#kinda sorta if you squint

[wing-dingy]

spent a lot of time on this yet bullshitted the entire background to make it vaguely r76 cosmic horror lmao

idk the idea was Soldier 76's messed up eldritch arm painfully acting up, maybe it happens whenever reaper's around? 🤷‍♀️ It's like a horror version of those soulmate aus jhfgbjhg

I just wanted to draw the skin it's one of my fave soldier skins

[stinkrascal]

Hey sorry if you’ve already answered this but I was wondering how you made vlad look good but also recognisable? Whenever I try and give him a makeover he’s either ugly or a totally different sim!

no way omg... im so flattered you think my vlad resembles ea vlad 😅

i rambled so i will put this under a cut!

so i would say focus on his eyes, nose, and mouth bc those are the features that stand out the most. im not against changing sims presets if i find their original preset is completely unworkable but try to keep the presets similar looking, like it'd be weird if you took vlad's prominent hooked nose and used a preset that gives him a button nose instead. also recommend trying to maintain similar proportions. for instance he has a very long narrow face so try to keep his chin long and pointed and his cheeks hollow.

im learning to draw rn the process is so embarrassing dont ask lmao and a tip i learned while drawing is to fill in the basic features with different colors to get an idea of your character's proportions and i think that could help when recreating a sim in your sim style!!!!!!

see as you can tell it isn't an exact match but it's similar enough for him to be recognizable. and the things which were changed still resemble his original presets so it still feels like vlad even if hes been stinkrascalified

[spacedace]

Reluctant War AU Part 2

Part One

...I ended up writing more for that Reluctant War AU...Like. Wrote this before work and started on part 3 with plans for part 4 more.

this was supposed to just be a brain worm what happened (also thank you @catastrophic-crow for the AU name <3 <3 <3 Also, also: welcome to the cult of Ancient of the Speedforce Elle! Membership includes nonsense, shenanigans and chaos haha)

-

Gotham had always been a place for ghosts.

Every corner haunted by death and tragedy.

Every street stained red at least once in its many years.

Every dark shadow holding the faint shadows and shades of the dead.

Gotham was, before all else, a grave yard.

Jason had known that his entire life. Every kid born and raised in the Alley did. Death came fast to Gotham’s streets. Especially for those the rest of the city turned its back on. He did his best to lighten the reaper’s load when it came to the people that called Crime Alley home. Well, mostly. He’d certainly added names to old Death’s list before, when the occasion called.

When the armies of the dead descended upon Gotham, the only surprise Jason could feel was that those white wearing pieces of shit had dared to try and hunker down in his city.

It was a sentiment shared by most of Gotham’s fine citizens. By the city itself - herself? Something to ask later, if there was a later - even if the impossible, living shadow that rose up out of Gotham’s many dark corners was anything to go by. He knew, almost instinctively, that the entity - skin of cracked pavement, mouth a bridge suspended too wide across the face, eyes of CCTV camera lenses and body built brick by grimy, bloody brick of the sharp skyline - was Gotham. Not a ghost but something bigger, greater. Something awfully, terribly alive in all its horrible, noble glory. His city, manifest in the shape almost human beneath the green glow of the torn apart sky above.

Phantom’s armies arrived without warning as they had everywhere else, and their enemies poured out in unforgivably unmarred white suits to meet them. Horrible and garish against the Gotham streets. How they’d ever managed to slink by unnoticed while being so blatantly, clearly not of Gotham Jason wasn’t sure he’d ever know.

If either side thought this would be like the battles they fought before, they were mistaken.

Gotham was a place for Ghosts.

A place the dead piled up, lingered well beyond their deaths. A place where the rules were different from everywhere else in the world. Where crime was rampant and chaos reigned but at the end of the day people said their thanks that they were born to this hellhole and not so cursed to call anywhere else in the world home.

The dead came to fight

And Gotham, a thing so alive it was sickening to look upon, rose up to fight right along side them all.

The agents were ready and prepared for the incursion of the dead. It’d been two weeks since the first volley of attacks. Two weeks spent shoring up defenses and ramping up weapons and strategizing ways to kill what was already dead. They were, as best as they were able to be considering how endless the armies that came for them, prepared.

They weren’t prepared for Gotham.

Weren’t prepared for the city itself to rise up and take spectral, eldritch shape. Jagged building spire and shattered glass teeth bared in a snarl that spanned miles. Screaming rage in a voice made of gunfire and the concussive boom of explosions and the shrieks of a furious crowd.

Weren’t prepared for its people to ignore the gentle ushering of the dead trying to push them away to safety and instead press forward to fight shoulder to shoulder with the ghostly armies.

Weren’t prepared to have brick and bottles and trash and debris rain down upon them from the jeering living. Weren’t prepared for dirty faced children with hard eyes to light up rags stuffed into chipped beer bottles filled with gas and kerosene and throw them with more speed an accuracy than any professional baseball player. Weren’t ready for Gotham’s motley crew of terrifying Rogues to band together with the citizens they so often accosted and worried and bring down wave after wave of chaos and Goons.

Weren’t prepared for Red Hood to swap out his rubber bullets for the real deal and start mowing the fuckers in white down, his own crew at his back, the rest of the Outlaws on their way.

The Justice League was trying to find a peaceful resolution. Trying to play go between to the US Government and the infinite dead. Too wound up in US politics to side with the dead outright, too disgusted by what the American government had done to ever want to stand with them. All it had gotten them was spun wheels and confusion and the slow creeping realization that the time to try and play negotiators had well passed.

Red Hood wasn’t a member of the Justice League.

He had no obligation to try and find a way to talk things out.

What he had was a grave he’d dug his way out of, enough ammunition to arm a sizable country, and a burning need to make things right.

Gotham had always been a place for ghosts, and Jason had long accepted that he was one of them.

Haunting the streets he’d survived as a child, the city he protected as Robin, the family he’d loved and lost a thousand and one times before and after his death.

The sky cracked open above his home, and it was not an invading army that came rushing out but a native one. Friends, neighbors, strangers on the street you caught from the corner of your eye. The people of Gotham knew their own and fought for them. Only Gotham was allowed to fucked with Gotham and they’d been screwed over enough by the government themselves to know what side they were on.

He lifted his guns and fired, teeth bared in vicious satisfaction beneath his helmet as white was splattered bright red.

A hissing electric whine of a weapon, a flash of green from the edge of his vision.

“Down!”

He was thrown bodily to the cracked and ruined street beneath him, the body shielding him warm and living as one of the agent’s weapon fired a blast of energy right where he’d been a second before. He’d seen that same weapon reduce one of the raging dead to dripping green and screams of agony the dead should not be capable of making.

Before he could shove himself up and respond in kind, the body above him was in motion and the air above him cracking with the snapping-popping-roar of a gun of a much higher power than even what he had. The fucker in white that had shot at him dissolved into a mist of red viscera, body seizing and shuttering in the briefest moment it had before it was obliterated completely.

“Watch yourself.” He looked up - and up - and wondered at the lovely, fierce face he found staring down at him. “Even without shooting at them you’re Liminal enough to trip their sensors.”

She was tall enough to be an amazon, six inches in height on him at least. Body strong beneath the pitch black armor she work - as deep and dark as the depths of space, etched with starlight, a familiar crest upon her chest in the dizzying burst of a supernova - she held herself with confidence. Strands of hair the color of a warning sunrise escaped out from beneath the helm she wore, bright against her pale skin, warming the glass-sharp teal eyes that had pinned him in place.

The hand not holding the gun she’d just used to delete the asshole that had just tried to shoot him - a strange, impossible thing that made him taste lightning at the back of his throat to look at it - stretched out to help him up.

He accepted it.

Something pulsed to life in his chest. A piece forgotten where it’d been left behind, half buried in grave dirt and broken pieces of a casket he’d clawed his way out of. It burned like a hot coal in his chest, froze him with the same aching cold of a blizzard, crackled his nerves to life with lightning even as his brain popped and fried with the same sizzling energy.

On his feet, hair on end and body and Core pulsing with the need to fight, to rend and tear and scream for all done to him, his people, his home, he met the eyes of the woman before him. Her cool gaze softened, just a moment, just a second as she seemed to realize what had happened. Her hand, lighter than the armor she wore should allow it to be, tightened on his just a moment, mouth tilting from determined frown to soft understanding.

Gotham had always been a place for ghosts.

Jason had long accepted that he was one of them.

---

Part Three

[tetrameryxx]

Ragnat-zug, terrestrial dragon, the roiling lindwyrm beneath the earth tilling ancient soil. In a memory of flight, trapped permanently in mudstones and sandstones, fossils gleam in replaced splendor. Silts and slides form into layers, forever piling and then eroding. Ragnat-zug embodies these processes– stasis in the short term, and change in the long.

[thatoneawkwardhorse]

Everyone hold hands and pray. Socks is getting body slammed back into the Godzilla fandom

[mossattack]

that's one unusual looking vallaslin (?)

[starrymushrooms]

I CANT LOOK AT FANART CAUSE I WANNA AVOID SPOILERS BUT I CAN MAKE MY OWN!!!!! Hi TGAA community is this a good introduction to the fandom.

RIP Van Zieks he would’ve LOVED Margaritaville

[puppygirlpencil]

I finished Unleashed :3 enjoyed it <3

[strayheartless]

When you go quiet I hate myself:

**title credit to Dodie Clark’s song “hate myself”**

*****

Wanting to be left alone was all fun and games until you didn’t want to be alone anymore. Cloud knew this intimately. Being alone meant safety. It meant there was no possible way he could say the wrong thing, or be too blunt. He couldn’t upset someone with his resting face, nor could he make someone cry by telling them he really didn’t care.

He didn’t do it to be mean. He did it to be honest. Kindness wasn’t a foreign concept to him, but it was hard to master. Nobody gave you a book on how not to be an asshole. Nobody told you “hey, here’s all the rules you need to know in order to survive social interaction!”

No, you were simply thrust into it, naked and newborn and you just had to cope. He understood survival of the fittest, but he was not the fittest and he sure as shit wasn’t surviving. He just… was.

Maybe he’s feeling like this because it’s the first time Zack has been away since they started being friends. Maybe it’s because everyone else in the barracks went out for a drink and he hadn’t been invited. Regardless of the fact that he would have said no… he still felt the tang of rejection like breathing in air freshener just after it’s been sprayed. Nasty and bitter but oddly exactly like it smells.

He’d been asked before and he’d always said no. Of course they would stop asking eventually. It was just common sense. He’d done this to himself. He was the reason he currently felt so cripplingly alone. He just had to suck it up and get on with it.

Cloud rolls over and checks his phone again. Nothing.

Zack had said that he wasn’t likely to be on a non contact mission but so far it had been radio silence from the one person who always met Cloud in the middle. It was killing him, and he knew why… he just wasn’t willing to admit it yet.

Zack had given him his girlfriends number. He’d said she would be happy to keep him company while he was away. He’d said she had been keen to meet him even.

Zack was an oblivious fool.

Cloud was sure Aerith was quite lovely. Zack painted her to be Midgar’s sweetheart, and Clouds sure she was just fine… but he was also sure he’d be rude to her on purpose. All because she had the one thing he wanted and that wasn’t fair to her.

It wasn’t Aerith’s fault Cloud fell in love with someone so out of bounds it was ridiculous. Dark hair, exceedingly kind, willing to put up with his moody bullshit? Yeah Cloud was aware he had a type.

That type just happened to always be off limits. With Tifa it had been the fact that she was the towns only girl and therefore she was hoarded like gold by the boys she played with and the parents who had labelled him a problem. With Zack it was because he was straight and an idiot.

A gorgeous idiot… but an idiot never the less.

Zack had given Cloud a colour pallet with which to paint the world by and Cloud had realised too late that he could only access it when Zack was here. Being friends was fine, but the never ending torture of hearing him be in love was maddening. The constant reminder from everyone around him that he was terribly, awfully, chronically, terminally alone was agony.

But Cloud liked being alone, he always had. Being alone meant nobody could hate you for being you. Being alone meant that you controlled the quiet and the game and the rate at which things happened to you.

Being alone meant deafening silence and the knowledge that you still felt like a fucking child.

He’s aware he’s only twenty one. He’s aware that there will be time for relationships and life plans and families if he wants one.

He’s also aware that Denny in dorm C had just had a baby with his girlfriend. That Kai in his dorm had asked his girl to marry him. He was aware that people were sleeping with eachother casually and that even the underground queer community within the troops were going to the honey bee on weekends for drag shows and mixers.

He knows that he’d bypassed the pride parade for three years now because that many people all making noise in bright colours was Clouds idea of actual hell. He’s aware that even being bisexual, he’s still on the outside of the crowd. He’s never known what the in crowd looks like and he thought it was fine.

But now he aches. He aches so much he feels physically paralysed by it. Lying in his bunk staring at his phone and begging Zack to just… send a thumbs up. Anything to let him know he’s at least important enough to warrant remembering.

The phone stays silent.

Cloud pushes it off of the bed and turns over.

He pulls the covers over his head and feels the need to cry but it won’t happen. It never does.

He slams his head back on the matress, but it doesn’t hurt or even make him feel better. So he growls in fustration, shoves his head under his pillow and digs his nails into his scalp.

He tries to sleep but it is disturbed and full of anxiety and pain. Eventually he just pretends with his eyes closed and his head stuffy and numb.

He doesn’t see the text flash through from Zack. He doesn’t know that Aerith is wondering if she should make the first move.

‘Hi buddy, miss you tons. Gonna be back in a few days. How are you? Aerith said you haven’t text? No pressure man, I just worry your isolating yourself again. Call me when you see this?’

[the-way-astray]

wow stria thinks Gethen is hot?

does this mean Stria x Gethen

it's better than strieefe

[ask-johnnyverse]

Are you sure that you and Kenshi are just close 'Bestfriend' and nothing more than that?

Where’d you get the idea we’d be anything more?

You’re acting crazy right now.

[Art by Mod Eddie]

[optiwashere]

Nocturne, Baby's breath? Mostly I wonder how will you manage to turn it into angst.

You know what... fair enough lmao. Thanks for requesting this one! 💜

---

Baby's Breath: a wholesome moment

The first time Nocturne awoke outside the cloister, she didn’t know what to do with herself. She had no routine to follow, no duties to observe. At least she knew she wasn’t alone.

The fifth time Nocturne awoke like this, they were in a noisy roadside inn. The bed was warm, and there was only one. At least she knew they were safe.

The thirtieth time Nocturne awoke after gathering her courage was to the smell of a freshly planted garden under the windowsill by their bed. Shadowheart snuggled into her chest, still asleep.

What else was there to know?

[hi-note]

Kaden in elphelt's color 4 scheme because his design MIGHT be influenced. Just a little.

What's that? You wanted a time lapse? With the last minute of elphelt's theme playing in the background? What? Nobody asked for that? Oh well I have one anyways

[this-is-a-username124]

Gasp...the phantom miis....

(Just silly tomodachi life things :P)

[estrelladeishtar]

"—I-I thought we were done dealing with him—I thought he-"

"Easy, sparkles, easy... I know you're afraid. Believe me, I ain't too thrilled 'bout what happened earlier too. But, listen—If there's one thing's for certain? He's not comin' back, no matter what he tries, & he sure as hell ain't settin' foot here in Vinyl City. I know the possibility scares ya, but you know I've got your back throughout this. Promise ya that."

Little something based off some charter verse musings I was going on about earlier on a diff blog of mine, with this sort of being a. Doodle of what happened later that day or whatever, so yeah.

Context will be discussed on this blog eventually ☆ (since its already discussed kinda on my oc rambling blog LOL)

[callmecastiel]

Can't really think of words to say other than this is a redraw of a redraw and quite frankly put I still am in awe at just how much I've improved in the two years since I've made the original version. Also up to just about 190 documented images of Rattus so. I think they're my favorite sona.