#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

[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!

[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

[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.

[chaotic-super]

Back To Krypton - Chapter 32

Read Back To Krypton on AO3 here!

Alura transports them to a small building close to the edge of Kandor, just a few miles west of the city. It’s surrounded by farming fields, most of which are becoming barren by this time with the impending doom of the planet forever inching nearer.

The conversation on the journey there is incredibly stilted, perhaps from the shock of everything going on. For Kara, it’s seeing her mother alive and well for the first time since she was just a young girl. For Alura, it’s seeing her daughter all grown up whilst knowing there’s a twelve-year-old version of this very woman waiting at home in Argo with her father. For Alex and Lena, it’s pure awkwardness from being in the same space as the pair of them.

It becomes clear very quickly that this is some kind of agricultural research facility, one that is for some reason, empty. One would think that the council would be doing everything they could to keep a place like this running constantly since they are fully aware of what’s coming, even if they aren’t willing to tell the public.

Alura leads them to some kind of stable to secure Bolt into and give him some kind of medical treatment for his wounds where the panther-like animals clawed at his legs and wings when they were trapped in the ship.

When they round the corner and they head inside the stable, they see a familiar winged beast.

“Hey Swoopy, how are you, buddy?” Kara joyfully moves to pat the head of the other H’Raka, the one that Nia, Kelly and Esme had, meaning that they are inside, safe and sound, exactly where Alex needs them to be. Exactly where all of them need them to be. They have a whole heap of questions and they have a lot of confusion surrounding everything but at the very least, they know that their group is safe.

Alura can’t seem to take her eyes off Kara, watching the way she’s interacting with the H’Raka and her gentle nature towards what many would believe to be a dangerous, ugly animal. Her daughter is instead enamoured, filled with love and intrigue, exactly what she’s always wished for her to grow up to be. She might not know how Kara being here is possible but she’s getting the feeling that she and Zor-El must have done something right to have a daughter like her.

Alura is the one to take a look over Bolt’s injuries once he’s been put into one of the pens in the stable, his head harness attached to a ring on the back wall so she can be certain that he won’t instinctively set her on fire for hurting him accidentally in the process of trying to check him over.

She carefully hoses off all of the tree sap from his legs and is almost astonished by the state of his legs. They are very obviously badly cut up and he has some pretty gnarly-looking scratches but what’s strange is the rate that he is healing. His cuts have scabbed over well and look like they have been healing for several days rather than just a few hours, it’s remarkable.

“What is this stuff?” Alura grumbles to herself, mostly just in awe.

Lena, having overheard Alura’s quiet question, jumps in to answer. “It’s tree sap from one of the trees in The Scarlett Jungle. The giant snake thing broke a bunch of trees and when he ran, he got covered in it. The Rebellion use this to heal wounds from the plants from the forest but if what it’s doing to Bolt is any suggestion, it could be used for a whole lot more than it currently is.

“Incredible,” Alura mutters. “It has healing properties that are really quite fascinating. Are you sure this is naturally occurring? I’ve never seen anything like it, nor seen any record of it, although not many dare to venture that far into The Scarlet Jungle, you can see the reason why in that ship you were aboard.”

Lena nods. “Well, if it makes you feel any better, we didn’t go in there for fun. We had a goal in mind and we’re lucky we made it out alive, that’s all thanks to you.” Lena looks over towards where Alex and Kara and surrounding Swoopy, greeting the other H’Raka with lots of fuss and attention. He’s the favourite now they have learnt what a coward Bolt is, Bolt has really earned his name.

“I’m not sure that does make me feel any better, any business you have in there, it isn’t good and since I know Astra was involved, I am doubly scared.”

“What happened to Astra?” Lena questions.

“I think it’s best we wait until we are all inside before we talk about all of that.” Alura brushes her off and gets back to healing Bolt as best as she can.

Lena lets it slide, not necessarily happily, but she’s content to wait because there’s a high possibility that whatever it is she’s going to say, it’s going to be big because in the game they’ve been caught up playing, Astra’s role is ginormous.

The three Superfriends watch Alura as she works for several minutes, bandaging him up and washing him off before adding some of the sap back onto his cuts, this time with a lot more precision since it was Bolt himself that rubbed himself in the gunk.

Alex is practically running towards the building with how fast she’s walking and trying to encourage the others to walk too because she’s so excited to get back to Kelly and Esme. For a second back in the jungle, well for a few seconds, she really thought that she was never going to see them again and she’s honestly shocked that they are standing here now, alive and mostly unscathed, it’s a true phenomenon.

Kara takes Lena’s hand gently in her own, slipping her fingers between Lena’s in a move that is well-practised. They all make their way across the field towards the building with haste in their steps, they know who is inside and they don’t want to waste a moment.

Alura opens the door to the building with a code, pressing multiple buttons with various Kryptonese symbols scrawled across them in a rapid movement that she has obviously done many a time before today, all the while she has the three women behind her watching every move she makes while they wait with an obvious impatience to get inside.

The second the door is open, Alex shoves her way passed Kara and Lena, effectively tearing their joined hands apart so she can get to her wife and daughter. Kara and Lena don’t so much as bat an eyelid though, they just let her go ahead and race their way in themselves, unaware of the look Alura is adorning, one of inquisitiveness.

Her eyes aren’t on the group, just one person, and she’s almost afraid to look away, too curious about the woman that is obviously her daughter, the woman that came out of a birthing pod just twelve years ago, a woman that looks like she’s in her mid-twenties, a woman that doesn’t make any sense and yet makes all the sense in the world because she’s her daughter and that’s all she needs to know and yet there’s more she yearns to know.

They immediately enter a large room, the floor made of what appears to be tile except it’s not smaller tiles like they have on Earth, the entire floor is one giant tile. There are muddy boots and clothes tossed aside in a far corner and there’s some kind of tap or hose-like feature coming out of one wall over a drain. This is definitely an agricultural facility of kinds because this is the wet room for washing off before heading into the building fully.

They don’t wash off though, despite the fact that they are all kinds of dirty, they aren’t fussed. Instead, they direct themselves completely towards the door that they just know leads to the rest of their group, and Alex wastes no time in grabbing the handle.

She tries to pull the door open as hard as she can, almost falling on her butt when the door doesn’t actually open. Kara snickers as she regains her footing and takes over, gripping the handle and sliding the door to the side. She really thought that the time they spent in the other accommodation would have prepared Alex for the sliding doors Kryptonians prefer.

Alex barely even registers Kara’s amusement though because the moment the door is open, she’s going through it and she’s rushing to find the others. She doesn’t have to look very far though.

The door leads directly into what looks to be a common area with a couch and a few chairs, all oddly shaped, their backs curved into the silhouette of a mountainside. They might be odd, but they are inviting, especially to their tired bodies that yearn for rest except it’s not the couch they are interested in, it’s the people sitting on the couch.

“Mommy!” Esme spots Alex before Alex can spot her and there’s barely a moment’s notice before she has her arms full of the little girl. Without missing a beat, Alex pulls her to her chest tightly and presses her nose into the shoulder of her daughter, overwhelmed with her joy and relief that she’s been reunited.

It’s not a few seconds later that Kelly is in the mix, the little family huddled together while Nia pops up to drag Kara and Lena into a hug too. “Hey, guys.”

“Hey Nia, are you ok?”

Nia nods into the pair, happy to be held between two of the women she’s spent the last couple of days worrying about. “I’m good, your mom is really nice, Kara.”

That kind of snaps Kara out of the daze she’s been in since seeing her mom again, the daze that has stopped her from fully comprehending what it means that they are in the same place and that she is interacting with someone that she shouldn’t be interacting within the best interests of the future and someone that in her timeline, has been dead for decades.

Kara releases Nia and Lena from the hug and moves to hug Kelly and Esme. Once they are all reacquainted and settled, she can move on to the discussion they all need to have, preferably one without her mother first so the group can get back on the same page and share information about what’s going on because for the others to be here and have spoken to her mom, they must know something they don’t.

Alura allows them the time to say hello to each other and check over one another to ensure everyone really is ok and only once she’s certain everyone is satisfied does she speak. She starts by clearing her throat to get their attention. “So, I think we have a lot to talk about, shall we sit?”

She gets several nods in response but no verbal confirmation but she figures that everyone is just as nervous as she is so she just takes a seat at one end of the couch with the hope that it will allow her the opportunity to sit beside Kara but not pushing it by outright expressing that desire.

Everyone follows suit and takes a seat. Kelly and Alex take chairs beside each other with Esme on Alex’s lap and Nia takes another chair not too far away. There’s one chair left and then the other side of the couch that should really only fit one other person but Kara and Lena squeeze in together.

It was Lena’s decision to do that, she knows Kara and she knows her well. She can tell that Kara wants to be near her mother and she wants to allow herself to be open towards the strange interactions they are going to have to have but she’s nervous, more nervous than Lena’s seen her in a while.

It’s not the same kind of nerves she’s seen in Kara when they are in a sticky situation or when something terrible is happening to make them fear for their lives. Instead, it’s the kind of nerves she’s seen when Kara’s got an interview with someone she admires or the nerves she’s seen when she used to help Kara get ready for a date or two back in the day. The nerves she sees now are much more poignant though.

She can see it in Kara’s face, the way her right eyebrow twitches slightly and the way she can see Kara’s jaw move as she nibbles at the side of her tongue. It’s tiny things but she knows them well and she knows she can help so she’s unafraid to do something that makes her look a little strange in order to be there for Kara.

Kara does still end up beside her mother, she’s just also squished up into Lena’s side with her arm draped over Lena’s legs and Lena’s arm wrapped around her shoulder loosely.

“Alright, where shall we start?” Kara asks, all too eager to have as much clarity on their situation as possible.

Alura hums as she thinks, a trait that Lena can’t help but notice that Kara also does and it makes her heart ache in a strange kind of way to realize that it’s one of the only things Kara has left of her mother, tiny traits of characteristics she can barely recall but still does without a second thought.

“I think it’s best I just explain why I’m here to start with and then you can explain why you’re here,” Alura says with a hint of a demand, her voice strong enough that everyone can tell she’s not going to back down easily but not so firm that it was an order. It reminds Kara of the days when her mom used to tell her to clean her room, it was simply a task she had to complete.

Kara sniffs, her nose full of smells she hasn’t smelt for a long time. The smell of an air conditioner and scented pouches of herbs that were always around their home when she was young. She can smell the dust that she can see gently scattered over the windowsills and the faint scent of her mother’s perfume, one so ghostly familiar it makes her want to cry. “That sounds good.” Her voice is thick because she’s barely holding back her emotions but nobody comments on it. Lena’s arm just tightens around her shoulders by a tiny fraction.

Alura presses her lips together in a movement that once again, mirrors an action they have all seen a thousand times before in Kara, and then she starts her explanation. “Right, so, Astra came to Argo to see Kara, my Kara, and we caught her. She offered to make it easy for us, to hand herself over without a fight and to talk openly about what has been happening with The Rebellion if I speak to her privately. I couldn’t pass up on the information so I agreed, with precautions of course.”

Kara sucks her cheeks into her mouth to stop her from snapping at her mother for the obvious anger she holds towards Astra, a woman she loves because she loves her no matter what her flaws are. Astra offered up what little she has to get them to safety and yet her mom is still speaking down on her now.

“She told me that she knew she wouldn’t get the chance to fulfil a promise she made and wanted me to do so for her, she begged me to and that was what got me to agree. Astra is many things but she’s never been someone to beg. She told me where I could find your group  and asked me to help you in any way I can and she gave me her spy beacon, she begged me to keep you all as safe as I can and to help you all out, she told me it will all make sense when I see who it is in the group, something that confused me quite a bit when I first saw just three people, all of whom I’ve no connection to.”

“And then the beacon went off.” Kara fills in.

“And then the beacon went off,” Alura confirms. “I’m not sure why I even went out into the jungle that far, I could see that it was dangerous but something in my gut just told me I had to go and that I would regret it if I didn’t so I went and found the rest of you. I knew who you were the moment I saw you and I wasn’t about to leave you behind. I couldn’t.”

Kara can’t look at her mother. It’s been a long time since Astra died in her time and since she learned of the way her mother so ruthlessly sentenced her own twin sister to Fort Rozz and she thought she had dealt with the emotions that come with that a long time ago but it’s quite obvious to her now that she’s fooling herself because that’s not true, not now that she’s seeing it play out in real-time.

“Where is Astra now?”

“Let’s hold off on that for a while.” Alura says, “I want to know all about how you got there and why you’re here.” She reaches over to try and take Kara’s hand but she pulls it away.

“No.” Kara shakes her head. “I need to know what’s going on with Aunt Astra. She’s been there for me and she’s a better person than you seem to think she is.”

Alura sighs, looking down at the couch cushion between them for a long few seconds before looking up and trying to find Kara’s eyes. “Kara, your aunt isn’t as good of a person as she has led you to believe, she’s done things that are—”

“She’s done things that aren’t great out of desperation to save the planet you’re hiding the impending doom of.”

“She’s killed people, Kara.” Alura looks desperate to get Kara to see reason but it’s not happening.

“And you think the planet dying isn’t going to kill people. Wilful negligence is murder too and we both know you have had a hand in hiding the truth from the public. You’re two sides of the same coin and yet you still want to toss her away like she’s nothing more than a nuisance to be rid of.”

Alura breaks eye contact with Kara, she can barely stand to look into them. They are so familiar and yet so foreign. She’s stared into them so many times over the twelve wonderful years she’s had with her daughter but this version of her, this Kara, she’s jaded in a way Alura doesn’t like. She’s seen things that haunt her, it’s written across her irises in a way that can’t be hidden and the anger…The anger in her eyes is nothing short of scorching, terrifying and untameable.

“Kara, I don’t know what you think you know, but there are a lot of factors at play at the moment and there’s a lot you don’t know. Astra has handed over information about The rebellion and now she’s being transported to a secure location until her trial, which won’t take place until I’m present.”

Kara shakes her head. “She’s just put herself in so much danger to protect me and you don’t even care.”

“And how is it that she’s put herself in danger? She was already surrounded, she wasn’t escaping.”

“You’re going to sentence her to Fort Rozz along with any other members of The Rebellion you’re going to catch because of the information you got from her will be sent there too. Do you think they’re going to forget that she’s the one that sold them out between being attacked by phantoms in The Phantom Zone? I don’t think so.”

Alura doesn’t want to think about that. “Kara, how are you here?”

“I think that’s obvious.”

With Kara’s tone growing more and more aggressive and accusatory, Lena decides to jump in because it’s clear from the awkward expressions on the rest of the team’s faces that nobody else wants to because it’s a family matter. To Lena, that’s just bullshit. “We’re from the future and we have a mission to accomplish in order to save a lot of lives.”

In some ways, Alura was expecting that, she kind of guessed from some of the comments Kara made back when she first got out of the ship and from simply guessing from having her prepubescent daughter suddenly be standing before her as an adult but having it confirmed is a whole new ballgame.

“You’re being serious?”

“Yes.”

“What’s the mission?”

“I can’t say.”

“Why not?”

“With all due respect, we’ve done way too much damage to the timeline already by simply interacting with you. We’ve already changed too much and we can’t risk anything else happening that can cause rifts we can’t fix.”

A sour look crosses over Alura’s face. “I need something. You may be my daughter, Kara, but you have given me no reason to trust that you aren’t going to cause major issues by exposing council intellect. The people of Krypton can’t know what’s coming, it’ll just cause panic and we have so many avenues to explore that could solve the issue before we even get to the kind of stages where we warn people.”

“We need a piece of technology from Father’s lab in Kandor. That’s what we came here for. We had to land far away from the city so we weren’t detected and then the plan was to trek all the way on foot. Astra helped us out part way through our journey. That’s all I can share and even that is too much.”

Alura’s eyebrows pull together as she tries to make sense of what she’s been told, the whirring of her brain only increasing with each new tidbit of information she manages to gather. “You came from off-world, was that because of the time travel or because you came from another planet?”

“Both,” Lena answers. “We came from Earth.”

“Oh Rao, no.” Alura mumbles, all of the pieces clicking into place in one swoop. Kara’s strange anger towards her, the look in her eyes, the way she holds herself, it all makes sense now. They might be working on solving the issues with the planet but they still have a backup plan in all else fails and that backup plan is Earth so for them to have come from Earth, that means they fail. They fail and this is who Kara will become because of that failure; a woman haunted by the rotting corpse of her planet and the family she’s lost.

Kara and Lena find themselves looking to each other for answers as to why Alura just reacted that way, unaware of the pieces of the puzzle that just fell into place for her and just all around too tired for the conversation they are having and too in the dark about too many things to make sense of it all anyway.

“If you came from Earth then that means Krypton is gone,” Alura answers their silent question. “Kara, please tell me it isn’t true.”

“I can’t do that, ieiu.” Kara switches to Kryptonese at the end, referring to her mother as she always did as a child, hoping to bring her some kind of comfort she can’t help but think she doesn’t fully deserve.

Alura turns in her seat, moving her body to better face Kara before grabbing her hand again, this time with enough strength that Kara doesn’t bother fighting it. “How long?”

“Not long.”

“Days? Weeks? Months? How long? I need to know.”

“I can’t tell you that.” Kara shakes her head, “I can’t tell you anything.”

Alura drops her head down onto their hands, breathing deeply while she absorbs what that really means. Billions of people are going to die and she doesn’t have the power to fix it.

She takes a while to collect herself enough to lift her head again but when she does, she’s still completely unable to think of anything else or bring herself to pretend that she’s alright when she’s very well not. “I think we should go and rest and then reconvene to continue this conversation at a later time, we all have a lot to think about.”

“I think that’s a good idea,” Kara says, voice small but not timid, just soft.

“The others can show you where the rooms are, go and wash up and get some sleep, you know how grumpy you can get if you don’t get enough sleep.” Alura tucks a stray strand of Kara’s hair behind her ear and presses a kiss to her forehead, an act this is just second nature to her.

Kara’s eyes immediately flood with tears. She can’t decide if she’s happy about her mother being here or not and seeing her again after all this time and a lot of that is because she can’t decide if she wants to hug her or if she wants to slap some sense into her. Either way, her mother isn’t going to let her hide anything so for better or for worse, she’s stuck with her now.

Kelly guides them all up to where there are several bedrooms. This place isn’t as big as the accommodation is so they have to share anyway. For the group, there are only two bedrooms, one with two large beds inside of it and one with just one large bed.

Kara and Lena are very happy to find that they are being allowed to take the room with just one bed for themselves but Kara knows why they are letting her have it. They know she has issues with her mom, they just saw it first-hand, and so they are trying to give her space.

Luckily, not all of the group want to give her space because, within minutes of being in their bedroom, their packs are dumped, their shoes and clothes shrugged off and they are beneath the sheets, heads resting on the same pillow and their eyes are closed. They can wash up later but for now, they just need to be close and they need to have the ability to hold a conversation without their eyes closing.

Read the next 3 chapters early on my Patreon here!

[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.)

[aprillikesthings]

Now that I've spent a good day thinking about how hot it is when Catra is a terrible person corrupted by setting off a portal, I'm ready to go back to (re)watching her try to be Good lolol

well okay more than one day.

I mean I literally spent the last four? five? days listening to songs off The Downward Spiral over and over while thinking about Catra and practicing my makeup for my Catra cosplay and ordering more of the things I need for it; like literally just staring off into space at work between phone calls thinking about Catra

I'm totally a well-adjusted middle-aged adult, thanks for asking!

Shit where did I even leave off

Oh right

SO HEY if you're new here, I've been rewatching all of the 2018 She-Ra, and I started doing it for fic-writing reasons but predictably I have become deeply obsessed. Anyway these posts sometimes have a lot of asides and commentary and references to other stuff and dumb jokes among a ton of screenshots, also (and it feels odd saying it this close to the end of the show) it's a RE-watch, so there's often spoilers for later bits of the story, also I keep trying NOT to just describe the entire plots of the episodes but I keep failing lol

s5 ep7 Perils of Peekablue

Adora's trying to become She-Ra (without an immanent threat) and then Bow and Glimmer distract her, and then the door opens on Catra and

I literally did a YES YES YESSSS AHAHAH out loud bc this is the point at which Catra just starts OPENLY FLIRTING, as opposed to just uhhhh flirtatiously taunting I suppose lol

like you're SITTING IN HER LAP

Also while rewinding it to watch again I paused it at the most hilarious moment

look at Catra's FACE

help I can't stop laughing but also look at Bow's expression

Glimmer: omg I'm gonna get to see my dad Catra: *gets up and leaves*

But also I make this face when a cat leaves my lap before I wanted them to:

Anyway they're a day out from arriving at Etheria

Adora's trying so hard

BACK ON ETHERIA

YAY IT'S THIS ONE

the intro finally changed!! I can't get a good screenshot but now when Catra (with short hair) and Adora (in She-Ra's new get-up) are fighting they stop much faster and they're both smiling omgggg

and there she is!! with everyone else!!

okay I'm going to take way less screenshots etc of the underwater speakeasy thing because let's be honest: that part of the plot isn't what I'm here for lol

But yeah they're going to the speakeasy thing to get Prince Peekablue who can see to the edges of the galaxy and can maybe tell them where Adora and the others are because they don't know what happened

Oh also Spinarella is chipped and Netossa is realizing something is off/weird about her but doesn't know what

Oh hey! You used to work for Huntara in the Crimson Wastes

Sea Hawk has pissed off approximately half the people in the room it seems (by lighting their ships on fire at some point)

Scorpia and Perfuma are the cutest and I can absolutely see how they end up together

In my fic I originally had Adora talking to some kind of therapist but I wasn't sure they existed on Etheria, and last week I edited that bit so Adora is talking to these two (which makes the conversation more fun AND easier to write anyway)

Perfuma: "Scorpia. You should do things not because you're good at them, but because they make you happy." THAT IS ONE OF MY LIFE PHILOSOPHIES thank you Perfuma you're 100% correct and I tell people this ALL THE TIME

Mermista: "I might've set their boat on fire. Just to see what it felt like."

Sea Hawk:

lolol

YESSSS I love this scene

Perfuma makes a flower, throws it to Scorpia as she sings, and she blushes and tucks it into her hair, these two are so sweet and cute

oh god I forgot that when "Prince Peekablue" get stung by Scorpia they go through the last half-dozen shapeshifts before turning into a (passed-out) Double Trouble.

lolol instead of "cash cow" it's an insult to poor Catra

Anyway they have the info the Rebellion wanted!

Horde Prime is pissed and has blockaded the planet, also half the people at the speakeasy were chipped....and now so is Mermista, though nobody realizes that yet

But also the phrasing of "She-ra stole his little kitten away" is just amazing

But also the last they heard, Adora and Bow and Entrapta had left to rescue Glimmer, do they think Double Trouble is talking about Glimmer here or what

(which. they did. they just also went back for Catra.)

Netossa realizes her wife (and most of the people around them) are chipped D:

And a chipped Mermista is gonna drown them all

oh shit Micah is also chipped

Entrapta gets the comms working!

"The Rebellion's been compromised! Horde Prime has them! We lost, I'm so sorry! We lost them!" --and then the comms go to static

AND CREDITS!

[duhragonball]

Dragon Ball Super 044

It’s the Potaufeu Trilogy, comin’ atcha!

So the only real value to the first 75% of Dragon Ball Super is the filler episodes they stick between each arc.  The Battle of Gods and Resurrection F episodes were crappy reruns, and the Destroyers Tournament looks like a crappy WWE B-list Pay-Per-View.  And the Zamasu arc.... well, we’ll get to that. 

But the filler episodes are generally fun and enjoyable, probably because they don’t waste time dragging out every little moment to pad out the series.  Like Dragon Ball GT, Super could probably be edited down to a much shorter anime if they just cut out all the pointless monologues and staredowns and reaction shots from minor characters.  These were always part of the charm with DBZ, but GT and Super just abuse the hell out of those tricks, with little to show for it.  What puts Super ahead of GT is that it can occasionally produce a good story once in a while. 

All right, so let’s dive into this.  Bulma’s doing some sort of experiment when Monaka shows up in his delivery truck to bring her more snacks.  She then borrows him to hold a funnel under a pipe while she generates a small amount of liquid.  There’s filter paper in the funnel, so I guess she needs to filter it.  Monaka just worries about falling behind on his route. 

See, this was what I was saying about Gohan’s career in the last episode.  They’re so vague about what he does and how he does it.  In this scene, Bulma’s working on an experiment which clearly has no basis in reality, but I can still recognize some of the equipment.  Glass funnel, filter paper, and a giant over-sized beaker.   The other stuff doesn’t look like anything in particular, but it still looks kind of authentic, like someone actually used references to draw this room instead of just winging it.  They should show Gohan in a room like this, only with biology stuff.  Like bugs and... more bugs.  That’s where biologists work, right?  They just hop into a big room full of bugs. 

Anyway, Goten and Trunks find Monaka’s unattended truck and start screwing around in the back.  Hey, those toys aren’t for you!

Monaka’s in such a hurry to get on with his route that he doesn’t even check to see if anyone’s in the back.  He just listens to the radio, and they read his letter on the air.  Under a psuedonym, Monaka confesses that he likes to take the packages marked “fragile” and set them on fire. 

Anyway, he doesn’t find the boys until he makes his next stop on Planet Potaufeu, where he has to warm them up because there’s no heat in the back of the truck. 

Monaka’s here to deliver a martial arts magazine to the planet’s sole inhabitant, Potage.  Potage kind of looks like a cross between a dog and a beetle, but not quite.  Anyway, he’s got bigger problems on his hands right now.

A bunch of bad guys, led by the evil Gryll, have come to this planet in search of “superhuman water”, but Goten and Trunks clobber them easily.

Gryll withdraws, but not without picking up the mysterious amulet that Potage dropped earlier.  Among other things, it’s the key to unlock the superhuman water. 

And while Goten and Trunks could easily stop him, he takes Monaka hostage, which allows him to take possession of the superhuman water.  Seems kind of anticlimactic, but...

Back on Earth, Bulma has finally discovered Trunks and Goten got into Monaka’s truck before he took off.  She calls Jaco to help them search, and when he tries to back out, she considers contacting the Galactic King and telling him about that picture she saw on Jaco’s ship with silly stuff drawn on it. 

More importantly, look how huge Vegeta is in this shot.  It’s ridiculous.  He’s supposed to be a little shorter than Bulma, and while I’ve gotten used to artists toeing that line, making him a little taller, this time they go way too far.  The character model isn’t meant to be this tall, which is why his shoulders and arms look so messed up. 

Here, they just screw it up in a whole different way.  Vegeta looks about right this time, except they just raised him up about six inches from Bulma’s level.  It looks like he’s standing on a box.

Back on Potaufeu, the bad guys are chasing the good guys, but these aliens look a little... different, don’t they?

Vegeta arrives in the nick of time (and so does Jaco) and he defeats the bad guys easily, but one of them melts into a puddle of purple goo, and it envelops Vegeta like a giant amoeba.

This is probably someone’s fetish, so drink it in, you sick fucks.

Vegeta emerges from the fluid seemingly unharmed, except he can’t use his powers. As for the purple goop...

It’s become an exact copy of Vegeta, with all his powers.  Uh-oh.

[thespamman24]

what is your favourite form of potato?

I’m glad you asked! These are all the different forms of potatoes, ranked worst to best:

18. Potato Salad

Potato salad is the opposite of fruit salad. Number one: mayonnaise. Mayonnaise is the most pointless liquid in the universe, and I live on the same planet as piss. Second off, there’s a right way to do onions and a wrong way. Potato salad does it the wrong way. Thirdly, potato salad is far too wet. It sticks to my mouth like a blood sucking parasite. However, instead of sucking blood, it just sucks joy.

17. Just a Raw Potato

Too hard. Tastes just like how it looks. I tell raw potatoes just what I told my ex, “call me back when you’ve been near a fire for a long time and also have been lightly salted."

16.  Potato Bread

Why would you do that? This is an offense to nature.

15. Baked Potatoes

Baked potatoes have the flavor of a Lewis Capaldi song. Sure, they are one of the most basic form of potato, but that’s what makes them so boring. It’s like playing as Mario in Smash.

14. Smashed Potatoes

These are mashed potatoes, but with the Lovecraftian horror of potato skins in the potatoes added in.

13. Mashed Potatoes

Everytime I eat mashed potatoes, I’m disappointed. They look so creamy and frothy and then I eat them and they taste like how airplanes smell.

12. Hasselback Potatoes

These ain’t much different than baked potatoes, but there’s something about the insane amount of slicing that is so…alluring, sexual perhaps. The amount of slicing is just so utterly ridiculous you know that something must be going on. However, these are just one trick ponies.

11. Gnocchi

Gnocchis taste good, but their appearance reminds me of maggots.

10. Potato Wedges

These are what French fries would be like if they weren't as good.

 9. Potato Skins

I like skin.

8. Potato Chips

Ohhh yeah…now we’re getting into the good stuff. A massive jump up in quality from previous offerings. Who doesn’t like potato chips? They set your mouth on fire, they turn your lips into deserts, they cut your tongue, and it’s amazing.

7. Patatas Bravas

Hey, what if potatoes, but spicy? Absolutely genius idea Spain, gold star for you. These taters will set you on fire in all the best ways, and they may also cure erectile dysfunction. You never know with potatoes. These are, without a doubt, the Kid A of potatoes.

6. Scalloped Potatoes

The answer to the question, what if Hasselback potatoes but we added other tricks to the pony? And boy oh boy does this pony have tricks! Cream and onions and sunshine and rainbows and all the love in the world.

5. Hash Browns

How can one bite into a hash brown without instantly being teleported to somewhere where there are a lot of hashbrowns?

4. Latkes

Ain’t no party like a Hanukkah. Obviously, everything is better when you smother it in oil and then set it on fire a bit.

3. Roasted Potatoes

Fuck yeah. I like my potatoes like I like my woman, set on fire for extended periods of time. At least, I assume that’s what roasted means. Nevertheless, roasted potatoes are juicy, succulent delights

2.Tater Tots

Now, sure, your ordinary elementary school cafeteria tater tots might not be anything special. However, those fancy deluxe tater tots? Those are to die, kill, maim, torture, and break the geneva convention for. Every bite just oozes with untold amounts of flavor.

Truely, tater tots are the OK Computer of potato forms.

French Fries

One of the greatest foods known to man. One bite of a single french fry is enough to make all your worries melt into a puddle and then fall down the drain.However, it is here that we must rank the various kinds of french fries.

1d. Normal french fries

Great, but ordinary, like a warm blanket or a cup of hot cocoa. Not anything groundbreaking, but enjoyable nonetheless.

1c. Curvy French Fries

I am literally salivating. Oh god…so good.

1b. Waffle French Fries

One of the best things ever created. Second only to…

1a. Garlic French Fries!

Garlic French fries are the best things ever because garlic.