis, as well as some helpful tips on how to improve your score.

Along with support from this trusty headline analyser, you can get opinions from coworkers. This collaboration can be helpful for sparking creativity and tweaking titles to perfection.

A parting gift

Before we leave you to craft the sexiest titles of your life, here are a few formulas for coming up with blog titles:

How to + [action] + [result]

[Number] things you need to know to [result]

The secret sauce to [result that’s totally relatable to audience]

[Number] + [attractive adjective] + [tips, tricks, products, ways, etc.] + [result]

Title + [bracketed clarification like infographic, video, interview, etc.]

[Question that article answers]?

At the very least, these templates can get your creative juices flowing. Don’t be afraid to break the rules and experiment with different methods. Track performance and see what suits your audience.

You got this. Go give your blog posts the names they deserve!

from http://bit.ly/365BTaf

[fmservers]

How Disney Built Star Wars, in real life

From the moment that Disney announced its acquisition of Lucasfilm, the question on every fan’s mind was “when will they build Star Wars in real life?”

While most assumed that they would do it eventually, they probably weren’t aware that in 2013 even as work began on the first movie of the ‘final’ trilogy, work also commenced on the early planning of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. That initial team fo a handful of people would eventually grow to over 4,000.

Over the course of the past 5 years, Walt Disney Imagineering has been hard at work making the world of Star Wars a reality on Earth. In two locations, California and Florida, Black Spire outpost on the planet of Batuu is now under construction. It’s an enormous several-billion-dollar bet that people will want to visit a place very similar to the ones that they’ve seen on the screen for decades.

In some ways, this project seems like the safest bet ever. The confluence of rabid fans of Star Wars and disciples of Disney’s particular flavor of amusement park alone feels like it could fuel the demand for the two park additions for years. But the ambitions of Walt Disney Imagineering staff and Parks management are stratospherically high for what is the largest single land expansion ever in a US Disney park. And the financial results required from these additions will require Disney to draw not just the loyalist crowd, but to convince a wide and deep array of park visitors to spend the day in a hyper-faithful reconstruction of a fictional far away galaxy.

To do this, Disney’s Imagineers have spent over five years planning and two years building the outposts that will open this year in its two US parks.

Last week, I got to spend three days talking to those Imagineers, partners from Lucasfilm and management about the inspiration, planning, tools, design and construction efforts. I also visited the construction site of Star Wars Land in Disneyland, California to take in the size, scale and environment of Batuu and its two major attractions.

“We’re really being very ambitious with what we do with Star Wars,” says Disney Portfolio Executive at Walt Disney Imagineering, Scott Trowbridge. “This location is over 14 acres. It is basically a small city in our parks. All the amazing architecture…the ships, the aliens, the droids, the creatures, everything that makes Star Wars Star Wars, all coming together so that our guests can have an opportunity to live that dream of living their Star Wars story.”

At risk of being too susceptible to marketing speak, I’d have to agree with this particular statement. What is being built here has little parallel in terms of immersion and ambition in an amusement park or out. And it’s going to blow Star Wars fans, casual and involved, away.

The nuts and bolts

If you’re familiar with what Disney has said about its “Star Wars lands” so far, then some of the following might be a refresher, but I think that some context about what they’re trying to build is important before we talk about the how.

Covering 14 acres individually at both Disneyland, Anaheim and Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Florida, the lands are pieces of the planet Batuu, and they host Black Spire Outpost, a village with shops, eateries, villagers and a First Order advance post. Outside of the village, you can also find the Resistance encampment with its ad-hoc infrastructure, rag-tag starfighters and equipment. The lands house two major attractions — Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance and Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run.

The entire land has been designed from the ground up to be immersive. The Disney cast members that inhabit Batuu will dress in authentic costumes and can pick and choose their own garments and accessories from a selection. They will be encouraged to have an understanding of the village, the various factions at play from the resistance to the First Order to the underbelly of smugglers operating there. The food is completely new, and it all has backstory as well. You won’t have pork ribs, you’ll have Kaadu ribs — the non-famous creature famously ridden by famously hated Jar Jar Binks. You’ll drink blue (and green) milk and cocktails at the seedy cantina (yes, with alcohol). The signage is all in-universe as much as possible, the products for sale have been created from scratch just for Batuu and will be sold nowhere else — and they all have a ‘found’ or ‘crafted’ vibe with minimal packaging.

The name of the game is transportive.

Transportation to Batuu

One of the over-arching themes throughout the discussions over the course of several days was the concept of transportation. How do you convey the feeling of being transported from the worlds of Disneyland and Earth to the world of Star Wars.

That begins with the decision to make the location for the lands a new planet.

“Why not make a place that is very familiar from the classic Star Wars films, a Tatooine, a Hoth, or one of those places? The answer really is we know those places, we know those stories that happen there, and we know that we’re not in them,” said Trowbridge. “This place, Black Spire Outpost, is an opportunity. It’s designed from the very get‑go to be a place that invites exploration and discovery, a place that invites us to become a character in the world of Star Wars, and, to the extent that we want to, to participate in the stories of Star Wars.”

A multi-purpose transport shuttle docked on top of a large hangar (left) will beckon guests into Docking Bay 7 Food and Cargo

  One of the primary drivers for the decision was also to create some sense of equanimity between hardcore fans and casual attendees.

“I want to talk into this land and be in the same level as everyone else, from the really hardcore Star Wars fan to someone who knows nothing about Star Wars,” Managing Story Editor at WDI Margaret Kerrison recalls saying in the first pitch meeting she attended for Star Wars land. “I want to have that urgency to explore, to discover, to run around every corner, and to meet every single droid and alien in this land. I want to not feel like I’m at a disadvantage because I don’t know all the nitty‑gritty details as a hardcore Star Wars fan would know.”

Walking through one of the entrances to Batuu, guests should feel a bit of compression and then decompression, says Executive Creative Director, WDI Chris Beatty. Coming in from Frontierland, Critter Country or just outside Fantasyland, you’re presented with ‘laser cut’ rock tunnel that creates a blank slate that then opens up into a cinematically framed vista that varies depending on your entrance. For the middle tunnel, you get a peek at some of the architecture, for instance and then boom, you’re presented with ships in the foreground, buildings, tall ancient spires, ships perched atop the buildings, canopies sawing in the wind. Shot established, you’re in Black Spire Outpost.

There are several of these ‘reveal’ moments throughout the land. The first time you see the resistance encampment, your first glimpse of the Millennium Falcon. Photographic moments, but also establishing moments, grounding you in the place you’re in.

Having stood in that vantage, even with construction going on all around, I can tell you it’s incredibly effective. There is no hint or trace of the rest of the park here. The vegetation, the meticulous weathering and rockscapes and the eerily familiar yet newly remixed shapes of Star Wars buildings and accessories make you feel like this is another place that you know.

The land is constructed using a blend of familiar techniques and newly minted ones. In some ways, Disney’s Pandora – The World of Avatar at Walt Disney World and its in-theme dining, open spaces and rides feels like a test run for how far it could push themed worlds. Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge feels like an additive result of learnings from a land that has ‘native’ merchandise and foods and tries to keep as much as possible ‘in story’.

Before they could begin to build, though, Imagineers had to build the tools to do so.

Building Star Wars

Headquartered in the compound of low beige and salmon colored buildings making up Grand Central Business Park in Glendale, California, Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI) is a wonderland of mad tinkers, costumers, roboticists, simulations engineers and historians. The only Disney design and development organization founded by Walt Disney himself as WED Enterprises (and later sold to the Disney company in a somewhat controversial move for the time). Since then, it has proven to be so influential around the world through its application of theming and robotics that the term Imagineering is synonymous with the basic concept of world building.

Dok-Ondar’s Den of Antiquities in Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge will feature rare items from across the galaxy for sale

One of the things that you have to understand about the way that Imagineering works is that they waste as little effort as possible. The imagination is always a hundred times more creative, complex and ambitious than the reality, and to even get a tiny chunk of that in front of guests Imagineers have to constantly find ways to work within constraints of time, space, money and, yes, the laws of physics.

In order to get the job done, they often build their own tools or cobble together solutions for problems out of a combination of off-the-shelf hardware and custom built components. It feels a bit odd to describe it this way, because there is certainly pride involved, but building for Imagineering is remarkably ego free. It’s not ‘our way or no way’ it’s ‘whatever works’. This commitment to making the illusion complete for the viewer no matter what the source of the solution is has led to some really fascinating advances from Disney R&D and Imagineering.

You only have to look at the procession from a couple of metal slugs attached to a servo through to full on humanoid stunt doubles to see what the kind of teasing out of technical applications to storytelling problems happen inside Imagineering.

For the Galaxy’s Edge project, one of the first problems to be solved was how to manage such a complex undertaking inside WDI and in partnership with Lucasfilm.

This was largely due to the major difference between this project and any that Disney has undertaken in the past: the intimate involvement of all departments from the beginning. People from props, set dressing, construction, merchandising, food, ride systems and technical departments all worked together from ideation onwards. On a normal production, they are typically brought in at various phases — but for Batuu, everyone had to be on the same page from the very beginning.

If Disney wanted this to be a truly immersive experience it had to feel organically integrated and the conversation had to be lengthy and continuous so that set design served vending and vending served story and story served ride systems and engineering. They all had to be in lock step.

One of the major tools Imagineering used to keep everyone on the same project page is their BIM (building information modeling) tool. The tool takes a combination of 2D plans, 3D models, infrastructure and set dressing information and combines them into one massive interlocking source of truth for all departments to pull from. Teams were able to drill down from an overview of the land in 3D to the design plans for a specific doorway control panel.

Basically, it’s foundational geometry from across the project that’s then fed into the Unreal engine and presented in 3D. Like a 3D world from a game, but it’s a real place with real plumbing, architecture and technology underneath.

“When we saw the level of complexity that we were faced with when we started this project, we understood that we would need to use all the tools at our disposal. What the plan was is that we would essentially build a digital replica of the entire project. We built the planet before we actually built the planet,” said Sanne Worthing, Manager of BIM & VDC Technology, WDI. “It allows the creative designers to make decisions. It allows our contractors and the guys actually out in the field to make decisions before they actually have to go through and do these things. It gives you a lot of planning time. It helps avoid some of the more complicated and costly problems out in the field.”

BIM allowed the teams to do everything from testing how things would interlock in 3D to seeing where cranes could be placed during construction. The BIM reconstruction also fed into a system that WDI built in virtual reality to simulate the park.

“Using Unreal, we were able to take from all different parts of our attraction and put the moving pieces together. That means putting in our media that we would get from ILM, our partners there, getting our animation for our animated figures. Every piece of our puzzle to create our attraction, we put into a virtual reality simulation,” says April Warren, Show Programmer for WDI. “We’re able to look at it and make quick iterations with our creative team to be able to find things that we wouldn’t find normally until we were in the field and solve those problems early, or to be able to find out something just wasn’t working for us creatively and we wanted to change that.”

WDI has been using its own VR simulation system for a while, I first saw it a couple of years ago when it was being fleshed out. It feels very similar to flying around inside a simulator. It allows the Imagineers to look at the land from all sides, swooping through projects and highlighting elements of various types from infrastructure to set dressing. More importantly, it allows them to get as clear a picture as possible of what it will look like to a guest on the ground. This includes sight lines that play to maximum effect, with forced perspective and seamless presentation while hiding things like heating and cooling units, conduits and ducts and regular Earth buildings.

Theme Park design is is wild — with modeling/VR they know exactly where to place scenic elements to accomplish line-of-sight effects, but as a result from up above the lands kinda look like you fell through the ground in a video game

(pic by @bioreconstruct) pic.twitter.com/61KkufMQ3j

— Cabel (@cabel) February 24, 2019

“We do do a lot of work with sight lines, making sure that when you’re out in the land, where guests are moving through, that the experience is what we intend it to be. That we’re not looking at some ugly AC unit,” says Worthing. “Immersion, and making sure that people feel like they are immersed in this world is super important. BIM is one of the ways that we are able to do that.”

“There’s things from the BIM that have been super [helpful],” says Warren. “We’ve had some back and forth I would say trying to run a vehicle through an area and I go, “oh, there’s a piece of conduit there that I didn’t realize what going to be there, because I got from…BIM.” I can say, “Hey, can we remove that piece of conduit?”

“If we were in the field and we had planned this without that step, we could have been in trouble because we might have hit it.”

A saying that the Imagineers have, says Bei Yang, Technology Studio Exec, WDI, is that it’s “easier to move bits than it is to move Atoms.”

There is a daily review of packages added to BIM, which allows the ride and animatronics team to ‘walk’ inside the attraction regularly before it’s built.

“While we’re only building one building, I promise there are a hundred designs of that building that nobody will ever see,” says Jacqueline King, Producer on Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run. “We get to go into them, and be able to make the best decisions, so that when we start putting rebar into the ground, you’re putting it in the right place. They talk about discovering those walls once you get out in the field later, but for the most part, we’re able to work out a lot of those early on, and completely change layouts to get the best results.”

In addition to using VR simulations driven by BIM, WDI has also begun using it for simulation of the actual rides, but more on that a bit later.

Once the construction pipeline was in place, it was time to start fleshing out the physical world of Batuu, including the architecture, set dressing, props, merchandise, food and inhabitants.

Anima-lectric

As you’d imagine with any high profile Disney Parks property, Batuu will be home to a variety of animated robots, Animatronics, in Imagineering parlance. From droids to shop proprietors to ride pre-show characters, there are a lot of animated figures in Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge.

Since the 80’s, the hydraulics-based animatronics in Disney parks were based on the A-100 chassis. A sort of basic humanoid template. The animatronics on Batuu are all based on a new A-1000 series chassis, which can be configured in a variety of ways at a variety of sizes — with one major difference: electric motors.

Electric motors were pioneered in 2009 with the head of Mr. Lincoln. They’ve since been used in Enchanted Tales with Belle, Frozen Ever After and the Na’ve River Journey attractions. Rocket Raccoon in Guardians of the Galaxy Mission: Breakout is also an electric figure.

At Savi’s Workshop Ð Handbuilt Lightsabers, guests will have the opportunity to customize and craft their own lightsabers.

Unlike hydraulics, electric motors enable far more precise movements. They can start and stop nearly instantly, have less wind up and wind down times and make for more fluid transitions between directional movements. Plus, you cut the amount of cabling going to the figure in half by eliminating hydraulic lines. This cuts down on figure installation size and control cabinet size, allowing for more interesting placements in scenes that don’t have to allow for covering all of that stuff up and for easier maintenance.

The new figures are smooth, capable and really fun to watch in action.

Here are some of the major AA characters that will inhabit Star Wars land:

Hondo Ohnaka — A Weequay pirate introduced in Clone Wars, Hondo is now the proprietor of Ohnaka Transport Solutions and has been loaned the Millennium Falcon by Chewie for some “deliveries”. The animatronic figure itself is around 7 feet tall and uses the latest in electric motors instead of hydraulics. Hondo’s figure includes around 50 functions (movement points) total and is the second most complicated animatronic in Disney parks. The most complicated, for the record, is the Na’vi Shaman, mentioned above, which has 40 functions in its face alone, not to mention the rest of the body. We had the Shaman at our robotics event a couple of years ago, it’s incredible to watch. Hondo isn’t far behind, with fluid movements, smooth facial contortions and believable interactions between himself and his R5 droid.

DJ R-3X — You know him previously classified as RX-24, or Captain Rex, the pilot over at Star Tours. Now, he’s a DJ at Oga’s Cantina on Batuu. He plays music composed by the Imagineering team and a variety of artists from around the world. All of it is poppy and synth-ey and a bit 80’s, with some classic mixes of Cantina tunes gone by. His torso and arms move to work the controls and dance and he has a three hour cycle of music and dialog to keep patrons entertained. Fun fact, Lucasfilm Creative Executive Matt Martin says he has many, many pages of backstory about how Rex ended up on Batuu.

Dok-Ondar — An Ithorian trader, Don is renowned for his Jedi and Sith artifact collection. I was able to see Dok fully active in the Imagineering animation building and he looks incredible. The figure towers several feet above guests heads as he sits behind his counter and interacts with shop employees. The detail is lovely here, with a rich, smooth set of animations for hands and neck, his whole body rising up and down. The lips along his two mouths ripple as he speaks in a resonant stereophonic voice.

Nien Nunb — A Sullustun pilot famous for copiloting the Millennium Falcon on its mission to destroy the second Death Star in Return of the Jedi. On Batuu he will pilot the transport ship that you board during the Rise of the Resistance attraction.

One of the more minor but no less intriguing characters includes a Dianoga beast which will cameo inside of a water fountain, popping up out of the very murky looking (for show) water intermittently to surprise guests. You’ll also see a ton of animated creatures inside the Creature Stall including fan favorites like the Loth-cat and a Worrt. The Droid Shop is also set to be full of animated droids of all kinds, and its exterior will have droids interacting with guests via the PLAY Disney app and getting a refreshing lubricant bath.

Interestingly, I’m aware of some droid projects that Disney is working on that have not yet appeared in any official reveals. There is a lot more to come in the interactive figure department and Imagineering already has plans to expand Batuu with new experiences. I was also unable to get them to tell me whether the Loth-cat and other small creatures that will be featured here are part of the interactive semi-autonomous Tiny Life project I’ve written about previously.

Black Spire Outpost

The process of animating the figures has also been updated along with the chassis.

“One of the things that went so well on this project is that some of our software partners have developed tools that allow us to import and export data from design software into modeling and animation software,” says Associate Show Mechanical Engineer Victoria Thomas. “We’re able to give them a 3D representation of exactly what the figure is, exactly where the pivots are. They’re able to take that and animate in exactly how fast they want those joints to move. We’re able to get a lot of great feedback like, “Oh, well the shoulder pivot’s kind of off. Is it possible for you to adjust that?”

“Getting that feedback early in the process allows us to change, improvise and adapt and overcome anything that’s going on with the figures.”

The animations, like all of the other data that makes up the land, are hosted inside of BIM. That pre-visualization work saves a lot of heartache and physical fudging on the back end.

“Doing things early allows us to solve problems before they become serious problems. With the Hondo figure specifically, we were able to determine, “Oh, based on his show set and where he is, there’s not enough room for audio in his scene. He needs an onboard speaker,” says Thomas.

“In another scene, we were able to determine, “Oh, there’s large speakers in the scene where we expected a maintenance person to be able to access the figures. If those speakers are there, then you can’t maintenance the base frame.”

Because of BIM and pre‑visualization, we were allowed to do a lot of that. One of the other cool things is that we were able to get motion‑capture data on these figures initially as a way to prove out, how would a human move? How would this look natural? How can we make this look as organic as possible in order to improve the guest experience?”

The resulting figures are some of the best looking creations Disney can currently make, and they’re at the forefront of this pre-visualization work with electric-driven figures. It’s as absolutely close to a real-life Star Wars alien as you’re ever likely to meet.

But the denizens, though cool, aren’t the biggest attraction in Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. That would be, well, the attractions.

The Rides

There are two attractions inside the land. Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run (Falcon from here on out) and Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance (Rise). The Falcon is a simulator type ride that reads like a very, very advanced version of Star Tours that you can actually control in real time with a crew of 6 people. Rise is much harder to explain, and consists of multiple stages of ‘ride’ that, taken together, are best described as an “experiential” attraction.

Developing those rides involves some wild new technology, some known tech applied in new ways, and some really sky high difficulty levels to pull off correctly.

Rise and Simulate

For a while now, Disney has been using VR and augmented reality in various ways to help it design and test rides. At Imagineering in Glendale it has a big simulator room called The Dish to paraphrase myself from my earlier visits, This is a curved chamber that houses multiple high resolution projectors that functions, most simply, as a holodeck. Disney uses it to “see” rides and attractions as a group to make decisions about look and feel.

Millennium Falcon pictured under development

Users wear a ‘Bowler Hat’ that tracks their movements and walk around inside a space that changes and shifts to match perspectives. We flew through and around Batuu, getting to see, virtually, the vistas we would see the next day when we were at the land physically.

But Disney has also been using VR in more radical ways to simulate their rides. Specifically, they’ve built a full ride-on vehicle that sits inside a warehouse on the Imagineering lot. It’s surrounded in a wide 100 foot long ring by traffic dividers and operates just like the trackless vehicles in Rise.

“We were able to test all of our vehicle motion early using VR,” says April Warren. “Imagine you’re on a vehicle, you’ve got your VR headset, and you are able to see what this attraction is going to look like in the future. We could do that all in real‑time. It was very exciting. I don’t think we could’ve made this attraction without this workflow. We broke the attraction to pieces and could ride it in the facility to really prove out that what we thought we were getting with our vehicle is what we were going to get in the attraction.”

“The great thing was when we got to the actual building things were all installed. We hadn’t been down there before, at least I hadn’t. To walk through that building knowing what we’d seen in VR and go, “Oh, my gosh. I know exactly where I am. I know how to get around this place because I have seen all of this before, and it looks exactly like what I thought it would look like.” It’s been super exciting.”

The rig itself is pretty wild. It’s built out to match the seat layout of the Rise of the Resistance vehicle itself. On board it has enough compute power to push out the visuals to headsets of everyone on board and a motor to run the vehicle around the floor perfectly in sync with those visuals. This gives you the illusion of the ride mixed with the real physicality of moving through space and feeling the pull — a process the imagineers who show us the rig call “Visceralization”. It’s the most bad ass VR sim rig ever.

Disney is clear to note throughout our visit to the sim center that they are not using it to develop VR rides. Rather they are developing physical rides using VR. An important distinction these days with VR becoming more prevalent in the parks.

The Rise of the Resistance ‘experience’ itself is much harder to categorize. On our site tour we got to go through what we are later told is about 1/3 of the total ride (a figure which boggled me). You approach through the Resistance area of Batuu, outside of the village gates. There are star fighters (an X-Wing, an A-Wing, both perfectly replicated from the films) which will be being actively worked on and primed at intervals throughout the day by Resistance members. you enter the queue and walk through chambers which advance from scrubland with railings made out of the ubiquitous Star Wars cabling through to ancient ruins that have been co-opted by the scrappy rebels.

Disney guests will traverse the corridors of a Star Destroyer

The rooms advance to sections that are ‘laser cut’ through rock as they would be by an army trying to make due in natural and unnatural caverns. Rooms are piled high with equipment of medical, utilitarian and military origin. There is an armory with blasters and pilots uniforms in cages. A room merges the Fast Pass and Standby lines in a communications hub. The entire effect is wildly effective, giving you the feel of walking the cramped halls of a base from the movies.

This queue, by the way, features a low stone bench cut into a big section of the middle of it, allowing a place for families and kids to rest. A personal victory, Executive Creative Director John Larena jokes, as a dad with kids who knows what it’s like to wait in long lines.

From there, we’re led into a briefing room that will feature an animatronic BB-8 on a high cabinet that interacts with a video element of Poe Dameron, your escort on the mission. Other appearances will be made by a hologram of Rey and a message from Finn.

From there, you make your way across a landing pad as Poe’s X-Wing warms up to your right. You walk towards and board a U-Wing transport ship with a group of fellow passengers. A simulated takeoff and flight, facilitated by your Nien Nunb and Poe, commence with everyone standing troop transport style. You are quickly captured and pulled aboard a Star Destroyer.

Then, through some ride magic I won’t disclose here, your door opens to what is one of the most stunning ride reveals I can ever remember: a full size Star Destroyer hangar bay, complete with expansive black floor, Tie Fighters on loading racks and, yes, an absolutely enormous window opening up onto space outside with (eventually) a view of the First Order fleet.

Disney guests will traverse the corridors of a Star Destroyer

After your moment of awe, you are split up into groups by First Order officers — played by real cast members in uniform by the way — and led down perfectly rendered corridors to a holding cell the spitting image of the one Poe Dameron was held in. At this point, you have an encounter with a nearby Kylo Ren and your adventure continues.

This is where we left off on our tour, and we hadn’t even made it to the vehicle portion yet, which features encounters with more First Order troops, AT-ATs and more that they have yet to reveal.

It’s an enormous attraction, with a sense of scale that goes beyond anything I’ve seen Disney do. And it’s only one of the two major attractions.

Flying the Falcon

The other, of course, is the Falcon ride. There have been tons of questions about this one, so I’ll try to sate some appetites.

Approaching the Falcon from one of the entrances to Batuu for the first time is a surreal experience. This is a full-size 110-foot version of the ship as you’ve seen it in the movies. It’s meticulously detailed and acts as a center-piece for the area. The ship will periodically vent out gas and Hondo’s tinkerers are constantly working on its engines. It’s a living thing inside the land, a character.

Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run

As you enter the maintenance bay, you pass into the queue inside Ohnaka’s Transport Solutions. Climbing gantries through a working shipping and machine shop, getting views of the Falcon from every angle. Until, finally, you burst out into the oh-so-familiar weathered ‘chiclet’ corridors of the Falcon herself. The holding area is the very well known common area of the ship with the chess board (not currently holographically active) and communications console. Everything in this space is meticulously accurate down to the bolts. Break out your magnifying glasses and soak it in, you’re on the Millennium Falcon.

From here, you’re handed boarding cards in groups of six and wait to be ushered down the corridor to your waiting cockpit.

The famous chess room

The Falcon, as previously mentioned, is a simulator ride that puts you in the cockpit of the most famous starship in the galaxy. The cockpits (there are multiple that can be loaded at a time, but they won’t say how many) fit six people. Two pilots, two gunners and two engineers. You’re all responsible for how smoothly the Falcon completes its mission, but it always completes, one way or another.

The simulation is run on the Unreal engine and the mechanics are a much upgraded version of what powers Star Tours. Each cockpit has its own real‑time rendering system for a multi‑projection feedback hub across five screens that completely surround the cockpit seamlessly. Any decision you make as a member of the crew has to result in an action on screen, and it’s all real-time, so none of the major stuff is pre-rendered. While Disney itself was fairly cagey about what powers the ‘magic’ behind this system, Nvidia talked a bit about it last year.

Black Spire Outpost is the name of the village

“Walt Disney Imagineering teamed with NVIDIA and Epic Games to develop new technology to drive its attraction. When it launches, riders will enter a cockpit powered with a single BOXX chassis packed with eight high-end NVIDIA Quadro P6000 GPUs, connected via Quadro SLI.

Quadro Sync synchronizes five projectors for the creation of dazzling ultra-high resolution, perfectly timed displays to fully immerse the riders in the world of planet Batuu.

Working with NVIDIA and Epic Games, the Imagineering team created a custom multi-GPU implementation for Unreal Engine. This new code was returned to the Epic Games team and will help influence how multi-GPUs function for their engine.

“We worked with NVIDIA engineers to use Quadro-specific features like Mosaic and cross-GPU reads to develop a renderer that had performance characteristics we needed,” says Bei Yang, technology studio executive at Disney Imagineering. “Using the eight connected GPUs allowed us to achieve performance unlike anything before.””

The effect in person is wild, though we only saw a static-ish scene of the hangar bay.

Entering the cockpit was an out-of-body situation for me, I’m not ashamed to admit it. It’s wild how right it feels. The six seats all feature belts and the familiar weathered look. More importantly, each of them has a wide array of buttons either to the side or in front of them if you’re one of the pilots. Every square or rectangular button has a light up ring around it which will indicate which of them you need to press for the best result during your moments to act during the ride. The toggles have small LED indicators built into one end that do the same indicating job. I am happy to report that the large, satisfyingly chunky toggle switches and satisfyingly clicks buttons have been very well chosen and require enough force to push without stress but with satisfaction. They’re the right switches.

And yes, one of the right-hand pilot’s jobs is to pull back the lever to jump to hyperspace, and that pull is very satisfying.

This is how you will ‘control’ the falcon. Left and right or throttles for the pilots, depending on seats, and buttons to push to shoot down Tie Fighters or put out fires if those Tie Fighters get missed.

Though every flight will have its own permutations, you cannot ‘fail’ a flight on the Falcon. You just come through either pristine or more battered, depending on your efficiency. And the people of Black Spire Outpost will react to your team’s performance flying the Falcon — either you all do well or you all don’t.

“If our guests so choose, and they opt in, we will be able to have some level of persistent interaction with them, not only throughout their day as they accumulate experiences, but on the attractions or as they meet certain characters,” says Bob Chapek, Chairman of Parks, Experiences and Products. “Not only will we be able to remember that and then interact with the guest accordingly, but over the course of several visits, we’ll remember what they did the previous visit. As a result, we’ll have much more of a close, tight interaction.”

One big question mark that still remains undisclosed despite my inquiries, is how, exactly the proprietors or characters will remember this. They seemed to indicate that it was not the PLAY Disney app that would do this, so more yet to be revealed. Perhaps a system like the Magic Bands out in the Florida parks that has yet to be discussed.

The land is a ride

The way that Imagineering thinks of Galaxy’s Edge is that there are three main attractions. The 2 rides and the land itself. In addition to the 5 restaurants and 5 shops, there are two distinct biomes and the land is embedded with activities that are accessed through the PLAY Disney app. When you enter the land, it switches over to a Star Wars mode, allowing you access to several tools including Scan, Translate, Tune and Jobs. Through these, and dozens of bluetooth beacons located throughout Batuu, you can activate droids, download schematics from hacking ships, download secret messages from door panels and listen to transmissions from three factions inclined the First Order, the Resistance and the Smugglers. You can also translate some of the alien languages that are spoken or written throughout the land.

You can choose to complete jobs for these factions, and there is an over-arching meta game that allows you to use scannable to try to tilt the balance from the Resistance to the First Order throughout your visit — rewarding you with digital collectibles. There are even missions to complete in the app during ride queues. 1 in Smuggler’s Run and 2 in the Rise queue for both sides of the conflict.

The vision is that if you become aligned, for instance, with the Smuggler’s faction, you could even be called out by name by Hondo while in the queue for the ride. “Hey, is Matthew there?”

This is an absolutely enormous undertaking. And walking through the village of Black Spire or the outskirts showed us construction still very much underway. Disney is pushing hard day and night to finish what is going to be a massively big risk for it on the storytelling and immersion front. While the world of Star Wars seems like a gimme from a fan point of view, that attention also means that Disney has to get everything so right from the beginning. It’s telling that even on our tour, workers continued to cut, paint and plaster. Summer isn’t very far away and there’s a long way to go to Batuu.

Via Matthew Panzarino https://techcrunch.com

[toomanysinks]

How Disney Built Star Wars, in real life

From the moment that Disney announced its acquisition of LucasFilm, the question on every fan’s mind was “when will they build Star Wars in real life?”

While most assumed that they would do it eventually, they probably weren’t aware that in 2013 even as work began on the first movie of the ‘final’ trilogy, work also commenced on the early planning of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. That initial team fo a handful of people would eventually grow to over 4,000.

Over the course of the past 5 years, Walt Disney Imagineering has been hard at work making the world of Star Wars a reality on Earth. In two locations, California and Florida, Black Spire outpost on the planet of Batuu is now under construction. It’s an enormous several-billion-dollar bet that people will want to visit a place very similar to the ones that they’ve seen on the screen for decades.

In some ways, this project seems like the safest bet ever. The confluence of rabid fans of Star Wars and disciples of Disney’s particular flavor of amusement park alone feels like it could fuel the demand for the two park additions for years. But the ambitions of Walt Disney Imagineering staff and Parks management are stratospherically high for what is the largest single land expansion ever in a US Disney park. And the financial results required from these additions will require Disney to draw not just the loyalist crowd, but to convince a wide and deep array of park visitors to spend the day in a hyper-faithful reconstruction of a fictional far away galaxy.

To do this, Disney’s Imagineers have spent over five years planning and two years building the outposts that will open this year in its two US parks.

Last week, I got to spend three days talking to those Imagineers, partners from Lucasfilm and management about the inspiration, planning, tools, design and construction efforts. I also visited the construction site of Star Wars Land in Disneyland, California to take in the size, scale and environment of Batuu and its two major attractions.

“We’re really being very ambitious with what we do with Star Wars,” says Disney Portfolio Executive at Walt Disney Imagineering, Scott Trowbridge. “This location is over 14 acres. It is basically a small city in our parks. All the amazing architecture…the ships, the aliens, the droids, the creatures, everything that makes Star Wars Star Wars, all coming together so that our guests can have an opportunity to live that dream of living their Star Wars story.”

At risk of being too agreeable to marketing speak, I’d have to agree with this particular statement. What is being built here has little parallel in terms of immersion and ambition in an amusement park or out. And it’s going to blow Star Wars fans, casual and involved, away.

The nuts and bolts

If you’re familiar with what Disney has said about its “Star Wars lands” so far, then some of the following might be a refresher, but I think that some context about what they’re trying to build is important before we talk about the how.

Covering 14 acres individually at both Disneyland, Anaheim and Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Florida, the lands are pieces of the planet Batuu, and they host Black Spire Outpost, a village with shops, eateries, villagers and a First Order advance post. Outside of the village, you can also find the Resistance encampment with its ad-hoc infrastructure, rag-tag starfighters and equipment. The lands house two major attractions — Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance and Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run.

The entire land has been designed from the ground up to be immersive. The Disney cast members that inhabit Batuu will dress in authentic costumes and can pick and choose their own garments and accessories from a selection. They will be encouraged to have an understanding of the village, the various factions at play from the resistance to the First Order to the underbelly of smugglers operating there. The food is completely new, and it all has backstory as well. You won’t have pork ribs, you’ll have Kaadu ribs — the non-famous creature famously ridden by famously hated Jar Jar Binks. You’ll drink blue (and green) milk and cocktails at the seedy cantina (yes, with alcohol). The signage is all in-universe as much as possible, the products for sale have been created from scratch just for Batuu and will be sold nowhere else — and they all have a ‘found’ or ‘crafted’ vibe with minimal packaging.

The name of the game is transportive.

Transportation to Batuu

One of the over-arching themes throughout the discussions over the course of several days was the concept of transportation. How do you convey the feeling of being transported from the worlds of Disneyland and Earth to the world of Star Wars.

That begins with the decision to make the location for the lands a new planet.

“Why not make a place that is very familiar from the classic Star Wars films, a Tatooine, a Hoth, or one of those places? The answer really is we know those places, we know those stories that happen there, and we know that we’re not in them,” said Trowbridge. “This place, Black Spire Outpost, is an opportunity. It’s designed from the very get‑go to be a place that invites exploration and discovery, a place that invites us to become a character in the world of Star Wars, and, to the extent that we want to, to participate in the stories of Star Wars.”

A multi-purpose transport shuttle docked on top of a large hangar (left) will beckon guests into Docking Bay 7 Food and Cargo

One of the primary drivers for the decision was also to create some sense of equanimity between hardcore fans and casual attendees.

“I want to talk into this land and be in the same level as everyone else, from the really hardcore Star Wars fan to someone who knows nothing about Star Wars,” Managing Story Editor at WDI Margaret Kerrison recalls saying in the first pitch meeting she attended for Star Wars land. “I want to have that urgency to explore, to discover, to run around every corner, and to meet every single droid and alien in this land. I want to not feel like I’m at a disadvantage because I don’t know all the nitty‑gritty details as a hardcore Star Wars fan would know.”

Walking through one of the entrances to Batuu, guests should feel a bit of compression and then decompression, says Executive Creative Director, WDI Chris Beatty. Coming in from Frontierland, Critter Country or just outside Fantasyland, you’re presented with ‘laser cut’ rock tunnel that creates a blank slate that then opens up into a cinematically framed vista that varies depending on your entrance. For the middle tunnel, you get a peek at some of the architecture, for instance and then boom, you’re presented with ships in the foreground, buildings, tall ancient spires, ships perched atop the buildings, canopies sawing in the wind. Shot established, you’re in Black Spire Outpost.

There are several of these ‘reveal’ moments throughout the land. The first time you see the resistance encampment, your first glimpse of the Millennium Falcon. Photographic moments, but also establishing moments, grounding you in the place you’re in.

Having stood in that vantage, even with construction going on all around, I can tell you it’s incredibly effective. There is no hint or trace of the rest of the park here. The vegetation, the meticulous weathering and rockscapes and the eerily familiar yet newly remixed shapes of Star Wars buildings and accessories make you feel like this is another place that you know.

The land is constructed using a blend of familiar techniques and newly minted ones. In some ways, Disney’s Pandora – The World of Avatar at Walt Disney World and its in-theme dining, open spaces and rides feels like a test run for how far it could push themed worlds. Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge feels like an additive result of learnings from a land that has ‘native’ merchandise and foods and tries to keep as much as possible ‘in story’.

Before they could begin to build, though, Imagineers had to build the tools to do so.

Building Star Wars

Headquartered in the compound of low beige and salmon colored buildings making up Grand Central Business Park in Glendale, California, Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI) is a wonderland of mad tinkers, costumers, roboticists, simulations engineers and historians. The only Disney design and development organization founded by Walt Disney himself as WED Enterprises (and later sold to the Disney company in a somewhat controversial move for the time). Since then, it has proven to be so influential around the world through its application of theming and robotics that the term Imagineering is synonymous with the basic concept of world building.

Dok-OndarÕs Den of Antiquities in Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge will feature rare items from across the galaxy for sale, all part of Dok-Ondar’s collection.

One of the things that you have to understand about the way that Imagineering works is that they waste as little effort as possible. The imagination is always a hundred times more creative, complex and ambitious than the reality, and to even get a tiny chunk of that in front of guests Imagineers have to constantly find ways to work within constraints of time, space, money and, yes, the laws of physics.

In order to get the job done, they often build their own tools or cobble together solutions for problems out of a combination of off-the-shelf hardware and custom built components. It feels a bit odd to describe it this way, because there is certainly pride involved, but building for Imagineering is remarkably ego free. It’s not ‘our way or no way’ it’s ‘whatever works’. This commitment to making the illusion complete for the viewer no matter what the source of the solution is has led to some really fascinating advances from Disney R&D and Imagineering.

You only have to look at the procession from a couple of metal slugs attached to a servo through to full on humanoid stunt doubles to see what the kind of teasing out of technical applications to storytelling problems happen inside Imagineering.

For the Galaxy’s Edge project, one of the first problems to be solved was how to manage such a complex undertaking inside WDI and in partnership with LucasFilm.

This was largely due to the major difference between this project and any that Disney has undertaken in the past: the intimate involvement of all departments from the beginning. People from props, set dressing, construction, merchandising, food, ride systems and technical departments all worked together from ideation onwards. On a normal production, they are typically brought in at various phases — but for Batuu, everyone had to be on the same page from the very beginning.

If Disney wanted this to be a truly immersive experience it had to feel organically integrated and the conversation had to be lengthy and continuous so that set design served vending and vending served story and story served ride systems and engineering. They all had to be in lock step.

One of the major tools Imagineering used to keep everyone on the same project page is their BIM (building information modeling) tool. The tool takes a combination of 2D plans, 3D models, infrastructure and set dressing information and combines them into one massive interlocking source of truth for all departments to pull from. Teams were able to drill down from an overview of the land in 3D to the design plans for a specific doorway control panel.

Basically, it’s foundational geometry from across the project that’s then fed into the Unreal engine and presented in 3D. Like a 3D world from a game, but it’s a real place with real plumbing, architecture and technology underneath.

“When we saw the level of complexity that we were faced with when we started this project, we understood that we would need to use all the tools at our disposal. What the plan was is that we would essentially build a digital replica of the entire project. We built the planet before we actually built the planet,” said Sanne Worthing, Manager of BIM & VDC Technology, WDI. “It allows the creative designers to make decisions. It allows our contractors and the guys actually out in the field to make decisions before they actually have to go through and do these things. It gives you a lot of planning time. It helps avoid some of the more complicated and costly problems out in the field.”

BIM allowed the teams to do everything from testing how things would interlock in 3D to seeing where cranes could be placed during construction. The BIM reconstruction also fed into a system that WDI built in virtual reality to simulate the park.

“Using Unreal, we were able to take from all different parts of our attraction and put the moving pieces together. That means putting in our media that we would get from ILM, our partners there, getting our animation for our animated figures. Every piece of our puzzle to create our attraction, we put into a virtual reality simulation,” says April Warren, Show Programmer for WDI. “We’re able to look at it and make quick iterations with our creative team to be able to find things that we wouldn’t find normally until we were in the field and solve those problems early, or to be able to find out something just wasn’t working for us creatively and we wanted to change that.”

WDI has been using its own VR simulation system for a while, I first saw it a couple of years ago when it was being fleshed out. It feels very similar to flying around inside a simulator. It allows the Imagineers to look at the land from all sides, swooping through projects and highlighting elements of various types from infrastructure to set dressing. More importantly, it allows them to get as clear a picture as possible of what it will look like to a guest on the ground. This includes sight lines that play to maximum effect, with forced perspective and seamless presentation while hiding things like heating and cooling units, conduits and ducts and regular Earth buildings.

Theme Park design is is wild — with modeling/VR they know exactly where to place scenic elements to accomplish line-of-sight effects, but as a result from up above the lands kinda look like you fell through the ground in a video game

(pic by @bioreconstruct) pic.twitter.com/61KkufMQ3j

— Cabel (@cabel) February 24, 2019

“We do do a lot of work with sight lines, making sure that when you’re out in the land, where guests are moving through, that the experience is what we intend it to be. That we’re not looking at some ugly AC unit,” says Worthing. “Immersion, and making sure that people feel like they are immersed in this world is super important. BIM is one of the ways that we are able to do that.”

“There’s things from the BIM that have been super [helpful],” says Warren. “We’ve had some back and forth I would say trying to run a vehicle through an area and I go, “oh, there’s a piece of conduit there that I didn’t realize what going to be there, because I got from…BIM.” I can say, “Hey, can we remove that piece of conduit?”

“If we were in the field and we had planned this without that step, we could have been in trouble because we might have hit it.”

A saying that the Imagineers have, says Bei Yang, Technology Studio Exec, WDI, is that it’s “easier to move bits than it is to move Atoms.”

There is a daily review of packages added to BIM, which allows the ride and animatronics team to ‘walk’ inside the attraction regularly before it’s built.

“While we’re only building one building, I promise there are a hundred designs of that building that nobody will ever see,” says Jacqueline King, Producer on Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run. “We get to go into them, and be able to make the best decisions, so that when we start putting rebar into the ground, you’re putting it in the right place. They talk about discovering those walls once you get out in the field later, but for the most part, we’re able to work out a lot of those early on, and completely change layouts to get the best results.”

In addition to using VR simulations driven by BIM, WDI has also begun using it for simulation of the actual rides, but more on that a bit later.

Once the construction pipeline was in place, it was time to start fleshing out the physical world of Batuu, including the architecture, set dressing, props, merchandise, food and inhabitants.

Anima-lectric

As you’d imagine with any high profile Disney Parks property, Batuu will be home to a variety of animated robots, Animatronics, in Imagineering parlance. From droids to shop proprietors to ride pre-show characters, there are a lot of animated figures in Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge.

Since the 80’s, the hydraulics-based animatronics in Disney parks were based on the A-100 chassis. A sort of basic humanoid template. The animatronics on Batuu are all based on a new A-1000 series chassis, which can be configured in a variety of ways at a variety of sizes — with one major difference: electric motors.

Electric motors were pioneered in 2009 with the head of Mr. Lincoln. They’ve since been used in Enchanted Tales with Belle, Frozen Ever After and the Na’ve River Journey attractions. Rocket Raccoon in Guardians of the Galaxy Mission: Breakout is also an electric figure.

 At Savi’s Workshop Ð Handbuilt Lightsabers, guests will have the opportunity to customize and craft their own lightsabers.

Unlike hydraulics, electric motors enable far more precise movements. They can start and stop nearly instantly, have less wind up and wind down times and make for more fluid transitions between directional movements. Plus, you cut the amount of cabling going to the figure in half by eliminating hydraulic lines. This cuts down on figure installation size and control cabinet size, allowing for more interesting placements in scenes that don’t have to allow for covering all of that stuff up and for easier maintenance.

The new figures are smooth, capable and really fun to watch in action.

Here are some of the major AA characters that will inhabit Star Wars land:

Hondo Ohnaka — A Weequay pirate introduced in Clone Wars, Hondo is now the proprietor of Ohnaka Transport Solutions and has been loaned the Millennium Falcon by Chewie for some “deliveries”. The animatronic figure itself is around 7 feet tall and uses the latest in electric motors instead of hydraulics. Hondo’s figure includes around 50 functions (movement points) total and is the second most complicated animatronic in Disney parks. The most complicated, for the record, is the Na’vi Shaman, mentioned above, which has 40 functions in its face alone, not to mention the rest of the body. We had the Shaman at our robotics event a couple of years ago, it’s incredible to watch. Hondo isn’t far behind, with fluid movements, smooth facial contortions and believable interactions between himself and his R5 droid.

DJ R-3X — You know him previously classified as RX-24, or Captain Rex, the pilot over at Star Tours. Now, he’s a DJ at Oga’s Cantina on Batuu. He plays music composed by the Imagineering team and a variety of artists from around the world. All of it is poppy and synth-ey and a bit 80’s, with some classic mixes of Cantina tunes gone by. His torso and arms move to work the controls and dance and he has a three hour cycle of music and dialog to keep patrons entertained. Fun fact, Lucasfilm Creative Executive Matt Martin says he has many, many pages of backstory about how Rex ended up on Batuu.

Dok-Ondar — An Ithorian trader, Don is renowned for his Jedi and Sith artifact collection. I was able to see Dok fully active in the Imagineering animation building and he looks incredible. The figure towers several feet above guests heads as he sits behind his counter and interacts with shop employees. The detail is lovely here, with a rich, smooth set of animations for hands and neck, his whole body rising up and down. The lips along his two mouths ripple as he speaks in a resonant stereophonic voice.

Nien Nunb — A Sullustun pilot famous for copiloting the Millennium Falcon on its mission to destroy the second Death Star in Return of the Jedi. On Batuu he will pilot the transport ship that you board during the Rise of the Resistance attraction.

One of the more minor but no less intriguing characters includes a Dianoga beast which will cameo inside of a water fountain, popping up out of the very murky looking (for show) water intermittently to surprise guests. You’ll also see a ton of animated creatures inside the Creature Stall including fan favorites like the Loth-cat and a Worrt. The Droid Shop is also set to be full of animated droids of all kinds, and its exterior will have droids interacting with guests via the PLAY Disney app and getting a refreshing lubricant bath.

Interestingly, I’m aware of some droid projects that Disney is working on that have not yet appeared in any official reveals. There is a lot more to come in the interactive figure department and Imagineering already has plans to expand Batuu with new experiences. I was also unable to get them to tell me whether the Loth-cat and other small creatures that will be featured here are part of the interactive semi-autonomous Tiny Life project I’ve written about previously.

Black Spire Outpost

The process of animating the figures has also been updated along with the chassis.

“One of the things that went so well on this project is that some of our software partners have developed tools that allow us to import and export data from design software into modeling and animation software,” says Associate Show Mechanical Engineer Victoria Thomas. “We’re able to give them a 3D representation of exactly what the figure is, exactly where the pivots are. They’re able to take that and animate in exactly how fast they want those joints to move. We’re able to get a lot of great feedback like, “Oh, well the shoulder pivot’s kind of off. Is it possible for you to adjust that?”

“Getting that feedback early in the process allows us to change, improvise and adapt and overcome anything that’s going on with the figures.”

The animations, like all of the other data that makes up the land, are hosted inside of BIM. That pre-visualization work saves a lot of heartache and physical fudging on the back end.

“Doing things early allows us to solve problems before they become serious problems. With the Hondo figure specifically, we were able to determine, “Oh, based on his show set and where he is, there’s not enough room for audio in his scene. He needs an onboard speaker,” says Thomas.

“In another scene, we were able to determine, “Oh, there’s large speakers in the scene where we expected a maintenance person to be able to access the figures. If those speakers are there, then you can’t maintenance the base frame.”

Because of BIM and pre‑visualization, we were allowed to do a lot of that. One of the other cool things is that we were able to get motion‑capture data on these figures initially as a way to prove out, how would a human move? How would this look natural? How can we make this look as organic as possible in order to improve the guest experience?”

The resulting figures are some of the best looking creations Disney can currently make, and they’re at the forefront of this pre-visualization work with electric-driven figures. It’s as absolutely close to a real-life Star Wars alien as you’re ever likely to meet.

But the denizens, though cool, aren’t the biggest attraction in Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. That would be, well, the attractions.

The Rides

There are two attractions inside the land. Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run (Falcon from here on out) and Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance (Rise). The Falcon is a simulator type ride that reads like a very, very advanced version of Star Tours that you can actually control in real time with a crew of 6 people. Rise is much harder to explain, and consists of multiple stages of ‘ride’ that, taken together, are best described as an “experiential” attraction.

Developing those rides involves some wild new technology, some known tech applied in new ways, and some really sky high difficulty levels to pull off correctly.

Rise and Simulate

For a while now, Disney has been using VR and augmented reality in various ways to help it design and test rides. At Imagineering in Glendale it has a big simulator room called The Dish to paraphrase myself from my earlier visits, This is a curved chamber that houses multiple high resolution projectors that functions, most simply, as a holodeck. Disney uses it to “see” rides and attractions as a group to make decisions about look and feel.

Millennium Falcon pictured under development 

Users wear a ‘Bowler Hat’ that tracks their movements and walk around inside a space that changes and shifts to match perspectives. We flew through and around Batuu, getting to see, virtually, the vistas we would see the next day when we were at the land physically.

But Disney has also been using VR in more radical ways to simulate their rides. Specifically, they’ve built a full ride-on vehicle that sits inside a warehouse on the Imagineering lot. It’s surrounded in a wide 100 foot long ring by traffic dividers and operates just like the trackless vehicles in Rise.

“We were able to test all of our vehicle motion early using VR,” says April Warren. “Imagine you’re on a vehicle, you’ve got your VR headset, and you are able to see what this attraction is going to look like in the future. We could do that all in real‑time. It was very exciting. I don’t think we could’ve made this attraction without this workflow. We broke the attraction to pieces and could ride it in the facility to really prove out that what we thought we were getting with our vehicle is what we were going to get in the attraction.”

“The great thing was when we got to the actual building things were all installed. We hadn’t been down there before, at least I hadn’t. To walk through that building knowing what we’d seen in VR and go, “Oh, my gosh. I know exactly where I am. I know how to get around this place because I have seen all of this before, and it looks exactly like what I thought it would look like.” It’s been super exciting.”

The rig itself is pretty wild. It’s built out to match the seat layout of the Rise of the Resistance vehicle itself. On board it has enough compute power to push out the visuals to headsets of everyone on board and a motor to run the vehicle around the floor perfectly in sync with those visuals. This gives you the illusion of the ride mixed with the real physicality of moving through space and feeling the pull — a process the imagineers who show us the rig call “Visceralization”. It’s the most bad ass VR sim rig ever.

Disney is clear to note throughout our visit to the sim center that they are not using it to develop VR rides. Rather they are developing physical rides using VR. An important distinction these days with VR becoming more prevalent in the parks.

The Rise of the Resistance ‘experience’ itself is much harder to categorize. On our site tour we got to go through what we are later told is about 1/3 of the total ride (a figure which boggled me). You approach through the Resistance area of Batuu, outside of the village gates. There are star fighters (an X-Wing, an A-Wing, both perfectly replicated from the films) which will be being actively worked on and primed at intervals throughout the day by Resistance members. you enter the queue and walk through chambers which advance from scrubland with railings made out of the ubiquitous Star Wars cabling through to ancient ruins that have been co-opted by the scrappy rebels.

Disney guests will traverse the corridors of a Star Destroyer 

The rooms advance to sections that are ‘laser cut’ through rock as they would be by an army trying to make due in natural and unnatural caverns. Rooms are piled high with equipment of medical, utilitarian and military origin. There is an armory with blasters and pilots uniforms in cages. A room merges the Fast Pass and Standby lines in a communications hub. The entire effect is wildly effective, giving you the feel of walking the cramped halls of a base from the movies.

This queue, by the way, features a low stone bench cut into a big section of the middle of it, allowing a place for families and kids to rest. A personal victory, Executive Creative Director John Larena jokes, as a dad with kids who knows what it’s like to wait in long lines.

From there, we’re led into a briefing room that will feature an animatronic BB-8 on a high cabinet that interacts with a video element of Poe Dameron, your escort on the mission. Other appearances will be made by a hologram of Rey and a message from Finn.

From there, you make your way across a landing pad as Poe’s X-Wing warms up to your right. You walk towards and board a U-Wing transport ship with a group of fellow passengers. A simulated takeoff and flight, facilitated by your Nien Nunb and Poe, commence with everyone standing troop transport style. You are quickly captured and pulled aboard a Star Destroyer.

Then, through some ride magic I won’t disclose here, your door opens to what is one of the most stunning ride reveals I can ever remember: a full size Star Destroyer hangar bay, complete with expansive black floor, Tie Fighters on loading racks and, yes, an absolutely enormous window opening up onto space outside with (eventually) a view of the First Order fleet.

Disney guests will traverse the corridors of a Star Destroyer

After your moment of awe, you are split up into groups by First Order officers — played by real cast members in uniform by the way — and led down perfectly rendered corridors to a holding cell the spitting image of the one Poe Dameron was held in. At this point, you have an encounter with a nearby Kylo Ren and your adventure continues.

This is where we left off on our tour, and we hadn’t even made it to the vehicle portion yet, which features encounters with more First Order troops, AT-ATs and more that they have yet to reveal.

It’s an enormous attraction, with a sense of scale that goes beyond anything I’ve seen Disney do. And it’s only one of the two major attractions.

Flying the Falcon

The other, of course, is the Falcon ride. There have been tons of questions about this one, so I’ll try to sate some appetites.

Approaching the Falcon from one of the entrances to Batuu for the first time is a surreal experience. This is a full-size 110-foot version of the ship as you’ve seen it in the movies. It’s meticulously detailed and acts as a center-piece for the area. The ship will periodically vent out gas and Hondo’s tinkerers are constantly working on its engines. It’s a living thing inside the land, a character.

Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run 

As you enter the maintenance bay, you pass into the queue inside Ohnaka’s Transport Solutions. Climbing gantries through a working shipping and machine shop, getting views of the Falcon from every angle. Until, finally, you burst out into the oh-so-familiar weathered ‘chiclet’ corridors of the Falcon herself. The holding area is the very well known common area of the ship with the chess board (not currently holographically active) and communications console. Everything in this space is meticulously accurate down to the bolts. Break out your magnifying glasses and soak it in, you’re on the Millennium Falcon.

From here, you’re handed boarding cards in groups of six and wait to be ushered down the corridor to your waiting cockpit.

The famous chess room

The Falcon, as previously mentioned, is a simulator ride that puts you in the cockpit of the most famous starship in the galaxy. The cockpits (there are multiple that can be loaded at a time, but they won’t say how many) fit six people. Two pilots, two gunners and two engineers. You’re all responsible for how smoothly the Falcon completes its mission, but it always completes, one way or another.

The simulation is run on the Unreal engine and the mechanics are a much upgraded version of what powers Star Tours. Each cockpit has its own real‑time rendering system for a multi‑projection feedback hub across five screens that completely surround the cockpit seamlessly. Any decision you make as a member of the crew has to result in an action on screen, and it’s all real-time, so none of the major stuff is pre-rendered. While Disney itself was fairly cagey about what powers the ‘magic’ behind this system, Nvidia talked a bit about it last year.

Black Spire Outpost is the name of the village

“Walt Disney Imagineering teamed with NVIDIA and Epic Games to develop new technology to drive its attraction. When it launches, riders will enter a cockpit powered with a single BOXX chassis packed with eight high-end NVIDIA Quadro P6000 GPUs, connected via Quadro SLI.

Quadro Sync synchronizes five projectors for the creation of dazzling ultra-high resolution, perfectly timed displays to fully immerse the riders in the world of planet Batuu.

Working with NVIDIA and Epic Games, the Imagineering team created a custom multi-GPU implementation for Unreal Engine. This new code was returned to the Epic Games team and will help influence how multi-GPUs function for their engine.

“We worked with NVIDIA engineers to use Quadro-specific features like Mosaic and cross-GPU reads to develop a renderer that had performance characteristics we needed,” says Bei Yang, technology studio executive at Disney Imagineering. “Using the eight connected GPUs allowed us to achieve performance unlike anything before.””

The effect in person is wild, though we only saw a static-ish scene of the hangar bay.

Entering the cockpit was an out-of-body situation for me, I’m not ashamed to admit it. It’s wild how right it feels. The six seats all feature belts and the familiar weathered look. More importantly, each of them has a wide array of buttons either to the side or in front of them if you’re one of the pilots. Every square or rectangular button has a light up ring around it which will indicate which of them you need to press for the best result during your moments to act during the ride. The toggles have small LED indicators built into one end that do the same indicating job. I am happy to report that the large, satisfyingly chunky toggle switches and satisfyingly clicks buttons have been very well chosen and require enough force to push without stress but with satisfaction. They’re the right switches.

And yes, one of the right-hand pilot’s jobs is to pull back the lever to jump to hyperspace, and that pull is very satisfying.

This is how you will ‘control’ the falcon. Left and right or throttles for the pilots, depending on seats, and buttons to push to shoot down Tie Fighters or put out fires if those Tie Fighters get missed.

Though every flight will have its own permutations, you cannot ‘fail’ a flight on the Falcon. You just come through either pristine or more battered, depending on your efficiency. And the people of Black Spire Outpost will react to your team’s performance flying the Falcon — either you all do well or you all don’t.

“If our guests so choose, and they opt in, we will be able to have some level of persistent interaction with them, not only throughout their day as they accumulate experiences, but on the attractions or as they meet certain characters,” says Bob Chapek, Chairman of Parks, Experiences and Products. “Not only will we be able to remember that and then interact with the guest accordingly, but over the course of several visits, we’ll remember what they did the previous visit. As a result, we’ll have much more of a close, tight interaction.”

One big question mark that still remains undisclosed despite my inquiries, is how, exactly the proprietors or characters will remember this. They seemed to indicate that it was not the PLAY Disney app that would do this, so more yet to be revealed. Perhaps a system like the Magic Bands out in the Florida parks that has yet to be discussed.

The land is a ride

The way that Imagineering thinks of Galaxy’s Edge is that there are three main attractions. The 2 rides and the land itself. In addition to the 5 restaurants and 5 shops, there are two distinct biomes and the land is embedded with activities that are accessed through the PLAY Disney app. When you enter the land, it switches over to a Star Wars mode, allowing you access to several tools including Scan, Translate, Tune and Jobs. Through these, and dozens of bluetooth beacons located throughout Batuu, you can activate droids, download schematics from hacking ships, download secret messages from door panels and listen to transmissions from three factions inclined the First Order, the Resistance and the Smugglers. You can also translate some of the alien languages that are spoken or written throughout the land.

You can choose to complete jobs for these factions, and there is an over-arching meta game that allows you to use scannable to try to tilt the balance from the Resistance to the First Order throughout your visit — rewarding you with digital collectibles. There are even missions to complete in the app during ride queues. 1 in Smuggler’s Run and 2 in the Rise queue for both sides of the conflict.

The vision is that if you become aligned, for instance, with the Smuggler’s faction, you could even be called out by name by Hondo while in the queue for the ride. “Hey, is Matthew there?”

This is an absolutely enormous undertaking. And walking through the village of Black Spire or the outskirts showed us construction still very much underway. Disney is pushing hard day and night to finish what is going to be a massively big risk for it on the storytelling and immersion front. While the world of Star Wars seems like a gimme from a fan point of view, that attention also means that Disney has to get everything so right from the beginning. It’s telling that even on our tour, workers continued to cut, paint and plaster. Summer isn’t very far away and there’s a long way to go to Batuu.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/27/how-disney-built-star-wars-in-real-life/