#just one part to go :3

[linipik]

FAR OUT AT SEA

"Shiro is determined to know if the new human research base is a risk for his fellow merfolk with the help of a marine biologist and research intern Adam."

rating: T

pairing: Adam/Shiro

tags: Adam (Voltron) Shiro (Voltron), Keith for half a line but he is there, Merman Shiro, Everyone lives, First Meetings, plot-driven action, Alternate Universe Merpeople, Canon-Typical Violence

This fic is part of the Once Upon the Seashore PDF (get it for free on my Ko-fi)

Chapter 3 of 4

Or that was the plan. Unfortunately, there were cameras Shiro didn't discover on time and sensors he could not avoid. Before he could destroy more than half the machines, he was captured.

The superior officers tried to hide the havoc from the cadets, researchers, and interns. However, the damage was considerable, and, soon enough, soon enough the whole base’s personnel was moving.

 With his heart about to break through his chest, Adam ran towards Shiro's quarters and found them empty. At that moment he knew that a suspicious incident down in the deepest, more classified parts of the whole facility was thanks to one single person. How could Shiro go behind Adam’s back? the one person who has been helping him, after all the things they've discovered together. But if Shiro was really involved, doing so would be more dangerous than anything they’d been discovering before. Steeling himself, Adam resorted to going with the rest of the staff and waiting, turning off any suspicions for when it would be easier to sneak around.

He didn't find anything in the higher-up offices, the security rooms, or the storage units, which made him restless. It didn't make much sense to look for Shiro deeper down the base, but since they were being so careful and all out of better ideas, Adam went there.

The way there was painfully quiet, but he knew, thanks to the planes they uncovered early on, that there was a huge walk-in fridge at the bottom of the marine biology lab internal dock, which was used to store big tanks in a queue for cleaning. 

Adam almost forgot how to breathe. There were temporary cameras and alarms set in place so he could not come closer, but there was no mistake, that face was Shiro's face with pointy fins in the place of ears, sporting a very new very deep cut on the bridge of his nose. It was Shiro but all the way down in his shoulders in his arms shiny dark purple scales, all the way down to… to a lustrous dark flying fishtail. Adam had to do a mental double-take. 

Mermaids were real and Shiro was one of them. Mermaids, merfolk, merpeople, a merman. In front of him.

This was beyond anything Adam could imagine or dream. It also… made sense, somehow? No wonder Shiro had so much random deep knowledge of marine life, no wonder he asked stuff about their operation. Above all, no wonder he was so invested in unveiling whatever the base was doing in the middle of the ocean. Probably this was his home first and they were invading!

Adam was still frozen in place, wishing nothing more than to see that familiar and other-worldly face up close and to be able to talk to Shiro about everything he had seen while living deep in the sea, knowing that the truth was so much wilder than anything he ever imagined. It all would have to wait, though. Shiro was bruised and seemed heavily drugged, he needed Adam's help. 

The few officials with enough clearance were probably afraid and had decided to guard Shiro with machines only, probably wary of the reaction any soldier would have upon seeing a real merman. An actual merman! Adam couldn't wrap his head around it yet. Forcing himself to function, he dug in his memory for the passwords and system protocols he had learned while trying to breach the security measures with Shiro the days prior, and after a lot of tinkering and mumbled cursing, he managed to loop the key cameras and cut the flow of sedatives. Hoping Shiro was not too sensitive to changes in pH and temperature of the water, Adam connected the nearest water supply to replace the whole tank, dumping the contaminated liquid in another nearby.

Shiro stirred up after a while. He blinked heavily, disoriented, and bumped into the glass by accident, which made him scowl. Instead of trashing or causing a ruckus, though, Shiro shook his head vigorously and used his hands to explore the limits of the tank. Frozen in place, still unnoticed, Adam could see Shiro had membranes between his fingers.

It was truly incredible.

While Adam, mesmerized, stared at him, Shiro reached the upper edge of the tank and struggled to remove the lid… lid that was locked with a bolt placed outside the tank. Damn, what was Adam doing? He swiftly approached to remove the bolt, startling Shiro.

“Sorry!” Adam said, unsure of what he was apologizing for.

As soon as the lid was removed Shiro took his head out of the water.

 “...Hey” he added quietly, something between a greeting and acknowledgment of the new situation between them.

Shiro got his upper half body out of the tank and quickly crawled helping himself with his hand through the shallow water, following the drain into the marine biology lab main pool. It didn't look like the first time he has gotten himself in this kind of situation, very different from the helplessly drugged-up merman Adam first saw moments ago floating in the tank but not a little less impressive. Dumbfounded, Adam followed him, mindful of not stepping on his fins.

“Do you think you can open the gate to the cetacean interaction pool?” Shiro asked once he got comfortable in the marine biology pool, "There is a hatch towards the open waters at the bottom of this, I think.”

“Takashi.”

Shiro turned to finally see him. Adam had a million questions and the full awareness of that being the worst moment to ask any of them.

“Adam, I'm sorry,” Shiro said before Adam could gather his thoughts, there was a plea in his tone “you understand why I didn't tell you, right? No one is supposed to know.”

Adam knew that was exactly the case, yet he needed to understand.

“I…” he stuttered. It was hard to find of a single thing to say, their situation was far more complicated than the unnamed thing they’d been dancing around since they met.

Then they could hear the sound of people approaching. 

“Shit. I'll open the gate” Without losing a second, Adam ran towards the control panel and initiated the opening sequence. Shiro swam towards the sluice gate, ready to escape as soon as the pool got filled with enough water for the doors to open.

“They can’t find you here,” Shiro's worried tone traveled over the sound of the water rushing into the pool, “And… don't tell anybody I was an intern, they usually can’t put two and two together and realize we can shift forms.”

“Who's there?!” someone yelled from afar, “WHO IS THERE!?” the voice repeated while the footsteps came to a halt and the clicking of guns echoed in the corridor.

“GO!” Shiro shouted.

– o –

Adam could only run back inside the walk-in fridge, hiding behind all the tanks. He heard a crowd breaking into the lab, their gasps and curses upon finding Shiro, and many fierce screams and hits. There was a loud splash and many people yelled stuff like “Don't let him get away” and “Grab the UUVs.”

It was over after a few more seconds of whirring, clashing, and swearing. Curled in his hiding place, Adam couldn't help a sense of dread. Could Shiro really run away unscathed? Judging by the officer's cursing and rapid exit toward the upper levels, Shiro might have been lucky this time. When Adam determined it was safe enough to go out of hiding, the faint pink tint on the pool and the trail of blood made his stomach churn.

Adam was just an irrelevant intern, but he was determined to do everything he could to help. Lucky is not enough, He had to make sure Shiro was not followed, his secret his people were not going to be easily hunted if he could help it.

 Shaking his commotion off, he ran to erase any and all evidence of Shiro's existence, both as a human and as a merman And the last two hours have to be complete confusion. He tinkered with all the cameras, he stole all the files from the archives, he threw away the clothes, the food in the fridge, he burned the notebooks and fake IDs. While wiping out any mention of Shiro from the base, he wished he could wipe his memories as well. It was the sensible thing to do. The best thing to do. Shiro was something -someone- too amazing -too special- to be forced to be apart from his true home in the name of science or in the name of Adam's dumb feelings. He would never see Shiro again, and he'd better be at peace with that reality sooner than later.

With all evidence lost, the whole ordeal was officially brushed off as a freaky accident, something about a faulty engine exploding that didn't really make sense but was better than proclaiming a mermaid had come to destroy half the equipment of a supposedly super secure military base. The mess was picked up, the very few people implicated were bribed and then relocated, and nothing was said about the incident again, going down in everyone’s memories as a cryptid sighting at best and not more serious than that.

 Left adrift among all that chaos and all his plans for the future shattered, Adam ended up accepting a new position at an institute that had nothing to do with the one he originally aimed for, located on land where he could still see the shore from the lab's window.

----

Far Out at Sea is complete on PDF >> GET IT HERE <<

[zaahvi]

GLORY TO THE RISEN GODS

[hinamie]

i'm exactly as normal about him as I thought I'd be

[aroaceleovaldez]

Nico referring to his mom as "Mama" implies he most likely at least used to refer to Hades as "Papa" and i 100% headcanon he still does but mostly in the manner of him having the entire Underworld wrapped around his finger for being the baby of the family

[heartorbit]

figure skating set right now please. thanks

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Enki S Ending: God Blocking Gambit

[egophiliac]

ENG PLAYERS I BESEECH YOU

I have been informed that you guys are getting part 4 of episode 7 tomorrow, which means we are FINALLY going to get the official romanization of Revaan's name, somebody please tell me because I need to know what it is.

like, yes, it's probably just Revan/Levan, but look, I'm sitting here with my finger over the button of all these Laverne and Shirley jokes and just waiting for the opportunity to deploy them --

[ninyard]

exy fans + twitter (the trial: day one)

[arsenicflame]

Bonus round! Do you use a queue tag?

[puppyeared]

act 4 :(

@chipper-smol and i came to a realization

[captainmaxatx]

I think Deadpool and Wolverine 2 should start with them beating the shit out eachother in some nondescript field, just going full tilt completely mauling eachother

And then we see colossus come out the mansions back doors and he starts yelling about them ruining the lawn

[solitairedeere]

i was never as optimistic about the ending of bnha as some villain stans were, but i never thought it'd end so badly it left me wondering why horikoshi ever bothered to humanize the villains or make them complex characters at all.

like-- i expected that at least 1-2 of the 3 villains who were heavily foreshadowed and outlined by the narrative as people to be saved would be, you know, actually saved. i didn't think that was a high bar. i've been let down before in fandoms where everyone was certain a character would live and then they didn't, so i tried to keep my hopes low. AND YET.

what happened to tomura was upsetting, but i wasn't that shocked after how disinterested the manga has seemed to be in him for like, the past 100 or so chapters. a bit surprised, because you'd think if anyone would succeed in the 'saving' mission it would be the MC, but whatever. dabi, well, they've spent a lot of time showing the way his quirk destroys his body even before this arc, so that also sucked but at least it didn't feel completely out of left field.

........but they're not even letting toga live???

i just-- what have we even been doing here? when zero out of the 3 characters that were marked out for saving were actually saved, you have to acknowledge that something has gone seriously fucking wrong with the storytelling. not even just from the perspective of a villain fan but from the perspective of someone who likes stories to be thematically consistent or satisfying in any way.

you can set up an expectation of these characters being saved and then subvert that and turn it into a tragedy- if done well that could even be worthwhile and interesting. but you can't turn it into a tragedy and then just... keep trucking along with the happy ending messaging and act like anything in the manga has been resolved and that the characters have somehow successfully completed their heroic origin stories.

like, maybe i shouldn't have expected this much from a shounen- at the end of the day it is still a shounen so i didn't expect to feel that it truly satisfactorily wrapped up all the themes it brought up around societal ills. but i expected it to at least resolve those things in a shounen-y way where they punch the problems and help these specific people and then you can feel good assuming that the state of things will continue to improve in the post-canon world of the manga.

instead we got... uh, none of that. the story refused to answer a single one of the larger questions it's been outlining for the past 400+ chapters. in the end, it was all flash and no substance, which again could've been fine, if it weren't for the way the story seemed to spend significant chunks of time trying to delude you into thinking it had substance.

truly makes me wonder what horikoshi thought he was doing the entire time. can it really all be blamed on burnout? the most that can be said for this ending is that it is, well, an ending. fuck dude, it is that.

and that's just... such a sad way to end a project that took up 10 years of your life.

[phoenixcatch7]

Okay but it's super interesting how

Din = Power = Ganondorf

Naryu = Wisdom = Zelda

Farore = Courage = Link.

Because Din, in the hylian creation myth, created the physical world. Naryu then created the laws - gravity, time, etc. And Farore finally created life - plants and people.

Din created the body, naryu the mind, Farore the soul.

And the triforce and its wielders so perfectly reflect that.

Ganon is physical power, he is big and intimidating and he breaks things. He is cunning and determined, but that's not what he focuses on. He is might makes right.

Zelda is wisdom and cleverness. She is stall tactics and information and team work. She is a powerful mage with a spine of steel, but that's not how she'll win. She is the pen being mightier than the sword.

Link is courage and persistence. He is the wild card sneaking behind enemy ranks, always moving, plunging into terrifying situations head first. He's a phenomenal fighter with a keen wit, but that's not what will get him through his challenges. He is bravery not being the absence of fear but the triumph over it.

They sit in perfect parallels to each other.

And ganon is reborn through his body - his resurrection is immortality. No matter how low he is cast, as long as he has a body he can claw his way back. He can cling to his power, build it ever higher.

Zelda is reborn through the magic of her bloodline. It's the accumulated knowledge handed down for generations, the unique power she must master, the skills she must develop to survive and get her kingdom out the other side intact. Even her name, the knowledge of herself, is handed down from all the way from the very first. Her ancestors knowledge of her future presence, her stability, is what gives her the edge.

Link is reborn in spirit. He is not bound by flesh or blood. Just like his wanderlust soul he can reappear in any time or place. His variation, his unpredictability, is exactly how he fights. It's what makes him so hard to pin down.

Ganons need to build strength means he can't chase after link. Links impulsiveness means zelda can outwit him. Zeldas stationary predictability means she's an easy target for ganon.

But the other direction?

Fire melts ice, ice redirects lightning, lightning burns fire.

And that's the very essence of the triforce.

[leafspiritz]

they’re besties to me 🐀💜

[ineed-to-sleep]

Some sketches I did to try to get a feel for what I want my Rook to look like 🤔

[heartorbit]

i want to know everything that makes you happy! 💫🪐🎇