I love libraries.
I'm browsing the WWI shelves (as you do) and notice a very old book about the war. I glance at the first pages that talk about how one day the war will be over and we'll look at this place and not see any signs of the battlefield.
Then it hits me. And I check the publishing date.
This book was printed before the war's end. Not written. Printed. The physical object was created in 1918, while the war in question was raging and the end was as yet uncertain.
Now I'm standing on the other side of the apocalypse, with this physical link to that era in my hands. I'm living proof that the war did end and life did go on and we can all look at the end of the world as a long-ago memory.
Reading old books is cool enough, connecting our minds and hearts through the ideas of people who lived long ago, but there's something extra profound about holding a copy of the book that comes from the time that it was written. It's a physical link between the past and the present connecting me to those long-ago people. A piece of the past come into the future that gives me the chance to almost take the hand of some long-ago reader, to hold something they could have held, connecting not just mentally but physically to their era, a moment of connection across more than a century.
Excuse me while I go weep.
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ID: Sepia tone art of Chara and Asriel from Undertale,
a signature in the middle says "@ascelhire".
They are playing in a muddy flower patch filled with leaves, picking up handfuls and smiling. Text over the art reads;
"I just hope"
"we'll be friends"
"for 999 more years".
/End ID
My dear old friend, don't hurt your eyes
Seeing you in all this pain hurts more than my demise
Just wait, you'll see soon
That it's better once you let me go and see it through
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GHOSTS WITH HEARTBEATS
When Jason had been going to Gotham Academy, he had (for a good reputation for the media and to help him catch up on his penmanship, remember he had been on the streets and dropped out of school before getting picked up by Bruce for a while) signed up for a penpal project for 'less privileged people' to write to.
(Although Jason was annoyed the penpal project stayed within the states and only selected a middle of nowhere town, he knew the Richie Rich Elites would never subjugate their 'Heirs' to actual kids in need of learning how to read and write)
But Jason didn't mind his penpal.
Danny Fenton was a riot to talk, err write to in all honestly.
From his dry punny humor (and boy can he give even Dick a run for his money in the pun department but hey using some of them actually got Dick to warm up to him a few missions ago) and death jokes so many death jokes, to his nerdy love for space Jason enjoyed writing to Danny.
Even the short stories he would write about a ghost kid protecting a small town from other ghosts was interesting to read. He really liked the different kinds of ghosts there could be. Granted some seemed very OP like that Clockwork dude.
Jason liked writing to Danny, and even after the penpal project was over they had plans to keep sending letters, maybe even exchange numbers soon...
But then he died by the hands of the Joker.
The letters leaving Wayne Manor may had decreased but the letters being sent never did or at least until a few years ago.
Then Jason somehow returned to the land of the living.
Got taken by the LoA, tossed in the green waters and turned into their Pit Raged weapon for a while before leaving them behind and setting out for his revenge against the Joker and to force B's hand.
And becoming a Crime Boss for a while too. Can't forget that.
Point being with all this going on, the old warm memories of exchanging letters with Danny Fenton was pushed into the back of his mind and forgotten about for a while.
It isn't until one afternoon at Wayne Manor that while roughhousing with Dick, who had Jason in a brotherly headlock as they walked down a hall to one of the sitting rooms, that while Jason had slipped out of Dick's hold had stumbled into a hallway desk that had a few things on the top of it, one of the things being a small box that tumbled off when Jason hit it.
The box lid opened and out of it spilled out a good number of letters.
"Shiii-p, dang it Dick!" Jason said when he looked at the mess he accidentally made and stopped himself from swearing, the place might be named Wayne Manor but everyone knew this was Alfie's domain and no swearing was a rule within his halls.
Dick only laughed and teased only in a way a sibling can do "Hey not my fault your as big as a tank Jaybird! We should get you some caution signals if you keep bumping into things!"
Jason flipped him his favorite finger, thankfully Alfred only knew when they swore thus it did not summon him, and bent down to the letters.
His hands froze when he recognized the hand writing and the address it was sent from.
"From: Danny Fent Nightingale
Amity Park, IL"
To: Jason Todd-Wayne
Gotham City, NJ.
Wayne Manor"
And when Jason opened the letter. He really wasn't expecting what was written inside.
"Jason.
I'm finally leaving Amity Park. I can't be there anymore, not after everything. I'm too tired, and emotionally hurt. Everything is just to much. And I can't keep doing this to myself. My parents still can’t understand there is nothing ‘wrong’ with me or why I refuse to let them take care of Ellie, I refuse to let her live the way Jazz and I did, Jazz has to much on her plate already with her own life and college but she’s been hounding me to reach out to mom and dad, Sam refuses to listen to me when I tell her I want to be more than ‘Phantom’ in Amity Park, and Tucker is so busy trying to get into a good college and job we barely have time to talk nowadays. And don’t get me started on Vlad, that fruitloop’s been breathing down my neck since Ellie’s deaging.
Despite how much of a hellhole you like to call it, I think Gotham might be my, no mine and Ellie’s best bet of living some kind of life, especially now since the whole deaging she had to go through, she needs an ectoplasm rich city as well and since she has no actual papers because she was my clone and I remember you saying Gotham has people who can create new identities and-
I’m rambling again, to letter you again. I really need to stop it.
I can’t keep pretending you’re going to read these.
I know you’ll never read these. You’re gone. I can’t even find you in the Realms no matter where I look.
I’m sorry. For using you as, well, a way to vent my life for last couple of years. I shouldn’t had done it but it helped me.
Believing my friend was still alive and getting my letters I mean.
Again I’m sorry.
This will be my last letter to your ghost, pun unintended.
Goodbye Jason. Wish us luck in your city.
-Danny Fen-Nightingale...."
The sent date on the letter was roughly eight years ago.
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Chakotay being a person who (while of course being willing to follow orders to a point) ultimately puts what's morally right and wrong in his eyes over Starfleet protocol while Tuvok is shown to be a person who will follow Starfleet protocol (and more accurately Janeway's word) over what he personally thinks is right is something that could have been so interesting if the three of them were actually shown as a triumvirate instead of it usually being Janeway-Chakotay and even then mostly just Janeway.
It would be an opportunity to explore more about the Maquis v Starfleet dynamic, about how Chakotay & Janeway's different leadership styles work and don't work with this new crew and with different people, to interrogate what exactly Voyager should look like - to incorporate more leniency and Maquis tactics into its operation so that they really do become a blended ship instead of the Maquis simply becoming subsumed into Starfleet. It'd also give more opportunities to let all three characters shine and introduce more moral quandaries that they can have differing ideas about and how does that affect them?
At one point Tuvok is willing to go against Janeway's orders because she wants to do something but can't due to Starfleet protocol. In another episode he also follows Janeway's orders to assist in killing an entire ship of people despite that being against both Starfleet protocol and certain moral standards because she feels strongly that they should. He protests this but once she rebukes him he doesn't object again or attempt to stop her (like Chakotay - though they both know at that point that she's crossing lines). This sort of implies to me that he's much more loyal to Janeway herself than he is to Starfleet as a concept.
Meanwhile Janeway is shown to be staunchly and strictly Starfleet - adopting the code AS her moral compass a lot of the time. She sometimes has to go off-script due to the nature of their situation but most of her decisions are made depending on how Starfleet would feel about it. If she wants to do something but Starfleet would disagree, she rarely if ever questions Starfleet protocol and instead will go with what it says is best even if it's painful on a personal level. She also tells Tuvok in the episode aforementioned that he is "Her advisor, her moral compass" and having a moral compass/advisor that's either a bunch of rules written by the space government or a person who is mostly just going to agree with you no matter what they actually think and not challenge you if you rebuke them isn't the best idea. Enter Chakotay.
Chakotay's willingness to disagree with Janeway and not back down is something I wish had been shown more. When he says "I don't care about logs or reports or whatever - I care about person to person shit. I care about what's right and what you're doing is wrong." it's something that could be so interesting and so necessary when contrasted with the other two. A good example is of course 'Equinox' but also 'Manuevers' where he goes off against literally everyone's orders and friendly advice because he feels responsible. And that's important - he's doing it because he feels responsible. That's different from Tuvok (who doesn't feel) and Janeway (who would most likely try to find comfort in protocol) - because Chakotay feels he's responsible and that he needs to protect the crew since he (in his eyes) is the one who put them in danger. He's a person who's shown to be willing to go against everything anyone says in order to do what he feels is right if the wrong is too great to allow.
Voyager if these three were actually allowed to argue and be equals and figure out how to work together as sort of a microcosm of how this new blended crew is going to be able to fight and work and band together.
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headcanon musings explosion for tonight
Gortash/Dark Urge and Balduran/Ansur relationships being parallels to each other (specifically with vanilla dragonborn durge)
gortash and durge planning to rule the city together in a twisted perversion of its origins
history of heists and adventures together
that one npc in the city talking about gortash being called the second coming of baluran (Bonus: the goddamn dragons all over gortash's clothes)
how durge comes back to gortash a different person the way balduran came back to ansur different
the balduran & ansur ending because one of them changed, became someone who didn't want to go back to being what they used to be even if it meant destroying the relationship
"I had no choice but to kill him first - it was an act of self-preservation"
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