#just set fire to the planet instead hey?

[thatidiotmonro]

Simmer on low heat for TWO HOURS? Fucking hell, Rockefeller, I'll stick with a tin of Glade.

🎥 _beesbaking (TT)

[ckret2]

Chapter 55 of human Bill Cipher finally having a little fun for the first time in over a month of captivity in the Mystery Shack:

Bill does his level best to teach Mabel everything he knows about everything as fast as possible (while Ford eavesdrops). In the process, he finally reveals something about his home dimension!

But not everything about his dimension.

"Did you have rainbows in Flatworld?" Mabel had started drawing her shapesona again at the bottom of a fresh piece of paper. The heart was holding out one hand with several strips of glue shooting in a beam out from the palm; Mabel started shaking glitter onto the glue strips to make them rainbow.

"Not natural ones."

"Awww!"

"We could make them with flashlights and prisms, though."

"That's something." Still, it wasn't as cool as a real rainbow. She started carefully drawing Bill floating above her shapesona. (She probably should have drawn him before she put down glitter. She had to push up her sleeve and lift her wrist to avoid smearing the glue.) "When's the first time you saw a real rainbow?"

Bill didn't answer.

Mabel glanced at him. He had a hard look in his eyes. "Bill?"

####

For the first time in his life, the triangle was up—up but not north—in space, in the third dimension, looking down but not south at the plane where he'd spent his entire existence. It shuddered and rippled and cracked, contracting, as the entire universe crunched together around him.

Great walls of pale blue flame half a googol light years wide erupted into third dimensional space, where stars were caught and crushed between the quickly collapsing cosmic tectonic plates. He hadn't known his flat universe had stars of its own.

His home world shattered and crumbled, shrapnel and rubble spraying out, stone instantly pulverized into dust. Distant oceans rode the waves of the convulsing universe, flinging billions of gallons of water into space in a fine thin spray, glittering in the sunlight.

As the triangle watched, a great flickering rainbow ring formed in front of the ejected ocean, like the hollow eye of a hostile god staring at him in judgment.

He stared back.

And he felt himself fill with more and more and more power.

####

"Bill?"

"Sorry, I was trying to remember!" Bill sat back, laced his hands behind his head, and shrugged, "It's not coming to me. But I'm sure it was after I took charge of Dimension Zero. From time to time planets with weather systems would fall in through a wormhole, I must've seen a rainbow on one of them!"

"Oh." The answer disappointed her, but she couldn't quite put her finger on why. She puzzled over it as she drew a fireball shape around Bill's hands in glue and shook on pale blue glitter.

Bill nodded at the page, "So what are we up to?"

"Fighting evil! With rainbow lasers and... whatever that magic fire thing you do is!"

"Hey, superheroes! Sounds fun. Who are we killing?"

"Superheroes don't kill people!"

"Fine. Who are we sending to the hospital with third degree burns?"

"I don't know, I haven't made up a villain yet." She almost asked Bill what kind of monsters existed in his world; but the question died in her throat. That might be too depressing a question. She added a heart-shaped glue outline around her shapesona and shook on a glitter rainbow, and set the picture aside to dry. She grabbed a fresh paper and tried to imagine what a two-dimensional butterfly would look like. Would it just have flat little stick wings since that was more aerodynamic? That sounded boring. She started drawing a two-dimensional squid instead.

Bill studied Mabel's latest finished work—the glitter-outlined heart, the glitter rainbow laser, the glitter fire, and the plain him. After a moment, he casually mentioned, "I used to wear body glitter."

She blinked at him. "What?"

"Earlier you asked me about glitter in my dimension," Bill said. "Body paint was makeup to us. I wore it when I went dancing."

"WHAT!"

"And I'd cut open glow sticks to paint my arms and legs!"

"What color glitter did you wear?!"

"Usually gold."

"What?! Bill!" Mabel laughed. "You're already yellow!"

"But I didn't glitter. That's important!"

"You're boring."

"Shut up! I was gorgeous and I knew it! Why mess with perfection?!" He gestured down at himself, perfection, as though he'd momentarily forgotten what body he was in. "Listen, club fashion gets repetitive. If you've seen one equilateral in cutesy primary color gradients, you've see 'em all. There's beauty in simplicity—not a lot of shapes can pull off a solid color with a little light highlighting and still look flashy!" He'd sat up straighter, chest puffed out proudly, as he talked about how pretty he thought he'd been. "Buuut sure, sometimes I highlighted my points for fun. And to keep from stabbing people—it's hard for other people to judge distances with strobe lights on."

"What colors."

"Usually red, blue, or purple. You know—nice contrasts with gold."

Mabel grabbed another paper and started drawing Bill dancing. He leaned closer, elbows on the table, watching with more interest now. Mabel asked, "You had clubs with strobe lights?"

"Of course we did, we aren't barbarians." Bill picked up yellow and black markers out of Mabel's supplies, leaned over to her drawing in progress, and started adding a decorative border around the nearest edge of the paper in dots and dashes.

"What kind of music did you listen to?"

"It was... It's closest to the music in— You've never been to that dimension. Well, it kind of sounds like... I'll never hit those notes with human vocal cords." He drummed his fingers on the table. "Hold on. Let me get Questiony's piano."

####

It turned out that Flatworld club music sounded kind of like a broken tornado siren.

"It doesn't sound very good on a human piano," Bill said, giving the electric piano balanced on his knees a disapproving look. "The intervals between notes are tuned wrong, it's about four octaves short, and it's missing that tympanic membrane shredding tremolo when the treble jumps."

Mabel regarded the piano with some dismay. "Do you know how to play anything else?"

Bill sighed.

He played "Don't Start Un-Believing" for her. He even did that cool thing where you drag a finger up half the keyboard at once.

####

By now, Bill seemed a lot happier to answer Mabel's questions about his world; but she quickly worked out which ones he'd actually give a direct answer. He was the most free with science-y questions, hit or miss on the fun cultural questions, and instantly evasive when asked about his own life or uncomfortable political issues.

When she asked if shapes and their houses just kinda floated unattached to anything because they didn't have a home planet, Bill said they did have a home planet—hundreds of miles below, marking south by its gravitational pull—and they lived in the sky in between their planet and its rings. When she asked what kind of clothing they wore, Bill said they usually didn't wear anything, unless it was for practical purposes (gloves for gardening; goggles for chemistry; elbow-, knee-, and corner-pads for spelunking), and when she asked about his top hat he said slyly, "You mean my telescope?" and gleefully refused to explain further.

But when she asked if it was true that equilateral triangles were the lowest rung you could stand on before getting knocked off the social ladder altogether, Bill said that was a pretty rude question to ask a triangle. And then he said his world didn't have ladders.

When he casually let slip that he'd been able to see the third dimension when nobody else could, she asked how that was possible. He'd paused, looked up from his seventh completely incomprehensible drawing of an animal (she'd asked him whether Flatworlders had pets), and, with an eager gleam in his eye, he asked, "How much time do you have?"

####

Ford heard Bill's voice the moment he opened the door—"All right, star girl, pop quiz, let's see how much of that you kept in your noggin."

"Oh, I'm so ready!"

Baffled, Ford leaned in the living room doorway. The room was absolutely plastered in crayon-covered papers—illustrations, lists, mathematical and scientific diagrams—stars, cells, planets, vehicles. At the moment Bill was pointing at six papers taped together with a diagram on them that Ford thought was a Punnett square that had been expanded into a four-dimensional tessaract. "A polygon's sides are determined by...?"

"Genetic inheritance!" Mabel announced, the proud student who knew all the answers. "You have however many sides your parents have genes for!"

"And the idea that polygons increase by one side each generation...?"

"Is propaganda! Because if everybody hides their kids without enough sides, and they only talk about the kids that did go up a side, it makes everyone think that's what always happens and their family is the only one that's failing!"

"Perfect! And the highest natural amount of sides a shape can have?"

"Twelve! Decadoggins!"

"Close enough, dodecagons! But this isn't Greek class, I'll give you full points. So, any shapes with more sides than that got them through—?"

"Random mutation!"

"Correctamundo! Meaning the only way to get shapes with hundreds of sides is..."

"Crazy bonkers inbreeding! Because the same rich families just keep marrying each other!"

"With consequences including—?"

"Um..." Mabel puffed out her cheeks as she thought. "Skeletons getting all crackly, having a hard time making babies, and high—uh—infant morality!"

"Mortality."

"Lots of dead babies."

"Yes! And remember: when a mutation makes a body produce so much more of something than it needs that it starts harming the body, that's called...?"

"Cancer!"

"Meaning circles are...?"

"Tumors!"

"And what do we do with tumors?"

"EXECUTE THEM!"

"YES!" Bill ripped the Punnett tesseract off the wall. Behind it was a piece of paper that read, in blood red crayon, ANTI-MONARCHIST ANARCISM. "You're ready to man the guillotines! A+, star girl! Give yourself another sticker!"

"Yes!" Mabel peeled a sparkly purple star off a sticker sheet and stuck it on her cheek. Her face had over twenty star stickers.

Ford leaned against the living room doorframe, watching the scene inside with wonder. He was more than a little iffy about the political lesson—he, personally, was incredibly opposed to the idea that it was morally imperative to execute anybody with extra body parts, nobility or not—but the presentation of it was certainly captivating. It had been a long time since Ford had seen Bill like this. (It had been a long time since Ford would have trusted any lesson out of Bill's mouth.)

"Now let's get back to biangles." Bill picked up a fake crystal ball that he'd drawn various lines and shapes on with a marker.

"Awww, again?!"

"Hey. Listen," he said firmly. "I believe in you. You'll get it this time, I know it."

Ford looked around the room, taking in the scene more fully. The floor was scattered with drawings of aliens. A few of them were various polygons—regular and irregular, with the irregularities further broken down by whether they otherwise showed radial or lateral symmetry—each with thin limbs and an eye on a corner. Most were fantastical alien animals, a few that Ford had seen or been warned about on other worlds. Some had been scribbled out and redrawn when Bill's limited artistic capabilities didn't live up to his unknown standards; a few were in Mabel's art style, meaning Bill must have described them to her while she drew.

Twenty pieces of paper had been taped together on the wall behind the TV, with a drawing of a planet surrounded by a circular ring of small blobs—a planetary ring?—and a moon further out. The empty atmosphere between the planet and the ring was filled with squares and rectangles, which were grouped together in red blobby circles that were each labeled by letter: "Country △," "Country B," "Country C," "Country D (communists)," etc. A badly-drawn sea serpent slithered along the outside of the ring with the words "Here There Be Monsters" written over it.

A tall column of taped together papers was covered in examples of alien writing systems—some of them Ford recognized from his travels through other dimensions. From the ones he understood, it looked like the words were demonstrations of Mabel's name in dozens of alien writing systems. Sometimes Bill spelled her name Maybell or Mabelle.

And there were so many papers scattered around the room with little graphs and symbols and arrows Ford couldn't make sense of. And in the center of it all, Bill, alive, energetic, his full attention enthusiastically focused on his student.

Bill had to be up to something; but Ford couldn't imagine what, based on the bizarre assemblage of information in front of him. What nefarious purpose could be behind showing Mabel how to spell her name in alien languages? Unless his goal was to so enchant her with tales of other worlds that he could persuade her to help him open a new portal...? No, even for Bill that felt like a stretch. 

He looked at the wall again. Surely, that wasn't Bill's homeworld. Ford had spent years of his life trying to find the world Bill was from; surely Bill hadn't just drawn it in the middle of Ford's living room. Had he?

"Okay, let's start with spherical geometry from the top," Bill said, polishing the crystal ball on his leggings to rub off the marker lines. "Don't tell anyone I can do this." He held up the ball, tapped it twice on the bottom, and it hovered in place when he let it go, freeing up both his hands to hold a ruler and marker. (How long had he been able to do that? Had he even noticed Ford was standing right outside?) He drew a line across the surface of the ball, "Pretend it's a planet. If you draw a line on a sphere, it's obviously curved, right?"

"Right," Mabel said.

"But now pretend you're on the planet. The surface of the world is a flat plane to you. From your perspective, you can walk in a straight line from point A to point B."

"But it's actually a curve. From space."

"Now you're catching on. That's what makes spherical geometry a little weird: when you're on the sphere you treat everything around you like it's 2D even though when you're off the sphere you can see it's 3D." Why in the world was Bill teaching Mabel about spherical geometry?

Bill drew two more lines to connect to the first. "So! You can draw a triangle on a sphere, no problem, right?"

"Right."

"And something you can only do in spherical geometry... is... pretend this is the North Pole and the South Pole..." Bill carefully rotated the ball under his marker as he drew a straight line from one "pole" to the other, and then drew a second straight line from pole to pole next to it. "Ta-da! If a tri-angle has three angles, a bi-angle has two angles. You've got yourself a two-sided polygon. Right?"

Mabel hesitated. "Right."

"You with me so far, Shooting Star?"

"So far," she said, with a tone that suggested she expected that to change very soon.

"But if you try to transfer that shape from spherical geometry to Euclidean geometry—" Bill turned to an expanse of still partially-uncovered white papers taped to the wall like a makeshift whiteboard, drew two points, and drew two straight lines, red and blue, between the points, "—it just doesn't work. You can't see a biangle in a flat world."

And now Mabel was squinting suspiciously at him.

Bill said, "I lost you."

"But where does it go!"

Bill shrugged. "You lost it when you lost the third dimension."

"But you said when you're on the sphere it's two dimensional!"

"From your perspective it's two dimensional, but there's still a third dimension enabling the sphere to exist."

"Then from my perspective when I'm on the planet shouldn't a biangle look like that?" Mabel pointed at the two straight lines on the piece of paper. "Since everything looks all 2D to me? But it doesn't! It's like flying from the North Pole to the South Pole through America and then flying back through China! China and America don't just squish together into the same place just because you're going in a straight line on a sphere!"

"I'd kill to hear you give a geography lesson to a Flat Earther convention."

Mabel gave him her best angry scowl.

"It was a compliment! I think you'd inspire some hilarious arguments, that's all!" Bill put two dots on the paper and offered Mabel the marker. "Look, try it for yourself! Draw a biangle."

Mabel took the marker and, after a moment of thought, drew two curved lines between the points, making a football shape.

"Those aren't straight lines, kid."

"Argh!" Mabel pulled the paper off the wallpaper, bent it into a curve, and shakily drew a straight line between the two points; but no matter how else she twisted or bent the paper, she couldn't find a path that would let her draw a second straight line between the points without overlapping the first line she'd drawn. She crumpled the paper, tossed it on the floor, and whispered, "It's witchcraft, Bill."

He burst out laughing. "I could name a few horror writers that felt the same way about non-Euclidean geometry."

"But whyyy does the biangle disappear when it goes from a sphere to normal flat paper."

"Because..." Bill groped for an explanation he hadn't already tried. He crossed an arm across his chest and tapped a knuckle just under the bow tied in his hoodie's draw strings the way some humans might tap a hand to their chin, his eyes narrowed in thought. How many times had Ford seen him make that exact same face in his true triangular form, whenever Ford was struggling to understand a lesson on portal physics and Bill was struggling to find a way to translate it into concepts Ford had encountered in his human education? "Let's try this another way."

The scene made Ford ache.

Look past the paper and the crayons, and the graph- and figure- and writing-covered walls looked so much like the advanced physics lessons and blueprints that Bill had coated Ford's starry blue dreamscape in during his sleep. Look past the flesh and bone, and Bill moved and gestured and spoke the way he had when he was teaching Ford how to build a bridge between worlds.

It was the first time since Bill's death that Ford had seen 100% of his personality shining—unhindered by grief, secrets, or a disdainful human audience. It was the first time in decades that Ford had seen Bill at his best.

In that moment, for a split second, Ford forgot how to hate Bill. He couldn't see Bill the traitor, Bill the invader, Bill the homicidal party animal. The only person in that room with Mabel was Bill Cipher the Teacher, Mentor, and Muse that Ford used to know so long ago. Like an ancient god who'd chosen to spend a day roleplaying as a giddy professor—Bill was holding back a tsunami's worth of vast, ancient, unintelligible alien knowledge so that he could drip out revelations at a faucet's pace, slow enough for his student to catch each drop in her hands.

Over thirty years ago, there had been moments when this Bill peeked out behind the above-it-all façade—and that had been the Bill that Ford was happiest to see, the Bill that Ford had thought of as a friend rather than a mere teacher... but each time, it hadn't been long before Bill seemly caught himself and turned off the faucet for the night.

Because he couldn't let Ford learn too much, or he would have seen through Bill's ruse.

Hatred tiredly crept back in.

"I've got it!" Mabel triumphantly flung her hands in the air. "It's like orange slices!"

"Orange slices?" Bill repeated.

"Be right back!" Mabel zoomed to the kitchen, shouting, "Hi Grunkle Ford!" as she passed.

Ford watched her go, then looked back at Bill; Bill had glanced at him for the first time. But all he did was frown and mutter, "I don't remember inviting you to audit this course."

Before Ford could decide whether to retort, Mabel charged back into the living room with an orange and a sharp knife. "Okay! If you draw a triangle on the orange," Mabel said, doing so with a marker, before cutting into it with the knife, "and then you—you cut it out all the way to the center..."

"Be careful with that," Ford said. Mabel was holding the orange in one palm and stabbing into it from the opposite side.

Bill said, "Lay off, Six Fingers. I'm keeping my eye on her, she's not gonna hurt herself."

"I'm being careful!" Mabel was struggling to get an even wedge cut all the way to the center of the orange; she eventually gave up and  dug into the orange with her fingertips to tug out a messy mangled handful of fruit, attached to a roughly equilateral patch of orange peel about two inches to each side. She shook orange juice off her fingers. "Pretend I cut that out better."

"I dunno what you're talking about," Bill said. "It looks flawless."

She pointed at each corner of the peel triangle. "Okay so, these are the three corners of the spherical triangle, right?"

"Right."

"And if you want to make a regular flat triangle, you can... try to cut a straight line between the corners, like..." She squeezed the rest of the orange between her knees, held the edges of the triangular peel with her fingertips, and sawed off the orange pulp underneath, trying to cut a flat level plane as near to the triangle's corners as she could. Ford almost warned Mabel about the knife again, but glanced at Bill's face and his expression of unworried, keen curiosity, and kept quiet. Bill reached out and caught the sawed-off chunk of orange pulp before it hit the ground.

Mabel held out the peel slice. "There! Right? Spherical triangle on top and flat triangle on the bottom!"

Bill considered that, one hand on his hip. He popped the orange chunk in his mouth. "All right. So far so good."

"But if you make a biangle..." Mabel drew two lines between the top and bottom of the remaining orange, and cut a wedge free. "There isn't anything extra to cut off to let you make a flat shape. There's just a straight line between the two points!"

"Ha! Okay, all right, that works! Brilliant! What do you need me for? You just taught yourself the whole lesson!" Bill ruffled her hair so enthusiastically that he knocked her headband askew.

She shoved him away, laughing, and straightened out her headband. "Bill!"

"What did I say! Didn't I tell you you'd get it?" Bill was beaming at her, impressed, delighted, proud. "Congratulations, you've just mastered college-level geometry."

"Wh—What? Are you serious? This is college stuff?" She shook her head. "No way, you're lying."

Bill pointed at Ford without looking at him. "Tell her."

He felt a little like a dog being commanded to bark; but he said, "He's right. I didn't start studying spherical geometry until my second semester in college." He was sure he could have studied it sooner, if his high school had offered it; and he doubted Mabel had absorbed an entire semester's worth of spherical geometry; but he didn't see any reason to point any of that out when Mabel's face lit up in excitement.

Bill said, "There you have it! Way to go, star girl! Two big stickers."

"YES!" Mabel peeled off two jumbo-sized star stickers with smiley faces and stuck them onto her earrings. "So does that make a biangle a girl or a boy?"

And Ford was immediately lost again.

"No," Bill said.

Mabel sighed loudly and tried again. "Does that make a biangle a line or a polygon?"

"Still no, but for a different reason. Externally, they look like lines to anyone who isn't psychic. Internally, their anatomy usually functions like a polygon's. But socially, you've gotta ask. Some of 'em consider themselves lines, some polygons, some claim biangularity is neither linear nor polygonal. Personally, I say they're whatever they say they are. Because," he said grandly, "I'm just that open-minded and accepting."

Ford stifled a derisive snort. But Bill's self-aggrandizing aside, Ford's mind was reeling trying to keep up—spherical geometry, the (gendered?) socialization of shapes, Flatworlder anatomy—what did psychics have to do with anything? Ford's fingers itched for a pen. He wished he had his journal with him.

Bill grabbed several papers off the floor and the floating crystal ball and climbed on top of the wooden TV cabinet. He left the ball hovering behind him seven feet up in the air, tossed aside several papers he'd already used both sides of to let them flutter back to the floor, and taped the rest to the wall with their blank backsides turned out. "Now back to remote viewing." He drew a grid in blue lines on the papers, said, "Toss me that triangle wedge," used a marker to draw an eye on the triangular orange peel, tapped it twice like he had the crystal ball, and stuck it against the grid, where it sat unmoving.

And the entire time, Ford watched with his arms crossed tightly.

Almost a month ago, Bill had given Ford his manipulative trap of a birthday gift, a miniature grimoire, five pieces of paper, margins filled, two rows of text per line, packed with as diverse an array of magical spells and occult knowledge as Bill could fit. It wasn't a gift, it was a boast and a taunt: look at everything I know that you don't; look at what I could teach you if you let me live. 

It was something Bill could have given him all along—effortlessly, with no cost to himself—but didn't, until Bill wanted something from him. 

On his birthday, Ford had wondered, furiously: when this was what Bill could have been—gift-giver, wish-granter, teacher, guide, friend—why did he choose not to be?! It was an internal scream of rage, the howl of a wounded victim at the condemned criminal as he was marched to the gallows: you monster, you monster, you monster, when it would have been so easy for you to be something better, why instead are you a liar, manipulator, torturer, murderer, life-ruiner, world-ender? Answer for yourself: why are you this instead of someone better? How dare you?

It had made Ford want him dead even more.

This was the exact opposite of the grimoire.

The question in Ford's head wasn't a scream of rage anymore. It was grief. It was a plea. It was one last desperate attempt to understand:

Instead of being who he was, why couldn't Bill have been this person? This charismatic, energetic, ecstatic muse who ruled like a king over a classroom he'd constructed himself, eager to share a trillion years of collected wisdom with a fragile mortal mind, lighting up with joy whenever she grasped something that was trivially simple to him? This guide to the vast wonders beyond Earth, competent and encouraging and funny, delighting in the weirdness of the wide wide universe? The Bill that Ford had once liked so much—the Bill that he'd called his friend?

"Okay," Bill said, all sunshine and excitement, "Back to how to view the third dimension from the second dimension—"

Mabel said, "Can you view the fourth dimension from the third?"

Bill hesitated a split second, but said, "Sure! You can view any dimension from any dimension! You've just gotta bend your eye the right way to see higher ones!"

"What does the fourth dimension look like?"

"Well—hm. Imagine the way that the third dimension looks different from the second, and that's the way the fourth dimension looks different from the third."

Mabel stared at Bill.

"Eddie wrote an entire book about a square meeting a sphere because that was the closest he could get to telling other humans what seeing the fourth dimension is like! If I could still visit dreams, I could just show you, but..."

"Isn't the fourth dimension time? Blendo showed us the time stream! Is that what it looks like?"

"Nnn—close! You're close. The fourth dimension isn't time, but time is in the fourth dimension."

"How's that different."

Bill pointed at the floor. "If the carpet's the second dimension and the lamp's shining on it, the third dimension isn't light, but light is in the third dimension."

"Ohhh." Mabel gasped. "That's why you called some weird thing flying around in a higher dimension an eclipse! Because eclipses were in a higher dimension in Flatworld!"

Bill's face lit up in surprised delight. "All right, skip three lessons ahead, why don't you! In a week's time you'll be teaching people how my dimension works." He turned back to his papers and started drawing a branching river. "So! That time stream you saw isn't time itself! It's a visual metaphor being generated so humans can see time too—sort of a hologram projecting from the fourth dimension into the third—have I explained that the universe is a hologram yet—"

Why weren't you this person, Ford wondered. Why did you choose not to be this person? When it was so easy for you to be this? When this made you happy, too?

Why couldn't you have been this person?

Why are you only like this now, when you're about to die?

####

(Hope y'all enjoyed Infodump: The Chapter. This is one of those chapters with something hidden in it that'll unravel the whole fic if you happen to find it, so have fun searching for that. Let me know what you thought of this week's chapter! And get excited—we've got Big Things coming up... soon.)

[dddragoni-drabbles]

You know, five years ago, I never would have called myself the adventurous type. I was the kind of guy who thought driving out to the beach was all the excitement I needed. But when all those portals opened up everywhere... I dunno, something about them just called to me.

So I went. Went down to the store and picked up a backpack and some bottled water, found the nearest portal and just... walked through it. I didn't even tell anyone I was going. I mean, like, what would I even have said? "Hey guys, I'm gonna be late to game night, I've decided to dive into an unknown rift in space-time." In hindsight, that was really stupid. A lot of people went in those things and didn't come back.

I guess I got lucky. I could have ended up in one of those parallel realities where everything is on fire, or with bloodthirsty monsters, or some other thing that would have killed me dead, but instead I got one that was just plains of purple grass as far as the eye could see.

Standing there, looking out over it, that changed something in me. I never figured I was going to amount to much. We've already explored the planet, and space travel wasn't going to happen in my lifetime. I'm not smart enough to make some scientific breakthrough, not creative enough to make some bold new artwork, not athletic enough to go around setting records.

But now, I had something. No one had ever set foot here before. I had something that I could truly call my accomplishment, and nothing could take that away. Sure, it wasn't anything crazy special, but it was my discovery.

I've been exploring ever since. Before I knew it, I was making maps, making contact with people from other realities, and helping to contain incursions from the more dangerous worlds. And now, it's your turn.

-An Explorer's Guide to the Infinite Cities, By Thunder Rockwell, Foreword

[dilf-din]

Silver Spring (Din Djarin x reader)

WC: 1200

Summary: I was listening to Fleetwood Mac today and had a lot of feelings. Some angst but mostly fluff

A strong wind whipped through the grassy hillside you found yourself perched atop of. This planet’s sun quickly sinking into the sea below you casting fiery rays of pink and orange on the water and sky alike. The sound of the tide coming in was drowned out by the salty wind rushing around the three of you. Grogu leaned against the basket you had brought from the crest carrying your dinner for tonight. His little chest rising and falling, his little hands rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.

You had been begging Din to park somewhere green for a few days so you and the child could stretch your legs. The last few weeks filled with countless hours waiting for his return. The two of you reading and rereading his little board books, tossing a ball against the wall, singing songs and dancing around the hull. You were so clearly full to the brim with cabin fever when he came back. He stood on the open ramp, arms crossed watching you twirl with Grogu wrapped tightly in your arms. You were singing him a nursery rhyme from your home planet while the little green child broke out in giggles. He was the first one to see his father, wiggling out of your grasp and tottering to him with his arms up.

Din knelt to meet him, greeting him with a, “Hey little guy.”

You bent over catching your breath and smoothing out your tunic from your little romp.

“Looks like you two were having fun,” Din remarked, a hint of teasing in his voice.

“If you take us somewhere pretty, we can all hold hands and twirl like kids in a school yard,” you panted, “I don’t think there’s room for all three of us here though.”

He chuckled at your response, “We’ll see.”

“Please Din,” you pleaded, “If you leave me here again to come up with another dance routine I’m going to lose my blasted mind.”

Of course he obliged, saying that you were ahead on quarries and credits and it would be nice for the child to have a break. The underlying tone of his voice implied that it was just as much for you and you knew it.

You were always thankful for his good moods, when he allowed room for frivolity instead of his usual strictly business mindset. You stretched your legs out in front of you. The sea grass tickling you through your thin pants.

“I’m going to take him to bed if you want to try to get a fire going,” Din said standing and plucking Grogu’s sleep heavy body up and cradling him gently in his strong arms. “Figured we could stay out here a little while longer if you wanted.”

You smiled at the thought of it. He had never said it in as many words, but you knew he had grown to miss your company, especially when he was gone for long stretches of time.

“Will we be able to keep a fire going with all this wind?” you called to him.

“It shouldn’t be an issue,” he said over his shoulder, continuing towards the Crest. It was parked partially under the cover of some trees about a hundred meters from where you had all gathered to eat. You trailed behind him looking for some drier wood pieces littered amidst the yellowed, dancing blades.

When you were satisfied with the pile you had made with a little extra to hopefully last a few hours, you set to making a small pit. Using the flint you kept tucked into your belt, you had a nice fire going in no time. You were just sitting back to admire your work when you heard Din’s footfall approaching from behind. You drew your arms around yourself as you caught a chill from the wind, his gloved hand extended offering down your shawl for you.

“It gets cold here pretty quickly,” he said smoothly, kneeling down to sit as well. There was a rock jutting out of the ground that you had gotten somewhat comfy against, large enough for both of you to sit and enjoy the fire and hide from some of the biting wind.

“Thank you,” you replied wrapping yourself in the warm layers.

You sat in a comfortable silence for several minutes, watching twin moons rise higher in the onyx sky casting glittering reflections on the wild sea surrounding you. You had taken to plucking some of the longer grass and braiding it to keep your hands busy.

“Din,” you started. His helmet turned slightly towards you, “Can I ask you something?”

“Go ahead,” he said calmly.

“Have you ever been in love?”

He had been sitting still this whole time but you could feel his presence tense slightly. He took a long time before replying, “Why do you ask?”

“I just wondered,” you said, nothing detectable in your voice but innocent curiosity.

“Have you?” he asked after a beat.

You chuckled softly, “Yeah, once. Or at least I thought. I was young, we both were. We never would have lasted what with my plans to leave Tattooine. He was content to stay there, and I just always needed,” you paused, “more.”

Din hummed in contemplation. The silence wrapped around you both again. A low howl of the wind, the crackle of the fire, his steady breaths through the modulator. By now you had several braided strands and were working them into one big braided piece. You couldn’t tell, but he was watching you intently through his visor, the deft sureness of your fingers. He thought of how nicely they would fit in his own.

“I have,” he broke the silence again, “Been in love before.”

You hoped your face didn’t give away how shocked you were to hear that. Not that you couldn’t see someone falling in love with Din, you just always imagined he had been the same. Stoic, married to his work.

“We were also young. I met her on Nevarro when I first got in good with the guild. A local crime mob didn’t like the way I had busted a few of their guys, I went in to find a quarry one day and was met with her corpse instead,” he finished, his boot digging into the ground and loosening some of the soft earth. The nervousness of him sharing something so heavy was obvious in his body language.

“Oh Din, I’m sorry, I-“

“You didn’t know, it’s okay.”

You allowed the silence to settle in again.

“Was she pretty?”

He waited awhile before giving a simple, “Yes, she was.”

A mix of emotions were battling out in your chest right now. Guilt for bringing it up, sadness for the grief he must carry, jealousy at his heart longing for someone else. You tried to stamp out those feelings any time they came up, but it happened so frequently now, it was getting harder to ignore.

“Like I said, we were young,” his voice startling you. “It was, we didn’t know what we were doing really. It was different.”

You paused. “Different than what?” you drew your gaze to his helmet glowing orange in the light of the fire.

The wind roared wildly around you and you almost thought that you imagined the next word that fell from his lips.

“This.”

[mybworlds]

Chapter 4

Pairing: Din Djarin x F!Reader (no use of Y/N)

Summary: This story sets 15 yrs before The Mandalorian events, Din Djarin is hired by Rebel Alliance forces to protect and escort you, the princess of a dead planet, to your new home.

Series warnings: use of you, violence, science fantasy elements, slow burn, angst, fluff, mutual pining, eventual smut (18+ MDNI), trauma.

A/N Here is the second story to be updated that you’ve chosen, I repeat the others will arrive in the next few days. Thanks as always for following me. Love ya ❤️

Masterlist

Thanks @idontgetanysleep and @saradika-graphics the dividers. Thanks @vase-of-lilies for the banner.

Taglist: @thegreenkid2, @harriedandharassed if someone else wants to be added let me know.

The Mandalorian didn't say anything to you so as not to scare you, but they are very close, they are looking for you, he sees them, they are on a hill almost in the vicinity of the clearing. He will keep them busy, you have to stay hidden and safe, that's his priority, that's his mission.

He doesn't run, he walks. He's sure you're watching him, but because he doesn't want to worry he doesn't walk away quickly, he still hasn't understood why you were so special to that man who called himself your father's servant, but it doesn't matter, he never asked why in his previous missions, he just did it. He'll just act this time too, he's been told that you're special and that you have to get to your destination alive? And so it will be.

When he is far enough away from you and your gaze, he runs, as fast as his armor allows him, he has come very close to that large group that is looking for you, he crouches down and picks up his rifle, straining his ears: he hears strange buzzing and sounds, and at that moment your words about the inhabitants of that Planet reading his mind come back to him; so maybe they know he's there and waiting for them. Well, they'd be playing on equal terms!

Suddenly, not even a step away from him, the Mandalorian hears a bang and clods of earth rise up creating a whirlwind of dust, he rolls onto his side out into the open and fires, once, twice, immediately hitting his first two targets which are disintegrated. The Mandalorian rolls back behind a large log, hiding and waiting to hear the next noises that might betray the presence of other enemies, a stamping sound makes him understand that he is not alone again, he comes out into the open again and shoots, killing a third enemy, he was about to return to his hiding place when someone rains on him, a fourth unexpected enemy jumps on him making him lose his balance and above all his weapon. He falls forward, but rolls back onto his back just in time as the fourth man was about to shoot him in the back and kill him; instead, luckily the Mandalorian blocks the weapon by ripping it out of his hands and turning it against his fourth enemy who falls backwards.

Moments later a hail of bullets ripples through the air, more enemies are approaching. The Mandalorian crouches behind a rock and watches where his enemies are, some are still far away, a small group is running away, two are quite close. He immediately retrieves his rifle and after a couple of failed attempts, manages to hit two more of them who are pulverized. He hears another noise and when he turns around, he sees you, he was about to hit you convinced that you were another enemy.

“I could have killed you!” he exclaims almost annoyed.

“I wanted to help you.” You justify yourself, looking at him guiltily, he shakes his head.

“It wasn’t necessary, but thanks.”

You nod, smiling nervously at him, “Hey, you're hurt!” you exclaim, looking at his partially torn armor on his shoulder.

He turns his helmet to his shoulder and brings a hand to the tear, “It’s just a scratch.”

You look to where you imagine his eyes are, “I’m fine.” He looks around as if to make sure you’re alone. “We need to get back on the road.”

Neither you nor he speak to each other until you reach his Razor Crest. The spacecraft is not in bad condition. It is only slightly scorched on the sides, perhaps due to contact with the atmosphere.

When you take your eyes off the opening hatch for a moment, you notice the drops of blood at his feet. You look at him scared, he doesn't even seem to realize that you're looking at him or maybe he just ignores your worried look.

“We need to take off immediately,” he announces, as you enter the ship “If we use the thruster beams we should…” a roar echoes through the ship, you duck as if to protect yourself, while the Mandalorian takes you in his iron arms and shields you.

You don't see what he does, but you hear the ship creaking so you deduce that the hatch is closing. The gunshots continue until they become a distant noise and the man loosens his grip.

You turn to him and see him put his hand to where the tear is.

“Does it hurt?” you ask, looking at him.

“I need to get some medical treatment. I can’t continue the journey like this,” he says, putting down his hand and finding it covered in blood. “Okay, you have to assist me for takeoff. I’ll tell you what to do.” you nod.

Together you enter the cockpit and take a seat. He fiddles with a series of buttons on his left, then he places his hands on the spaceship's control stick and then gives you the order to give it power so it can take off.

Completely unexpectedly you manage to take flight and leave the Planet. Your travel companion doesn't say a word, the journey turns out to be very boring and probably if you hadn't seen what you saw and you couldn't stop thinking about how that strange energy was released from your hands against that woman, you would have already collapsed.

“How will they treat you?” you ask him.

“What?” he replies, surprised by your question.

“In this place where we are going, there will be someone who will take care of you, right?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

“I thought you needed treatment.” you say perplexed.

“Yes, indeed.”

“So, there will be someone who will take care of you.”

“No. I will treat myself. No one must see my face.” he clarifies.

“What’s wrong with showing your face?” you ask, turning your head towards him.

“It’s our credo. If you embrace it, there are no exceptions,” he explains.

“But you will take off your armor,” you say, “you said you can never take it off.”

“That’s right.” he agrees. “However, there are some planets in our solar system that allow for exceptions.” he adds. “As long as no one sees us.”

“What if that happens?” you ask him.

“It’s complicated to explain. Forget it,” he answers you hastily.

For a while you remain silent, “Can I ask you something?” You look towards him and, not hearing any sign of agreement or dissent, you continue, “What is your name?”

“Din.” he answers you.

“Din,” you repeat, “is that your name or a nickname?”

“That’s my name.” He replies. “Someone uses the nickname Mando,” you smile. “What’s there to smile about?”

“Sorry.” you say looking away “I’m not smiling at you. It’s just this nickname that’s funny. Not you. I mean, you’re… anything but funny.” you are babbling.

“You're a funny one,” he says to you “Have you always been so chatty or did you become this way?” he asks you.

“This is the first time you’ve asked a question about me,” you state with a smile. “Anyway, yes, I talk a lot, but only when I’m nervous,” you confess.

“What is making you so nervous? Is it me or is it something else?”

You clench your hands nervously and bite your bottom lip, “No… Um, it’s not your fault.” You feel his gaze on you “The truth is, I don't know what happened when that creature touched me. It's like a force was released from my hands,” you say, massaging your palm. “I know it's absurd, but it was such a powerful feeling and it was like every little part of me felt it spreading and then it could explode out of my body...” you stop “You’ll think I’m weird.”

“Was it your first time?” he asks you.

You nod.

“That man. The one I talked to, didn't he tell you anything strange about yourself?” you shake your head “I'm sure there's a reason.” you nod.

You sigh, nodding, then look up at him, and then you notice how blood is staining his armor. You look at him worriedly, “How much longer?”

“Little time.”

You know he's suffering, but you know he won't tell you a word.

When you arrive on this mysterious new planet, you feel as if you are among banks of pink clouds dotted with stardust. As soon as the Razor Crest lands, you unhook yourself from your seats and he, before you, moves first, exiting the cockpit.

The people of that planet seem to be friendly. Perhaps a little odd in their costumes so different from what you were used to wearing. The sun is not as hot as your beloved Arkanon's.

Oh, how you miss your parents, your father's warm and powerful tone, that slightly austere air, but actually just marked by life, your mother's ringing tone and sometimes her long silent hugs! You even miss your brothers and their constant desire to joke and take you with them on their many adventures and misadventures!

No one survived.

Your heart aches, you're alone. Sure, you have your droid friend, but it can never fill that void, that now familiar feeling of not belonging anywhere.

I miss you. All of you.

You feel empty, the people here treat you well. They made you wear a clean robe, it's so thin that you almost shiver inside it, but you just thank them. They are kind, they they offer you something to drink and eat. They even accepted your droid friend and apparently not everyone accepts them and looks favorably on them.

You haven’t seen saw the Mandalorian , Din, after you were greeted by the villagers. You imagine he went to get treated. You would like to say hello and ask him how he is, but you know that he probably can't see you right now. So, your looking for him would be useless. You might as well wait.

So, you decide to explore this Planet that seems to have come out of a dream. Everyone is happy. Everyone wears the same colors. Everyone has a life of their own that they know will begin and end here.

Who knows if your wandering will end one day and if you too will one day have a happy and stable life somewhere!

You approach what looks like a river, the water is not blue as it was on your planet, but it is aqua green and the fish that occasionally jump from its waters are pink. You smile.

You sit down nearby and enjoy this singular spectacle. You lift your head towards the pink clouds and then close your eyes letting yourself be lulled by the gurgling of the water and by that pleasant climate.

In moments of absolute peace like this, you think — or perhaps you delude yourself — that you can be at peace with every little part of the universe. And you even think that you can still be at home. You can almost feel the warm sun of Arkanon, the mild air of your home, everything is so peaceful...

When you open your eyes, you're on a bed and you're alone.

What the...?!

By the time you stand up and the Mandalorian opens the curtain.

Din.

You still have to get used to the fact that he has a name.

“What happened?” you ask him.

“You had what’s called hypoxia,” he replies. “I brought you this. It’ll help with your headache.” He adds, showing you a syringe.

You hadn't even realized you had a headache until that moment.

“How did you know that?” you ask him.

“I had it too.” you whisper “May I?” he asks, coming closer to you “It’ll help.”

“Will it hurt?”

“Apart from the sting, no.”

You nod, Din approaches you “Uncover your arm,” he says, as he slips off his gloves, revealing his fingers.

If you still had any doubts that he was not human, you'd say that you no longer have any.

You undo the knot of your dress at chest level and then slide the dress off one shoulder, keeping it at chest level. You then look up at him, nodding your head.

He places a hand just below your shoulder as if to slightly stretch your skin, the contact of his fingers makes you shiver.

You turn your head away as he brings the syringe closer, you squeeze your eyes shut as you feel the needle penetrate your skin and then the muscle in your arm.

“Did you get treatment?” you ask him.

“Of course,” he replies.

He's right, it doesn't hurt except for the needle. You swallow, take a deep breath, and then ask him, “Do you trust these people?”

“With my job, I've gotten to know all kinds of people. They're good people. In their own way.” You take another deep breath and your head feels less heavy. “We're all good in our own way.” he adds pulling out the needle and then rubbing your skin hard “Get dressed.” he says again and you obey.

You can barely look up at him. You almost feel uncomfortable not knowing what his face or expression is.

“Thank you.” you say, adjusting your dress “Um, are you okay now?” you ask when he is about to leave.

He turns back looking at you, “Yes.”

“Can I ask you one more thing?” you ask him when he’s about to leave you again “Have you always been this way? I mean… Did you always know who you were going to be? I know it’s none of my business,” you continue, interpreting his silence as annoyance, “it’s just that I don’t know who I am anymore.” you lower your head shaking It, “I’m sorry. I know you don't care." You suddenly feel tears gathering behind your eyes. "I don't know why I'm with you. I don't know what Nanuk knew or thought he knew. Sometimes I wish I was dead with my people rather than being taken from one place to another without knowing why or where,” you confess to him.

Din listens to you in silence, you don't know what he's thinking or if his expression is bored or compassionate.

You're about to tell him to let it go, not to give weight to your ravings, when he adds, “I know where we’re going. As long as you’re with me, you’ll be perfectly safe.”

[badbatchposts]

Quiet Corners of the Galaxy, Chapter 7

While on a routine mission for Cid, the Bad Batch encounter a woman fleeing from the Empire. Crosshair suspects her seemingly free-spirited, nomadic existence is actually a cover for something else, but struggles to keep his attraction toward her in check as their personalities and ideals clash.

Relevant tags: Slow Burn, Enemies to Lovers, Eventual Smut (it finally starts getting spicy in a couple more chapters!), Canon-Typical Violence, Alcohol Use

Chapters posted 1-2x weekly!

Read the full fic so far on AO3

Read previous chapters on Tumblr: Ch. 1 l Ch. 2 l Ch. 3 l Ch. 4 l Ch. 5 l Ch. 6

Chapter 7 summary: Dara joins them on a mission. She performs a little too coolly under pressure.

“I don’t want her staying on the ship alone,” Crosshair insisted. The Batch was huddled together in the cockpit as they began their approach to the red planet which loomed largely through the Marauder’s viewport. Dara had returned to her makeshift room in the cargo hold just as they were exiting hyperspace, and the sniper meant to take advantage of her temporary absence to continue to voice his protestations against her involvement.

“We need someone to remain behind to provide a pick-up when we make our exit,” Tech insisted impatiently. “And our infiltration strategy requires five.”

“That won’t matter if she takes off with our ship and leaves us stranded,” Crosshair replied angrily. The others considered the dilemma; he had a point.

“Why didn’t you bring that up before we made this plan?!” Hunter protested.

“Why did you insist on bringing a complete stranger with us to break someone out of jail?!” the sniper shot back.

“Hey!” Echo, as always, stepped up to mediate. “Think this through first, fight about it later. Tech and I are needed to access the back entrance. Crosshair is setting up decoy fire at the landing pad and front entrance. Hunter and Wrecker are setting the charges to first draw their attention and later cover our escape. How about Hunter stays with the ship and Dara helps with the charges.”

Dara returned before the issue could be debated further. “Change of plans, boys?” she asked.

Hunter nodded. “Just a small one. How do you feel about helping Wrecker instead? You shouldn’t have to engage with anyone directly. Just a bit of sneaking around and property destruction to keep them occupied while we go after the real target. Not that we doubt your piloting skills, but the Marauder’s a complicated ship, and if things go sideways it might be a bit chaotic getting us out of there.”

“Oh, sure,” Dara agreed affably. “That and you don’t want to have to worry about someone you just met stealing your transport and leaving you for dead.” She chuckled at the squad’s vaguely embarrassed expressions, ignoring Crosshair’s sneer. “It’s okay, I get it. Trust is built, right? I’ll just go with Wrecker.”

“Yeah!” the giant clapped her on the back enthusiastically, nearly knocking her over. “This’ll be way more fun anyway!”

Tech set the Marauder down some distance away from the prison to avoid detection, and Hunter handed Dara a comm before they began the trek toward their destination. The Sergeant looked sternly at Crosshair as the sniper made to exit. “Watch their back,” he instructed.

Crosshair’s expression was disguised behind his helmet, but his voice had lost some of the hostility of their earlier discussion, and now sounded more amused. “Don’t I always?”

“That includes her,” Hunter called insistently after his retreating form.

***

After a short hike, the sniper, dug into position, watched through his scope as the others approached the prison, flanking it from the west. The team moved stealthily amid the gathering dark, pausing only momentarily for Tech to easily bypass the perimeter sensors. Inside the prison, no one would even notice a glitch on their screens as they drew nearer to the building, and the next foot patrol wasn’t due to pass by for another 20 minutes. In the meantime, the group separated, Echo and Tech heading to the back of the building, Dara to the landing pad, and Wrecker to the main entrance. He had no concerns about Wrecker; while he wasn’t the stealthiest among them, Tech had already overwritten any camera feeds with a loop, and his brother would be able to easily stun anyone he came across while planting the first set of explosives, which would draw all attention to the front of the building as Echo and Tech entered and retrieved their target.

Dara, however, was another story. Crosshair watched her closely, his keen eyesight still able to easily detect her shadowy form through his scope even in the failing light. He was not much happier at the decision to bring her along than to leave her with the Marauder, but at least here he could keep an eye on her.

But, of course, there was already a problem. The landing pad was supposed to be empty.

“Dara, you have company. Maintenance tech and a couple of droids just exited the building and are headed to the landing pad. Abort,” he instructed. It wouldn’t be ideal—the landing pad explosion was meant to cover their exit—but they would have to make do.

“Don’t worry. It’ll be fine.” Her voice over the comm was perfectly calm. He felt annoyance bubble up in him; the landing pad was well-lit, and they couldn’t afford to alert anyone to their presence before Wrecker set off the first set of charges.

“That’s an order. Turn the kriff around.”

“I don’t take orders from you.”

Infuriated, Crosshair could only watch as she turned her comm off. He briefly shifted his scope to Wrecker, who had just reached the main entrance. The nearby guard station was empty, apart from the crumpled forms of the two aliens who had been staffing it—at least, up until the moment that Wrecker snuck up behind them and knocked them out. His brother began setting the charges.

“Status update?” he requested over the open comm channel.

“Approximately 1.5 minutes to get the back door open,” Tech reported.

“Front’s gonna go boom in one.”

Crosshair moved his scope back to the landing pad, where Dara was crouching by a cabinet out of sight of the maintenance tech. She opened it, pulling out a vest and hat that matched the worker’s uniform, then stored her larger blaster in the cabinet and pulled the clothing on before straightening up. He grinded his teeth together as she headed straight for the maintenance tech, a look of confusion on her face. After a brief, animated discussion, the tech headed back inside, followed by the droids. She strolled leisurely about the landing pad, placing her own charges at regular intervals.

Wrecker’s explosion at the main entrance rocked the building, and Crosshair returned his attention there. Alarms began blaring throughout the prison, and only minutes later, a wave of guards cautiously filed out of the front doors, guns drawn. It was time for him to make them think they were under attack by nothing short of an invading army. Calmly, he let out shot after shot, letting each of them narrowly miss. From the position he had retreated to, Wrecker did the same, occasionally lobbing stun bombs. The guards scrambled, looking for cover. By now, Tech and Echo were well on their way to the target’s cell.

“Landing pad charges set,” Dara’s voice reported over the open comm channel.

A few minutes later, Echo indicated that they were on their way out, and a second explosion drew the attention of the guards. Even more of them exited the building in the direction of the landing pad as Crosshair alternated his shots between there and the entrance. Now thoroughly distracted on two fronts, the others would be able to make their exit from the prison nearly unchallenged.  

“Coming in for a pickup at the rendezvous,” Hunter piped up. First Dara, then Echo, Tech, and the prisoner, and finally Wrecker all converged on Crosshair’s position. He kept the guards pinned down until Hunter landed the Marauder behind them and everyone was on board, then made his way up the ramp himself. They were leaving the atmosphere before the guards even realized it was all over.

“So…who’s this guy?” Wrecker asked. The Rodian they had picked up at the prison stared at them with wide, glassy eyes as they entered hyperspace. He didn’t seem to speak Basic.

Hunter shrugged. “Cid didn’t say. Just said he was scheduled to be transferred from the local authorities to the Empire and her client wanted us to get him out before that happened.”

Dara raised her eyebrow. “You guys just broke someone out of jail without even knowing why he was in there?”

“Yeah, well…Cid isn’t always the most forthcoming about what her jobs entail,” Echo responded, his resentment toward the Trandoshan palpable.

“Mmmhmm…” Turning to the fugitive, she spoke to him in Rodian. They exchanged a few sentences before she reported back in Basic to the squad, pursing her lips critically. “He’s a bounty hunter. Works for the Hutts. They apparently weren’t interested in letting him undergo interrogation.” Crosshair thought she looked like she had more to say, but she bit her tongue.  

“You speak Rodian?” inquired Tech, with polite interest. He himself spoke several languages, and had developed his own translation program to help communicate in those he did not.

“Among a few others. I was a linguist, in another life.” A pang of sadness flashed across her eyes before she could tamp it down. “Didn’t work out.”

“Well, hey,” Wrecker announced cheerfully, “you could be in for a long career with us! You did great today!”

Crosshair’s anger, briefly forgotten amid his focus on completing their mission, flared back up. “Actually, what she did was disobey a direct order and put the whole team at risk.”

“I had everything under control. It was just a maintenance tech, not a guard. All I had to do was tell him there must have been some sort of scheduling mix-up because I was already assigned to repairs at the landing pad, and by the time he was inside trying to sort everything out Wrecker’s explosion would have made him forget all about me.”

The sniper pointed angrily at her with his toothpick. “That wasn’t your call to make.”

Her eyes flashed, but her tone remained calm. “Well, it wasn’t yours either.”

“Enough.” Hunter’s serious tone shut them both up. “Dara, that was good thinking on your feet, but next time, listen to Crosshair. We have more experience at this than you. If he says to play it safe, it’s for a reason. We said we’d take your help on a few jobs, but you’re not a soldier. We don’t want to put you in harm’s way if we can avoid it.”

Dara looked chastened. “Of course.” But when Hunter turned her back on them, she glared at Crosshair before retiring to the cargo hold, leaving him there to stew.

Next chapter

Tag List: @stardusthuntress @skellymom

[sirfrogsworth]

The number of items you qualify for determines which circle of Hell you will end up in.

Here is a handy guide to see who you will be partying with in The Inferno.

First Circle: Limbo or "Heaven Lite."

Were you a decent person but forgot to get baptized? Welcome to Meh-ven. Not quite as good as Heaven, but you still get to live in a neat castle.

Second Circle: Lust or "Too horny for Heaven."

This circle is for those who banged their way through life. You are punished by being blown violently back and forth by strong winds, preventing you from finding peace and rest.

So, basically Chicago.

Third Circle: Gluttony or "You should have ordered a salad instead of that Bloomin' Onion."

I'm pretty sure this is the fat shaming Hell. You are overseen by a giant worm monster named Cerberus and placed into a large slushie machine. You must lie in frozen slush for eternity thinking about all of those hot dog eating contests you won.

Fourth Circle: Greed or "What? I gave $20 to the Red Cross every year!"

You are overseen by Pluto, the dog of Mickey Mouse. Or maybe the demoted dwarf planet. I honestly did not do enough research to be sure. Circle 4 is divided into people who spent too much and people who hoarded too much. They must push giant boulders at each other in a game of eternal rock jousting.

Fifth Circle: Anger or...

The angry must join a fight club and brawl each other atop the River Styx.

The grumpy must gurgle beneath the pugilists--submerged forever in that same river.

Sixth Circle: Heresy or "Ya know, I'm pretty sure the Earth revolves around the Sun. Hey, why is this priest placing me in shackles? It's just science, bro!"

Did you go against the Church? Well, for that they just straight up set you on fire. Not the most creative damnation, but I'm sure all of the flaming souls look neat from a spectator's point of view.

Seventh Circle: Violence or "Apparently, these things are all the same amount of bad... murder, suicide, and booty sex."

This circle is divided into three other circles. Which means there are 12 total circles. Which is confusing, but whatever.

In sub-circle 7a, you have the murderers. They are submerged in a river of blood that is also on fire.

Is blood flammable? Did Dante even try to set blood on fire before writing this? I'm thinking, no. YOU ARE TESTING MY SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF, DANTE.

In sub-circle 7b, you have people who have taken their own life. These folks are turned into shrubbery. Once in your final shrub form, this handsome harpy gal slowly eats you for eternity.

In sub-circle 7c, you have all of the anal fornicators. If you ever stuck it in a butt or had it stuck in your butt, you get to spend your afterlife in a desert of burning sand. And it is raining. So it is one of those rare rainy deserts I guess. Oh, but the rain is on fire.

WHY ARE SO MANY NON-FLAMMABLE THINGS ON FIRE, DANTE?

Eighth Circle: Fraud or "Is fraud really worse than murder?"

I'm going to be straight with you.

The eighth circle is a hot mess.

I'm pretty sure Dante was getting tired of creating new circles for every bad person, so he made a catchall for the villains that didn't quite fit into the previous circles and sub-circles. Instead of creating 10 sub-circles for the 8th circle, he decided to just throw everyone into their own hell ditch. These ditches are called Bolgias.

And now a Top Ten List from the home office in Wahoo, Nebraska.

Top ten types of people stuck in an eternal Bolgia ditch in the 8th circle of hell.

10. Falsifiers such as counterfeiters and wellness gurus. 9. Divisive individuals such as Fox News pundits and Chris Pratt. 8. Advisors such as self help authors and life coaches. 7. Thieves such as whoever created overdraft fees. 6. Hypocrites such as rich Pro-Lifers who have paid for several abortions for their mistresses. 5. Corrupt politicians such as (the list exceeded this post's maximum word count). 4. Wizards!

3. People who purchase pardons like pretty much anyone associated with Donald Trump. 2. Flatterers such as pick up artists and old ladies who tell me I am handsome in the grocery store. 1. Seducers such as people who have cake and want sex and are like, "Would you like some tasty cake in exchange for sex?"

Look, seduction is in the eye of the beholder and all I'm saying is cake would probably work on me.

Circle Nine: Treachery or "You were my brother, Anakin! I loved you!"

Okay, so the 9th circle has 4 rounds.

Which sound an awful lot like circles.

Which brings us to 16 circles in the 9 circles of Hell.

I'm wondering if Dante named the book before he wrote it and everything was done with permanent ink so he couldn't change it.

The 9th circle has 4 frozen circles rounds, each dedicated to notorious traitors. Like a tribute to their epic level of sinfulness.

First up you have the Cain round. He was the first person to ever have a little brother and no one told him you can't just kill the little shit. People in the Cain round are encased up to the base of the neck, so they can still look around and stuff.

The second round is dedicated to Antenor. He was a Trojan. In reality, he negotiated peace with the Greeks. In myth, he opened the city gates and let the Greeks in so they could murder everyone. He was spared because he painted his house with panther blood.

"Panther Blood... 60% of the time it works *every* time." --Antenor

People here are encased to the top of the neck, so they are looking one direction forever.

Coming in round three we have Ptolemy. He didn't care much for his father-in-law, Simon Maccabaeus. So he invited Simon and his sons to a fancy banquet and Red Wedding'd the shit out of them. Ptolemy rounders are encased face-up in the ice just below eye level. That way, whenever they cry for being damned, their tears will freeze over. Over time those frozen tears create an ice visor that takes away the ability to weep ever again. And I'm guessing everything is real blurry too.

Round four is dedicated to the most infamous betrayer of all time. That's right, my favorite character in JC Superstar... Judas Iscariot.

Judas rounders are completely encased in ice. Permanently frozen and immobile with their bodies in every conceivable distorted and twisted position. Chances are, they have too much Heaven on their minds.

And in the very center of the nine-ish 16 circles of Hell, you have Satan himself. The fallen angel, Lucifer.

The story, as I like to imagine it, goes like this...

Lucifer was shooting the shit with the other angels and was all, "I could probably take God, right? He's not so tough."

And since a utopian existence is actually pretty boring and without drama, the other angels responded, "Absolutely! You've been working out and look totally jacked. You got this, dude." All while trying to hold in their laughter.

ANGEL PRANKS!

Lucifer then challenges God and gets instantly Thanos snap'd into a frozen lake. Lucifer sulks for all eternity wondering why those other angels told him he could whip God's metaphorical noncorporeal ass.

Satan is depicted as a hideous three-headed beast frozen up to his waist. He has six bat-like wings that flap and create a chilling breeze that keeps the ice frozen. Literally a hell of his own making. In each of Lucifer's mouths is a famous traitor being forever gnawed. History's most famous collective stabbers, Brutus and Cassius are being chewed in the left and right heads. And Judas is stuck in the viscous center maw while getting the world's worst backscratch from Satan's claws.

But wait, it gets racist!

Each devil head is a different color... Red for Europeans. Yellow for Asians. And black for Africans.

Dante, you little shit.

Alright folks, it is time to add up your totals. Which circle or sub-circle of Hell are you going to party in for eternity?

I'll do mine.

I am slightly homo for Chris Evans when he uses his biceps to curl a helicopter. I want him to hug me because I think he probably smells nice.

I do consider myself a feminist because I watched too many woke Disney films and I was indoctrinated by public schools.

I once ran out of RAM because I had too many tabs open in Chrome. I'm not sure if that qualifies me as a "porn freak" but I'm going to count it.

I smoked pot twice. The first time it made me feel like my head was full of bees and then I passed out for 12 hours. The second time I only inhaled once... and my head filled with bees and I passed out for 12 hours. Counting it.

When I was 18 my church's youth counselor matter-of-factly stated that my best friend was going to Hell. I thought, "That's silly, he's just a theater nerd who wore a floofy shirt and a Phantom of the Opera cape to school on multiple occasions. He's harmless and religion is dumb." So a big check for atheist.

I idolize my bestie Katrina because she is very good a puns. Is that worthy of idolization? Probably not. But I stand by it regardless.

And as far as masturbation goes... again, I ran out of RAM for having too many tabs open in Chrome.

I think I qualify for the seventh circle of Hell. I think I am going to engage in some mild thuggery so I can hang out in 7b as a nice shrub getting eaten by a harpy.

I realize there are only 12 options and 16 possible circles. So I have decided you may use a yoga pants multiplier.

1x if they are too tight but you went through tremendous effort to put them on so you are just going with it. 1x if they were acquired from an MLM mom on Facebook. 1x if they make that booty pop. 1x if they contain a pattern with as many non-complimentary colors as possible.

Welp. I put way too much effort into this.

I guess I'll see you all in Hell!

[rappaccini]

Hello! I came across your arachnophobia fic and I must say its quite the masterpiece and every fan of spider gwen should read it--but I do have a question. I keep seeing people say Gwen is handled better in the movies vs the comics, but you seem to think otherwise. Can you explain why, and what are the differences, cause I honestly felt they're going the same thing

first, thank you! second, you're not gonna believe how long this is. instead of an essay, have a dissertation. hopefully it makes sense:

gwen's age:

in the comics, gwen is bitten by her spider at seventeen, kills peter at eighteen, is nineteen at the start of her story and is currently in her early twenties (miles is still in high school).

in the movies, gwen is bitten at thirteen, she's fifteen in itsv and 16-17 in atsv.

gwen's appearance

spiderverse gwen doesn't wear a headband, has a pierced eyebrow, and dyes her hair pink in a reference to the marvel rising cartoon's gwen. she also has a side-shave. comics gwen wears the classic gwen stacy headband, has no interesting piercings (her dad made her take them out), and doesn't dye her hair.

spiderverse gwen wears ballet slippers, which she trades for chucks. comics gwen wears chuck soles stitched into the bottom of her costume.

gwen's powerset and fighting style.

both spiderverse and comics gwen begin with the basic starter set of spider-powers.

a year and a half after her origin story, comics gwen has lost her powers and now uses a symbiote instead. she's her world's venom. comics gwen at this point has all the basic spider powers back, but thanks to the symbiote she has new ones that are totally unique to her. presumably she can do everything venom can do, but so far we've seen her use it to protect her from suffocation and burn damage in fires, heal from serious injuries, camouflage so well she's nearly invisible or generate any outfit she can imagine, and send out sentient pieces of her suit to spy for her or track people. also, organic webbing. always fun. she also has a unique set of weaknesses: yeah she's got damage protection from fire but it fucks her symbiote up for days, she has to change her diet and control her emotions to make sure her symbiote doesn't go rogue and hijack her. and unlike other symbiotes, hers is resilient against sound damage and doesn't give a shit about the symbiote home planet.

a year and a half after her origin story, spiderverse gwen... still has the starter pack.

except for one new power: a spider-sense that is linked to miles and can sense him across dimensions.

spiderverse gwen is far more competent than comics gwen. she's graceful, precise, a quick thinker and fights with the "skill and discipline of a trained dancer." she's a ballerina who incorporates her pointe shoes into her costume in itsv, and her dance moves into her combat moves (and since her dad has a visions gymnastics sweatshirt, she's probably a gymnast too). comic-gwen is a klutz who uses all her moves from kung fu movies, brute forces her way through situations, and was never a ballerina or gymnast. comics gwen is such a fucking loser at fighting that after she's conscripted into the hand and they try to give her ninja training, they give up because they find her unteachable.

gwen's personality.

in itsv, she's a cardboard cutout with 'strong female character' scribbled on the torso. she's trinity syndrome personified: she's the stoic, confident, hypercompetent female character who for no reason at all just hangs around not contributing to a plot she should be able to fix on her own, so the writers can say 'strong female character! we're not sexist!' while getting to live their fantasy of having their relatable male lead win a cool, confident girl's respect for rapidly becoming even more competent than her. she's the wyldstyle of this movie-- which i mention because the lego movie was made by lord and miller, the brains behind the spiderverse movies.

but hey, they acknowledged that she likes to play the drums in one line, which she shares with her comics self.

in across, she finally has some of the attributes of her comics self: gwen is an impulsive emotional mess who compulsively lies to avoid rejection from her loved ones and distances herself from them when she's in emotional distress. she's extremely guilty about the death of peter parker. she's a smart mouth with a corny sense of humor, geeky interests and a passionate artist with a love of rock music. she's constantly walking on eggshells around other spider-people because of how badly she wants to fit in around them, even when they put her in situations that hurt her.

BUT. she does not have comics-gwen's temper (i don't just mean 'denting a storage container when she's mad' i mean getting genuinely homicidal even before she gets her symbiote), her total indifference to romance, and her lack of interest in getting male validation. comics gwen would never pine for a boy she barely spent one day with for seventeen months and break the rules of her spider-team to sneak away for a date with him. spiderverse gwen's character is driven by her desire for a romance, and all the other aspects of her development are secondary to it.

spiderverse gwen craves a team of heroes to work with. comics gwen mostly works alone and doesn't mind it.

gwen's queerness

[edit: wrote a monster post on this. comics-gwen has been queer the whole time and slowly but surely building towards coming out]

so i'll keep it brief: spiderverse gwen is trans-coded, but definitely written, directed and performed as heterosexual. all her romantic interests are male, she shows no interest in other girls even platonically, is driven by a desire for a romantic relationship that has a happy ending, seems to like kids, and there's even a deleted shot in the gwiles swinging date where they photobomb a wedding in place of the bride and groom.

yes, spiderverse-gwen's speech to her father screams coming-out speech. said speech is lifted directly from the comics, where gwen's original run is basically one long allegory for coming out as queer.

comics-gwen could be read as trans, but is absolutely 100% intended to be queer. she has chemistry with women as well as men, she hangs out with a queer female friend group, she ducks out of romantic relationships like she's playing dodgeball, she's constantly encountering gwen variants who are even more overtly queer-coded, she has zero maternal instincts, and she's repulsed by the idea of a future where she's happily married to a man with biological children.

gwen's backstory

for starters, a note: at the time itsv was made, comics-gwen went by "spider-woman." after itsv came out she got a rename to make her distinct from the dozen other spider-women. she's gone by "ghost-spider" for about five years now. atsv gwen still goes by spider-woman, because they either wrote the script before the name change and couldn't swap out the dialogue in time, or they decided to just stick with it to avoid confusion. no shade, but it is a difference. and it is worth noting that spiderverse-gwen has an alter ego name that isn't unique to her.

we meet gwen two years into being spider-woman in both the movies and comics. spiderverse gwen is still in high school. comics gwen is out of high school and either a college dropout or hasn't applied yet.

spiderverse gwen goes to visions academy, and lives in an apartment in chelsea. comics gwen went to midtown high, and lives in a house in queens.

comics-gwen and her father are irreligious, but her mother had a christian funeral service, so they presumably left the faith when gwen was young. spiderverse gwen is saying grace at the table as a teenager, so at the bare minimum her father's still a christian, if not her too.

spiderverse gwen was already a hypercompetent superhero by the time peter dies. comics gwen was an irresponsible vigilante half the city hated.

spiderverse gwen's lizard fight is sanitized: gwen's best friend peter parker was pushed too far by a bully and gave himself powers to defend himself and be a hero, like spider-woman, who he knows is gwen. he attacked the prom when triggered by a bully, targeted the bully, and was killed by mistake when rubble fell on him.

in the comics, gwen's best friend peter was still a victim of bullying who gave himself lizard powers, but he did it because he was embarrassed that a girl (gwen) was sticking up for him. he's still bullied at the prom right before he lizards out, but he attacks gwen's date, not the bully, because he's angry that gwen wasn't going to the dance with him. and gwen killed peter (who didn't seem to know it was her) intentionally by beating him to death after he stopped fighting her, tried to retreat and begged her to stop. it's not a terrible misunderstanding by a cop who didn't read the situation right-- it's exactly what it looks like: gwen committed manslaughter.

idk man i find it interesting that a spider-hero story all about learning responsibility... refuses to let gwen be responsible for the most important event in her origin story.

like comics gwen, spiderverse gwen is hunted by the police, led by her dad, after peter's death, quits her band due to her stress and grief, and after taking down a supervillain that threatens his life, she's caught by her father and reveals her identity to him to stop him from arresting/shooting her. in spiderverse, gwen takes down an alternate vulture in the guggenheim with miguel and jess-- and she quits her band first. in the comics, the kingpin sends the rhino to a mary janes gig to kill captain stacy because he wants to impress spider-woman and gwen protects her father.

like comics-gwen, spiderverse gwen then encounters a recruiter for an interdimensional team of elite spider-people and joins him. spiderverse gwen meets miguel and jess, and is an accidental recruit to the spider-society after jess begs miguel to take her when her father tries to arrest her. comics gwen's dad lets her escape, and afterwards she meets spider-britain, who does find her worthy and wants her for the team, but it's the spider-army, and their goal is to protect other spider-people from a villain that's hunting them down, not the multiverse as a whole.

and she's still part of the band at this point. she quits after returning from the spider-army, who she's with for a few weeks instead of spiderverse gwen's five months.

that "my mask is my badge" speech is lifted word for word from the comics. in spiderverse, gwen gives it to her father after returning home. in the comics, gwen gives it to her father as soon as she's caught and it's what makes him decide to let her go. when spiderverse gwen joins the society, it's while believing her father wants to hurt her. when comics gwen joins the spider-army, it's while knowing her father is looking out for her.

also, it seems like itsv made gwen's first foray into the multiverse that moment in the timeline given the peter death angst... but decided to double dip and replay the same beat again for atsv. it works, but it is interesting.

in itsv, we meet gwen at the start of her arc right after peter's death. in atsv, spiderverse-gwen's status quo hasn't changed at all after a year and a half. she's still mourning peter parker, still on the run from the cops, still on the outs with her band. for reference, after a year and a half of in-universe time since peter's death in comics-gwen's continuity, she's revealed herself to her friends, family and entire city, rejoined her band, lost her powers, joined her nemesis's criminal organization in exchange for pills that temporarily give her powers back, nearly got pressured into an arranged spidermarriage with miles by interdimensional omniscient observers that are a metacommentary on the writers and fans of the comics, quit the gang, gotten a symbiote, went on a murderous rampage with said symbiote to avenge her comatose father, bonded with said symbiote, made good with her supporting cast, taken down her nemesis and his organization, been arrested, gone on trial for peter's death and gone to prison. the manhunt is over, gwen has forgiven herself and been redeemed for peter's death and her city has accepted her as a true hero.

spiderverse gwen has spent 2 years in comics-gwen's first issue.

gwen's relationship with miles

needs its own section

spiderverse miles is gwen's most important relationship. you know they're the big romance of the story. they're in love, somehow, even though they went on one bus ride together and spent a grand total of probably about twelve hours together across two movies and seventeen months. they're ~linked across dimensions~. they spent a year and a half pining for each other, ignoring everyone in their lives in favor of a hypothetical relationship with each other. they leap into the multiverse to find each other. they're going to defy canon for each other. they're almost certainly going to end up together.

comics gwen and comics miles aren't even friends. yes, they kissed, once, infamously. but gwen immediately regretted it, got him to agree to remain friends, and while miles carried a torch for a few years before moving on, gwen IMMEDIATELY stopped mentioning or thinking of him. she never missed him. she didn't pine for him. she didn't steal away to miles's dimension to see him again, and when she was in his dimension to go to college she made no effort to come see him. she didn't care at all that he wasn't around, she's friendly with him when they hang out during crossover and spiderverse events but she otherwise has no interest in him, and the one time she brings him up in every single spider-gwen issue since the miniseries that shipped them, it was to say "fuck off miles, i can turn invisible too, you're not that special."

(again, spiderverse gwiles have a fifteen month age gap. comics gwiles have a four year age gap with miles in high school and gwen as a college dropout, so them hanging out together casually would be weird as hell. yes, that scene of them kissing on a rooftop in the moonlight is a 20 year old woman making out with a 16 year old boy who had to sit outside like a kid waiting in the car for his mom to leave the grocery store while she went to the club. yes that happened in sitting in a tree. yes it was awful.)

to be honest the only reason gwen keeps getting trio'd off with miles and peter is synergy with the spiderverse movies. they only started doing it after itsv. miles and gwen are not friends, they're like coworkers at the same job who have a common friend in peter the manager, who occasionally end up on the same shift, who made out once at the holiday party and never spoke of it again.

though spiderverse gwiles have the chemistry and sincere emotional connection comics gwiles never did, the ship still has all the fundamental problems.

spiderverse miles is being framed as the guy who's going to break gwen's canon and set her free. in reality, like in the comics, he's the guy who will succeed at taking her independence away. the comics understood this (or at least, gwen's creator did). the movies definitely don't.

gwen's other relationships

her mother: like in the comics, spiderverse-gwen has a single dad and an absent mother, though we don't know if she left or died; and if she died, at what age? was it when she was a baby, like comics gwen? given that gwen has a present signed by her mom in her drumset, it seems like her mom was in her life longer.

her father: like in the comics, spiderverse-gwen's dad is the police chief hunting her alter ego, who discovers her identity and quits over it. unlike in the comics, her father tries to arrest her and takes months to change his mind. comics-gwen's dad instantly starts protecting her from the police. however his quitting the force is only temporary-- he rejoins later.

peter 616: comics gwen and peter-616 are close, with the kind of mentorship spiderverse-peter b and miles have. they have an older brother-younger sister vibe. they're constantly teaming up and working together, and gwen is especially protective of him. spiderverse-peter b and gwen are coworkers at most and peter b is nice to her, but doesn't bother to spend time with her, teach her things, or help her when she's in trouble.

hobie brown 138: spiderverse gwen and hobie are close friends with a romantic vibe that's definitely going to be played down and kept platonic in favor of gwiles. comics gwen and hobie are also close friends who met during an interdimensional teamup, and also have a romantic vibe but the context is different-- in the comics, when the spidergeddon event that the writers definitely used as inspiration for atsv since it features the only appearance of margo kess and the miles-gwen-hobie love triangle, comic gwen and comic hobie are the ones with the stronger romantic connection, and the scene where someone in the love triangle appears to die, a member of the love triangle panics and when they arrive they have a shippy moment with someone? in the comics, gwen gets the death fakeout, and even though miles flips out, hobie is the one who gets the shippy moment with her when she survives.

anya corazon: spiderverse gwen doesn't interact with her at all. comics gwen, during the time she joins a multiversal spider team where pav and hobie are also present, hangs out with anya more than pav. pav's around, but they're more acquaintances who work together than actual friends.

miguel o'hara: spiderverse gwen works for and looks up to him, before losing faith in him and finding the courage to stand up against him. comics gwen barely knows his ass.

peter 65: spiderverse gwen was clearly in love with peter-65, wanted to be his girlfriend so bad she's projecting peter onto miles for a do-over, and his death was a terrible accident. comics gwen was never attracted to hers, was uncomfortable with his crush on her, and is personally responsible for killing him after he pulled a 'quiet kid brings a gun to prom to punish the girl who turned him down by killing her date.' spiderverse peter admires spider-woman, crushes on gwen and his candid photos of her are framed as flattering, and comics-peter had a pepe silvia conspiracy wall shrine dedicated to her that is framed as a toxic obsession. i really, really hate how the spiderverse writers decided that he was just a nice guy who was pushed too far, and gwen would have loved to be with him. the whole point is the opposite.

harry osborn: speaking of comic gwen's date: harry osborn. comic gwen went to the prom with harry. she, harry and peter were a trio of best friends. spiderverse gwen went with peter, and doesn't seem to have a harry at all.

jessica drew: both gwens are mentored by a jess from another dimension. spiderverse gwen is constantly strung along by jess, who doesn't give her any emotional support and ultimately refuses to protect her. comics gwen gets along great with her, and their relationship is far more egalitarian because comics-gwen is an adult and not a minor.

the mary janes: spiderverse gwen doesn't seem to regard the mary janes as her real friends ("i never found the right band to join" = "it's not just my grief that's separating me from them, i sincerely don't relate to them"). comics gwen loves her friends even when she's grieving peter and always, always tries to find her way back to them, even when she can't be honest with them. also, betty brant and glory grant's personalities, styles, and instruments have been swapped around. in the comics, glory's the keyboardist with the super gay vibe who takes gwen's place. also, comics-em jay is white, spiderverse em jay is black; comics em jay grew up with gwen and is her closest friend now that peter is dead (and seems to have feelings for her), spiderverse em jay... who even knows.

her villains: spiderverse gwen's doc ock is ripped right from the raimi movies. in the comics, gwen's doc ock is a goofy villain of the week who's a lackey of another big bad, and whose octopus is a literal giant blue octopus. spiderverse gwen's kraven is ripped right from the comics, and her last canon event was kraven's last hunt. comics gwen's kraven was another goofy villain of the week who instead of hunting animals, controls a giant safari of exotic animals and uses them to hunt people. comics gwen hasn't had a kraven's last hunt canon event and never can because her kraven would never do that. i mention this because movie gwen's rogues gallery is unique to her world and full of fun and interesting original takes on well-known characters. spiderverse gwen's rogues gallery just rips from what's been done somewhere else without bothering to do something new.

related: spiderverse gwen's j jonah jameson is a reporter, like he is literally everywhere else. comic gwen's jjj is the mayor of new york city.

spiderverse gwen in general is a guys' girl. all her friends are guys, all her mentors minus jess are guys, and all her significant relationships that are positive are with men. all her validation comes from men (her father, her love interest, her friends). comics-gwen has some male friends and allies, but generally regards them with a lot more trepidation because they usually end up coming onto her or trying to control her.

in the comics, gwen’s greatest supporters are women. the mary janes. janet van dyne and her captain america. jessica and anya. gwen-617 and the literal council of spider-gwens who exist only to protect each other. gwen's clones. the alternate gwens who are avengers in their respective worlds. she prefers the company of other women (the mary janes most of all) to guys. spiderverse gwen's relationships with women are all negative: she's jealous at margo over a boy's attention, she seems to have not reconnected with peni, she has a strained relationship with jess that falls apart by the end of the film, she quits the mary janes, which does happen in the comics, but given that she ends the movie declaring she "never found the right band to join" she's implying she doesn't intend to be friends with them now that she... sigh, has a band of guys. and two girls who aren't her friends and aren't there for her.

gwen's arc.

grief and guilt: both gwens are grieving the death of their best friend and feel guilty over his death.

-> when comics-gwen gets over her grief and guilt about peter's death, it's by taking responsibility for killing him. she apologizes to his friends and family. she completely changes her fighting style to pull her punches and tries to empathize with her villains so she'll never kill anyone who could've been helped again. she goes to jail willingly and stays there to serve out her sentence despite being given opportunities to leave early. she does it for the people she and peter love, and for her own sake.

-> spiderverse gwen seems to be getting over her grief and guilt over peter's death by latching onto miles and transferring all her feelings about peter onto him. if she can protect miles from bullies (... like the spider-society), keep him safe and alive, and successfully become his girlfriend without someone dying in the process, she's done it. also, the context of her guilt is totally different: spiderverse gwen isn't guilty that she killed peter, she's guilty that she outlived him.

redemption and responsibility. both are seeking redemption for a bad thing they did at the start of the story to someone they care about, that got that person seriously hurt. they get it by accepting responsibility for that action and making amends.

-> comics gwen's entire first run is essentially a redemption arc. she begins the story as a selfish irresponsible vigilante who recklessly gets someone killed and has such a bad reputation that the city's villains think she's one of them. and she spends 30+ issues of comics changing her ways, realizing how corrupt her nyc and its courts and police are and becoming a hero to protect the people from them.

-> spiderverse gwen's crime is lying to miles (about the society, what it does, why he's not in it, her runaway situation, her feelings, his father's upcoming death...) and not sticking up for him when the spider-society turns on him. she's redeeming herself by searching for him through the multiverse, and intending to apologize to him, be honest to him about her feelings (and probably the gwen stacy death canon event) and take him home to protect his family.

girlbossery, acab and radicalization. both gwens mean well but have blind spots about certain structural inequalities due to their privilege that they shed after they cause harm to a loved one. they radicalize throughout the story thanks in part to hobie brown, and both of the stories they're in have a strong acab theme.

->comics gwen begins the story as a girlbossy white feminist. i am dead serious. she was (a variant of gwen stacy 616, who had a white feminism problem nobody remembers) created in the mid-2010s, in the middle of the girlboss feminism heyday, the arrival of the first wave of Strong Female Characters, and right around the time discussions of police brutality started gaining traction in the mainstream. and comics gwen is a commentary on those things. she initally uses her Great Power to be irresponsible, but is held accountable for that irresponsibility: just because gwen's a girl doesn't mean her power is inherently empowering if she's using it only to benefit herself. it is extremely relevant that gwen's called out for fucking around and calling herself a hero while actual structural issues hurting the city's people are going unchallenged by her world's hobie brown-- and she listens, realizes he's right, and shapes the fuck up. see: her redemption arc.

-> her killing of peter parker is framed as an act of police brutality, and the entire first run of her comics is a giant acab thesis. the "my mask is my badge speech" = gwen initially sees herself as a cop. her frank castle/punisher is a murderous cop. gwen's dad is a whistleblower, and his departure from the police force and gwen's radicalization are paralleled on purpose. half the cops are working with the criminals, the other half are reckless or incompetent, and all of them are out to get gwen. even the One Good Detective character is still an antagonist to gwen in the end, and she hands her over to another broken, abusive system- the prison system. it's not subtle. comics gwen's arc is about how a cop becomes a hero.

-> i should point out that the reason gwen's comics after the first run keep failing to connect is that all the writers who've handled her since her creator don't seem to realize this. the girlboss vibe is back and it's awful.

-> spiderverse gwen was 100% given that girlboss vibe in itsv, so it's there. and since peter's death is a misunderstanding, the vigilante aspect of comics-gwen's arc doesn't exist here, nor does the girlboss deconstruction.

-> her father's mishandling of gwen at the scene of peter's death and the guggenheim still works as a critique though. the "my mask is my badge" speech is still here and her dad still quits the force for her. and the spider-society are cops. her naivete about them causes her to lead to miles into a dangerous situation that she does not protect him from, she becomes disillusioned after he is harmed, and hobie gives her a way to go against the society to protect miles and his family.

-> there's another element to spiderverse gwen's arc that's unique to the movies: race. gwen and miles are an interracial couple. gwen's a white girl bringing the black boy she likes away from his community into a society where he is not safe because he is black, and where she fails to stick up for him when he and his family are threatened by said society. and when gwen meets miles's family, they rightfully doubt her intentions and don't accept her until she proves she understands how important they and his community are to him, apologizes for trying to take him away, and commits to bringing him back and helping him protect them. again, gwen radicalizes because of and for miles. (... and for some reason, not hobie, even though she's spent far more time with him and he's far more political)

... are we noticing a theme in why these changes are being made?

gwen's metanarrative

who is gwen stacy?

-> gwen stacy is the girl who only appears in spider-man's story to be his love interest, who's challenging to win the affection of, and unattainable because she's out of his league, she's not from his world and her father figure is out to get the hero, which means when the hero finally gets her, you know he's really special. and she's the girl who dies, totally helpless, so the hero can look even more special for trying to save her, because the trying's what really matters, right? and even though she's in a world where people come back from the dead all the time, she never does. she's cloned a few times, but they're all just copies of her who drop dead quickly. she's resurrected a few times, but that's just to tell spider-man she loves him, she forgives him, she doesn't forgive him, she's disappointed in him. it keeps going.

-> and every time the story's retold, and gwen is in it, it happens again. because nobody telling the story wants it to change. they like it best this way. it's like this for forty years. 1973 to 2014.

who is gwen stacy?

-> gwen stacy was the most beautiful girl in school. she was also a science whiz who was her boyfriend's intellectual equal. she was a fantastic student at the top of her class. she was a party girl and a night owl. she was temperamental and selfish. she was a devoted daughter to her cop father and a great friend who came back to nyc even though she left afraid for her life because her friends and boyfriend were there and that was worth the risk. she was peter's first serious girlfriend. she dated flash and harry too, sometimes while also seeing peter. she was a feminist who objected when peter was sexist to her and treated her poorly. she was totally fine with disrupting campus vietnam war protests when they got in the way of her education and contemplated campaigning for a racist fascist politician if he promised to lock spider-man up too. she hated spider-man. she loved peter parker.

-> nobody talks about most of that. just the first thing, and the last, and the one in the middle about her being the hero's first love. everything else dips in and out, usually to contrast her to mj.

why is the death of gwen stacy such a problem?

-> because for forty years, nobody wanted to do something different. because nobody remembered that she was a person.

-> that's what spider-gwen is for.

spider-gwen's metanarrative is about being a gwen stacy in a spider-man story. it's about being a female character in a story written by, for and about men. it's about being a young woman (specifically white and queer) in a world made by, for and about men

-> gwen stacy dies because she's a girl in a world that doesn't see her as a person, just an extension of a more important man.

-> spider-gwen lives because she's in a world where it's possible for her to be her own person, and she has a story designed to give her the power of the protagonist. she gets to leave the male gaze behind and be in stories that aren't about her boyfriend.

-> in the comics, we first meet her at the age original gwen died. and she passes it. in order to do that, her first villain, who she has to kill to access a story where she gets to be the protagonist, is the boy the story's usually about, peter parker. she kills him and incites the hate of her city by, direct quote: "breaking his heart."

-> gwen's world and her narrative know she wasn't supposed to be the hero, to not be interested in peter romantically, and to outlive him. they punish her for it. she's gwen stacy and this is a spider-man story. it's trying to kill her. her friends and family hate her and hunt her for peter. she's constantly swinging past billboards deifying peter as a sweet boy who never would have tried to murder his friends, with a hotline for spider-woman tips called 1-800-for peter. when she's sent to prison, it's for peter. and after she gets out, her world and it keeps trying to spit her out and send her to 616. where peter parker-616 lives. but she's not being sent there for peter. she's being sent there for miles.

-> when comics gwen and miles go on their one date in ten years of publication history, gwen encounters omniscient watchers that show her a utopian future where she is a loved superhero, and the wife of miles morales. those two things are linked. the watchers, who are stand-ins for the spider-man writers and fandom, have decided that spider-gwen can be tolerated, but only if she belongs to a different spider-man. gwen sees through the manipulation, turns miles down because she wants them to challenge fate and make their own choices, and hasn't relented in close to a decade.

-> her alternate selves form a secret society to protect their narratives from people who want to take their agency away. gwen's creator ends his run on her comics by inserting himself into the narrative as an alternate gwen speaking directly to the reader, whose insert is a salty watcher who's pissed that gwen hasn't left her world to go hook up with miles and pump out his babies yet, telling them gwen deserves a world of her own and a story that's new. and what's not new is being the hero's girlfriend. what's new is being the hero, with stories about her as an individual. -> comics gwen doesn't need miles to teach her that she can imagine something better for herself. she does it on her own. and she's the one who tells miles he should do the same.

-> spiderverse gwen never kills peter with a power he was supposed to have instead of her. she even loves him back. her world still turns on her anyway. the problem was never that she did or didn't kill him. it was that she got a story of her own. then she enters the spiderverse, meets miles, and her story isn't hers ever again.

-> spiderverse gwen gets a pov in atsv. her pov is about she how loves miles, thinks he's so special, has been inspired by him to do things differently and wants to be his girlfriend. she gets a story. the story is about becoming the kind of girl miles needs. she gets a metanarrative. the metanarrative is that maybe, if she gets with a different boy than the usual one, it'll work out. -> even then, spiderverse gwen has to get this idea from miles, and she doesn't believe in it until he inspires her to try.

they are very, very different characters.

for what it's worth, i don't want every adaptation of spider-gwen to be like the original. if you're adapting to a different medium, that brings with it different drawbacks, opportunities and needs and satisfying those to tell the best story possible is more important than being 100% accurate to the story.

and with spiderverse gwen, i like some of the changes. i think they have great potential.

gwen's age: yes, it's relevent in a meta sense that comics spider-gwen is at the age original gwen dies, but kids have trouble relating to characters older than high school age, and kids are who these movies are for. aging gwen down so we first encounter her as a high schooler makes her more relatable to them.

gwen's appearance: i like that gwen isn't wearing the headband and gets an edgier hairstyle. comics characters have to have the same hairstyle all the time because comics artists can only draw so many faces and it helps keep them straight, so gwen had to keep the headband so people would know she's a gwen. it's great that a movie that doesn't have that limitation did something new.

gwen's fighting style: making gwen less klutzy was necessary in itsv because it would've undercut how miles was the clumsy one, as the character newest to his powers. i like that gwen is the one with more experience. and i think making gwen a ballerina is a great idea, now that atsv has gwen ditching the pointe shoes for her chucks.

-> it marks a development in her character: gwen begins as a girl who aligns with more traditional expectations of femininity, and through being spider-woman, finds the confidence to reject them and do her own thing. it works even better since spiderverse gwen is younger than comics gwen, who's much more comfortable not fitting in. it makes sense that a 15 year old girl would be less comfortable with being herself than a 19 year old.

-> from a thematic perspective: ballerinas are disciplined athletes and dedicated artists who are stereotyped as frivolous and delicate, and whose bodies are admired for their sex appeal instead of their strength. they're the pinnacle of ideal femininity: thin, (white), beautiful, young, graceful, silent, demure, sexy, in pain but smiling through it even as it literally wrecks their bodies and minds, interchangeable and easily replaced by the time they hit forty. becoming one is often imposed on you as a young child instead of something you choose, the culture is unbelievably toxic, the actual dancing is painful, and pro ballerinas have to put so much work into their craft that it destroys their bodies before they hit middle age. and many ballets are romances-- the most famous being romantic tragedies where the ballerina dies after a love gone wrong. making gwen stacy, the perfect, delicate, conventionally beautiful, rule-following too-good-to-be-true girlfriend who dies young a ballerina is a brilliant idea.

-> it also makes her more appealing to the girls she's meant to be for: many little girls have dance, specifically ballet, pushed towards them as an interest they're both supposed to like and be good at, and will be laughed at for liking. seeing a ballerina be this powerful and not be mocked for using her dance skills is important-- there's a reason why female fans latched onto it so hard. and gwen letting go of the ballet shoes for something punkier is just as relatable: many girls, as they grow older and start gaining more autonomy, often reject the traditionally feminine things that are imposed upon them. possibly even the same girls who watched itsv as children and atsv as teenagers.

gwen's powers: i don't mind that spiderverse gwen doesn't have a symbiote. i just wish that when she's in group fight scenes, she isn't stuck with just pretty-looking kicks while the other characters get to do more interesting things than her. jess has a motorcycle, miguel has fangs and claws, hobie has his guitar, miles has invisibility and bioelectricity, margo can clone herself and stretch her arms, peni pilots a giant robot, pav uses a unique weapon for his webslinging. and gwen... pirouettes and then bonks her head so she can fall and miles can catch her.

gwen's personality: craving belonging with the spider-society is necessary to the plot. if she weren't so desperate to stay with them, her motivation for lying to miles falls apart. and i like that gwen's dishonesty to other spider-people is an intentional part of the plot; when comics gwen withholds information from other spider-people and acts uncharacteristically peppy around them, it's because the people writing her in crossover events don't know she's out of character, because they haven't read her comics. being around other spider-people is bad for gwen, and the spiderverse movies are the first piece of canon to actually bring that up.

gwen's queerness: i love that we can add a trans-coded gwen to the long list of queercoded spider-gwens. and that a trans-coded girl is the subject of desire for multiple boys, without any creepiness attached to it. it also creates a more subversive reason for gwen's ballet background and need for a boyfriend: she's using those things to access the kind of femininity reserved for cis girls.

gwen's backstory: gwen living in the city distinguishes her from the peter parker derivative setting of queens. making gwen's dad religious adds another wrinkle to their relationship. i love the guggenheim fight and think it's a more visually dynamic scene and a better fit to introduce the spider-society as interdimensional cops. the shift from protecting against an existential threat to spider-people to canon cops is a better fit for atsv's acab theme.

gwen's relationship with miles: i like that miles and gwen are friends and peers. i love that the spiderverse movies made the connection that they are both in the same position: both are marginalized by a story designed by, for and about white men. them being spider-people is an existential threat to it (an afrolatino boy who's the hero instead of the side-villain; a queer girl who's the hero instead of the hero's girlfriend). both are punished for not being able to live up to harmful expectations about what they're allowed to be. they're in perfect positions to understand each other's situation and help one another break free.

gwen's other relationships: i LOVE that gwen got to have more time with her mother. i LOVE gwen and pav's friendship, and that even if it's never going anywhere and no one will admit it, everyone knows about the romantic vibe between gwen and hobie now. the creepy worst case scenario girldad vibe miguel has towards gwen makes my head spin. gwen and jess's fucked up foster mother-daughter vibe is fascinating. and racebending em jay helps distinguish her from mj-616.

gwen's arc: the one thing about spiderverse gwiles that i like is that gwen's projecting peter parker onto miles. her fixation on him makes sense in that context, and gwen having survivor's guilt over not dying in peter's place makes sense, especially after all the time she spent being exposed to the multiverse, and is very compelling. i like that gwen gets to lose her faith in the spider-people and connecting the spider-society to the cops gwen is often in opposition to was brilliant. and having some of her white feminism called out in any capacity is good, especially since that element of her character is missing lately.

gwen's metanarrative: i like that the movies are pointing out that gwen should be able to have a romantic relationship with spider-man that doesn't end badly. like yeah. she should. a girl should not have to be eternally single or shun men forever to be safe and keep her autonomy. heterofatalism is bullshit and if we act like it's not we're accepting men as inherently terrible instead of challenging them to be better than that. and the potential of spider-gwen's character will be fulfilled once she is able to have this relationship and no one even questions that she can live and retain protagonism of her own story.

i like these changes! i think they're a good fit to this version of the character, they enhance the spiderverse story, and they're great additions to spider-gwen's canon. i think if comics-gwen incorporates some of these original elements she could benefit from them.

but. the changes were not made for the reasons i listed. at most, they were happy side effects of the real reason the changes were made.

the changes were made for miles.

it's that simple. even though the spiderverse movies are all about the importance of intersectionality and representation, gwen isn't here to represent the little girls and women in the audience, or show the boys and men in the audience that girls can be the heroes of their own stories too.

she's here to be miles's girlfriend.

gwen's age: was reduced to make her a more appropriate romantic interest for miles. why 15, instead of 16 or 17? so she's only 15 months older than him. no one can object to that age gap.

gwen's appearance: she has an eyebrow piercing because comics miles's first love interest, who has the exact same 'sneaking a look at you in the visions classroom/watching you in the hallway' moments, is katie bishop, who has an eyebrow piercing and a punk vibe to her design. the entire itsv gwen-miles vibe is just miles and katie with gwen replacing katie. -> the side shave happens because of miles. she keeps it as a reminder of him.

gwen's fighting style: gwen has pointe shoes because the itsv animators didn't look closely enough at her design to notice she's wearing chucks instead of ballet flats (and realized it in time for atsv). and also probably because as the token girl hero, they wanted her to be graceful, and a dancer's more appealing to a teenage boy than a grungy drummer.

gwen's powers: were kept basic so gwen can accompany miles on adventures without being a liability but she can never outshine him. she might have more spider-person experience than him, but he catches up so fast it doesn't matter.

-> instead of retreading her origin, couldn't they have reintroduced gwen in atsv when she was dependent on power-up pills? she had a multiversal encounter with miles then, so there's even comic precedent. plus her father being in the hospital and gwen being in the custody of the kingpin would be even more frightening, because spiderverse gwen is a minor-- wanting to flee that situation and being willing to do anything to avoid returning to it makes perfect sense.

-> THAT could've been the thing that made her stand out during group fights: at any moment she could become vulnerable. especially if the spider-society's providing them, and quitting means she'll be entering the climax with only a few power-up pills left.

-> plus, she could get her symbiote in btsv.

instead? her one new power revolves around being constantly aware of her boyfriend's needs even when he isn't on the same plane of reality as her. no woman or girl would want this. every teenage boy would want the girl he likes to have it. so apparantly do the grown men who wrote atsv.

gwen's personality: is all about miles. when she's dishonest, it's for miles's safety. when she's running from her problems, she's running from her feelings for miles. when she plays the drums she thinks of miles. when she's a nerd, she likes, of all things, the exact same action figures miles collects. when she finds the strength to defy authority and strike out on her own, it's to protect miles. her rage was toned down, and her need for romance was cranked up. for miles. and if gwen doesn't need male validation, keeping miles's approval would be a lot less important to her. gwen was a fantasy in itsv, and she's still a fantasy in atsv.

gwen's queerness: the trans-coding is important and not any less powerful than any other kind of queer representation. but it does feel like the creators decided on it as a way to acknowledge spider-gwen's queerness... while also making sure she was still attracted to miles and he didn't have any more competition for her.

-> oh my god the power-ups could have been an allegory for estrogen.

gwen's backstory: gwen goes to visions because miles goes to visions (note how they have more things in common because the writers are removing what makes gwen unique?). gwen doesn't kill peter because if she did, miles wouldn't find her attractive anymore. gwen liked peter back because if she didn't, she wouldn't respond well to miles's crush. gwen's status quo and her development as a character have stagnated for 17 months, while miles has grown into his own as a hero to fix the maturity gap. by stunting her growth.

gwen's relationship with miles: is being framed as a canon-defying epic romance that's never worked out before (not true; it has: see earth-8) but will this time. but it's only going to subvert canon and free gwen from her narrative if they don't get together. if they become a couple, nothing changes. she's still the girlfriend, even if she lives. and she will never be treated as his equal by the writers or the audience anywhere they're together.

-> gwen is all in on helping miles break his canon. but in btsv, will miles help gwen break hers? or will he stop short at 'well, i can break mine. but you can't because yours benefits me.'

gwen's other relationships: gwens' supporting cast was gutted to make her dependent on miles for emotional support. peter b isn't her mentor because he's miles's. jess can only redeem herself to gwen by helping miles. the miles-gwen-hobie love triangle was reconfigured so miles comes out on top. peter 65 is gwen's lost love, so she can find it again with miles. harry's cut from her origin story so miles has less competition. gwen's supporting cast and and villains are mixed up because the creators either never read gwen's comics past the first few issues, or did and didn't care what makes her world unique. gwen's a guys' girl so she can be the cool girlfriend who hangs out with your bros but would never cheat on you with one of them, and who'd never prioritize her girls over her boyfriend. gwen snips at margo because miles is so hot he's got girls fighting over him.

gwen's arc: isn't about becoming a better hero. it's about becoming a better girlfriend.

-> her grief and guilt can be overcome by successfully protecting and ending up with miles. why get over peter when you can replace him with miles? why die for your boyfriend when you can live for him?

-> she can't redeem herself by taking responsibility for the reckless, selfish actions she takes for her own sake. just the ones that harm miles.

-> her radicalization still happens, but on a different scale: she doesn't do it to be a better hero for her city. she does it to become a better ally to miles and his world. (remember the swinging date, when she introduces herself as HIS friendly neighborhood's spider-woman?)

every time gwen's punished by the narrative, it's for doing something that moves her away from miles, like lying to him or not having his back. every time she's rewarded, it's for moving closer to him, like sticking up for him in front of his parents or deciding to apologize to him.

when gwen resolves her conflict with her father, it's because she went home to get her photo of miles, not to face him. and it's resolved so gwen has her baggage out of the way and nothing's stopping her from pursuing miles.

when gwen decides to resist the spider-society and lead her own spider-team, it's made up mostly of people there for miles, their goal is to support miles, and she'll probably hand leadership of the team to miles when he joins them in btsv. it's not her team, it's his.

gwen's metanarrative: is now just 'hey gwen, if you choose a different boyfriend, and you're super supportive of him, maybe we won't kill you this time!' and she still has to have miles come up with it, and inspire her to believe in it.

because if she wants to be her own person, she can't be miles's person.

it's about miles. she was put in these movies to be his girlfriend, and was written from the ground up to be accepting of that.

fifty years after the death of gwen stacy and ten years after the creation of spider-gwen, she's being put back in the narrative of spider-man's girlfriend. the most change they're willing to make is that this time, the girlfriend will live, and the spider-man will be miles instead of peter. the most agency they're willing to give gwen is the agency to climb back into the girlfriend box herself so miles doesn't have to take responsibility for taking her story away from her.

that's the problem. that's why spiderverse gwen isn't handled better in the movies than the comics. comics gwen is the main character. spiderverse gwen is the main character's girlfriend.

sorry about the length. hopefully that answers your question.

-----

p.s.: even if she squeaks out of btsv single, will it be because gwen realizes she needs to be her own person? or will it be because miles comes to that conclusion for her? or hell, maybe it'll be that he isn't ready to be with her yet.

[dewedup]

just some mountdew fluff, getting high, anger management and confessing feelings

“Am I only hot when I talk about emotions?” Mountain questions as he accepts the lit joint, taking a deep breath in and showing off slightly by blowing some O’s on the exhale. Dew’s eyes track the movement of his lips and throat as he continues the smoke trick until there’s no smoke left in his lungs. 

word count: 1055

Mountain let out a thick cloud of smoke, placing the bong back on the table and sinking into the couch. Planet Earth playing on the TV in front of him, it’s the perfect Saturday. He finished his chores and is just killing time until he needs to pack for the upcoming tour. The plane ride will be long and boring but something exciting builds at the thought of playing in a new city every other night with his bandmates.

A knock on the door disrupts the calm aura surrounding him, and he gets up to answer it, spraying a light dusting of Febreze to mask the smell as he walks towards the door of his room.

“Hey man,” He greets the blond before him as Mountain gestures for him to enter. Dew walks in, dropping his jacket on the ground like he lives there before slumping onto the couch. In all honesty Dew could be a co-inhabitant of the room. Mountain’s room is usually his own personal sanctuary, but the amount of nights Dew’s spent here would make up for more than half the year. 

“I’m pretty sure I set fire to a priceless heirloom,” Dew says, packing some bud into the pipe and taking a deep inhale, only coughing slightly upon release. Mountain takes back his own seat and levels Dew with a glare.

“What do you mean you’re pretty sure?” Mountain pesters, taking the pipe from Dew, who shrugs in response. He’d spent the last few weeks of Dew’s previous punishment to help him with his temper. Mountain’s an emotion regulation enthusiast and thought he was making progress with the fire ghoul. They would sit for hours and go over how to gauge his feelings, and when to take a step back. Dew had a hard time voicing his feelings, but they’d had a breakthrough when Mountain had compared his anger level to that of a flame. Dull red was the base, the ideal so to speak. Dew lived around an orange; a simmering level of frustration nearly always present. They’d worked hard to decipher that if his rage reached a bright yellow then he needed to remove himself from the situation before it escalated further. 

“I blanked on what do when I hit yellow, I got distracted while we were practicing.” Dew mumbles, accepting the paper Mountain hands him and starts rolling a joint.

“What do you mean you got distracted? It was just us going over different scenarios and solutions.” Mountain chides, bumping Dew’s shoulder with his own. He reaches for the remote and turns the tv down a bit, so they can talk without shouting over David Attenborough’s narration. 

“I think it’s pretty self-explanatory then,” Dew says, licking a stripe along the paper to activate the adhesive. “You’re pretty hot when you’re explaining feelings while smoking a blunt.” 

Mountain blushes, recalling just how into the discussion he had gotten. It also happened to be unseasonably hot the last month or so and he’d shed his shirt like any normal ghoul. 

“Am I only hot when I talk about emotions?” Mountain questions as he accepts the lit joint, taking a deep breath in and showing off slightly by blowing some O’s on the exhale. Dew’s eyes track the movement of his lips and throat as he continues the smoke trick until there’s no smoke left in his lungs. 

“Definitely not.”

“Am I turning you on right now?” 

“Maybe.”

Mountain smiles ruefully at the fire ghoul, licking his lips as he takes another deep inhale. This time, instead, he grabs Dew by the back of the neck and pushes their heads together, letting out the smoke directly into his mouth while applying slight pressure with his lips. Dew swallows the smoke and deepens the kiss, tangling their tongues together teasingly. 

As he pulls away Dew empties the smoke from his lungs, and it’s like the light’s changed from red to green and suddenly they are all over each other.

The joint lays abandoned on the rim of the ashtray as they both pull off their t-shirts, reconnecting after with bruising kisses and added gnashing of teeth. The speed is zero to sixty, no testing the waters just diving right into a cool abyss of touch. 

“I like you,” Dew admits as he pulls away, hands fumbling with Mountain’s pants. Mountain takes a deep breath, blood going straight to his cock at the confession.

“I’ve been dropping hints the last few months,” Mountain says, taking the pants situation into his own hands and shucking them to the ground where they belong. “I thought you were taken or just weren’t interested so I stopped trying.”

Dew guffaws, jumping up to undo his jeans but somehow in the heat of passion, he manages to trip over his own feet. 

He lands on the edge of the table, Mountain barely having enough time to grab the bong before everything goes flying across the room, the pipe smashing into pieces and the joint landing on top of Dew. He calmly picks it up and takes another hit, coughing out what turns into full-on laughter.

Mountain can’t help himself, joining in.

And suddenly, what was becoming a hot and heavy moment turns into the funniest shit Mountain’s experienced in a while. They sit there, laughing for a solid ten minutes, ignoring the huge mess and chunks of broken glass in favour of the hilarity of the situation.

Dew crawls over to the couch and sits between Mountain’s legs, passing the joint back and forth between them until nothing’s left but a tiny roach. 

“I didn’t expect me telling you I loved you ending up like this,” Dew says after they’ve watched another episode of Planet Earth. “Sexier, for sure, and maybe a little more romantic.”

“Wait, are you saying you love me?” Mountain stops, choking on his toke of the bong. The comment catches him off guard and the smoke doesn’t help, sending him into a coughing fit. Dew reaches up, and helpfully pats him on the back to try and clear his lungs. 

“I thought it was obvious.” 

“Saying ‘I love you’ isn’t obvious, you asshole. It’s something you need to actually say out loud.” 

“Oh,” Dew chuckles, perching himself on Mountain’s lap and twining his fingers through his hair, caressing his horns softly. “Oops, my bad.”

[grailfinders]

Grailfinders Viewers' Choice #18: Archetype: Earth

today on Grailfinders we’re building everyone’s favorite funny vampire, Arcueid Brunestud, a.k.a Archetype: Earth. so yeah, all we have to do is make the primal manifestation of the planet who is canonically the most powerful character in Tsukihime in dungeons and dragons.

so obviously she’s a Silverquill Bard to do whatever the hell she wants and to get a free cast of Silvery Barbs constantly, but we also dip into Circle of the Land Druid for even more free spells and some shapeshifting.

check out her build breakdown below the cut, or her character sheet over here!

Race and Background

So, obviously the funny vampire has to be like, a dhampir or something right?

WRONG.

while Arc can suck people’s blood, she chooses not to, so I’d rather not pick a race that’s built around their bites. True Ancestors are naturally occurring beings that come out fully formed, and while they can suck blood, they can also choose not to with enough power. wildly enough, D&D already has a class that fits that description perfectly! hailing from the plane of Kaladesh, put your hands together for the Aetherborn!

most of their stat block is nothing we haven’t seen in other races- some Darkvision here, resistance to necrotic damage from being Born of Aether there, proficiency in Intimidation… the things that set them apart are the optional Gift of the Aetherborn, the previously mentioned bloodsucking which will start an addiction if you use it in-game, and the fact that they get three different stat boosts instead of most races’ two. you get +2 Charisma as well as two +1s in any stats you choose, like Dexterity and Constitution.

we’re also completely throwing out the rulebook on this build by picking up the  Mage of High Sorcery background, giving Arc proficiency in Arcana and History as well as the Initiate of High Sorcery feat she wouldn’t be able to get otherwise. hey look, you’re getting power from the moon! specifically we’re picking the moon Solinari to get Comprehend Languages and Shield. they technically use your Charisma to cast, and you can cast each of them once a day for free, or by using spell slots. you even get Fire Bolt for free too!

Ability Scores

Arc’s highest score is her Charisma. everyone loves Arc. you love Arc. more importantly, Nasu loves Arc. After that is Wisdom. as an embodiment of nature, it would be weird if you didn’t know much about it. Third highest is Constitution. I don’t think a +1 bonus is quite high enough to count for Arc’s nigh-invulnerability, but it’s a start. Your Dexterity is also okay, though I wish it could be higher to deal with fighting in a dress, but we’ll get something to help there later. That means our Strength isn’t great. Obviously it’s supposed to be higher, but DND characters need weaknesses, and this one can get covered by other options later. Finally, we’re dumping Intelligence. Two of your ascensions are completely unaware of the outside world, and we needed wisdom for nature stuff.

Class Levels

1. Bard 1: if you want to be the most powerful vampire, you have to learn the most powerful Spells, which you can cast using your Charisma. right now you can use Friends and Charm Person to make sure everyone loves the funny vampire, as well as Prestidigitation for various general uses, Earth Tremor to tremor some earth like the nature spirit you are, Heroism to boost the offensive power of your allies, and Longstrider to move a bit faster than the average person.

…what? we’re obviously not going to get the most powerful spells at level one. be patient.

you also get Bardic Inspiration, so you can give a d6 to your friends to improve one of their attacks, saves, or skill checks Charisma Modifier times per long rest. plus, starting as a bard you get proficiency in Dexterity and Charisma saves, plus three skills of your choice. Athletics and Acrobatics will help make up for the low scores in physical stats, and Nature just kind of makes sense.

2. Bard 2: second level bards can do whatever they want thanks to being a Jack of All Trades, adding half their proficiency bonus to any skill checks they make without proficiency. you can also sing a Song of Rest during short rests so your party heals 1d6 more if they use hit dice. like every other bard build, I have no excuse for this being here, but so few people heal on short rests anyways, it’s fine. your inspiration also becomes Magical Inspiration, so your allies can now add it to their healing and damage rolls from spells.

you can also Speak with Animals now. that’s a nature thing, probably. don’t worry, the funny vampire stuff will come.

3. Bard 3: At third level you join the college of Silverquill, becoming an Eloquent Apprentice. this gives you a free Sacred Flame, and you get proficiency in Insight and Persuasion. Soon, everyone will love the funny vampire. you can also cast Silvery Barbs. not the spell, but the feature! the only meaningful difference is that the feature doesn’t work on charm-immune creatures.

for anyone who doesn’t know how this works, you can react to any creature succeeding on an attack, check, or save within 60’ of you, and force them to roll another d20 and use the lower roll. if this causes the roll to fail, you can then empower another creature nearby, allowing them to roll another attack, check, or save they make within the next minute. as a feature, you can do this for free once per day, though the use isn’t actually expended until it causes a failure. that being said, the reason we’ll never pick up the spell in this build is because you can still use the feature again and again by spending spell slots. so yes, we now have essentially three extra spell slots, and we’re only at level three.

speaking of spell slots, you have second level slots now, and second level spells to use them with. Aid will add to your total HP as well as that of your allies’ for eight hours after casting.

finally, you get Expertise in two skills, doubling your proficiency bonus with Athletics and Acrobatics respectively. sure, you won’t be great at punching people, but with this and Jack of All Trades, you can more or less cover for having such a low strength score in the first place.

4. Bard 4: at fourth level you get your first Ability Score Improvement, so let’s round up those odd scores with a +1 to Dexterity and Charisma for stronger spells and a higher AC. if you’re really bent out of shape about your weak lil fists you can cast True Strike now to get advantage on your next melee attack. or you can spend your turn doing something actually useful like casting Enhance Ability to further enhance your skill rolls with free advantage for a minute for one kind of ability. intelligence, wisdom, and charisma don’t have anything special, but if you pick strength, you’ll also double your carrying capacity. constitution will give you some temporary HP, and dexterity prevents falling damage.

5. Bard 5: at level five bards get their biggest level yet. your inspiration die becomes a d8 now, and you become a Font of Inspiration, letting you recharge your dice every short rest instead of just long ones. you can grab third level spells now, but I’m going to hold off on that for a level to pick up Shatter. now you can punch really well, and you have a spell that can hit multiple enemies, which should start being useful around now.

6. Bard 6: if you’re going to be a powerful vampire, you need powerful feats, like Countercharm. hah, just kidding, that sucks. Inky Shroud is pretty cool though. you learn Darkness for free, and you can cast it once a day without spending a spell slot. on top of that, casting it for free lets you see through the darkness, and creatures starting their turn there take psychic damage with no save!

you can also manifest your naturey powers with some Plant Growth, which you can cast in two ways. the short-term growth creates difficult terrain in an area, while the long-term version will improve crop yields, if you ever feel like being nice to the NPCs.

7. Bard 7: at seventh level you get a lot more mobile thanks to Dimension Door allowing you to teleport up to 500’ away as an action, and you can even bring a willing friend along for the ride!

8. Bard 8: okay, I’m done with all this boring crap. grab that last Charisma boost from your ASI and learn Polymorph. admittedly this spell is stretching things a little, but you do get compared to Enkidu sometimes, and they can shapeshift out the wazoo. with Polymorph, you can turn yourself or a friend into any beast of a challenge rating equal to or lower than their level, fully replacing their stats and HP.

9. Bard 9: ninth level bards can play a better song of rest, but more importantly they get fifth level spells. with Hold Monster you can now use your rainbow mystic eyes to paralyze any one creature in place if they fail a wisdom save and aren’t undead. you can even use it on multiple targets by upcasting it, though I imagine you’ll have better uses for a ninth level spell slot. (aid, obviously.) this gives your allies advantage on all attacks against the paralyzed enemy, with instant critical damage for melee attacks. you can’t really take advantage of that yet, but give it a hot second.

10. Bard 10: now that a hot second has passed, let’s get down to business. real quick- your inspiration is a d10 now, and you have expertise in Persuasion and Nature (everyone will love that vampire).

you also learn some Magical Secrets, so you can pick up any two spells from any spell list in the game. for your regular cantrip pick up Blade Ward for some more unkillability. then for your secrets, Primal Savagery lets you turn your hands into claws and attack people, dealing acid damage when you hit. since it’s a spell attack, it’ll use your charisma (good) instead of your strength (bad). you can also craft a Wall of Stone. stone is natural, you make nature happen.

11. Druid 1: we’re only bouncing over to druid for a few things, but you do learn some Druidic while you’re there, and you learn even more cantrips. Shillelagh lets you make any staff magical, though it’ll still only use your wisdom to hit. still better than strength. you can also gain Resistance to magic thanks to an extra d4 on your next saving throw, and you can Mold Earth.

most importantly, you gain access to the druid Spell list, one of the most powerful in the game. and I don’t have to tell you exactly what to pick this time since anything that makes something natural is fair game.

your druid and bard spell slots kind of blur together, so check your handbook to see how many spell slots you have at a given time.

12. Druid 2: Second level druids can use a Wild Shape twice a short rest, turning into a beast of cr ¼ or lower as an action. Polymorph is much stronger at this stage, though being able to keep your intelligence and concentrate on another spell can have its uses. you can also use this to turn into Neco-Arc without wasting a fourth level spell slot.

alternatively, you can summon one as your Wild Companion, letting you cast Find Familiar for free instead.

as a druid of the land, you have access to another druid cantrip like gust. wind is natural, and we hadn’t picked it up yet. more importantly, your Natural Recovery lets you recharge spell slots over a short rest, with the total level recovered equal to half your druid level rounded up. yes, we’re taking multiple levels in another class just to get Breath of the Planet. you know I wouldn’t leave you hanging, fans of Breath of the Planet. can I call you breathheads? I’m not sure if that’s a fan nickname or a slur, it sounds a little like both.

13. Druid 3: third level druids get second level spells, and as a land druid you get some extras depending on the kind of nature you’re representing. while the moon may have a lot of seas, the forest circle has spells we actually want. Barkskin will supercharge your AC for a short period of time, while Spider Climb lets you do the classic “crawling up the walls” vampire thing.

14. Bard 11: now that our random detour is over, you get sixth level bard spells like Eyebite. It’s an even better and more literal Rainbow Mystic Eyes skill! each turn for a minute, you can use your action (including the casting action) to force one creature you can see to make a Wisdom save. if they fail, you can force them asleep, into a panic, or make them sickened.

15. Bard 12: using aid to bump up your health is getting less and less feasible at this point, so use this ASI to bump up your Constitution for an extra 15 HP this level.

16. Bard 13: blah blah better song of rest who cares it’s Mirage Arcane time baby! you can now make the millenium castle, as well as just about anything else you’d like, as long as it fits within a square mile of space. it takes ten minutes to cast, but it lasts ten days, and despite being an “illusion”, it even feels real. it also says it can’t change the general shape of the terrain, but then it immediately gives suggestions where it does exactly that, so it might just be poorly written.

17. Bard 14: fourteenth level strixhaven bards are a little weird. most classes get four subclass features, but bards don’t, so we have to pick between two different features this level. that said, Word of Power is obviously the stronger option. whenever your silvery barbs succeeds, the failed creature gets a vulnerability to one damage type for the rest of the round. you can’t capitalize on this, but if your paladin friend got a better initiative than you you can cause some serious damage.

alternatively, you can use your reaction to give a creature resistance to a type of damage they’re taking, with you taking the blocked damage as a psychic hit. boom, third skill done and dusted.

you also get another round of magical secrets, so pick up Haste for some actual super-speed and Wall of Thorns for some more plant growth. the former gives you doubled movement speed and an extra action for dashing, the latter makes a wall of thorny bushes that is 60’ long and 10’ high. creatures in the area upon its creation take piercing damage, and movement through the wall is quartered. moving into or ending a turn in the wall also deals slashing damage.

18. Bard 15: your inspiration grows one last time to a d12, and you can now cast eighth level spells like Glibness. for up to an hour after casting, all your charisma checks can automatically get a 15 on the die. there is no longer any point in resisting. you will like the funny vampire.

19. Bard 16: for our final ASI, we’re picking up a feat! no, we’re not grabbing Tough. instead, pick up Adept of the White Robes to get those fancy outfits you like wearing. thanks to this feat, you can now cast Fortune’s Favor once a day for free, and it’s added to your spell list as well. it takes a minute to cast, but for an hour afterwards the target can end the spell to roll another d20 when they make an attack, check or save, and use either option. this can also be used when someone attacks them. essentially, it’s a use of the lucky feat. things just kind of go Arc’s way. it’s mostly thanks to being the ultimate lifeform, but being the author’s favorite doesn’t hurt. 100 gold per casting is pretty costly, but when you upcast it you can give your whole party pseudo-Lucky, so it’s well worth the price.

you can also make a Protective Ward using your Charisma. when a creature takes damage nearby, you can use your reaction and a spell slot to reduce the damage they take. it’s kind of like Word of Power, but it’ll usually help less, though not having to bean yourself to make it work is nice. your roll the spell slot’s level in d6s, add your charisma modifier, and that’s how much damage it saves. you technically don’t have a use for your ninth level slot yet, but I still think there’s better uses than eating 9d6 damage, probably. but if it’s that or someone disintegrating go nuts.

20. Bard 17: our final level of bard gives you the most powerful bard feature ever made. mankind weeps at its coming… because the improved Song of Rest die is actually really bad. it scales terribly. the ninth level spell is cool though, especially if you pick Foresight. after a minute of cast time, you can spend the next eight hours with future sight, preventing you from ever being surprised. you also get advantage on all attacks, saves, and checks, plus anyone attacking you has disadvantage. it costs nothing, and it doesn’t use concentration. go nuts.

Archetype vs. Arc

normally, this is the part of the post where I post the strengths and weaknesses of the build. but this is a chance to simp for Magical-Biche’s Arcueid build, so instead I’m going to compare the two here and see if Earth can stand up to the original.

for anyone who doesn’t remember, the other Arc is a Vengeance Paladin and a Champion Fighter, as well as a Barbarian for flavor and unarmored defense. assuming they’re fighting one-on-one at level 20 it’s a pretty even match, with Arc showing up with way more HP and a more physical fighting style than Earth. however, Earth’s Foresight pulls a lot of weight to put her back in the lead, especially by giving Arc disadvantage on all attacks and using either shield or silvery barbs to beat back anything that still gets through.

Overall I think Earth would probably eke out a win here, but going up against Arc at any other level isn’t even a question. Arc’s simply way too aggressive for Earth to handle, even if she’s given setup time to cover for all of her bardic squishiness. it’s especially bad considering her most powerful attacking spell a) uses a save, which Arc’s paladin aura defangs handily, and b) deals physical damage, which Arc can resist.

I still think the Earth build is cool, it has a lot more utility than Arc does, but in a straight fight Arc stomps the competition.

[kalevalakryze]

Under Fire

For Bo-Katan Week Day Two: Prompt Wedding/Marriage Pairing: Bo-Katan Kryze/The Armorer Characters: Bo-Katan Kryze, The Armorer, Din Djarin, Axe Woves, Koska Reeves, Ragnar Vizsla , Din Grogu Warnings: canon typical violence, author trying to be funny, and probably failing. Summary: Blaster fire rained heavy on the ground around the small squad of Mandalorians, dirt, sand, and other debris tossed into the air with each shot around their stomping boots. A gloved hand shot out to grab Bo-Katan by the leather strap of her holster, tugging her under cover just in time for a burning red bolt of plasma to whizz through the air where she’d been only moments before. Bo dug her boots into the ground to change momentum, settling her elbows into the durasteel that The Armorer had pulled her behind. Yellow bolts fired from her Westar’s found homes in stormtrooper plastoid. The next one to pull her from an inevitable headshot had been Koska, who’d caught the E-11’s glint as the shot charged. “Hey!” Bo called to her golden helmeted companion as she reached for the blaster of a fallen stormtrooper. The sturm dowels were removed from their power packs, before she was launching them into the offensive firing line. Explosions reflected in The Armorer’s visor as she turned her attention to the Mandalore. “You remember what we talked about, a few weeks ago?” A blaster whizzed past, she felt it graze the side of her helmet and sear the paint. Shaking her head, Bo fired back. “I’m ready, I want to say the vows, with you, if you’ll have me!” 

AO3 Link: here

“There’s an Imperial base that’s in operation in the remains of Concordia,” Axe informed the leaders as he and his apprentice, Ragnar Vizsla, entered the war room. Koska followed behind the pair, helmet tucked under her arm, her brows pulled in a contemplative expression.

“Scans have proved the existence of the Beskar alloy they’d been using to make the super commando armor, and heat signatures prove that the old factories are back in working order,” Koska added in as she set her helmet on the war room console.

The Mand’alor frowned as she pulled the star map up. They’d only recently managed to get the proper equipment in the atmosphere to keep an eye on the healing Mandalore sector, the storms slowing down after they’d bartered trade with the New Republic to fix the environment. They were even on track to restarting the old Mando-Motors buildings, and started to get details in the books to renew ship manufacturing, so having Imperials on Concordia when they could be using the planets resources for materials instead of bartering, just wouldn’t work for her.

“Ragnar, what do you think we should do?” She questioned the young apprentice, lips quirking as he tensed from the spotlight. He was meant to be learning strategy by now anyways, and his inexperience could prove useful in dealing with the troopers.

“Well, Lady Kryze, we could take a small squad for a scouting operation, and decide from there how to continue depending on what we see? Our scanners could still be faulty with the storms,” His hand traced the chin of his helmet in thought, though Bo-Katan was nodding her head.

“That’s a good plan, Ragnar. Does anyone oppose?” Bo-Katan looked around the room, nodding her head at the shakes of everyones head. “Perfect, Din, Grogu, could you two run interference and surveillance from the Gauntlet while we hit the ground?” She turned to the Clan of Two, where Din was pointing out different locations on the map.

“It will be done, Lady Kryze,” He affirmed, his hand resting on Grogu’s head, where a miniature helmet covered the brunt of his head, though there was no visor, and his ears were also uncovered, the beskar would protect from anything fall, something she was glad to see the Jetti apprentice wearing.

“Alright, if you’re in this room, congratulations, you’ve all been drafted for recon, load up,” She patted her hand on the table, a smile pulling at her lips at Axe’s laugh as the man threw his arm around his apprentice and led him to the newly reconstructed hangars. Bo-Katan and The Armorer were the last to file out of the war room, mostly so the Mand’alor could press a soft kiss to the hard gold metal of the woman’s helm.

Letting Din and Grogu pilot, Bo-Katan, The Armorer, Axe, and Ragnar loaded into the drop transport, while Koska stuck in the cockpit to run the scans. The ship rocked and rumbled as they breached the storms in the atmosphere, when they broke the edge, The Armorer’s hand reached to settle on Bo’s waist, under the impression of helping her stay steady, since the Mand’alor refused to strap into one of the seats.

“We’re breaching atmo, there’s activity on the surface,” Din called over comms, the ship rattling as he pulled it harshly to avoid hostile scanners. “I’ll drop you as close as I can, and then we’ll sit until you call,” The floor of the gauntlet started to shift, until Bo was leading the drop, the others unstrapping and freefalling after her.

They couldn’t activate their thrusters until they were closer to the ground, which meant it would be close, especially since Ragnar didn’t have nearly the same amount of skill as the others. The comms were silent as the air rushed around her, her head turning just enough to catch the gold and blue of her squad. In the last few feet they had to spare, five sets of thrusters engaged in tandem. When her feet touched the dirt, her rangefinder dropped to scan their immediate surroundings, watching for some indication that they’ve been seen.

“It has been some time since I have been here,” The Armorer spoke with a hint of nostalgia, though Bo and her Niteowls all nodded their head in agreement. They’d all been a part of Death Watch, had hidden themselves from New Mandalorian rule under Pre Vizsla’s order, and had terrorized their people under his command, until they’d had no choice but to flee.

“It has been some time,” Bo agreed her head as she started towards the closest facility, where she last knew the most secure facility to have been. “The manufacturing centers were all forced to shut down, or to transition into making ship pieces for Mando-motors, though while Concordia was under the rule of Pre Vizsla, Death Watch managed to restart the production of Beskar alloys, and make produce enough armor to renew each set that had been given up by families who’d bent to the New Mandalorian’s pacifistic ways,” The redhead explained quietly as they walked, keeping her head on a swivel as they moved.

Koska nodded her head with her gauntlet held in front of her face. “Though, the mass production was nothing compared to what the old armorer’s were doing, before the new laws.” The Armorer listened to them speak as she marched on beside Ragnar and Axe. She hadn’t seen life inside Death Watch, as her clan had derived from those who managed to break away, she’d only been subjected to the consequences of their actions, and then the consequences of The Niteowls actions in turn.

“We’ve got movement ahead,” Ragnar called, pointing towards an observation balcony built into the side of the facility. The trooper was turned around, so the team had enough time to move in and press themselves close to the exterior walls. “We can’t drop him, yet, I don’t want them knowing we’re here until it’s too late,” She signed using dadita to keep their cover.  

Nods of affirmation came from the four others in the squad. They waited in anticipation for several minutes, until the sounds of a door sliding open and the retreating of footsteps met their ears. Bo-Katan shot a line from her gauntlet that wrapped around the railing, pulling herself up quietly the balcony. No cameras met her eye when she landed, so she gestured to the others to follow.

The moment they got the doors open, Koska and Axe pushed forward to breach the interior, leaving Bo to cover the rear as they picked their way through old halls. The two Niteowls in lead had more experience than Bo-Katan in any of the production facilities, since her spot as Pre’s lieutenant had kept her away from the ‘grunt work’ of the job.

The resistance in the base was minimal, so Axe brought Ragnar to the front of the squad so he could work on his silent takedowns. The team managed to get all the way to the control rooms and place the charges before they’d ran into their first major issue. The guard rotations had been completed, and a janitor had stumbled upon a plastoid armored corpse in a closet.

Klaxons blared as an Imperial called orders over the ringing. Soon enough, the halls were filled with the sounds of shouting and blaster fire as the squad of Mandalorians made their way back to the exit. “Din, we’re going to need a fast pickup!” Bo called into the comms, only getting static in response. “We’re jammed, push outside and we’ll try again,”

A thermal detonator was chucked into the fray, though Bo couldn’t tell who’d thrown it. Before she could react, a bezoar hammer was smashing into the side of the explosive, sending it barreling into the squad of troopers keeping them from the exit.

Leaping past the prone bodies of stormtroopers, Bo-Katan was the first into the dim sunlight, her shield ejecting and raising in perfect timing to deflect a blaster bolt that would have destroyed her visor.

Clearing a path, The Mand’alor managed to secure room for the entire squad to take cover behind as more troopers rallied both in front and behind them. “Axe! Ragnar! Koska! Keep our shebs clear!” Bo commanded as she started firing into the troopers in front. The Armorer pressed ahead to the riot line with her hammer and tongs, leaving Bo-Katan to pick off anyone who tried to snag her while she was occupied in melee combat.

The thrusters of a jetpack sounded as another rifle joined their cause. “Where’s Grogu?” She called as Din landed beside her, his whistling birds striking home in three trooper’s chests.

“Piloting!” The mandalorian returned, his rifle mounted on the Imperial barricade wall by the entrance, yellow plasma ejecting from his rifle to take down the growing numbers.

It was truly only mildly concerning that Grogu was piloting, but she trusted Din enough to not leave any of them in bad hands.

“Heavy turret!” Bo called, her gauntlet’s cable shooting out to wind around The Armorer’s waist and drag her back before the blaster fire could open on her position. “Cover me!”

Without waiting for a reply, Bo-Katan’s thrusters engaged to send her into the air. In one fluid motion, the Mand’alor was dropping from the sky, allowing gravity to control her speed and the troopers body to cushion her fall. The trooper on the turret caved under the weight of her boots, with the feeling of bones cracking as she pushed herself off of him a relief in her mind that he would not be getting up.

Her shield engaged, while she pressed into melee combat to free up enough room around the turret. When she made the room, Bo-Katan smacked an ion grenade against the barrel, before springing back off in the direction of relative safety.

Blaster fire rained heavy on the ground around the small squad of Mandalorians, dirt, sand, and other debris tossed into the air with each shot around their stomping boots. A gloved hand shot out to grab Bo-Katan by the leather strap of her holster, tugging her under cover just in time for a burning red bolt of plasma to whizz through the air where she’d been only moments before. Bo dug her boots into the ground to change momentum, settling her elbows into the durasteel that The Armorer had pulled her behind.

Yellow bolts fired from her Westar’s found homes in stormtrooper plastoid. The next one to pull her from an inevitable headshot had been Koska, who’d caught the E-11’s glint as the shot charged.

“Hey!” Bo called to her golden helmeted companion as she reached for the blaster of a fallen stormtrooper. The sturm dowels were removed from their power packs, before she was launching them into the offensive firing line. Explosions reflected in The Armorer’s visor as she turned her attention to the Mandalore. “You remember what we talked about, a few weeks ago?”

A blaster whizzed past which she felt graze the side of her helmet and sear the paint. Shaking her head, Bo fired back into the enemy line. “I’m ready, I want to say the vows, with you, if you’ll have me!”

Din’s head snapped to the two warriors, though he remained silent as he covered where The Armorer’s defense faltered. “Would everyone bear witness?” She questioned to the closing squad.

“This is the way,” Echoed from the two children of the watch, while Koska and Axe took three seconds to slide credits into waiting gloves, before they called their approvals over the blaster fire.

“Keep us covered!” Bo-Katan tugged The Armorer so their heads were covered by the barricades. It was far from rare for Mandalorians to say the vows on the battlefield, all they truly needed to do was recite the vows with a witness present, and then trade a piece of armor (or, on the off chance one of them did not make it, the armor would be given before the last rites and the songs were sung before the pyre.

Bo took The Armorer’s hands in her own, lasers like fireworks overhead as the two took cover between their friends. ”Mhi solus tome, mhi solus dar'tome, mhi me'dinui an, mhi ba'juri verde” They spoke together, The Armorer shifting so her helmet rested against Bo-Katan’s in a keldabe kiss. Truly, it was what the redhead had always imagined the situation would be like for her, though she had never really considered there would ever be somebody on the other end.

“Ibic haar Yust.” Sounded from those who bore witness, and the Mand’alor gave herself a moment to breathe, before she and The Armorer were rising as one.

The pair moved past their defenses in tandem, Bo-Katan nearly pressed against The Armorer’s back, firing over her shoulder as her newly appointed Riduur bashed her tools into troopers, cracking plastoid, flesh, and bone as they went.

The gauntlet soared overhead, turrets raining blaster fire down to help clear the path, as the rest of the squad filed in close order, covering their leaders backs as they found their opening.

Grogu was an exceptional pilot, they learned. When they piled onto the gauntlet, the apprentice was at the controls, using the Force to man the turrets and his hands wrapped around the throttle, standing on the console to be able to reach. Din slid into the seat to get them in the air, as Axe and Koska jumped onto the turret controls, allowing the Jetti turned Mando to fall into his fathers arms, clearly spent from using his abilities.

Bo-Katan pulled her helmet off the moment the ramp was raised and they were shooting back into atmo. “Ragnar, blow it,” Came the order, which the teenager was more than happy to comply with. The explosions from the factories control rooms shook even their ship as they started to breach from the moon’s gravitational pull.

“We can send squads to ensure there are no survivors, and set up our own base of operations in whatever remains, to search out any other factories they may have gotten running,” The Armorer decided, looking to Bo for approval.

“I’ll put out a call to volunteers as soon as we land, Axe, Ragnar, would you two take lead on the operation?”

“Of course, Lady Kryze,” Axe nodded his head as he turned from the console. There were no TIE fighters swarming their position yet, promising that if the hit wasn’t a total wipe, it was still substantial enough to put them on their ass.

“So,” Koska started as she pulled her own helmet away, leaning back in her seat as she looked between Bo and The Armorer. “Bo, you owe me fifty creds for not waiting until next month,”

Axe laughed openly from his seat where he was cleaning his blaster, and Bo snorted. “Seriously? You two made bets?”

“Speaking of,” Din turned in the pilots seat once the autopilot engaged, causing Koska to groan and pass over more credits.

“Really, Din?” Bo shook her head in mock disappointment, though her expression changed to shock as Din handed the credits to Grogu. “My favorite green nephew, seriously?”

“Patu,” Grogu babbled with a crooked smile, his ears laying flat as he stuffed the credits in his pouch.

Shaking her head, Bo-Katan dropped herself into an open seat beside The Armorer, letting herself lean into the warmth of the woman behind her, instead of against the backrest. “I see how it is,”

“Do we still get to come to the wedding?” Koska asked, causing Bo to roll her eyes as the younger niteowl plastered a shit-eating grin onto her face

“You were literally just there,”

“You two still need to exchange armor,” Axe pointed out, kicking his feet up on the console, “Then it’ll be official, then she really will be walking the way of the Mand’alor,”

“Why are you two like this?” Bo questioned, though she knew she would receive no response. Instead, she turned towards The Armorer. “Have you thought about what piece you’d like to exchange?” Typically, a gauntlet or a pauldron would be traded off, though Bo-Katan’s full armor varied greatly from The Armorer’s helmet and chest plate.

The golden helmeted warrior paused in thought, before reaching to her own armor. “I give you my heart, Lady Kryze,” She spoke softly as she pulled the kar’ta from her armor. Even with the Riduurok taken, the woman still waited for Bo-Katan’s permission before removing the Mand’alor’s own Iron Heart.

Bo-Katan’s hand closed around The Armorer’s once both their hearts rested in her palms. “I readily give my own,” She confirmed, squeezing the hands in her own. The Armorer slid the red heart into the open space in her chest, as Bo-Katan did the same with her own against The Armorer’s chest. They weren’t perfect fits, but Bo-Katan had the perk of being with the tribes best blacksmith to perfect the fit.

Translations Jetti - Jedi dadita - Mandalorian morse code shebs - ass/rear Mhi solus tome, mhi solus dar'tome, mhi me'dinui an, mhi ba'juri verde - We are one when together, we are one when parted, we will share all, we will raise warriors. Ibic haar yust - this is the way Riduur - spouse kar'ta - iron heart Riduurok - vows

[o-kaythislooksbad]

ailesswhumptober day 24: deconditioning / relapse / "it's normal that you need more time"

chapter 3 / 7 of i'm too close to breaking | rated t, chose not to warn

herschel scuttles up and down the walls, leaving massive webs in his wake. dorothy's room is all but his now, but she can't care about that, not with manny being dead and it all being her fault. papa has yet to offer his condolences, spending his time instead with baby doll while she mourns katy. 

"it's not fair!" dorothy yells at flying robert, because he doesn't do anything but fly around while babbling. he can't scold her like darling-come-home or beat her and shout nonsense like damn all, so she can yell all she wants as long as they're not around. "baby doll is the one who got katy killed! she shouldn't have tried setting manny on fire; of course he would fight back!"

"hey, kid?" cliff peeks his head into the room. the spiderwebs unfortunately can't tickle his nose or make his skin itch, and are absolutely useless at preventing him from going where he doesn't belong. "you doing okay?"

cliff may have a robot's body, but he still has a man's brain. he should know better than to ask such an obvious question. 

"no," she replies shortly. "and i have no interest in hearing you lecture me about the consequences of playing where we shouldn't have been."

"lecture you?" cliff asks, his eyes shuttering and creaking as he blinks in confusion. "i don't do that shit, kid. the moralizing is your dad's department, the game plans are vic's; i talk a hell of a lot but in case you haven't noticed, i don't say much worth listening to."

dorothy actually laughs a bit at his self-awareness, then stops herself. she doesn't want to be happy! manny, the last thing connecting her to mum, is dead. papa has abandoned her in favor of the stupid baby. everything hurts and nothing is worth laughing about.

"then stop talking!" dorothy yells, but it isn't her own voice that she hears. it's like the candlemaker is speaking through her, closer than ever to finally freeing himself. 

cliff's body whirs and clicks as he brushes the webs out of the doorway. "i can't pretend to know how you're feeling, but it's normal that you need more time to process all of this shit."

dorothy has had nothing but time for most of her short, long, life, and it hasn't been much of an advantage. "i don't care about time."

"well, okay then. how'd you feel about space?"

---

cliff hadn't been lying. one of the garages does have two spaceships parked in it, with the keys and space suits on a shelf behind them. she's about to ask if he's sure that they're allowed to use them, but stops herself. who would they ask, anyway? papa would most likely tell them off, and she's sick of hearing from him about all the things she can't do. she hadn't been allowed to see where all the butterflies returned to, or stay at danny's party, or even play with baby doll any more. 

"do you know how to fly?" she asks instead, and finds it thrilling that cliff merely shrugs in response. 

"how hard can it be?"

much to dorothy's surprise, cliff's question hadn't been rhetorical. the ship is simple, with controls similar to some of the computer games vic had hauled up from one of the basements. they settle on a course for the moon, with the reasoning that of all the planets, it's the only one they know of that humans can actually walk on, and then a silence builds and all there is around them is time. 

"stupid time," dorothy mutters. 

"yeah, turns out we can't just teleport there." cliff shrugs, and dorothy, for the lack of other conversation topics, asks him how that works. "what? i don't know, kid, it's like breathing. or it would be, if i could do that. it's like walking and talking; my brain tells my body what to do, and that's what happens."

dorothy turns her attention to the stars. cliff can't compete with the view, and for once, he lets the quiet wash over them.

….

"cliff?" she asks, after they've taken a few leaps from the ship's landing site. this spot is as good as any for manny's grave.

"yeah?"

"why would baby doll say that my father hurt her? that he hurt you and everyone else in the house?"

cliff stops trying to build… whatever it is he was trying to build out of the moon rocks. robot fingers aren't very nimble, even without earth's gravity. he stares at dorothy, sighs, then sits on the edge of a crater. "baby doll can be a bit much."

"it's all right, cliff. i know you want to call her a bitch. i want to call her that, too," dorothy says, surprising herself.

"go for it," cliff encourages her. "personally, i wouldn't say that about a little kid, but we're on the freakin' moon. we can say or do whatever we want to up here. who's gonna stop us?"

the candlemaker insists that they should use cliff's words as an invitation to really let loose, but the candlemaker can shove off for now. 

"she is a bitch," dorothy declares, feeling not a single ounce of shame. it's a cruel thing to say about someone, but she can't help how she feels. "what do you mean, a bit much?"

"better start keeping track. you're gonna hit twenty soon, then boom! game over," he grumbles. "look, you're a kid, right, but you've been a kid forever. that hasn't stopped you from learning about the world and how life works. baby doll… she doesn't know as much as you do about that shit. she's little and emotional and damn, is she just full to the brim with emotions."

dorothy frowns, pausing her construction. cliff may have a point; dorothy is eleven and has lived at that age for a very long time. baby doll is five, but dorothy has no idea how many years she's actually experienced. 

"i was being mean," she admits, "but so was she! she lied about papa, and she killed manny!"

"she really didn't. you asked me earlier how i could talk? your dad had a recording of my voice and used it to recreate something resembling a dictionary. he also had a whole bunch of other nerdy neural things, but that recording…" cliff stands up and starts punching a rock. it doesn't even give off any dust as his metal knuckles slam into it. "he got that message and my brain after causing a whole series of fuck-ups, which, i admit, i did play a part in. and manny's not any deader than katy."

"if katy's not dead, then why is baby doll so upset?"

"if manny's not dead, then why are you?" cliff counters. 

"stop it! i saw them burn, i -"

"kid. dorothy," cliff corrects himself, and that's how she knows he's serious. "your friends, like jane's… they're imaginary, but also real. i'm really not supposed to talk about jane's, so i won't, but all you need to know is they're whatever you picture them to be. you guys got scared, which is totally normal, and katy and manny tried to help you." he turns to face her, as if what he's saying makes any sense. "what i'm trying to say is that you saw them fight and destroy each other, because it felt like they did, right? they stopped you and baby doll from hurting each other, and left once it was clear you wouldn't do that."

the candlemaker urges dorothy to hurt cliff, to punish him for his lies. the rest of her friends aren't there to balance out his voice; they seem to have remained in the manor, which means… "he only went away for a while?"

"yeah. kinda like what we're doing now, just taking a bit of a break from it all."

that shocks dorothy almost as much as the news about manny. "no! i'm staying up here. i'm a horrible person and i can't be in the world when all i do is hurt people and cause trouble."

cliff sighs and moves to sit beside her. "that helmet really isn't meant for a forever kinda thing. and the truth is, we're all a bit horrible. we all hurt each other, sometimes by accident and sometimes on purpose. sometimes we hurt so much that it feels like everyone else has to be in on it, so we end up hurting them before they can hurt us. mostly we're all just trying to be less alone without actually knowing how to do that. you're not alone, dorothy, even though you want to be alone. it's gonna be hard to prove that to you if you insist on staying up here."

dorothy sniffles. she doesn't mean to cry, especially from anything cliff says, but he doesn't tease her. he only holds out his hands and suggests they go on a scavenger hunt before going home, "because holy fuck, we're on the fucking moon!" and soon she's smiling again. 

"thank you, cliff."

"don't mention it, kid."

[ckret2]

Chapter 59 of human Bill Cipher possibly not being the Mystery Shack's prisoner because he got executed two chapters ago:

Everything you haven't wondered about how Bill survived his execution.

7:27 a.m.

Mabel didn't know why, but figuring out when to ask Mrs. Grendinator to pull over had felt as stressful as trying to throw a ping pong ball into a passing car's open fuel door to land in the little fuel pipe. All she had to do was ask to pull over after they'd passed everything but the last truck stop, but before it was too late for Mrs. Grendinator to make the turn into the Triple Digit parking lot. That was a large window. It wasn't easy to miss. Somehow Mabel still dreaded that she'd speak up too late and Mrs. Grendinator would say she'd have to wait for the next rest stop—by which point Bill would have splatted like a bug against the weirdness barrier while everyone else passed safely through.

But she'd managed to blurt out "I forgot to use the bathroom at home. Can we pull over?"; they'd stopped at the Triple Digit Truck Stop; and Mabel made it inside before her friends could catch her.

She locked the unisex restroom door, set her backpack on the ground, opened it up, and sighed with relief when she saw Bill sitting on her sweater. She carefully pulled him out, set him on the floor, and pointed the height-altering flashlight at him.

For a moment after returning to his true size, he remained seated on the floor, legs bent, elbows on his knees, head in his hands. Worriedly, Mabel asked, "You okay?"

"Think I learned what motion sickness is," Bill groaned. "Just—gimme a sec."

"Aww, I'm sorry." Mabel surreptitiously checked in her backpack to make sure Bill hadn't been sick on her sweater. (It was a cool one. It had kissing parrots.)

After a few deep breaths, Bill lifted his head enough to look at Mabel. The first thing he said was, "'Cool big brother-slash-sister,' huh?" He gave her a queasy, but cheeky, grin.

"Shut uuup you weren't supposed to hear that!" She'd just about died with embarrassment when Candy had repeated that where she knew Bill could hear.

"I'm flattered." Bill uncurled himself from his nauseous half-fetal position; and then, gripping onto the sink for support, got back to his feet. "Being smaller again was nice, but I'm never traveling like that again."

"You're such a whiner."

"Yeah, yeah. I have a lot to whine about. I'm dead and about to be executed. Talk about... lose your cake and... not-eat it, too."

Mabel laughed. Bill mussed her hair, grinning, and said, "Hey, you've got no room to laugh, you're the one with the not-setting-houses-on-fire bit."

"Arrrgh, don't remind me!" She pushed Bill to the side so she could use the mirror to straighten out her hair again.

"You did pretty well, though! I'd say that was some of the best acting I've ever seen out of you."

"You too! They definitely bought it," Mabel said. "Even Grunkle Stan was getting worried."

"Especially back in the kitchen, wow! That was really convincing." He paused. "Really, really convincing."

Something heavy hung in the air. Mabel focused on her hair in the mirror.

Bill said, "That bit in the kitchen about me 'depending' on you." He exaggerated the air quotes around the word, distancing himself from the concept. "It wasn't on our list."

"Yeah. It just kinda... seemed right. Improv." Mabel waved unenthusiastic jazz hands.

"It bothers you."

Mabel winced. "I mean... I'm not actually mad at you. But. I want to help, but I don't know what to do for..." She gestured at Bill. "The whole being dead on an alien planet issue."

"Believe it or not, the hoodie helps," Bill said. "Listening helps." But he couldn't meet her gaze; he was fiddling with his friendship bracelet instead. He had to know how heavy even just listening to him could be.

"I'm glad, but... I just... wish you had more friends you could talk to."

Bill nodded morosely. "So do I." It wasn't like he'd chosen to only have one friend, was it? Prisoners didn't get to make those kinds of decisions.

Mabel asked, "Do you really think I think you're just a summer fix-it project?"

"I... pfff... come on, I watched you spend all last summer handing out makeovers and dating advice. You've already done my makeup, taken me clothes shopping, and tried to pump me for info on what kinds of freaks I'm into."

(Mabel quietly filed away the fact that Bill referred to "freaks" as his preferred romantic targets.)

"That's how your summer was going to end," Bill said. "You tame the monster, go home triumphant, and don't worry about it anymore. Like how you patched up Broken Heart's love life and left him to sort out the consequences."

"No!" Mabel huffed, "I mean—maybe a little at the beginning, but... you're really my friend now, I'd hate it if I never saw you again. I don't give friendship bracelets to just anybody!"

Bill kind of thought she did; but he wasn't about to argue. "Well, I've only given one person a bracelet, and I meant it." (Even more now than when he'd originally made it.) "You're never getting rid of me now, star girl. You're stuck with me forever!"

Coming out of Bill Cipher, the promise should have filled her with dread. A month ago it would have filled her with dread. But Mabel just found it comforting. "Good."

(And Ford hadn't felt any dread when he'd sworn "until the end of time," either.)

Bill took off his backpack and rummaged through it. "Now let me make sure I can keep that promise."

He took out a map of the mountains and forest around Gravity Falls and spread it out on the floor for them to kneel in front of. "You know about the spaceship buried under town? When its ring cut through the mountain, a few chunks of the ship dislodged and were buried in one of the mountains. No human has ever found them before, not even your great uncle. That's where I'll hide."

"Are the chunks big enough to hide in?"

"Sure! There's one that'd serve as a decent studio apartment. Well—the cheapest studio apartment in Manhattan, maybe. But, hey, I don't have much furniture."

On the map, he showed Mabel a route to reach the base of the cliff, tracing it with his finger. She couldn't afford to take a map with the route marked; if the adults discovered Bill's escape and confiscated Mabel's possessions, a marked map would lead them straight to him. She'd just have to do her best to memorize the route he described. "When and if the coast is clear, you can come find me there."

"How do I get up the cliff?"

"Don't worry about that. You make it that far, I'll take care of the rest."

And that was all they could afford to discuss. Mabel couldn't hide in here for long. As Bill refolded the map (and Mabel was awed to learn he was the kind of person who could refold maps correctly on the first try), and he packed the map and the height-altering flashlight in his backpack, they each tried separately to figure out how to get around to saying goodbye.

"I uh... I know you're sticking your neck out for me, kid." (Bill wasn't used to this, wasn't used to people who didn't help him due to fear or duty or lies, wasn't used to people who still wanted to help him after they knew what he was really like.) "So, thanks—"

Mabel flung her arms around him. Her voice thick, she said, "I think your manners are getting better."

"Shut up, I've always known how to say thanks." It was gratitude that was new.

"Be safe out there," Mabel said. "Don't die, or else. Remember to eat. And drink water! And do laundry sometimes."

"All right, all right. You'll find me in better health than you left me. All the sunshine and fresh air this body can take."

"I'll miss you."

Keep it together, Cipher. He swallowed hard. "Have you ever heard the song 'We'll Meet Again'?"

"Uh-uh?"

"Old war song. Look it up once you're in Portland, when you aren't busy having synthesizers pumped in your ears."

"Is it about... how we'll meet again?"

"Yes, smartypants. Look it up anyway," Bill said. "I'll miss you too."

Mabel washed her face, left the restroom, and shut the door behind her; and Bill waited in the dark while everyone left.

####

7:45 a.m.

A woman with two children opened the unisex restroom door, and gasped in shock when she saw a human silhouette lurking in the dark, one eye shining.

"Hey, thanks, lady! Couldn't get the door for some reason." He breezed past her. "Careful, it sticks from the inside."

He grabbed an empty backpack for sale, and loaded it up with supplies, food, and drinks. (The good stuff, not the weak cider he got in the Mystery Shack. He was making margaritas tonight.) He headed up to the cash register... veered to a currently-unmanned register, stole a handful of loose change out of a tip jar, and timed his exit so he walked out just as a man walked in and kindly held the door for him.

####

7:55 a.m.

It was a fair walk from Triple Digit back to the cliffs around Gravity Falls. When Bill was a safe distance into the woods, he unzipped his first backpack, retrieved his flattened top hat, and popped it out; and then continued on, behatted and using his umbrella like a cane.

Even with no sleep, even just a couple of days after the worst hiking trip in history, even tired and sore from an hour of frenzied dancing, even carrying two full backpacks with one strap slung over each shoulder, even with the sky gloomy and overcast—this was the best he'd felt since Weirdmageddon.

His steps were sure, his body was unchained, and the future had opened up for him again.

####

8:00 a.m.

Mabel kept glancing out the window, back in the direction of Gravity Falls, waiting and waiting to see the light of some kind of killer laser cut through the sky.

Maybe the Quantum Destabilizer's beam just wasn't visible from this far. Maybe they'd decided to wait to execute Bill. Maybe they hadn't wasted their shot because they'd already discovered Bill and Mabel's ruse. Maybe the "enchantment" Bill had written hadn't done its job.

But if they had discovered Bill was missing, they would've called Mabel immediately, trying to find out what she'd done and where he'd gone.

Her phone sat hard and heavy and silent in her pocket.

The butterflies in her stomach didn't stop fluttering until long after they reached Portland.

####

10:30 a.m.

Plus or minus a few trees, the rendezvous point at the base of the cliff was just how Bill had remembered last seeing it millennia ago. The Trilazzx Betan proximity sensor that had been embedded in the cliff face since the ship crash was still there and still sensing, even after millions of years and a layer of stone had closed around it. He could see it behind the face of the cliff; and it could see him.

He took out the multi-tool pocket knife Dipper had "donated" to Bill's supplies, flipped out the blade, and carved his face in a tree far enough from the rendezvous point to avoid notice by anyone who found this spot, but near enough it could see anyone who showed up. He made it as accurate as he could—hat, bow, limbs, eyelashes. That would unfortunately make it easier for humans to identify the face if anyone happened to walk by, but his ability to connect to his other eyes was still weak, he needed as much of a boost as he could get. He licked the bark, leaving his saliva to connect the eye on the tree to him.

And then he returned to the rendezvous point at the base of the cliff, and, beneath the watchful eye of the proximity sensor, began digging in the dirt with his hands.

Beneath the soil, fortunately not buried too deep, was a stone shaped like a small tombstone with several symbols carved into its surface that superficially resembled common runes. Bill brushed the dirt off of his leggings and rubbed it out of the carved lines in the stone. It was lucky that today was overcast; it would make this thing a lot easier to control.

Bill took out the flashlight, removed the height-altering crystal, turned it on, and aimed the beam at the topmost rune.

The runes began glowing an eerie green.

The ground shuddered; and then a patch of ground five feet in diameter lifted up into the air, carrying Bill with it, tearing the grass at the edge of the circle, propelled by a long-forgotten enchanted stone platform concealed in the clump of dirt.

He rose to the gouge that the spaceship had carved into the mountain; and then he moved his flashlight's beam to another rune. The platform smoothly shifted to moving sideways, gliding beneath the ancient overhang. When he turned off the flashlight, the stone stopped glowing and gently settled to the ground. Bill stepped off, fished a spare shirt out of his backpack, and pulled it over the rune-covered stone so it couldn't take off if the sun came out. There was a reason this buried stone was the only platform of its kind left in the area outside of the deep mountain caverns: leave one outside on a sunny day where the light can hit its runes, and next thing you know it's zoomed out over the Pacific and is quickly rising toward space.

He surveyed the area. Every once in a while humans climbed up here just for the challenge of it, delightful little explorers they were; but he doubted anyone had been up here in decades. He stood in front of what was, to all appearances, a completely nondescript patch of stony ground; and he said, in heavily accented but intelligible Trilazzx Betan, "Let me in, you hunk of junk. Activate emergency crash protocols."

A fragment of ship deep beneath the ground stirred awake, registered the command, analyzed itself and concluded from the fact that it wasn't in space and was separated from 99% of the rest of itself that it had indeed crashed, and activated emergency crash protocols. In acknowledgment of the dire situation, it deactivated its usual authorized personnel list—there was no sense in waiting for the captain to approve new orders if the captain might be dead—accepted the command given by the unknown being above it, and opened its hatch.

Millions of years of solid stone groaned and buckled in protest at being moved; but Trilazzx Betan engineering was strong enough for the framework of a portal capable of ripping a hole between dimensions without being ripped apart itself. The stone yielded first. A hatch swung up, revealing a tilted chamber descending into the cliff.

Bill strolled confidently down the walkway. "Cancel distress signal. Disable life support's air filtering." The fragment of a ship beeped a warning, and Bill responded, "I'm aware of this planet's high oxygen content. You worry about your health, I'll worry about mine. Disable air filtering." The ship beeped a confirmation. "Reconnect to all external proximity sensors in range and display on screens one, two, and three." This broken part of the ship had once handled communications. It had a whole wall of screens. He wondered whether he could jury rig this thing to pick up human satellite TV. Nah, probably not worth the effort.

He slung off his backpacks and started unpacking.

####

12:04 p.m.

It was time.

Dipper sat on the floor and put his head in his hands. He felt sick.

He was dead. In just a few seconds Ford would discover that Bill was gone—Dipper was sure he was gone, they hadn't heard a peep from the room, Mabel must've snuck him out or left him some escape route—and then Ford would know that someone had warned Bill and Mabel, and then Dipper was dead—

"Are you alright?"

"Yeah." Dipper waved Ford off. "Just... didn't get much sleep. Little dizzy." Ford would never trust him again. Stan would be furious. They'd both be furious.

"You can go downstairs if you..."

"No no, I'm fine, I..." Dipper took a deep breath and lifted his head. "I'll face it." Better to get it over with now than to hide downstairs and wait for it. 

Stan nodded. "Good man." He wouldn't be so proud of Dipper in a moment.

Ford nodded, stood, opened the door—and Dipper buried his face in his hands again.

####

12:06 p.m.

Ford could see Bill up in the loft, hood up and shoulders hunched, back to the room. Ford could shoot Bill in the back without him ever waking up.

He climbed into the loft. Bill lay curled up in a ball, a small as Ford had ever seen him.

But it only took a moment for Ford's eyes to adjust to the dark; and even in the dim light through the stained glass window, he could tell:

The shape in front of him wasn't human. Just lumpy clothes.

Ford whipped around, heart pounding, clutching the Quantum Destabilizer's carrying case against his chest, searching for the real Bill lurking somewhere in the shadows. No sign of him. Ford had already looked on the floor level. Was he gone? How?

He was too dumbfounded to be outraged. He walked up to the dummy to pull it apart—

And saw the paper, folded in quarters, floating in the air above it. Four symbols in a cipher were written atop the paper. Ford recognized them: it was the alien alphabet of an interdimensional pidgin used as a written lingua franca throughout the Nightmare Realm and its bordering regions; it was so widespread that Ford had learned the alphabet before he ever left Earth.

The four letters read, "F O R D".

Ford plucked the paper out of the air and unfolded it.

Stanford–

I'll cut to the chase. I need your help. I don't want to die.

I'm banking on the hope that, in spite of everything you've said and done, part of you also doesn't want me to die.

You have a choice. You can walk out there, tell them I escaped, rally an angry mob, and comb everything under the weirdness barrier for me. This town's not that big and I'll need to eat eventually. We both know I can't hide forever.

Or you can tell them you finished the job. No one looks for me. No one knows but you and me.

I don't have rewards or deals to offer. You already know what I bring to the table. If that hasn't persuaded you to side with me by now, it never will. I'm not bargaining. I'm begging.

I'm asking you, as my friend, to help me survive.

Please.

· –·-– -–

Of course.

How dare he.

Had Bill planned this all along? Was this why he'd insisted he wanted to be Ford's friend? Was this why he'd saved his life? Maybe the entire rescue had been staged—the rescue, the performance of fear over a harmless phenomenon, the mental breakdown, all of it. For all Ford knew, maybe the accursed Axolotl was in on the scheme! How clairvoyant was Bill? Had he seen this moment coming?

But if he'd seen this moment coming, wouldn't it have been easier to just let Ford, his executioner-to-be, die? Ford and Dipper both, so Dipper wouldn't figure out how to synthesize NowUSeeitNowUDontium? If he'd saved them in spite of that, didn't that make it a sincere gesture?

But implication was clear: I've been a friend to you, now be one to me. A life for a life. There was nothing sincere in that. It was pure self interest.

(For just a couple of days, Ford really had thought it was sincere.)

But if the only reason Bill had saved Ford was to save himself—then why had Bill endangered his own life in the process?

With every thought Ford's paranoia pendulumed.

He should get Stan. Call the cops, confess who they'd been harboring for the past month, tell them everything, get a manhunt going before Bill could make it any further away. Even if he couldn't leave the weirdness barrier, there were probably hundreds of hidden hidey-holes Bill could dig himself into that humans had never seen—unexplored hallways in Crash Site Omega, uncharted caverns behind Trembley Falls where Bill didn't even need light to see. They could drag him back into the light, tie him up, aim the Quantum Destabilizer straight at him...

But. In spite of himself, he could still see Mabel's drawing hopefully reassigning Bill the role of a superhero. He could still see the crumpled drawing in his pocket—"I BELIEVE IN YOU. YOU CAN CHANGE!" He could still see Dipper tentatively asking whether they might need Bill someday. He could still see Bill playing teacher in the living room. And for a moment, for just a moment, Bill had been so good. He could be so good.

Why couldn't you have been this person?

Why can't you be this person?

What if he could be better? What if he could be decent? What if he could be a friend?

Ford didn't believe Bill was any better today than he had been the day he died. But—at some point, something had slowly turned over in Ford's mind. He believed that Bill could change. Not would change, not is changing, but could. And if Ford started a manhunt, Bill would never be a threat again—but he'd also never be better.

There was a point where the doubt and hope built up to a critical mass—when they became enough, just enough, to stay the trigger finger. Because once Ford fired on Bill, that was it. All chances were gone forever. It was over. If Bill was alive they could always try again to kill him later; but if Bill was dead, they could never try again to better him.

And for the first time in thirty years, Ford wanted Bill to be better more than he wanted Bill to be dead.

Ford looked at the dummy. Looked at the note.

And then he lay the note on the dummy, knelt by the edge of the loft, opened his case, and removed the Quantum Destabilizer.

####

12:09 p.m.

Ten minutes ago, Bill had been in the process of emptying out his backpacks and finding nooks and cubbies amongst the alien communication workstations where he could tuck his supplies, when he'd glanced out the open hatch and noticed the beforeimage of the shot lighting up the sky.

He'd come out of his shelter to watch the moment approach; but he hadn't quite believed it until it was in the present and actually happening. The blue-white beam of the Quantum Destabilizer—its one and only shot—screamed off into the sky.

"Well, what do you know," he murmured, standing at the edge of the cliff, hands on his hips, staring out in wonder over the town. "I really didn't think you'd do it."

Ford had saved his life.

Bill crossed his arms tight and tried to convince himself he didn't wonder why.

####

12:10 p.m.

Ford heard Dipper and Stan come into the bedroom and climb the ladder. He was seized by an urge to sweep away the ashes and the evidence of his trick before they could realize what he'd done.

"Grunkle Ford...?"

He forced himself to speak. "It's done."

"So... Bill is...?"

Ford suddenly realized: Dipper knew Bill wasn't in here. He must have warned Mabel, and Mabel had arranged for Bill to be alone in their room long enough to escape.

Which meant Dipper knew Bill was alive.

(Bill had written, "No one knows but you and me." Bill was covering for the kids.)

Ford turned to look him in the eyes. "Yes, he's dead."

Which meant Dipper knew what Ford had done—and knew Ford knew what he had done.

Neither one of them needed to say anything else to know what the other was thinking. They just shared a look—the two most miserable co-conspirators in Gravity Falls.

####

12:25 p.m.

Bill sat cross-legged at the edge of the cliff and watched until the afterimage of the Quantum Destabilizer's shot had faded from the sky; and then he went inside his shelter, mixed the world's lamest margarita in a coffee mug, took it outside, sat again, and toasted toward the town and the Mystery Shack.

Here's to survival.

He sat outside until the gash the Quantum Destabilizer had cut in the clouds closed and it began to rain.

####

1:10 p.m.

Stan had come and gone a few minutes ago, and already Ford had forgotten everything he'd said, if he'd even registered it in the first place.

His fingers had itched until he'd finally had a moment to steal down to his study, retrieve Journal 5, and bring it up to the guest room; and now for over half an hour he'd been feverishly writing down every single thing he could remember learning about Bill over the last two days. The drawing of his homeworld. His lecture on biangles and psychic powers. How polygons inherited their sides. (Their royalty sounded nigh on Habsburgian; had their political system ever changed?) What little details Bill had let slip about where Edward Bishop Bishop's book was wrong. (Had he told Mabel more about their relationship? He'd have to ask when she was home.) How Bill signed his letter: "· -·-- --", Morse code for "EYM," was it an acronym, was it a code, what did it mean, why did he write it in two colors? How Bill spelled Mabel's name in alien alphabets: Mabelle, Maybell, the varying extra letters. How Bill danced: how he struggled to cross his ankles, how he turned out his feet, how his spine and shoulders never bent, how the complex ways he tilted his legs and pelvis compensated for his stiff spine.

If Bill was sticking around a while longer, then these details still mattered.

He refused to forget a thing.

####

Sunday, 12:02 a.m.

As "We'll Meet Again" finished playing, Mabel turned off her phone, put it back on her nightstand, and wiped her eyes again. Big stupid dork couldn't even say this himself, he had to hide it behind a song. 

Yes. They would meet again. Law of attraction. Believing it was the first step to making it come true.

####

10:20 a.m.

The fearful butterflies in Mabel's stomach had slowly returned during the drive home from Portland. No one had texted her—was that a good sign?—but she was afraid it just meant they'd decided to let her enjoy the rest of her trip before letting her know she was grounded forever for helping Bill escape. When they'd all greeted her at the door, looking so somber, and she was sure she was about to get the bad news, she'd just had to keep acting normal and hope she wasn't gonna get in more trouble for playing dumb.

The last thing she expected Stan to say was, "Weshotim."

"Say wha?"

"We got that—space gun of Ford's working. We shot him. He's... I'm sorry, sweetie."

Mabel stared at Stan. That was impossible—there was no way they'd found Bill. But—if Stan believed he was dead...

She dragged her gaze from his face to Dipper's. Dipper bit his lips, staring at his feet. He wouldn't meet her eyes—too afraid that even looking at her would give something away.

She looked from Dipper to Ford. "Grunkle Ford?" She tried not to hope. "Is it true?"

There was no way he'd believed the dummy was real. The moment she'd read Bill's so-called "enchantment," she'd known making it believable was never the point. Bill's only real plan had always been to get Ford on their side.

For a long moment, Ford said nothing. He dragged his eyes up to meet her stare, took a deep breath, and nodded. "He's dead."

Mabel's eyes widened. Two days ago, Ford had been the one arguing that killing Bill was their only choice. If he'd changed his mind...

If anyone said anything else, she didn't register it in her excitement. She backed out of the doorway, leaped off the porch, and ran around the shack, looking for her bike. 

She had to see Bill immediately.

####

10:21 a.m.

Quietly, Dipper asked, "Did we do the right thing?"

Ford didn't know. His stomach had been twisting with guilt and doubt since yesterday. His conscience had kept him up half the night. "I hope so."

He feared they'd have second-guessed themselves no matter what.

####

2:30 p.m.

Bill was asleep. He'd been sleeping off and on for most of the past day. This was the first time since he'd died that he had somewhere safe to sleep—somewhere nobody could touch his vulnerable body, nobody could move him, drown him, kill him.

And this was the first time he hadn't been helpless and sightless.

In his sleep, he saw his own body, curled up on the tilted floor against a wall, on top of the sleeping bag and under the Pony Heist bedsheet, from an eye he'd drawn on the ceiling.

From another eye he'd drawn on the wall, he saw the ship's open hatch, the overhang above, a small sliver of the gray drizzly sky over Gravity Falls.

And from his eye on the tree, blurry and fading as the rain washed away his saliva, he saw a human-shaped mass of raucous colors exploring the pit in the ground left behind by his hovering platform.

A human? He sat up with a gasp and looked at the screen displaying the proximity sensors. Sure enough, the sensor at the base of the cliff was displaying a Mabel-shaped silhouette.

He grabbed his flashlight and climbed out of his shelter.

####

"Kid, what are you doing out out here?!"

Mabel looked up. Bill was some twenty feet above her and quickly descending on what looked like a chunk of flying dirt the same size as the pit in the ground she'd been inspecting. "Bill!" She leaned her bike against the cliff face. Finally—she'd been wandering around in the trees forever trying to figure out where Bill's rendezvous point was hidden.

"It's pouring rain," Bill scolded. "You could lose your immune system or—or slip in the mud or something."

"Wow, nice to see you too, mom." Mabel ran up as Bill landed his floating chunk of ground.

"Hey, I don't want anything happening to my favorite human!" He scooted over to make room for her on the platform. "Just couldn't wait for a sunny day to meet again, huh?"

"Psh, come on! Like you meant that literally." Near Bill, the rain had mysteriously stopped landing on Mabel. She looked up and saw the rain simply parting in the air over Bill's head.

He noticed her glance and said, "Did I ever teach you the spell to repel rain? Remind me to do that before you go." He pointed his flashlight's beam at a rune on a stone rising from the platform, and it lifted off again. "Nice sweater today." He poked one parrot-winged sleeve, its bright colors darkened by the soaking rain. "It probably looked better dry."

Mabel smacked away his hand. "Bill, guess what! Grunkle Ford decided to protect you!"

"I know, I saw the wasted shot from here." He steered the platform onto the cliff. He landed it next to a hatch that opened into a subterranean tunnel. "Of course, I always knew he would. Didn't I say we'd pull this off?"

Sure he'd known. That was why he'd lied about what the "enchanted" paper really was so Mabel wouldn't worry.

Mabel followed him down into the metal tunnel. "Do you know what this means? You can come back to the shack!"

Bill turned to stare at her in bewilderment. "Why would I want to do that?"

"Because... it's safe now? They're not gonna kill you?" Mabel squinted. "Why's it so dark in here?"

"Oh, right. You need this." Bill offered the flashlight.

Mabel turned it on. They were in a metal chamber, about half the size of the Mystery Shack's floor room and nowhere near as tall. One end of it had been torn off and dirt and stone served as the new wall. Most of the walls were dominated by heavy metal consoles, curved metal chairs, and screens, a few of which were on but flickered irritatingly. One chair still had a fossilized alien skeleton in it. Bill had put his top hat on it.

His supplies were piled haphazardly on consoles and the floor; all Mabel saw in his food pile was shelf-stable junk food and drinks. The air somehow felt more damp in here than it did outside with the rain. The chairs didn't have cushions, the floor didn't have carpet; everything was hard and cold and dark. She didn't even see a door for a bathroom in here. This was where Bill was staying?

"The Mystery Shack is safe for now," Bill said. "Just wait until Stanley decides to take another swing at me, or Dolores poisons my dinner again—or Ford changes his mind, dunks me in the bathtub, and doesn't let me back out."

"They wouldn't..." Mabel trailed off. She tried to imagine how mad Stan would be when he found out Bill was alive, and had to concede he might.

"Even if it was safe—why would I go back to that sorry makeshift prison?" Bill hopped up into one of the tilted alien chairs. There was a weird extended bit designed for alien anatomy that curved up at the end of the seat and forced Bill to straddle the chair rather than sit in it normally; it didn't look comfortable. "After almost a month and a half, I'm finally free!"

"Free inside a tiny bubble around the town," Mabel protested. "To live in a... weird little metal dirt room."

"Freely moving inside the entire barrier is a lot better than freely moving through half a shack! Surrounded by people who want me dead! I don't even get full privacy when I'm using the toilet—that's the bare minimum humans offer as basic respect! You don't know how many times I've been walked in on!"

"Do you even have a toilet here?"

Bill hesitated. "There's a—there are gas stations within walking distance."

"How are you gonna get into the restroom?"

"Fine, I'll dig a pit or something, all right? The point is, whatever I do, at least I can do it in freedom!"

He hadn't planned this through at all, Mabel realized. He'd only thought as far ahead as finding food and shelter that would last him the next couple of days. "But..." She gestured at the pathetic room around them. "The shack's got a proper roof and a shower and real food—wouldn't that be better than this?"

Bill scoffed "Only humans care about roofs and showers, and the idea of 'real' food is a social construct I reject!"

He'd be miserable here. Mabel couldn't let Bill do this to himself. "Then don't you wanna be in the shack with your only friend on Earth?" She gave him a pleading look. "Would you really rather spend the rest of summer in some dumb old busted alien ship?"

There was a flash of light reflected in the dark as Bill's eyes turned away from Mabel.

"Bill?"

He didn't respond. He trudged past her, halfway up the walkway out of the ship, and stopped there, his back to Mabel, hands on his hips, staring out into the rain. He sighed. "Kid, you're trying to give me Stockholm syndrome."

"I don't know what that means."

"It means I'll think about it," Bill said, voice flat. "Go back to the shack."

Before Mabel could move, Bill said, "Hold on. Let me teach you that umbrella spell first." He turned and descended back into the ship. "And when's the last time you ate? Human bodies act pathetic if they don't get glucose every three hours. Get some lunch, it's a long bike back to the shack." He gestured at his meager food supplies.

She rummaged through the foil bags and colorful boxes and grabbed some Chipackers and sour gummy dolphins.

Bill sat near her, grabbed a bag of jerky for himself, and said, "And tell me about that concert you abandoned me to my doom for."

####

4:00 p.m.

Bill escorted Mabel down off the cliff—and, at her request, let her borrow the flashlight and wiggle the floating platform back and forth a little as they descended. He took back the flashlight when she nearly crashed the platform and killed them both.

"Where'd this come from?" Mabel asked, poking the stone. "Did the aliens make this, too?"

"Nope! This is good old local Earth magic. Ever hear of Caterpillar Man?"

"Is that some kind of superhero?"

"Afraid not. Well—ever hear of Grendel?"

"Uh-uh."

They were nearly at the ground now. "I think I'll tell you next time."

As the platform lifted him back up, Bill watched Mabel wheel her bike through the trees, slowly heading toward the main road back into town.

For a midsummer day, it was chilly in the rain.

####

Monday, 1:03 a.m.

And it was even chillier in the post-midnight dark when he knocked on the Mystery Shack's door.

####

(Eager to hear what y'all think now that you've seen the full story of how Bill survived—last week once Dipper and Mabel's roles were revealed, I think most folks thought that fully explained how Bill faked his death. ;) Next week is probably a double length chapter, because there's no graceful way to break it in half and also it'd be nice to get this plot arc wrapped up before The Book of Bill comes out lmao.)

[tobiasdrake]

Now that Story Time's over, we can get to work keeping the promise I made to my personal temporal admirer. And also Serai.

Okay, team. We should expect not to have the element of surprise because I just leaned over the edge and shouted a message for the past into the clouds. I do not apologize.

I know we're all a little freaked out about Hollow TIA over there but if we grit our teeth and bear with it, I'm sure we can adjust.

We are here to carry out two tasks: To butcher the Catalyst with extreme prejudice and to commit catastrophic amounts of vandalism. I'm pretty sure we're all familiar with the process of aggravated homicide so I don't think we need to dwell much on the Catalyst's part of the plan.

For the other, here's how we're breaking it down.

Plan A: Find a way to disable the cloud cover and instead restore the Sky Base's original functionality as a climate regular. I call this the boring option.

Plan B: Find a way to pilot the Sky Base and send it crashing down directly into Fort Fleshy, preferably aiming for whatever looks like the most elaborate part of the building. I call this the fun option. But I have reluctantly agreed to try the boring route first.

So I guess we should refrain from being too overly destructive until we know which option we're going with.

Turtle machines with grasping spider claws. Wow, I hate it.

Serai, remind me to set this place on fire before we put it on its collision course. Or... reprogram it, I guess. I can set it on fire while we're reprogram it, that works too.

I do not love how much of this place is open to the air below. Or the way only some parts have guardrails.

More effort was made than with Zenith Academy but there are still safety concerns to be had nonetheless.

Holy shit, I can see the Sea of Stars from up here.

Serai, I thought about this on our way here but your world has an eerie beauty to its atmosphere, despite everything. Like a captivating aquamarine floating in the ocean of the cosmos.

Sorry, I'm getting a little choked up. Let's go paint it red.

Are... are we going to have to go into space?

Hang on. Serai, you're a robot. B'st is a glass golem. Hollow Resh'an is a doll.

...the three of you probably can, in fact, go into space. But what about me and Zale? We do draw our magic from celestial bodies. Can we... like... solstice powers our way into not having to breathe or something?

That would have been way more dramatic if machines could bleed.

Well, I guess we're going to find out. I hope you just made good choices, Serai, because we're committed to them now.

Oh, what!? They have force fields up over all the damaged sections! We're fine, then. Honestly, what's even the point of locking down the sector if it's perfectly safe to access?

B'st, your shapeshifting is hilarious and makes it incredibly difficult for me to hold my concentration. XD

I'm glad to see you're getting the hang of your Living Glass body.

How much higher could there possibly be for us to go?

I can't even see the planet out the window anymore. We're so far up now, I think we might be in space space.

Why are we in space space? In what possible way is this necessary for climate regulation? I think an architect wanted to see how tall they could get away with making the structure before their boss noticed.

And if their boss was anything like Moraine, the answer is "very".

SERAI!? THE WALL IS TRYING TO SELL ME THINGS. Should I punch it, yes or no?

I don't necessarily mean that in self-defense, if we wanted to rob the wall instead.

That is a metal rock. I don't know what I was expecting the Catalyst to be but "metal rock" wasn't it. I was anticipating another flesh abomination.

I'm sorry, Serai. I may have gotten ahead of myself. I promised you a murder, but this is more of a vandalism. I will nonetheless carry out excessive vandalism with extreme prejudice for you. That's what friends are for.

*ahem*

HEY ASSHOLE! OVER HERE! I'M HERE TO FILE A FORMAL COMPLAINT! See, I've been looking all over the place since we got here and I have not seen a single wall worth hunting anywhere. I demand to know where you're keeping the Wall Meat.

Oh. I. Um. I didn't think you'd actually be able to meet me halfway on that. Okay. This is awkward.

But. If you insist.

I WILL RIP OUT YOUR METAL FLESH, GIVE ME SUSTENANCE YOU UNFEELING BASTARD, I KNOW YOU HAVE IT

Nope, I still feel ripped off. These walls suck and have nothing but these stupid fleshless turrets in them. You can't eat any of this shit.

...though apparently B'st disagrees. Alright, knock yourself out, man. I'll be over here, holding out for dessert. Thanks, B'stie!

But, honestly, as much as I'm itching to crunch my staff through that big glass eye thing on its front... I can't bring myself to do it.

This is your moment, Serai. Go ahead and finish it.

...this moment would probably be stronger if machines could bleed but I hope you found some closure in this all the same.

I don't know who that is but we'll fuck them up too. A cornucopia of violence, we are going to unleash upon this dead world.

You were a good friend to us, and to Garl. Pretty much anyone who's even mildly inconvenienced you, I am willing to bury in a shallow grave. The Cerulean Expanse has plenty of space.

[quarktrinity]

quark watches star trek season 1 episode 10

uhuras wearing yellow again. why

THE CUBE

THE CUUUUUUUUUBE

were sexualizing kirk again. good

mccoy wants to dom him so bad

the cube just wants to be friends!!!

"i have a human thing called an adrenal gland" "it does sound most inconvenient, however, have you considered having it removed?" spock i love you

"no answer from the cube" "origin and purpose of the cube still unknown" i love this show

the cube is apparently radioactive

yes lets get closer to the cube

hey why are they just fine with the radiation

oh shit they blew it up

"the cube has been destroyed" :(

spock: "has it occurred to you that theres a certain... inefficiency in constantly questioning me on things youve already made up your mind about?" kirk: "it gives me emotional security :)" god just make out already

mccoy and kirk are married

mccoy put kirk on a diet because hes put on a few pounds. mccoy noooooooo youre killing me. let him keep his tummy

theyre approaching a... giant popcorn kernel...?

blowing up the cube was apparently a huge act of hostility against these aliens on the popcorn kernel

these aliens HATE them

they were literally like "pray to your earth god, were gonna blow you up in ten minutes :3"

this navigator is losing his mind

kirk fired him :0

mccoy lectures kirk on parenting (being captain)

kirk tries to bluff the aliens by saying if they blow the enterprise up itll hit back at them with their "corbumite". kind of obsessed with this actually

spock has daddy issues probably

were letting the navigator back i guess

"prove to us that you have corbumite" "no <3" (paraphrased) kirk i love you

were all pretty chill about this huh

oh this is about the cold war isnt it

"weve decided to take you to your destination instead of destroying you but well destroy you later we swear" ok

this episode was probably cheap as shit to film, no planet sets, only one non-spock alien, theyre staying on the helm for 90% of it, barely any extras, like damn. did they get this episode on sale?

the cast was very clearly told to Shake and its a little goofy looking lol

yeah ok lets save the aliens life why not

kirk wants to keep spock safe. dude

LMFAOOOOO THIS ALIEN LOOKS SO DUUUUUMB

oh wait its literally a puppet

the real alien looks like a bald child with the voice of a grown man. actors really good at lip syncing. cool?

the alien is just lonely?

so. theyre just leaving the navigator guy here to be the aliens friend?

...is that it?

thats it. ok

[cargopantsman]

i 'unno... not to be a "jod apologist" on main, but i do get the line of having a set of high ideals and running into even arbitrary realities... and to be honest with myself i can't say i'd do anything different than he did if i had those powers.

and while i'd like to just let that be an inflammatory critique on my own personality tamsin threw a wrench into the works with the nun. she warned john away from being as full-bore as christ was, to have restraint. to accept death.

but christ was able to turn the other cheek.

and we can argue predestination on that as we will, but john wasn't able to. john was vindictive, even when trying to be *fair*

and I keep sympathizing with his anger at the elite fleeing. at christ overturning the scales at the temple and saying a rich man can enter heaven as a camel through the eye of a needle.

and we generally want the soft christ, the gentle palative of our souls. but M's nun was right. jesus didn't keep office hours. jesus caused a stir and brought the heat down.

"Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire."

part of what i think draws me to john gaius is he is actually going through being a christ being. he's not an antichrist, he's a human that has godlike abilities.

and I can't blame his decisions. or... i can't say I wouldn't make the same decisions.

and i see a genius to Muir's story that I haven't seen since Kanzantzakis' Last Temptation where a demigod as man has had to deal with the problems of humanity while having supranatural powers.

and both of these situations are posited in having to contend with a preexisting power structure.

theologically there's nothing stopping jesus from just saying "hey y'all, my dad said y'all have do shit this way" and just making it be so.

but instead, he said that and got crucified and then there was An Resurrection. and after a couple of weeks he fucked off and let us fend for ourselves.

John Gaius is a valid fucking response to that, and a distressingly real response, to what a person that is just doing their job gets omnipotence and is then pressured from the outside to conform, when he actually has something he wants to stand for, and the whole thing just spirals out of control. yeah, there's godlike power in play, but the free will of everyone else is still in play. the bureaucracy is still in play. and it's just not fair.

and he's right, it not fair. (the trillionaires made it out, through the needle, through the paneuro gate)

and he tossed over the tables/planets of the temple/solar system

and if anything ever made me more sympathetic to Christianity (as in being Christ-like) it's Tamsyn showing me that I would've done the exact same as John.