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sweetlikehoneystingslikeabee · 11 months

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Halloween HCS - Rogues Party

Alright everybody it's that time of year. My personal favorite time of year, the spooky season. So what better way to celebrate than to write Halloween headcanons for all the rogues? Going for general plus what they're doing this year specifically. Also surprise, I've added Music Meister (Clarence Rinette fan name is from @itsmalachitenow)

TW: spooky shit, murder, gore

Riddler

Thinks himself the belle of the ball, so to speak. Decked out in full elaborate costume. He has a ridiculous budget for this. Sometimes he stays in and gives out candy, but normally, he either wants to set a huge heist or go out to party. He needs to peacock every once in a while, or emotionally he'll start to wither. Matching costumes with his s/o are a must ;)

This year, he's assisting Jonathan in his haunted house venture (discussed below). The moment Jonathan announced to the dork squad what he'd be doing, all of them teamed up in their own ways to assist in making a horrific Halloween experience for the people of Gotham. Edward put himself in charge of animatronics and robotics.

The theme ended up being a literal haunted house, the entire building one giant horror maze save for several control rooms and employee areas- Which means a lot of hidden hydraulics in the walls and moving pieces Edward gets to crack his knuckles and puts together. He even rigs a set-up for an actor to fly across a room in ghostly pallor.

His pièce de résistance, however, is the start of the maze in the Library that has a hidden passageway that opens to the inside walls of the house. That plus some spooky elevators that transport guests to different levels- Jonathan couldn't have asked for better technical aspects.

The whole night he's hanging out in the control room, cackling when one of his devices gets someone. There will be parties on other nights he'll go to. He wouldn't miss this for the world.

Penguin

When he was younger he disliked Halloween because of bullying. That his face was horrific enough to scare anyone. It killed the fantasy and fun of wearing a costume. Even as his mother kissed his forehead and asked why he wasn't going out with friends-

Now he quite enjoys it. He doesn't really dress up per say, but there's always some fun parties to go to. Have some drinks, mingle, make some connections for the next big crime he's planning, then pass out in a pile of Halloween candy wrappers on his fancy chaise lounge. He'll do his best to save you your favorite if you tell him.

Now, if his s/o wants to dress up, it's a slightly different story. He'll be surprisingly anxious about it. Certainly it's not a lack of money or that the idea is displeasing to him. He doesn't want to be an "ugly" monster, but he "can't" play someone handsome. There's definitely a mental block there that he can't quite get past emotionally.

HOWEVER. If you suggest a mobster for him and being his little moll/arm candy? Period piece? He can do that. Big old cigar and everything. Probably commissions Jervis for the work. The guy will make sure it's all accurate.

He rolls up to the Halloween party at Harley's place with a box of "goodies" he has one of his underlings haul in. Expensive chocolates filled with liquor. Don't ask where he got it. Tonight is gonna be a fun night.

Mad Hatter

Halloween is a special time for Jervis when he can get really wild with costuming. Besides patching and creating things for other rogues, of course. If there is any kind of contest, he is likely going to win it. In fact, he's been banned from several around the city for winning too many times. If his s/o doesn't ask him to do their costume, he will pout a little. Even if he can't do the entire thing, let him help! He has an eye for this, you see. And maybe one year, they'll dress up as Alice, for him?

Of course he gets put in charge of costuming for the Haunted House production. Period accurate post-WWI clothing? Give him something difficult to do, why don't you? He does have to be told to keep eyes off some of the scare actors because they're all so pretty and lovely and look so good in his outfits, maybe they'd like some of his special tea- Jonathan helps him keep on point. There will be no Alice searches here.

For the majority of the night, he's manning the backstage area with Edward. Checking cameras that things are running smoothly. Then being available for actors who need a touch up! When one of the actresses comes in crying because some creep grabbed at her, Jervis is scuttling into the behind the scenes walls before Edward can stop him.

He comes back, slightly ruffled and helps the young woman calm down with (non-drugged) tea before sending her back off ready to go. The dork squad can drag the creep out from under one of the beds later and really put the fear into him. Maybe they'll kill him. Perhaps just a maiming. Depends on how lenient they feel later.

He's going to keep the costumes afterwards for different potential projects later unless an actor gets particularly attached. You never know when you'll need something like this!

Scarecrow

His Halloween consists of three things depending upon the year and the current situation: An elaborate spooky plot, a Halloween party to top all others, or a haunted house. Sometimes involving fear toxin! Sometimes not! Again, depends on how he's feeling.

Originally, he had intended on doing everything for himself for the haunted house. He's more than capable of doing it all himself, certainly. Yet, when he mentioned it to his closer companions (or as some call them, "the dork squad"), they all insisted on helping him. Annoying but... he supposes it's rather nice to enjoy this holiday with friends outside of Arkham. He's very clear, however, this concept is his and he has final say.

The story... Oh, he has fun with this. An old spinster and her daughter waiting for the prodigal son to return home from the war... several years too late. The daughter lures inhabitants to the home where the two women overpower them to keep them "forever."

His favorite part of the haunted house besides the writing, is the cellar. As the participants have been led upstairs, then faked out down to the cellar- it's a graveyard of bodies buried in the walls and the ground. Writhing. Trying to get out. They exit with the serial killer chasing them out of the hatch that leads back outdoors. With a ramp for accessibility, of course.

It's a hit! There's a line out to the street and the ten dollar ticket entry fee is definitely racking up some nice change as a bonus. He sets himself up as a scarecrow in the field at the exit, giving one last scare to the guests as they leave. He didn't even need to pump fear toxin in this time!

At the end of the night, the dork squad has drinks after the closing and Jonathan has to admit it wouldn't have been the same without his friends.

Reads "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" at least once. As is tradition.

Music Meister

Normally, Clarence Rinette is quite busy this time of year! If he's not involved with a stage production, he's decorating his home to the nines for trick-or-treaters. Big crafty, theatrical nonsense. Don't ask him how he paid for all this (he got an amazing deal through some vocal persuasion-). Someone once tried to suggest becoming a scare actor- but the truth is if he scared a child, it might actually make him cry. SO! He couldn't be a full on jumping at people scare actor.

Then he hears about Jonathan's plans for the season. Oh-ho-ho! A haunted house? For him? ("No," Jonathan quips, "it's not for you at all-") Well, he's got to be involved in this. It's a theatrical production-! ("It's not a full on production-" Jonathan informs him) ALRIGHT- but it's environmental storytelling. That's set-design. That's him!

People might not expect it of him, but he's done a bit of everything in the theater world. Backstage, lighting, sound, set design and building- and of course as a singer and lead, where he truly belongs. Yet, he's having a field day bringing in furniture for the haunted house. Setting up spiderwebs and aging some of the walls and props. Atmospheric sounds and smells for some of the rooms.

He's also in charge of assisting Jervis with makeup and making sure actors are ready- Before dressing up as an actor himself, you know. Gives himself a guide role in the Library to hype people up with the "history" of the house. Plus the hidden passageway reveal. Loves every second of it.

Victor Zsasz

Hardly registers Halloween. Every day is Halloween to this guy. Look at the people he associates with! He's surrounded by dead things all the time. How is this one time of year really that much different except everyone else is on the same page? What, he's supposed to dress up? He's got killing business to do.

Picture it. His target is walking around Gotham, feeling tipsy in their angel costume. The biggest Halloween party in town always spills out into the streets. A figure is closely following them in a full latex mask and black outfit. "Fake" machete at their side. The angel stumbles into an alleyway, the figure following close behind. The figure is Zsasz, in case you didn't guess, and he's got an angel to carve up for dinner. Cuts their heart in half as he leaves it next to their corpse. Takes a couple of their teeth for souvenirs. The rest he'll toss in the harbor. Have fun identifying that, GCPD.

If for some reason he IS home, he'll pass out candy to kids. Hawaiian shirt to cover his chest of scars. Spooks teens away that he thinks are too old. Gives handfuls of candy to everyone else. Has a straight face for every single person and the parents are definitely checking that candy when they get home (it's fine).

Might be convinced to dress up if his s/o really begs. He'd like it if they dressed up in something suggestive (for him) but he'd understand if they didn't want to. He will let them know that whatever they wear, he's probably taking it off with his knife by the end of the night.

Killer Croc

Normally, he actually doesn't like Halloween much. People assume his face is a scary costume which, frankly, is a pretty awful feeling. Sure, he can walk around easier, but it doesn't stop the stares. Now people feel inclined to ask him for photos. Or worse, they just take them without asking. More than usual.

Several parents at the daycare he sometimes works security at decide to do group trick-or-treating. They tell him he doesn't have to join in or... you know, he probably has plans, nevermind- He's already agreeing. Chaperone, he can do that. Better than staying home to watch the tube and not answer the door all night. He always leaves a bowl of candy but they always end up knocking anyways.

One of the kids gives him kitty ears and he rolls with it. If anyone asks, he makes a graveled, growling "meow" in his voice that makes the children giggle. Waylon watches the groups of people around them, glaring if any of them even look like they might try to pinch someones wallet or start bullying.

There is one Incident that occurs at a place with a porch in the downtown area. Waylon recognizes it from a mile away. A guy in a reaper costume is sitting on a chair. The other college kids are drinking beers telling kids to go up. That it's safe. They won't get scared. Then the man in costume scares the life out of them to the raucous laughter of all of them.

One of the parents seems to be trying to ask them if the children are going to get scared. Of course the people at the house lies. Instead of guiding the children away, however, Waylon grabs one of the kids by the hand and steps onto the porch to the man in costume. Leans down and gives his best crackling "meow" into the masked face of the man. Do it. Scare this fucking kid. He can smell the fear on the reaper as the kid pulls him away.

"Don't scare any more kids." He tells the college students. Shaking, they nod before going to check on their friend. Genuinely, he's very proud of himself for handling it in a way that didn't phase the kids.

Harley Quinn

If she's dating someone, there's a 90% chance they're doing some kind of matching costume situation. It's like. The rule for couples! They'll be really cute or really scary or both! Joker would NEVER do anything like this with her no matter how much she begged and pleaded. Consider this part of her getting to just be happy with herself and the things he wants to do with her life.

This year, she is throwing a party and it is going to be talked about for years afterwards. She figured if Jon isn't doing it this year, it's her time. She and Ivy attend his haunted house the night before in support. At one point she almost jumps into her friends arms with a particularly well timed jump scare out of the wall.

The theme for her party (that no one is expected to dress for) is undead glitz and glamor. We're talking the Hollywood Forever Cemetery kind of style. There's skeletons dressed in 40s and 50s red carpet affair around the apartment. Harley herself is a zombified Marylin Monroe type. Curled blonde hair and full makeup, one side of her face "split" to show fake teeth on her cheek.

There is a photo station for everyone attending with a camera she borrowed from Edward for high quality shots. Plus a polaroid. For funsies! It has props and a cardboard standee that Harley painted herself to look like an old fashioned hotel ballroom.

There's old halloween movies playing in one room for people who need a break. Food on the table in one room. Another is playing some spooky music for dancing. Everyone has a little something for them! Everyone gets a tad too drunk but overall it's a great time.

Poison Ivy

Pamela is always doing a sexy costume. She and Selina have a slight competition each year on who can show off the most tasteful amount of cleavage in an outfit and have the most heads turn. It's not malicious or catty (ba-dum), but rather a friendly thing where it's the two of them in on the joke. One year Harley convinced them to do a very cute-sy group look as the Gotham City Sirens. There's several lovely posed photos from the beginning of the night and then a very drunk selfie of the three of them at a pizza place at the end of the night. The latter is Pamela's lock screen on her phone.

For the party, Harley asked for some minor assistance which roughly translates to "keep me reigned in or I'll go way overboard." A lot of shopping and keeping in budget. Dressing up the skeletons and helping to decorate. She even allowed Harley to borrow some of her "spooky" looking plants to add to the aesthetic.

Pamela asked Waylon (who already had plans) for some recipes and added her own recipes to the mix. There's some that are more elevated since it is an adult party. There are plenty, however, that are incredibly cheesy- like crushed oreos to mimic graveyard dirt. She dresses up as a spooky Mae West with floral/vine theming. Full curves on display. There's several non-rogues who try to hit on her and she kicks them from the party.

Two-Face

His costumes are usually incredibly on the nose. Angel/Devil. Black and white vs color. One year they even did Roger and Jessica Rabbit from "Who framed Roger Rabbit?" Before you ask, obviously Jessica was played by Harv, one fake tit barely held in a dress. What normally starts out as a night out going to a party ends up with very drunk Halloween karaoke where Two-Face sings duets, both parts.

If they have an s/o, the dynamic changes a little. Do they want to do a trio costume? A couple costume and Harv and Harvey have to just agree on one harmonious look? Honestly they're fair game with whatever. It's not often they've had a third that wants to be involved in the holidays with them. Being a kind of sort-of trio can complicate things or put people off.

This year in particular they were a blend of rollerskating Ken and white fur coat Ken from the new Barbie movie. It is... hideous. It is garish. Who the hell agreed to make this- Harv is struggling with the one rollerskate on his side but at least Harvey has them standing upright. He agreed on a whim to be white fur coat ken and now it's kind of itchy.

The photos at the party, however, are fire and Harley makes copies for herself because it's so delightful. In hindsight, they had so much fun and it was one of the best years.

they do sing "Barbie Girl" by Aqua and "Barbie World" from the movie with Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice as a theme by the end of the night. There is video.

Black Mask

Ironic or no, he loves Halloween. The mythos of wearing the face of a monster to prevent yourself from being haunted or taken by spirits? That's SO his thing. Before the incident in which he "gained" his new face, he would drop insane amounts of money for costumes and sfx. Movie-quality for the big parties at Sionis. Due to being a makeup company, they had some big ones over the years for Halloween.

Now he tends to get busy, but appreciates the masks on the market. If there's a particularly good one he finds that can be set permanently, he'll add it to his collection. If an s/o happens to show him scare maze videos with their different sets and makeup, he might actually find a special interest in it.

When he finds out Harley is throwing the Halloween party this year, he's throwing his own opposing party. A better party. A party with blackjack. And booze!

The party ends up being a lot of underground folks and their partners trying to out-look each other and network. If Roman doesn't have a partner at this point, he has some arm candy in a "sexy" whatever costume to make him look good. When a partner is in the mix- he gets to drop the money on THEM on wild costume and sfx shit. Think of Heidi Klum Halloween but a team effort. Plus bonus: to do the sfx, he'll have to make a mold of your face that he gets to keep and look at amongst his collection.

Mr. Freeze

He's working, leave him alone.

Used to really like passing out candy to the kids with Nora. Fell out of it for a long time. Some years due to incarceration. Others, because of his own mourning. Now he tends to be working towards a cure in solitude far away from civilization to not be bothered for things like holidays.

What he does this year is very dependent on if he's seeing someone or not. If he's seeing someone, he rather wants to stay in and celebrate "normally." Small decorations around the house. A bowl of candy and he dresses up as a space man- The two of you sit in front of the house passing out candy. He delights seeing the kids and complimenting them on their costumes.

If he's by himself, he ends up going to Harley's party and sitting by himself with a drink in his hand for most of it. So awkward and uncomfortable but there is something about his friends not wanting him to be alone. They convince him to a group photo that he ends up framing to put in his lab next to Nora's picture.

Either way, Christmas is his time, so the moment it hits midnight October 31st, everything Halloween is GONE. Now that he's celebrating holidays this year, he's had to restrain himself hard-core so he's not that guy rushing everyone to Christmas.

Ra's al-Ghul

Does Ra's really celebrate holidays? Not unless he's with someone where that's important to them. Let's be honest, he's so old, he was there for some of these celebrations in their infancy.

His idea of celebrating Halloween is recounting the traditions surrounding it. And getting really creepy and ancient with it. I'm talking Samhain kind of thing.

He does not give out candy. If his s/o is into that, he'll kind of participate and not really Get It. Don't expect dressing up, either.

Lots of Edgar Allen Poe readings.

Bane

Didn't celebrate Halloween as a child and constantly forgets about it as an adult. Waylon reminds him to have a bowl of candy the week before because otherwise, Bane won't have anything. This has resulted in him opening the door to some very irate children wondering why he's a weirdo with no candy. Children are harsh, they'll tell you!

If he's out and about for Halloween doing villain stuff, people compliment his Luchador costume and he dies a little inside. While it sucks for him, it is one of the funniest things to see in person. No one is scared of the luchador in Gotham. The children are downright delighted. They want photos with him. There's multiple kids that run up to him speaking the most rapid-fire spanish you've ever heard in your life. There's several in their own luchador costumes that are losing their tiny minds at him. Changes his mood immensely for the better.

He absolutely gives extra candy for cute costumes and little kids, the sucker. He sees a toddler dressed as a pig and he's just cooing "pobrecito cerdo...."

Might go to Harleys party once the kids stop coming. Just to say hi and grab a beer. Feels pretty happy with himself.

#SORRY THIS TOOK SO LONG THERE'S SO MANY OF THEM #foxwriting #batman rogues #riddler #penguin dc #dc scarecrow #dc mad hatter #poison ivy #Harley Quinn #music meister #killer croc #Bane #victor zsasz #black mask #mr. freeze #ra's al ghul #two-face #Halloween 2023

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fave-fight · 1 year

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ROUND 1, MATCH 9

NO MAGIC, POWERS, OR WEAPONS

Utatane Piko:

“Wow a vocaloid with an actual last name what a shocker *AHEM* Was made by Sony (yes morbius-releasing Sony made a vocaloid), was unfortunately released RIGHT NEXT TO two other way more popular vocaloids, ended up becoming half-obscure and more people know about him now that he's been discontinued. Yippee 💥”

“literally the most pathetic a boy can get discontinued (he is literally already losing) stuck in v2 forever and has no eng voicebank still assigned meme by fandom silly another vocaloid was meant to be his counterpart but they got split due to their original company going bankrupt sony hates him (yes hes owned by sony) sony please revive our baby boy :[”

“Imagine if a discontinued computer program won, just imagine, that would b cool”

“He deserves to win because he sadly probably won't ever get a voice update, and the little babyman deserves at least something good to happen to him.”

“Discontinued robot man. Let him kill.”

“ROBOT SWAG!! very skrunkly, looks really fucking tired in his official v2 art, dicontinued please give them some justice he has a beautiful voice :(”

Jonathan Sims:

“It would be really funny if he and Jonah Magnus both got in so John could literally strange his boss to death. That would be so much fun. He should lose to everyone else tho bc he is doomed by the narrative to always take the L”

“Listen. Listen this is a fistfight, im not sure if his all knowing fear god bullshit powers will work here. If he can’t smite people. If he can’t Know things about them and scare them to death. If it’s just a fistfight of pure ability. He is going to get beat up so badly but I think he’ll live. Jon’s sturdy. He had a rib taken out. Was kidnapped and forcibly moisturised by an evil ringmaster puppet. He is… the fandom interpretation is that he’s skinny. Thin. His boyfriend is the strong one. Jonathan Sims would probably lose in a fistfight -he’s Just A Guy without the antichrist shit- but it would be so fucking funny. He might win. He might lose. It’s 2:18 AM here and I cannot sleep.”

“He has an endless supply of disdain and is so willing to use it Especially if there's Martin He HATES Martin Martin can do no good Let me tell you, that Martin... Wait, where'd you go?”

#fight fight fight #round 1 #tournament poll #poll tournament #poll #polls #utatane piko #piko utatane #vocaloid #jonathan sims #the magnus archives

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sweeter-innocence-fics · 1 year

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My Sweetest Downfall - Chapter Six

Pairing: Eddie Munson x Reader

Work Summary:

Eddie’s back from the Upside Down, but things aren’t exactly how he left them. Hawkins is in pieces, his friends are scattered and the love of his life is… pregnant?

Eddie Munson x Harrington!Reader

Chapters: Prologue 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Epilogue

Rating: Mature

Word Count: 3326

Read on AO3.

Masterlists.

Taglist: @mrs-kai-anderson @ang3l1te @missryerye @eddiesgirlforever @harrys-tittie @munsonmoonshine86

Taglist info

Previous Chapter

Notes:

warnings for medical stuff, pregnancy stuff, allusions to King Steve, bullying, drug mentions, choking, mind control, violence

---

~ TWO MONTHS EARLIER ~

You were in a car again, driving to a clinic, although under much better circumstances than last time, because Steve was behind the wheel. You were going to find out your baby’s gender today.

After the stunt your parents tried to pull, Steve had taken you over to Hopper and Joyce’s place. You had stayed with Joyce and the kids, while Hop, Steve and Jonathan, as well as Hopper’s Russian friend Dmitri, went back to your house to talk to your parents.

None of them would tell you what happened, just that your parents were leaving town again. You couldn’t help but be grateful.

The two of you had stayed the night (Steve taking the couch, you commandeering Will’s room while Will shared with Eleven) and when you went home the next day, your parents were long gone.

With your parents gone, and unlikely to be coming back any time soon, you and Steve made a decision. You would stay at your parents’ house for a few more months, just to give you time to save up some extra money, since your parents were undoubtedly about to cut you off.

You had picked up some part-time secretarial work at the police station, while Steve took on more Family Video shifts.

Once he’d told Robin about your plan to move out, she had decided to throw her lot in with you as well. That was good. Splitting rent three ways was cheaper than two, and she’d be able to help out once the baby came.

It was strange. Your baby was becoming more and more real by the minute. You couldn’t help but imagine what it would look like, but every time you pictured it, you could only see Eddie’s face. You wondered how you would bear it.

What if you couldn’t care for your baby because looking at it only reminded you of your grief? Or worse, what if your baby looked nothing like Eddie, and over time every memory of his face faded?

“Are you okay?” asked Steve, making you jump. The car was parked in the parking lot of the clinic – your clinic, not the one your parents had taken you to – and Steve was watching you with concern.

You swallowed. “I don’t know.”

“Well, we don’t wanna be late, but we can talk about it after, if you want? I’ll buy you lunch?” he offered, as if he wasn’t paying for all your food anyway. He insisted that all the money you were earning should be for you to spend on yourself and the baby.

“That sounds nice.”

The nurse bustled into the examination room, where you were already settled, lying back on the bed with your tummy exposed. She was an older woman, with a kind face.

“Hello dear, my name is Laura. I need to ask you a few questions before we get started.” She glanced at Steve, who was sitting in the chair beside you. “Is this the father?”

“No,” you both said, very quickly.

“I’m her brother,” said Steve, at the same time that you said, “The father is…” You trailed off, feeling your eyes begin to sting.

You cleared your throat awkwardly. “The father is dead. He died shortly after the baby was conceived.”

The nurse gave you a sympathetic look. “I’m so sorry. The earthquakes?” You swallowed, and nodded. “Well, I don’t want to make this any more traumatic for you than it needs to be, so I’ll try to be quick about it.”

She took a brief medical history from you, filling out information on a clipboard. You answered robotically, wanting to get to the important part.

“Alright, this is going to feel quite cold. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Despite her warning, you winced as the cool gel was spread over your bump. As she pressed the ultrasound wand to your tummy, you looked at Steve, but he was staring at the screen.

There was your baby. It looked like a peanut. The nurse pointed out the baby’s head to you, but you couldn’t respond. Your mouth was too dry.

“And do you want to know the baby’s sex?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She examined the image on the screen, shifting the wand slightly. “It looks like you’re having a little baby girl.”

You let out a breath you didn’t know you were holding. You looked at Steve, and saw that he was crying.

“A girl,” you breathed, picturing a child with long dark curls and big brown eyes. Steve squeezed your hand, letting out a shaky laugh. Tears were rolling down your cheeks, and you weren’t even trying to wipe them away anymore.

The first time that you ever interacted with Eddie Munson, you were in your sophomore year.

You were the polar opposite of your brother. He was cool, and popular, and had a different girl hanging off his arm every week. You were dorky and shy, and the mean girls in your class could smell blood in the water from a mile away.

You had just closed your locker and turned to walk to your next class when a foot caught around your ankle, sending you headlong, your books flying out of your hands. From behind you, you could hear your bullies tittering as they walked away.

Your knees stung where they had scraped along the floor. As you started to gather up your books, you couldn’t seem to get your hands to move fast enough. The idea of going to your next class, of having to sit in front of those girls, filled you with dread.

It wasn’t as if you had many friends at high school. You were quiet and nerdy and kept to yourself. Steve, who had always been there to protect you throughout your childhood, was distant now. He was almost an adult, and he didn’t have time to hang out with his kid sister.

You’d probably cramp his style anyway. As you began stuffing your textbooks into your bag, a pair of scruffy sneakers entered your line of sight.

“You okay?” came a voice from above you. You looked up into the eyes of Eddie Munson, local drug dealer and drop-out waiting to happen. Or least, that’s what people said.

“I, uh… Yeah.” Your voice cracked embarrassingly, and you realised you were about ten seconds away from bursting into tears.

Eddie held out his hand to you, and you let him help you to your feet.

“It’s Harrington, right?” he asked.

“Yeah. And you’re Eddie Munson.”

He flashed you a grin. “I see my reputation precedes me. But what is a goody two shoes like you still doing here? Aren’t you gonna be late for class?” He drummed his fingers against a locker. He seemed unable to keep still.

You blew out some air from between your lips. You were already late, and the thought filled you with an anxiety that hit you like pain in the chest. The image of your bully sneering at you as you stumbled in, five minutes late, was unbearable. “Fuck going to class. The bitch who tripped me is in that class.”

Eddie’s eyes widened mischievously. “In that case, I know a spot that none of the teachers know about. You wanna hang out?”

You looked at him. He was smiling at you, but there was a trace of nervousness in his eyes. You realised that he was putting himself out on a limb here.

“Fuck it. Lead the way.”

His eyes glinted as he beckoned you to follow him.

That evening, you’d had to take the bus home, because Steve was hanging out with his asshole friends after school. You didn’t mind it. It was nice to have the house to yourself. Hanging out with your brother wasn’t as fun as it used to be.

It was after 11pm by the time he got home. You were eating pizza while watching a movie. He stopped in the doorway and regarded you.

“What are you looking at?” you asked, and he sighed.

“Tommy said he saw you walking into the woods with Eddie Munson earlier.”

Your heart sank. “And?”

Steve bit his lip. “I’m not telling you what to do, but be careful, alright? That guy is bad news. And he’s way too old to be hanging out with you anyway.” You scoffed, but Steve continued. “I’m serious, okay? The guy’s a freak.”

“He’s really nice, actually,” you snapped back at him. “I’m done with this conversation.”

You had never been happier to prove Steve wrong. Eddie was never anything short of a gentleman to you. He was almost too much of a gentleman.

It took a few months for you to realise that you were developing a bit of a crush on Eddie Munson. By that point, you hung out all the time, getting high and avoiding doing homework.

You got the sense that he was holding you at arm’s length. He would never sit too close to you, would never touch you if he could avoid it.

At the time, you had assumed he just didn’t like you that way, but in retrospect, it was probably because he was two years older than you.

You had no idea that he might’ve felt in any way the same as you did until that one night at Reefer Rick’s. You had a feeling that Steve had known before you had.

“I just don’t like you hanging around with him,” he’d said one evening after Eddie had dropped you off in his van.

“Oh, so now you care?” you’d snapped back at him, and he’d flushed.

“I don’t like the way he looks at you.”

You’d rolled your eyes. “We’re just friends.”

“Look.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I know what guys are like. I’m just trying to look out for you, okay?”

“If you got your way, I wouldn’t have any friends at all.”

“Hey, that’s not fair,” he’d said, but you were done having the conversation. You’d stormed off up to your room and slammed the door behind you.

But Steve now was nothing like Steve then. He was still protective of you, but he was kinder. Maturity, grief, and the years of being an unwilling babysitter had softened his sharp edges.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked you. Again, you found yourself sitting in the passenger seat of Steve’s car, except this time you were in the parking lot of the motel that Wayne Munson was staying in. It was two days since you’d found out you were having a baby girl, and in those two days, you had realised that Wayne deserved an opportunity to be a part of that little girl’s life.

You liked Wayne plenty, although you barely knew him. He was always civil and courteous to you, but you knew from Eddie that he was a whole lot more than that. Eddie idolised him. You knew that Eddie would want Wayne in his daughter’s life.

You looked down at the photocopy of the sonogram that showed your baby girl.

“I already told him that I’m pregnant on the phone. That was the hard part,” you said.

Steve squeezed your shoulder. “I’m here with you.”

Wayne met you in front of his motel room. There was a moment’s hesitation from both of you, but you decided to hug him. He smelled clean, like soap and a trace of engine oil.

It was a warm evening, so the three of you sat at a little picnic table on a patch of grass beside the parking lot. Before any of you could speak, you slid the photocopy of the sonogram across the table to Wayne.

“I want you to have this,” you said as he picked it up. “The first picture of my baby girl.”

“A girl, huh?” Wayne wiped his eyes on a handkerchief, and you tactfully didn’t acknowledge the fact that he was crying. “Have you thought of any names for her yet? I know it’s early days.”

You hesitated. You hadn’t even told Steve what you wanted to name the baby.

“Melody,” you said. “Because Eddie was a musician.” Was. It still stung to say.

“Little Melody,” Wayne mused. A smile flickered across his face. “I like it.”

~ PRESENT DAY ~

Eddie released you and you sucked in a breath, your hands flying to your throat.

“Let go! Let go of her!” shouted Lucas, pulling on his arm. Eddie may have been bigger, but Lucas was athletic. Now that Eddie was no longer resisting, Lucas was able to drag him off you.

Your hands were covering your neck, mercifully hiding the bruises he knew were forming. His stomach was churning hard.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

You looked back at him, your eyes wet with tears, and Eddie’s heart shattered into a million pieces. He’d hurt you. He’d never meant to hurt you, but he had.

Dimly, he realised Dustin was yelling into the microphone attached to the switchboard, trying to get someone to help.

“I’m coming,” came Steve’s voice. “I never should’ve left her alone.”

“Steve, no-” Your voice came out weak, and you coughed. Instinctively, Eddie reached for you to comfort you, but pulled back suddenly, realising you may not want his comfort right now. Pushing yourself up using the coffee table, you went over to the switchboard and commandeered the mic. “Steve?”

“Are you okay?” Steve asked. “Did he hurt you?”

“Don’t come here,” you said. “Stick to the plan.”

“But-”

“Look, whatever just happened, happened because Vecna wanted it to. He’s trying to draw you away. Don’t give him what he wants.”

“Screw Vecna, I just need to know that you’re okay.”

You turned and looked at Eddie. There was a burning sensation in his chest, like shame he had never felt before. The evidence of violence – unwilling as it had been – was written into the bruises on your neck. If there was anything he could do to fix this, he would.

“Vecna isn’t controlling him right now.”

“But what’s to stop him from doing it again?”

“Tie me up,” Eddie cut in. You looked at him, wide-eyed. “I can’t hurt you if I’m tied up.”

“What if you need to fight?” you asked, and he shook his head.

“It’s too risky. I can’t hurt you. I won’t. Please. Just tie me up.”

You swallowed. “Okay.” You turned back to the microphone. “We’re gonna tie Eddie up.”

“I heard.” The disapproval in Steve’s voice was evident.

“Please, just…” You took a deep breath. “Please just stick to the plan, okay? We’ve got to do this on our terms, not Vecna’s.”

There was a long pause, and then Steve sighed. “Fine.”

Fortunately, Hopper had anticipated the need to keep someone incapacitated. There were a couple of sets of handcuffs, as well as a closet with a sturdy, lockable door.

Eddie held out his hands to you so that you could cuff him. You decided to cuff his hands in front of him rather than behind, for his comfort. In spite of everything, you didn’t want to hurt him.

“I’m so sorry,” he murmured to you as he walked into the closet, almost too quiet for you to hear.

You cleared your throat, which still stung. “Not your fault.”

“Still.” He swung around to look at you, a pleading look in his eyes. “I’m sorry. Not just for this.” He gestured at your neck. “For all of it. Dying. Leaving you. Hurting you. I never wanted any of that for you.”

“You didn’t die,” you said, wiping away a few stray tears. You’d taken a couple of cushions from the sofa, so you busied yourself arranging them, and then set a bottle of water on the floor for him.

“I think I did. I don’t know what I am now.” You could only stare at him. There was a long pause, and then he said, “you should probably close the door. Before… you know…”

“Right.”

You were just about to close the door when he said, “Wait.” You hesitated, and immediately regretted it when he lunged at you, a sickening grin on his face.

You slammed the closet door just in time to hear him collide with it and then curse loudly. Eddie was gone. Vecna had him again.

From the living room, you heard shouting. Your fingers were trembling as you locked the closet using the three deadbolts Hopper had installed.

“Come on, baby,” Eddie whined, sounding so unlike himself. “I just wanna have fun. Can’t we have fun?”

“Get out of his head,” you hissed.

“I love you, you know that?” You stopped in your tracks. “You’re my dream girl. I’ve been in love with you for years.” Your heart was hammering in your chest. These weren’t Eddie’s words, as much as you wanted them to be.

Footsteps were rushing towards you. Dustin was calling your name. You turned to see him looking frantic. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s Will. And Max. They- They’re-”

Blood ice cold in your veins, you sprinted past him, back into the living room. To your horror, the front door was wide open. You ran to close it, but Dustin blocked you.

“Will ran out there. Mike followed him.”

“Shit.” You rushed to the door and looked outside, but it was pitch dark. “Why did he do that?” Shadows danced in between the trees, too fast for you to make out.

“He was in some kind of trance, and-”

Lucas shouted your name. You had to resist the urge to put your hands over your ears.

“I need your help,” he shouted. The terror in his voice made you turn around. He was holding Max, but her body was limp, her eyes rolled back into her head. You saw that he had put her headphones on.

“Let’s get her into the bedroom,” you said. The bedroom had been prepared as a last resort. It was where the weapons were, and was even more heavily fortified than the rest of the cabin. “Close the door, but keep watch for Mike and Will. Don’t do anything without me,” you said to Dustin and Erica.

Between you, you and Lucas managed to lift Max into her wheelchair, wheel her into the bedroom and manoeuvre her onto the bed. You checked that her music was still playing, and thankfully, it was. You hoped against hope that it would still work.

From next door, you heard a huge, horrifying crash. Everything was happening so fast, and despite being surrounded by people, you had never felt so alone.

“Stay with her,” you said to Lucas, although you knew that there wasn’t a force on this earth that could tear him away from her now.

The living room was carnage, even worse than how you’d just left it. You almost tripped over a sofa cushion on the ground. Dustin was lying in the shattered remains of the switchboard, and Erica was trying to hold the front door shut by herself.

There was a strange hissing, and then you realised what Erica was trying to hold off. Trapped with its head in the doorframe, its body outside, was a demodog. It was trying to wrap its head around her legs, and she was kicking at it ineffectually.

Something slammed into the door hard, almost knocking Erica off balance. That snapped you into action.

You ran to her side and grabbed the baseball bat that was by the front door. You brought down the bat with all your strength on the creature’s head, and then continued beating it until its head slipped back through the gap.

Adding your strength to Erica’s, you shoved the door back into place. You held it shut while she fumbled with all the locks, and at last, it stopped shaking.

“What happened?” you asked, out of breath.

“Eddie,” she said, her big eyes shiny with tears. “He escaped.”

Next Chapter

#eddie munson x reader #eddie munson x harrington!reader #eddie munson x you #steve harrington x sister!reader

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stevebattle · 1 year

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“The Intelligent Robot” by Jonathan T. Kaplan (1977). “Mobile, programmable, electronic personal robot; makes electronic noises, lifts approx. 3 lbs.” – The Robot Exhibit, New York, NY.

"Jonathan Kaplan traces his interest in robots back to when he was four and watched cartoons about robots. He built his first robot when he was eight. Today, Jonathan is a graduate student, studying artificial intelligence with the Robotics Research Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All total he has built around a dozen robots, not all of which are still working. "I keep the complex ones," he explains, "others get recycled for the parts." He also scrounges for parts in electronic supply stores and junk shops." Unlike many homebrew builders, Jonathan does not name his creations. He also does not treat them like pets. As he says, "I am painfully aware that they are only machines." He feels, however, that they can be smart machines! He even built an intelligent robot with sensors to search out an avoid objects. The robot stands about 33 inches tall. His ideas for this and most projects come from reading books and magazines. ... and a lot of trial and error." – The Everyone Can Build a Robot Book, by Kendra Bonnett and Gene Oldfield, 1984.

#cybernetics #robot #1977 #TheRobotExhibit

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lavenderstobins · 6 months

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could u pls explain the ronance transistor au to me

Absolutely I can!

Transistor Spoilers below:

Transistor is a video game where you play as a character named Red who has this sword-like weapon called the Transistor. She’s a singer whose voice was stolen by a group called The Camerata, who had tried to have her killed but ended up killing her lover instead when he dived in the way. Because of how the Transistor works, her lover can see/hear everything and narrates the story for the player by talking to Red throughout the game. The game follows Red trying to avenge her lover and take down The Camerata for good, having to fight a legion of their robots called The Process.

Ronance Transistor AU

In my AU, Nancy is a well-known journalist who's liked by the general public (like Red with her singing). She's about to go public with an article about Brenner's organisation and work when Brenner has her attacked.

Robin and Steve had both been working under Brenner, but Robin quit for Nancy's safety while Steve stayed behind to try and help them get information. When she realised Brenner was sending the Transistor towards Nancy to absorb her, she got in the way of it in the process, so Nancy only lost her voice while Robin got stabbed.

Nancy blacked out at the beginning of the process, so she came to to find Robin slumped on the ground, the Transistor embedded in her. Robin speaks to her, though, and Nancy realises Robin's been absorbed into the Transistor, in a unique way caused by being killed by it.

Nancy then goes on to try and take down Brenner's organisation for good, both to stop them and to avenge Robin. Robin guides her the entire time. They find the bodies of Jonathan, Eddie and Argyle and are able to absorb them into the Transistor, but Robin remains the only one able to speak.

(There's also an aspect where Steve didn't know about the planned attack on Nancy, so he was helpless to stop it, which also meant that Robin thought Steve had betrayed her. Nancy ends up fighting a corrupted Steve, who tries to fight off the corruption the whole time. He hears Robin's voice and that's what gets through to him enough to throw himself onto the blade, apologising profusely to her as he does because he never wanted either of them to be hurt.

There's also a theory that the Transistor itself serves as an "afterlife" of sorts, so Steve and Robin are able to reunite afterwards.)

More Spoilers, both for the game and this AU:

Nancy's able to defeat all of Brenner's organisation (Corrupted Steve, Owens, Creel, Brenner) and is left with the Transistor, able to live her life. She doesn't want the world she's left with, though. One without her best friends, one without Robin.

She gets the Transistor to impale her, even as Robin begs her not to.

When she next wakes up, she's standing before Robin in a grassy field, Steve, Eddie, Argyle and Jonathan visible in the distance, and Nancy finds that she's finally happy again.

(Slide from the game's ending below!)

#st transistor au #ronance #transistor spoilers #spoilers #stranger things #my aus #robin buckley #steve harrington #stobin #platonic stobin #platonic stancy #nancy wheeler #asks #answered #anonymous

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maspers · 11 months

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Okay so I have an idea for a Halloween movie

Not a horror movie. A Halloween movie. Spooky tropes up the wazoo. Action-packed comedy, with a taste of camp. Banger soundtrack. I don't have all the details down, but the basic gist is a pair of monster hunters ala Supernatural engage in shenanigans. Other deets include:

-The Monster Hunters duo is a blonde woman named Jack and a guy of ambiguous race (Asian-Hispanic mix?) named Cygnus, both in their mid to late twenties. They speak with British accents, but are repeatedly identified as Americans. They take turns wearing the same pair of glasses. If the audience looks closely in a couple shots they will realize Jack and Cygnus are wearing matching wedding rings, but this is the only indication whatsoever that they are married, and the fact that both of them rampantly flirt with everyone else doesn't clarify anything.

-Jack's name is not a nickname, and is established as being her actual name. Cygnus's name is actually short for something, but we never find out what.

-Jack speaks directly to the fourth wall often, Ferris Bueller style. Often to supply witty commentary and exposition. Nobody else does this. Cygnus is the only other character to acknowledge the fourth wall's existence, but he never addresses it directly. Once or twice when Jack is explaining things Cygnus will say something like "don't forget to tell them X" or "you forgot x" implying addressing the fourth wall is exclusively Jack's thing.

-Enough lampshading to make CinemaSins swoon.

-The film starts with a very stereotypical castle owned by a (male) mad scientist. Cygnus is being held captive. He jokingly flirts with the scientist. But also very quickly mentions Jack, thus ensuring that the movie fails to pass the Reverse Bechdel Test.

-Jack, meanwhile, is providing exposition to the audience and skillfully breaking into the place, beating up bad guys and loading an Igor ripoff into a catapult. "Skullcrusher Mountain" by Jonathan Coulton plays as the opening credits appear while Jack sneaks further into the building.

-After Cygnus is rescued, both our heroes escape in a convertible. The castle is on fire. Jack assures the audience not to worry, as no American castles are real castles anyway.

-The Villain is a very impressive politician, ideally played by Blake Lively. Her goal is to convince the monster populace to support her and help her win the upcoming election, supposedly so that she can make things easier for monsterkind. In reality she plans to tear apart the masquerade and expose monsters and trick the regular humans into destroying them. Rude. Jack and Cygnus aren't really aware of this plan at first but they do know someone is planning something with the less reputable parts of the supernatural world and so they want to put a stop to it.

-Jack and Cygnus need to infiltrate a fancy party. The goal is to seduce a vampire hostess and steal something she is carrying on her person. Cygnus volunteers but Jack shuts him down because the last time he tried to seduce something (a succubus) he panicked and stabbed himself with a fork (flashback scene included, apparently happened in Topeka). So Jack goes to the party instead.

-Band at party is playing an epic waltz version of the Monster Mash. Cue highly attractive dance between Jack and the Sexy Vampire Hostess.

-Meanwhile Cygnus goes disguised as a member of the kitchen staff. Unfortunately all the Kitchen staff are secretly robots. They attack. Cue epic fight scene with comedic/awesome usage of kitchenware. "Coconut Mall" from Mario Kart is playing.

-Cut back to Jack. She and the Sexy Vampire Hostess have moved to a side room.

*Jack and vamp kiss*

"Oh my… Garlic-dusted lip gloss? Spicy. I like it."

"Oh, if you like that, then I have something even spicier."

"Do tell"

*Jack stakes Vampire through heart*"SIKE"

-Jack escapes down fire escape. Opens window to kitchen. Last lap version of Coconut Mall can be heard as Cygnus jumps out, his hair covered in Cheese.

-I'm still shaky on the plot but they decide to go to Denny's to unwind and figure out where to go next. The postmodern jukebox version of Stacy's Mom plays as they pull up.

-Meanwhile the villainess is scheming and is like "frick the monster hunters killed my vampire I need to bring in the big guns"

-Also there's a police officer played by either Levar Burton or Samuel L. Jackson, who shows up right after Jack and Cygnus leave a place. Smooth jazz plays, and the lighting darkens. He seems to be familiar with our heroes, but whether he wants to help them or arrest them is unclear. Other cops are present, but are CGId to look like identical clones of ambiguous race and gender. The detective never talks to them directly, because that would require giving them personalities and we've got too many characters already.

-So Jack and Cygnus arrive at Denny's, get in a brief debate about drinks (they order a lot of different kinds) when a motorcyclist dude shows up. Motorcyclist dude is a werewolf in the villainess's employ. He warns them to either stop hunting their lead or die. Jack and Cygnus are very sad about this, because the werewolf is not wearing a shirt under his jacket and has very attractive abs that they do not want to kill. They decide to fight anyway. Immediately everyone else in the Denny's turns around to reveal they are actually rodeo clowns. Classic wild west shootout ensues. Jukebox in the corner goes off and plays "Saturday Night".

-Our heroes successfully take down most of the rodeo clowns but then the werewolf proceeds to wolf out (much to the joy of our heroes, as he reveals more muscles. Jack is visibly shown getting a nosebleed, and Cygnus swoons) and chase them out of the Denny's. Inexplicably, the Denny's looks different than it did when they first drove up. This is never commented on.

-Car chase starring Cygnus and Jack in their convertible and werewolf on Motorcycle Ensues. They are forced to trick him into swerving off a cliff. Danny Boy plays dramatically as he falls. Our heroes Mourn the death of the abs.

-Villainess has either a kindly father who looks like a college professor or an innocent husband who dresses like Makoto Naegi (if the latter, is played by Ryan Reynolds of course). They ask if villainess is going too far. Villainess responds by singing "Girls just want to have lunch" and ominously approaching father/husband. Screen blacks out before sounds of eating are heard. They are later seen with a large head bandage and muttering the chorus to the aforementioned song.

-Detective enters and investigates the Denny's (which again looks different) and dispatches the remaining rodeo clown with a taser.

-Heroes pull up to Villainess's fancy mansion. Various attempts at entering are foiled. Jack points out they need to enter in order to progress the plot, so they take the car and crash it directly into the front door. They then make their way through the rooms, casually dealing with a variety of supernatural threats. Reptiles and Samurai by oingo boingo plays.

-Villainess is getting really mad that she hasn't even really been able to enact her plan yet at ALL (elections are still like a month away) and she wants the heroes gone. None of her traps have worked (even the pit trap, which Jack and Cygnus swung over Indiana Jones style, complete with the iconic music) so she goes to meet them herself in the main hall.

-Jack and Cygnus enter main hall, with Jack playing Yankee Doodle on a piccolo and Cygnus accompanying on the drum. Villainess rebukes them for not taking her seriously. Jack tells her to put her money where her mouth is and challenges Villainess to a sword Duel. They proceed to have an epic, fully choreographed Princess-Bride-level swordfight (which just as much homoerotic tension) while an original Halloween song plays. The song heavily features an organ and electric guitar, which are being played in universe by the Villainess's father/husband and Cygnus respectively.

- "Are neither of you going to take this seriously?"

"Of course not, have you even been paying attention to the film? This ain't Supernatural."

"Though to be fair, people like Supernatural."

-Abruptly Villainess (just as she's disarmed) is like "enough I can't take it anymore" pulls out a gun and shoots at Cygnus, grazing him in the arm. Record scratch. Dead silence. Villainess rants about how Jack and Cygnus are being completely nonsensical and complains about a whole bunch of other inconsistencies in the story. Jack and Cygnus respond by poking holes in her own apparent evil scheme, Villainess loudly proclaims it would have actually worked. Jack and Cygnus open doors to reveal the Detective, who strides in to arrest Villainess.

-Detective does have a legitimate warrant and I want there to be some kind of joke that it was easy for him to get one because of some other crazy sus things the Villainess was doing but I need to do more research on how Warrants work. He asks if our heroes would like to provide any commentary, but they both shout "we plead the fifth" and jump out a window. Detective chuckles and comments "Just like in Topeka".

-Jack and Cygnus ride a zip line down a hill to a nearby graveyard. They sit on a fence together, make a couple of bad puns, and Cygnus tries to soliloquize about the apparent lack of Skeletons in the entire film but is quickly cut off by Jack thanking the audience for watching. Credits roll as "Bittersweet" by Panic! At the Disco plays.

Think it would be called "Pumpernickel"

#halloween #october #spooky month #spooky season #movie idea #vampire #werewolf #monster hunters #comedy #music #spoopy #spooptober #spooktober #robots #not horror #idk how to tag this #dennys

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tdadtwch · 7 months

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TDADTWCH Character Intro: Hogarth Hughes

(Headshot art commissioned by @nicstylus)

FULL NAME: Hogarth Hughes

ALIASES/NICKNAMES:

Garth

G (by Heath)

Genius (by Heath)

Hobart (by Kent)

Ho-Barf (by Griffin)

Fuckface (by Griffin)

Momma’s Boy (by Heath)

Precious Golden Child (by Heath)

Golden Boy (by Heath)

Teacher’s Pet (by Griffin)

STATUS: Alive

AGE: 18

HOMETOWN: Rockwell, Maine

OCCUPATION: Unemployed

NATIONALITY: Caucasian American

GENDER: Male

SEXUAL ORIENTATION: Heterosexual

ROMANTIC ORIENTATION: Heteromantic

LIKES:

Drawing/Sketching

Bike Riding

Cheesy Horror Films

Sci-Fi Novels

Comic Books/Graphic Novels

Robots

Cars

Jazz & Old Rock ‘n’ Roll

Nature

Turbo Twinkies

DISLIKES:

Unwanted Attention

Bullying

Heath’s Impulsivity

Rom-Coms

HABITS:

Fidgeting

Rambling

Anxious Doodling

Tendency To Overthink

ABOUT: He’s a canon character from the movie “The Iron Giant” and the main protagonist of the fanfic, “the dark after dusk, the wolf comes howlin’”. When his twin brother gets infected by a werewolf, he does everything he can to find a cure. Although, how far is he willing to go to find one before it’s too late?

FAMILY:

Heath Hughes (twin brother)

Annie Hughes (mother)

Dean McCoppin (stepfather)

Jonathan Hughes (father; deceased)

FRIENDS:

Gerry McDonald

Benny Friedman-Stone

Adam

ENEMIES:

Kent Mansley

Griffin Johnson

Harry

Willy

APPEARANCE: He’s a handsome young man with auburn hair, blue eyes, and crooked teeth. He’s tall (5’9), and has a lean and somewhat toned build. He’s usually seen wearing a white T-shirt, blue jeans, a hooded flannel jacket, black Converses and a handmade screw-bolt necklace around his neck. He’ll also be seen wearing a red-and-black cargo jacket, similar to the jacket he wore as a kid.

PERSONALITY: He’s a kind and intelligent person and is willing to help others when they need it most. As a child, he was more outgoing, talkative, curious and fun, but as he got older, he has become more cautious and reserved due to years of bullying and judgment. Even so, his true self will shine through whenever he’s with family and friends. He sometimes thinks himself a coward but would often put his own life in danger for the people he loves and cares about. He’s also very observant and is able to come up with a plan whenever he needs to, especially when under stress.

#hogarth hughes #iron giant #the iron giant #fanfic #fanfiction #ao3 fanfic #ao3 #ao3 writer #character info #character intro #headshot #art commisions

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kedreeva · 1 year

Text

My friend (>:|) started talking to me about someone writing a Steddie JP AU, but all that did was make me really want a Camp Cretaceous AU with the Party. So please come along with me for a moment.

Will Byers wins an art contest to get there. Dustin beats a video game. Mike enters a storytelling competition. Max's skateboarding sponsors send her. Lucas and Erica's mom is one of the lead scientists, so they usually live up the island with their dad, who lets them go to the camp to hang out (which incidentally means neither of them but especially not Erica is impressed with the camp). El... no one's quite sure how El got there. She's quiet.

The camp counselors, Steve and Eddie, introduce themselves at the dock and take the new arrivals to the camp to meet Lucas and Erica. Everyone hits it off well that first night, trading their stories about how they got here, talking about dinosaurs. Most of them actually do like dinosaurs, but there's a line drawn in the sand about whether these even ARE dinosaurs (Will and Dustin argue they are NOT, Lucas and Mike argue that they ARE, Max doesn't care she just thinks they're cool, Erica doesn't care she just thinks they're not cool, El doesn't really know what dinosaurs are, but it's her fault they got into the debate).

They actually get to spend a few days on the island before shit hits the fan. Getting into shenanigans, learning the layout, seeing things that will come back later. Getting little hints of the evil going on behind the scenes, but in ways that don't particularly set off alarm bells until you're looking back.

And then the indorex breaks containment and the island gets abandoned. The kids are out when it happens, maybe in the riding balls so they end up relatively safe, but not recovered. Steve and Eddie stay behind to try to find them, but they JUST miss each other several times, and finally they're forced to leave the kids there despite KNOWING in their BONES that the kids ARE alive.

The kids spend the next 6 months surviving the wilds of jurassic world. Dustin befriends a dinosaur he names Dart and gets lost in the woods for a while when they get separated. They build a fort from the remains of the camp. They go on adventures to acquire food and drink and try to communicate with the mainland. They face off against opportunistic poachers and nearly escape on the boat, eventually making it to the nearby island and finding out all the lurking evil from the first half of the story has come back to bite them, and they can't go home without saving the dinosaurs from the Russians running some kind of underground dinosaur fight club.

Meanwhile on the mainland, Jonathan is mourning his little brother while Joyce is trying to figure out how to get them to the island to go looking for Will. Nancy turns up because she caught a wisp of communication from Mike from one of their attempts to contact home, and she KNOWS they are alive. So the three of them start digging and end up in contact with Steve and Eddie who are like yeah we got you, we can get you there, we know the place, we'll come help. So THEIR group ends up heading to the islands to look.

Hopper, meanwhile, as head of security for the island, has been losing his mind because he cannot think how this happened except one of his team failed but he personally vetted the whole team, they were all exceptional. it HAD to be sabotage. Someone was not telling him something. He's furious. He ends up going to the island to investigate , and runs aground of Joyce's group, and ends up joining them.

They find evidence of the kids on the island, and then somehow end up in radio contact with the kids on the other island. They call in authorities (hello Sam Owens), and hop islands to go get the kids, who by this point have definitely befriended Murray the scientist who is 99% certain there's a conspiracy going on he hasn't figured out yet and Dmitri, one of the robots they've reprogrammed to be on their side instead. They're getting ready to go head to head with Dr. Brenner, El's "dad" in some way, when Joyce's group finally gets to them, and it's getting kind of grim until Sam's group also arrives, and everyone gets rescued and/or arrested and the place gets closed down and our people all get to go home.

#stranger things #the party #steddie #camp cretaceous au #stranger things fic #my writing #idkfandomwhatever #this is your fault maz

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invitationtoher · 13 days

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You're in my Way, Cage. | Chapter 1: Kitana

Summery: Kitana Edenia, smart, beautiful, and stressed. With dreams of becoming a doctor due to her sister, Mileena, having a major case of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). Throughout her entire school life she's been focused on her goal of getting into the very same college that her mother and father went to and fell in love at, Mortal Kampus University (MKU), an ivy league school where the only people are intelligent as they are talented. Kitana vows to make her mother proud with no distractions, at least that was the plan until she met an obnoxious dirty blonde in her English Class.

Jonathan Carlton? No, he's Johnny Cage! Hollywood's next big star! He may not act as smart as he actually is, but he shines when it comes to entertainment, if it's on the screen or behind the scenes Johnny can do it all, thanks to the Carlton family being in the film industry for generations. Thanks to his parents money and his acting and martial arts talents (as well as writing), he got a scholarship to MKU's theater department! He knows MKU will be a good time, it's his chance to make his own name. When he sees a pretty girl in his English class whose walls seem unbreakable, he vows to break down those walls and see the real her by showing her a film.

I always knew I was going to get into an ivy league school. My father always told me and my sister that we were born to make the world a better place, and that if he could become a governor, we could too- hell, possibly even more. So, when I got my acceptance letter to MKU, I just showed it to my parents and let them do the celebrating for me. My sister, Mileena, was also incredibly happy for me, since she is not able to attend a physical campus due to her illness.

“I swear, you’re like a robot!” Mileena teased at my nonchalant response of getting into one of the best schools in the country, I smiled and rolled my eyes at her teasing. Of course I was excited, just not as excited as everyone else since I knew it would happen. It sounds super cocky, I know, but I was a firm believer in working hard to get what you wanted, and I worked damn hard to get into MKU. It’s like MKU was the only thing on my mind, I was volunteering constantly, I was taking college classes at a local community college, I was working jobs, joining clubs, job shadowing, and making connections within the already busy schedule of a high school student that was also attending a technical school to get a head start on their career. Although, I wanted to follow my father’s footsteps to a T, and that is exactly what I did with a different goal in mind.

“Oh, Kitana, we’re so proud of you!” My father exclaimed with his phone in hand in front of the house, I could hear him trying to hold back his tears as Mileena teased him about it causing playful bickering as my mother fixes my hair. I scrunch my nose in slight annoyance as she messes with my long, black locks that were in my usual half-up half-down hairstyle. Although I know there was nothing wrong with my hair (and she knew it too), I would be a fool to protest my mother. When she stepped back, squinting her eyes a little to see if she missed any of the “imperfections” of my hair.

“Smile, Ki!” My father said, on instinct I smiled brightly, the way I did during school pictures. I tried my best not to squint at the flash of my father’s phone, the bright lights blinding me in the still dark sky. He lowered his phone once he finally got a picture he was satisfied with, I blinked rapidly to get rid of the little black dots that scattered across my vision as Mileena quickly walked over to me and squeezed me into a tight hug.

“Kick ass today, Kitana.” She whispered into my ear so mother would not hear her, a small giggle escaped my lips as I hugged her back and nodded my head, my smile dropping into its usual neutral position.

“I will, if you need anything at all, call me.”

“I’ll be okay, it’s a good spoon day.” She replied, I let out a small sigh of relief while she pulled away from the hug, her eyes looking into mine. “Good luck on your first day.”

“You too, Mileena.” I say as I adjust my black puffer bag on my shoulder, I walk over to my father and hugged him tightly. The hug was bittersweet, my father had a trip to Washington D.C. for work, meaning that I have no idea when I’ll get to see him again. We were slow to pull away from each other, I gave him a melancholic smile and a small nod.

“Good luck, father.” I said, he nodded back at me as he cleared his throat, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he did so.

“Good luck, daughter.” I let out a small laugh at his lame attempt to mock my formalities, he wiped his eyes before leaving me and walking over to Mileena to give her a goodbye hug. My smile slowly flattened as I walked up to my mother, preparing myself for her advice.

My mother was one of the smartest people I know, Sindel Edenia- who also went to MKU like my father, though she majored in law- is everything I wanted to be: strong, intelligent, intimidating, the list could go on. Although she is kind to me and my sister, she is also very intimidating, never putting the lawyer’s act away. She’s blunt, and she could pick you a part layer by layer like a cat with a dead mouse, she’d gut you until she got the truth.

“Kitana, I expect you to do your best.” She said, folding her arms across her chest and pulling her purple knitted cardigan close to keep herself warm from the chilliness of late August. I bit my bottom lip gently, tasting my strawberry flavored Glossier lip balm.

“Of course, mother, I worked too hard to disappoint.” My response earns me a small smile from my mother, she hesitantly opens her arms wide and steps forward. She hugs me, not as tightly as father or Mileena, but enough to where I can smell her elegant perfume that had the comforting smell of vanilla and jasmine. My body tenses up a bit, but I eventually hugged her back, it’s very rare that I receive hugs from my mother after 6th grade. She only hugs us for special occasions or for family photos.

“Don’t go messing around with those foolish college boys either, you’re too smart for that.” She whispers in my ear as she runs her hand through my hair. I nod my head again, a small, shaky sigh escaping my lips.

“Of course, mother.” I say as we pulled away from each other, I give everyone a final wave before walking to my car, pulling my keys out of my bag and fiddling with the little blue fan keychain on it that I got from my grandparents when we visited them in Taiwan. My mother’s words echoed through my head as I get into the driver’s seat of my blue 2019 Chevy Malibu, I placed my bag on the passenger’s seat before pressing the push to start button and buckling myself up. I hooked up the Bluetooth to my phone and put on my playlist before I backed out of the driveway and made my way to school.

I never had a boyfriend before, I thought I was way too good for the boys in my grade- thanks to my mother putting that idea into my head- of course I had crushes, everyone has crushes. But I would never act on them, I felt like I would’ve disappointed my mother with my choice in men. She expected Mileena and I to get with men with a financially stable job, one that can take care of us and our children; however, I feel like Mileena has already found that person. As for me, it sounded nice, it sounded like something I should be striving for- but it just felt… off in a way. I can’t really explain it to myself, maybe it’s me being jealous of my own suspicions of Mileena finding someone to love just by her blushing and giggling at her phone screen as she typed in rapid fire speeds. I guess I’ll just have to cross that bridge when I get there.

The college was roughly a twenty-minute drive from my home, it’s not a bad drive except if I’m driving behind someone who doesn’t know that you don’t have to go under the speed limit. I was lucky since it seemed that people were in a rush this morning, guess I’m not the only one who didn’t want to dorm and were close enough to commute.

I was lucky enough to get a parking spot close to the technology building, I only had four classes today and my first one was Intro to computers, then Chemistry, then Microbiology, and then finally English. It didn’t seem like a bad first day, I’d keep my head low, do my work, and then I should be out in no time, nothing’s going to distract me from getting what was barely in reach now.

I worked too hard to let anyone get in my way, and I won’t let anyone get in my way.

#fanfic #johnny cage #mortal kombat #kitana #mk1 #mk1 2023 #johnny cage x kitana #fanfiction #ao3 fanfic #modern au #college au #college #fluff #archive of our own #you're in my way cage #romance

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cuppatea8 · 2 months

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Spoilers for all of tmagp 22 under the cut :)

Gwen had her priorities straight pfft. Lena just expected her to ask for [ERROR]’s phone number before running for her life? My goodness

Gwen your job/promotion is not as important as your life. Honestly! She’s audibly shaking basically saying “don’t fire me” after almost getting tatooed by Ink50ul and protected (?) by [ERROR].

Gwen gets (effectively) demoted woooo! It’s for her safety, certainly.

Ministerial visit? Interesting.

Statement Incident Begins heheh

Oh, another letter? Read by (presumably) Mr. Magnus himself?

This old timey speaking reminds me of both how I write my essays and speak with people who aren’t my friends pfft

Ohhh brain surgery experiments fun

(All of this technical science stuff is going over my head I��ll need to look up all of this jargon later)

Haven’t heard ‘zeitgeist’ before, huh. Upon searching it up, it’s a German philospohy thing (which I probably should’ve inferred, but oh well).

Doing all this is reminding me just how much I am not a theory-making sort of person. I simply cannot connect the dots sometimes pfft. Wasn’t there something in the ARG about German stuff though?

Centre of self wow. This is shaping up to be Flesh/Stranger-esque. I can’t imagine consenting to going through a surgery to alter the core of my identity, my goodness.

This doctor’s just focused on the information wow. (Totally not guilty of this myself nope.)

The ocean part reminds me of the ‘the deep will care for his bones’ episode. Seriously, ‘plumb the depths of that ocean from which I had awaked’ wow. There are constant references to waves and currents during the climax too.

OH, A SEIZURE. That description my goodness. He’s dead???

“Unfortunate frontier science” WOW THAT’S ONE WAY TO PUT IT.

Telegraph message?

SO ALONE TOGETHER?

AAAAAA? EHFJDDJAOX “OUT OUT OUT…” WHAT?!?!

Awww no the voice is going robotic again >:(

Statement Incident Ends!

ALICE YAY! (and Sam!)

Sam knows about what Alice did last episode; lets see how she handles this. Is she going to just tell him about Freddie having tailored his case load?

The glitches when they lie are still quite intriguing to me. How does Freddie know when they’re lying?

“I’m just trying to look out for you” “No you’re not! You’re trying to control me.” That line oof. Also, “Again?” Wonder if she was manipulative back when they were together or something?

I’d just like to point out, Sam “I can look out for myself” Khalid is also Sam “Let’s investigate the ruins of the Magnus Institute” Khalid.

“I thought you might actually listen to me”

What’s that about Luke’s band, Alice?

The thing that breaks me about this genre is that even when the characters try to have honest, meaningful conversations, they’re doomed by the narrative to misunderstand and become isolated as a result of it.

Those shoe taps gave me violent flashbacks to my elementary school days eugh

Celiaaaaa!

Sam, no! just communicate meaningfully with Alice! Don’t dismiss her and her opinion, she’s looking out for you!

SAM! STOP LOOKING INTO THE MAGNUS INSTITUTE!

JONATHAN SIMS AND MARTIN BLACKWOOD NAME DROP WHAT?!?

Nooooooo the episode ended on that?! Alex ypu knew what you were doing with that one how dare youuuu

#tmagp #tmagp spoilers #tmagp 22

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the-robot-bracket · 1 year

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You said i could submit more propaganda so here you go.

Steam powered giraffe propaganda time because i can so:

They are a band of steampunk robots. And a couple of months ago they celebrated their 15-year anniversary. They do a lot of different genres with their songs. For example, honeybee is slow and rips your heart out whenever you listen to it. Then you have fart patrol which is goofy and you can't help but smile. And there's the band lore.

A guy called Peter A Walter built them in 1896 to impress this girl called Delilah Morreo

Who then died then got brought back as a vampire by the other guy trying to impress her

Then she killed the other guy and found a way to fix her being a vampire and became a wraith.

(It is worth also mentioning that she is canonically a lesbian)

Other lore facts include

They are canonically war veterans and pretty much all of them have fought in multiple wars

The Beatles opened for them at one point

The robots run on QWERTY "The first truly intelligent computing device for the home of 1999"

Ok time for character facts

First up Rabbit (Played by Isabella Bunny Bennett)

She changes her appearance so much that it is hard to keep track sometimes

Was in love with a toaster her name was Jenny (Jenny got dropped 8 minutes after she was bought and Rabbit didn't have the warranty)

In a couple of the iterations of her costume, she has worn up to 6 belts

Next The Spine (Played by David Michael Bennett) (Probably worth noting that Isabella and David are twins)

He has a titanium alloy spine that's his backstory

He can detach his spine from his chassis

He loves the wild west and cowboys

He has the brain cell (always)

Zer0 (Played by Bryan Barbarin)

Zer0 was built out of three incomplete systems

He was left in a basement for nearly 100 years

Has his own cereal brand called ZER-0'S

Hachworth (Played by Sam Luke)

He has a moustache (That's all you need to know about him)

The Jon (Played by Jonathan Sprague)

The Jon is powered by crystal pepsi

He apparently has no brain, and inside his chassis is a void in which several hot dogs and a koi fish float around.

He has a cowboy mode

And last but not least Upgrade (Played by Erin Burke)

She has not received an upgrade since 1996

She left the band in 2011 to become a princess

Her existence was erased from the lore when she left the band then she got retconned back into the lore (I don't know when exactly but around the time of the band's 10th anniversary)

I would do things with the albums but that would take waaayyy too long. Thanks for letting me ramble they are all i have been able to think of for months. Yea so if you get a minute listen to their music and i hope I've convinced you to vote for them.

#robot bracket #robot poll #propaganda #steam powered giraffe

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stevebattle · 1 year

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TJ2 - "The Little Robot That Might" (1994) by Jonathan Connell, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, and Mark C. Torrance, MIT AI Lab, Cambridge, MA. TJ is a Motorola HC6811 based robot built by Jon Connell, on loan to the MIT AI Lab for Mark Torrance’s research on Natural Communication with Robots. TJ makes it simpler for people to communicate with mobile robots using natural language. It can be taught the names and locations of places in simple typewritten English, and then answer questions and navigate to them in real time. Robots have a radically different way of perceiving the world because of their impoverished sensory capabilities and TJ aims to bridge that gap.

User: Where are you? TJ: I don't know where I am right now. User: Which way are you facing? TJ: I don't know which way I am facing. Please tell me. User: You are facing north TJ: I am facing NORTH. Thanks. User: You are at Mark's office TJ: I’m learning about MARK'S OFFICE. User: Turn around TJ: I’m turning around. User: Go until you can turn right TJ: I’m going until I see no obstacle on the right. User: You are at the northeast entrance to the elevator lobby TJ: I’m learning about THE NORTHEAST ENTRANCE TO THE ELEVATOR LOBBY.

The sign pinned to TJ’s back reads, "Don't follow me – I'm lost.”

#cybernetics #robot #1994 #MIT #IBM

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storytellersumayyah · 1 year

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usual pinned post!

it's been one year since the heartbreaker's handbook went live. and a year ago, i was still deciding whether or not i wanted to share it with the world. because sharing it meant it was real. it wasn't just mine. it was something that existed outside of a bubble.

but it was the best decision i ever made. it became a fun fact about me. it inspired further pieces of writing- side stories and companion pieces, that i never really hesitated to publish. it allowed me to talk about it as much as i wanted without feeling bad, and most of all, it made me proud. it made me happy. i wouldn't have published it had it not been for all the encouragement i received.

but now it is stocked in homes and two libraries, and it's something to celebrate.

so that's why we're here. this celebration is to make me happy. because that is what art is about. making ourselves happy, and having a release.

it'll run between july 10th and july 24th, and is also open on my instagram (also storytellersumayyah) but all the requests will still be answered here. feel free to send multiple! everything will be tagged as #thhfbp, so without further ado:

everyone:

🥀 the characters as...

🌻 a little doodle of something i associate with a character or relationship

🌼 a song i associate with a character or relationship

🌸 a random piece of information about the characters or relationship

🌺 directors cut of a scene

🍄 a song that reminds me of a character or relationship

🌹 something i want in the hypothetical television adaptation

🌷 give me a scene and i’ll tell you what could have been

💐 ask me anything about the book

mutuals (including if I know you in real life):

🌙 something that happened that i associate you with

🪐 the character you would be if i wrote someone inspired by you

☄️ a random deleted scene/something that i want to write that won’t fit in anywhere else

and if you want to participate, but don't know what to send, here's a character guide! (there are more characters, but these are the ones where's the enough to actually send things about):

tristan: the heir to the nightingale name, the most powerful of all the noble families. constantly described as a natural heartbreaker, everyone seems to forget how he was groomed to become one. but children are not robots, and the pressure of everything he wants and must sacrifice in order to do what is expected is causing him to drown.

camilla: knows why her name does not match her face. she found out she was noble too late for the school to properly did their claws in, and she did not want to be a heartbreaker. but her attempts to prove the system she so badly wants to destroy wrong only seem to reinforce that they were right.

jonathan: is also the heir to his name, and the power that it carries is the only reason he was not labelled heartbroken. his heartbreaks are a performance, and not in the good way. and there is only so much a child can play at being an adult before it all becomes too much for them.

adelaide: has always enjoyed pushing the boundaries and the system as far as she could. but it was always a joke. it was never something she really wanted to change. until it was. but she's spent her life being a heartbreaker and an heir. it's not something she's allowed to actually do.

viola: is a heartbroken who could not care less about relationships. she is determined to change the system, and she doesn't care about who gets hurt to do this. in fact, the more people who get hurt, the better. but in addition to wanting everything to change, she is sad for the people who will never get to know something different.

ellias: is a first-year student, who is already stuck in tristan's web. he always knew he would be a heartbroken, but the evidence is still upsetting. his art is the only thing holding him together, and it reveals more than it hides.

victoria: is tristan's mother, in name and nothing else. she carries the name and power of the nightingale family. that reputation comes before all else. including loving her husband and parenting her son. and she will always teach him lessons in the harshest way possible, no matter what the outcome becomes.

james: is tristan's father in all the ways he is allowed to be, which isn't many. he always knows what's really going. he never helps. he's too scared that if he intervenes, if he chooses his son, his wife will leave. that has always been his flaw. he loves his wife at the expense of his son.

mr carter: grew up in eros academy and returned as a teacher for reasons that he will never disclose. it was the place that made and broke him, in more ways than one. he knows who he is to the students. he knows that they want his validation. he will do his best to save them, but he will be awful if he thinks it's necessary. his thoughts are not always trustworthy.

stefan: is the ghost of tristan's past that haunts his every waking moment. their actions still influence him, no matter how much he tries to redefine them. with soft smiles and gentle words and loving eyes, it should have been simple. only it was life, and the entire thing went in ways the nightingales had not thought to consider.

ari: was camilla's until she told him she was leaving. and then she broke his heart (and hers with it), leaving him to pick up the pieces and do what he could. there was no anger. only a soft sort of grief. and then they found their way back to each other.

rafael: is all tristan wanted as a teenager. they meet as adults, and for that they're both grateful. it gave them time to become the right people. he is stable and gentle and romantic. they know what to say and when to be silent. and despite everything, they never stop looking at the world with love and hope.

#sumayyah creates #the heartbreaker's handbook #sumayyah writes #thhfbp

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dreamii-krybaby · 1 year

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BRASS GOGGLES BY STEAM POWERED GIRAFFE IS LITERALLY MURDER DRONES'S THEME SONG, NO I WILL NOT CHANGE MY MIND AND I WILL FIGHT YOU.

no but seriously it fits so well, the thing is this song has gone through many different versions it can fit the show in different ways.

like the song can be told in multiple POVs, but I think some version fit some characters better. For example the most current version of brass goggles (I think) is the one that includes "tea time", (for context some version aren't officially in platforms as it has only been performed by the band at their concerts/live shows but you can listen to it in youtube since a lot of their live performances are posted there) fits CYN as the main singer so well! ( I also feel she can fit as "upgrade"s part in the 2008 version)

tho yes even tho the song in all of it versions has a very old timey vibe (which honestly in that case fits the CYN and the whole creepy manor fiasco) lyric wise it fits a lot of the characters.

tho i think the 2013 version gives it a much more energy so gives it a different vibe (am talking the walter robotics expo and the one at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego) and I think it fits Uzi better bc the instrumentals and vocals go HARD in those performances of that version.

honestly any version of brass goggles can be sung by multiple characters from Murder Drones, each having their part.

there are so many songs from SPG that can fit murder drones so well, mostly lyric wise.

honestly we need sci-fi vibe songs about robot singing about the experience of living.

btw if u wanna know how many versions this song has its around 5 i think:

-album one (2009 version) this version of the album had the backup vocals of Erin Burke who portrayed "Upgrade" before she left the band in 2011

-album one (2012) the most known one

-"2013 version" - in this "version" which was performed at the Walter Robotics expo and at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego had much more energy and intensity and had an added drum solo.

-Music from SteamWorld heist (2015) - this version made for the game had a more upbeat but not necessarily an intense instrumental, and according to the SPG wiki,the developers game team sang alongside the band in the chorus.

btw in the 2013 and 2015 version had the backup vocals of Samuel luke, who was the og drum player before he joined as "Hatchworth" taking over the role of "the Jon" (who was portrayed by jonathan sprague, who left the band in late 2012)

-Tea time/Tea break (2014-present in performances) this version contains a "tea break" between before the final chorus and bridge of the song.

also in 2015 in performances the drums where no longer presented and instead was replaced by a keyboard and went HARD when the song had the "tea break" part (I think I know why this was made but GOD the history of the changes inside the band is hella long)

and btw in some performances you'll see a different member of the band, which is zero who joined the band in 2016 after Hatchworth/sam luke left

oh and in some version some lyrics of the song change, although most of the time they are minor ones and are mostly present in the the backup vocals.

anyways thank for reading me going down a rabbit hole of a pantomime-robot-band-lore-song named after a steampunk website

(also pls check out Steam Powered Giraffe, they are seriously super talented people, and just in case ALL of their albums and songs follow different vibes, like you will not find a song similar to brass goggles in their other albums. )

(Oh and btw Rabbit (the character) and isabella/"bunny" (Rabbit's performer) is trans and uses She/Her pronouns, but she started the band before she transitioned, so in some older performances you'll see rabbit with an outdated design and pronouns, am just saying this so some of yall dont get confused when watching their old content. Also Rabbit has the tendency to constantly change her design (which makes sense why this song has so many versions since its sang by rabbit and contains heavy lore of the SPG storyline))

youtube

#murder drones #steam powered giraffe #spg my beloved #Spotify #Youtube

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konmarkimageswords · 1 year

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Philip K. Dick (1928-82) was the kind of science-fiction writer who is read and praised by people who don’t like science fiction. His fame moved beyond the genre’s ghetto after some of his novels and short stories were turned into movies—Blade Runner (1982), Minority Report (2002), and A Scanner Darkly (2006), to name a few. He is sometimes compared to Jorge Luis Borges, one of the finest short-story writers, and his work has influenced many authors (genre-bending Jonathan Lethem, for example) and filmmakers (the Wachowski brothers, directors of The Matrix).

Just as critics dub certain writers’ visions of the world “Orwellian” or “Kafkaesque,” some now use the awkward term “Dickian.” Dick’s paranoid vision is a unique, sad, funny, and—in its strange and sometimes very moving manner—even ennobling way to think about what we are meant to be as humans. In his later work, Dick’s outlook became deeply, even explicitly, informed by a Gnostic sense of the struggle to be fully human. Ancient Gnosticism was, among other things, concerned with the dilemma of humanity trapped in delusion, imprisoned in a world ruled by malign and unseen forces—a recurrent theme in Dick’s work.

What does science fiction have to say about human nature? For many serious readers, this is GeekCity, a corner of genre fiction inhabited by sad and lonely people who go to Star Trek conventions and collect action figures. The science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon is credited with what has entered the wider critical discourse as “Sturgeon’s Law.” When it was said of science fiction that “90 percent of it is crap,” his answer was, “90 percent of everything is crap.” Who can disagree? Serious science-fiction criticism finds examples of imagined alternatives that illuminate our own world in Plato’s description of Atlantis in the Timaeus, in his vision of an ideal society in The Republic, and in Thomas More’s imaginary society in Utopia. Some writers prefer another name for the genre, “speculative fiction,” since much science fiction has little to do with science. Whatever term you choose, the best examples show that one way to see our situation clearly is to imagine another, very different one. This can be done by placing a story in the remote past, an alternative present, or a near or far future. Philip K. Dick was the writer who did it best.

The animating idea behind Dick’s fiction—hardly original in itself—is that things are not as they seem. This is, of course, a major part of any religious insight—and as an Episcopalian, Dick understood this. Walker Percy’s essay “The Message in the Bottle,” for example, describes an island (this could be the beginning of a sci-fi plot) where everything is pleasant. Life seems good for all its inhabitants; then someone walking along a beach finds a bottle with the message, “Don’t despair, help is on the way.” This is what the Christian gospel says to a complacent, obtuse world, and it is not unlike one of Dick’s plots. In many of his stories, as in Gnostic theology, the world is depicted as not merely asleep, but deliberately deceived. Any remedy or salvation will therefore have to include a battle against powers that not only seem insane, but are evil. Overcoming the ruse requires special insight or special revelation that is shared by only a few.

This theme of widespread deception is woven throughout several of his plots. In The Simulacra (1964), the U.S. president is an android, but the citizenry has no idea. In The Penultimate Truth (1964), World War III starts with a fight between two superpowers. The battle begins on Mars, spreads to Earth, and is fought by robots. Humans are forced to live and work underground in huge shelters. The war ends, but the people are told that the battle rages above them on an uninhabitable surface. Meanwhile, the authorities continue to generate false war stories while they themselves live a bucolic life on the earth above. In The Zap Gun (1967), two great superpowers are at peace, and citizens of both nations are reassured that they are secure because of their side’s superior arsenal—but the weapons are designed not to function. Weapon design is, in effect, a kind of conceptual art, although the fact that the weapons do not work is kept from the masses. This is what keeps the world truly disarmed. When aliens threaten the earth, the weapon designers have to come up with something that really functions. There is an implicit Gnosticism here: only a select few know what is going on; most of humanity is sleepwalking.

This isn’t a happy point of view, to be sure. Yet what’s missing from the film adaptations of Dick’s work (of which the best are Minority Report and the director’s cut of Blade Runner) is Dick’s humor. Even his darkest stories are laced with funny moments. Another quality missing in the movies is Dick’s enduring compassion for the sadness of ordinary, confused human existence. His stories usually take place in a future, or in an alternate reality, where paranoia reigns, where appearances cannot be trusted, where people may be androids—robots made to resemble humans—and androids may be whatever human beings are, where the world we are presented with is a lie.

Dick’s life was messy. (Lawrence Sutin has written a good biography, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, Carrol & Graf, 2005.) He was born inChicago in 1928 and died in 1982; his twin sister died in infancy. Dick’s parents moved toCalifornia and divorced. He lived with his mother until he matriculated at UC Berkeley for a short time, majoring in German. He was fascinated by German culture. After dropping out of college, he worked in a record store, and music plays an important part in much of his work. He was married and divorced five times, used drugs, was convinced at various points that the FBI was after him, feared for his sanity, and hoped for spiritual deliverance.

At the same time, Dick felt a keen loyalty to many friends, whose lives were often as complicated as his own. His novels are full of regular people with ordinary, often dull jobs; they struggle for decency, sometimes fail, sometimes succeed. There is always something sad, frustrating, and funny about their struggles, and I can’t think of another science-fiction writer who comes close to describing this sort of ordinary life with such compassion. The science-fiction novelist Ursula K. Le Guin once wrote that Dick’s characters reminded her of Dickens’s; sometimes you remember one and can’t place which novel he or she appears in, but the humanity remains vivid. Dick drew from his own life, sometimes quite directly, in writing his novels. A Scanner Darkly is about drug use—based in large part on his own experience—and it’s scary. It begins, “Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair.” It contains the only funny suicide scene I’ve ever read, and at the end of the novel Dick uncharacteristically explains what he has just written:

This is a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed—run over, maimed, destroyed—but they continued to play anyhow…. Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a lifestyle. In this particular lifestyle the motto is “Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying,” but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your lifestyle, it is only faster.

Before movies made him known beyond science-fiction circles, Dick’s best-known work was The Man in the High Castle. It won the Hugo award (science fiction’s highest) in 1962. It describes an alternative 1962 America, in which the Nazis and the Japanese won World War II. There are some nicely imagined touches (Americans forge Wild West artifacts to sell to wealthy Japanese collectors; Germans fly rapidly around the world not in jets, but in passenger rockets), but at the center of the novel is a search for the author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, an alternative-world tale in which Germany and Japan were defeated. This alternative world is not the one we know, the one that really followed from the defeat of Hitler; and finally, it is suggested that the world the protagonists live in isn’t real either. The I Ching, an ancient Chinese text, figures in the book’s plot, and Dick apparently used its chance-based methods of divination in composing the story. Although Dick never alluded to it, this sense of not being able to know what reality really is reminded me of the Taoist sage Chuang Tsu’s dream that he was a butterfly: it wasn’t clear to him whether he was Chuang Tsu dreaming that he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Chuang Tsu.

In 1978, Dick delivered a lecture, “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later.” In it, he said: “The two basic topics that fascinate me are ‘What is reality?’ and ‘What constitutes the authentic human being?’” This fascination went back to his first published story, “Roog,” which “had to do with a dog who imagined that the garbage men who came every Friday morning were stealing valuable food that the family had carefully stored away in a safe metal container. Every day, members of the family carried out paper sacks of nice ripe food, stuffed them into the metal container, shut the lid tightly—and when the container was full, these dreadful-looking creatures came and stole everything but the can… [T]he dog’s extrapolation was in a sense logical, given the facts at his disposal.”

Dick’s approach was not always so light. In an angry short story about abortion, “The Pre-Persons,” he wrote of a future in which the courts had decided that a person was a real human being only when capable of doing algebra. Children not yet old enough to grasp algebraic concepts lived in dread of extermination trucks that could come and take them away. Dick’s antiabortion stance led the feminist science-fiction writer Joanna Russ to send Dick a letter, “the nastiest letter I’ve ever received.” Although he later apologized for any hurt feelings, he said, “for the pre-persons’ sake, I am not sorry.”

If Dick’s early work sometimes had an implicitly Gnostic aspect, that quality became more explicit in his later writing. In 1974, Dick, recovering from minor surgery, answered his door for a delivery of painkillers. The young woman delivering the medication was wearing a fish pendant, and when he asked what it was, she told him that it was a sign worn by the early Christians. In “How to Build a Universe,” he writes,

I suddenly experienced what I later learned is called anamnesis—a Greek word meaning, literally, “loss of forgetfulness.” I remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to me. And not only could I remember it but I could see it. The girl was a secret Christian and so was I. We lived in fear of detection by the Romans. We had to communicate with secret signs. She had just told me all this, and it was true.

For a short time, as hard as this is to believe or explain, I saw fading into view the black, prison-like contours of hatefulRome. But, of much more importance, I remembered Jesus, who had just recently been with us, and had gone temporarily away, and would very soon return. My emotion was one of joy. We were secretly preparing to welcome him back. It would not be long. And the Romans did not know. They thought he was dead, forever dead. That was our great secret, our joyous knowledge. Despite all appearances, Christ was going to return, and our delight and anticipation was boundless.

Dick was never entirely clear about what that experience meant. But he was convinced that something of great significance had happened to him, and wrote at length about his encounters with what he called “the cosmic Christ” in a free-form journal called “The Exegesis,” in which he understood Christ as part of a continuity which included Ikhnaton, Zoroaster, and Hephaestus. This syncretism is typical of Gnosticism. Dick’s efforts to explain what all this meant are less interesting than the work that came from the experience, his final three novels.

Dick’s visions and dreams coalesced in the VALIS trilogy—VALIS being an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System, or God (of a sort). The most tangled, complicated, and autobiographical is the first, VALIS (1981). It is the least successful of the three, but worth reading because of its seriousness and its painful closeness to Dick’s own life. The plot of VALIS contains not only autobiographical fragments, but a movie with a secret meaning and a rock-star couple whose daughter, Sophia, is thought by some to be the returned Savior. The novel wrestles with the first question that haunted Dick—“What is reality?”—and it suggests one good answer, based on a real incident in Dick’s life. When a student asked him during a lecture for a simple definition of reality, he answered, “Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn’t go away.” Toward the end of the book Dick writes, “I lack Kevin’s faith and Fat’s madness…. I don’t know what to think. Maybe I am not required to think anything, or to have faith, or to have madness; maybe all that I need to do—all that is asked of me—is to wait. To wait and to stay awake.”

The second book of the trilogy, The Divine Invasion (1981), tells of an exiled or absent God—another Gnostic theme—trying to return to earth, which has been held captive by Belial, a fallen angel, since the fall of Masada. The novel involves a virgin birth, which perplexes the Catholic woman who is pregnant with a divine child. She says remotely, “Catholic doctrine, I never thought it would apply to me personally.” The child must struggle to awaken to his own identity. As in classic Gnostic teaching, a perverse power holds the world in its grasp, and it is represented by both the established church (the Christian-Islamic Church) and the imperial political establishment, whose members are uncomfortably but profitably allied. The Divine Invasion is an amazing story of parallel realities, redemption, and the war between good and evil, with a wonderful ending.

The final novel in the trilogy, the last Dick completed, is The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982). The author based Bishop Timothy Archer on Episcopalian Bishop James Pike, who went on an odd pilgrimage into the Judean desert with too little preparation and died of exposure. So does Timothy Archer, in search of the truth about Gnostic scroll fragments. Archer is a complicated character: brilliant and selfish, genuinely insightful and clueless. The novel is narrated by Archer’s daughter-in-law, Angel Archer. In Dick’s novels, the point of view frequently shifts from person to person; but here Angel is the sole narrator, and her voice carries the novel, which contains serious arguments about Gnosticism and a few genuinely funny and politically incorrect jokes.

In these and his other stories, Dick creates characters who struggle not only for salvation, for ultimate truths, but sometimes merely to be decent human beings—and the two struggles are really one. What reality is and what it means to be authentically human are intrinsically linked. Dick’s answers, such as they are, range randomly from new-age nonsense, through his own episodes of delusion and paranoia, to a Gnostic Christianity that contains more of the pain and compassion of real Christianity than most Gnostic visions. Many Gnostic writings advance an elitism that delights in being among the chosen in whom the divine light resides. Dick saw glimmers of the shattered divine light in many confused and struggling people, and he found something of cosmic significance there, both in the light and in the struggle. His finest novel, The Divine Invasion, for example, ends with the fall of Belial, the angelic dark force that held the good God at bay. Belial “lay broken everywhere, vast and lovely and destroyed. In pieces, like damaged light.”

“This is how he was once,” Linda said. “Originally. Before he fell. This was his original shape. We called him the Moth. The Moth that fell slowly, over thousands of years, intersecting the earth, like a geometrical shape descending stage by stage until nothing remained of its shape.”

Herb Asher said, “He was very beautiful.”

“He was the morning star,” Linda said. “The brightest star in the heavens. And now nothing remains of him but this….”

“Will he ever be as he once was?” Herb Asher said.

“Perhaps,” she said. “Perhaps we all may be.” And then she sang for Herb Asher one of the Dowland songs…. The most tender, the most haunting song that she had adapted from John Dowland’s lute books:

When the poor cripple by the pool did lie Full many years in misery and pain, No sooner he on Christ had set his eye, But he was well, and comfort came again.

Philip K. Dick’s fiction—perhaps because most of it was written in a genre known for conceptual risk-taking—dealt in an unembarrassed way with questions involving the ultimate meaning of our lives in a tone that was compassionate, often funny, and at some unexpected moments very moving.

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