#light and i wanted to process the mass of information i read through..

[vnd5lain88]

light thoughts

huge nonlinear waffle that may go places i never intended it to. it's 1 am. help!

i often think about an average day with light yagami, pre-death note usually. wake up, go to school, maybe mingle with semi-close acquaintances and perhaps even walk home with them. go home, lay in bed, read, study, sleep, rinse and repeat. maybe talk to your sister. have some food. and on the weekends you date. *snore*... none of these actions are really driven by self-interest either. unlike most top students, light's good grades just come to him. he sure is diligent and hardworking, yes, but it isn't in an effort to chase the standards he achieves, rather, these actions are simply part of the routine of a boy who believes he will undoubtedly get those results regardless. because in his mind, and in the mind of pretty much everybody else who knows him, he is just that brilliant. so that's just a truth, no motivator there. he gets such good scores... pretty much because he can. and it isn't much of a big deal to him either (read: the Sheer Enthusiasm /s with which he gives his mother his test scores and receives her praises in the very beginning of the series).

as for dating, light is involved with so many girls because people would raise an eyebrow if he wasn't. he usually isn't interested in those ordeals and the few times in which we do see him flirting or kissing it's made clear to us that it's duplicitous. and for friends... well... light isn't exactly keen on keeping any close relations with any peers.

that's all to say that light leads a pretty humdrum life. for someone like him, this way of being just doesn't do it. what's interesting here is that light plays along regardless. (as i am a westerner, i speak with only a bit of knowledge on this subject) seeing as there are certain societal norms placed in japan in an effort to maintain synchronicity in a community this complacence is simply expected of him so he acts accordingly. which means that light is a perfect product of the circumstances he was raised under, and that he also cares about what others think, and he expects norms to be followed, and so on. heavy emphasis on the "expects", i mean it as in like. it's just second nature to him. i don't even think he's particularly aware of the flaws of the social etiquette he maintains, or that he dwells on them much.

something else that's cute about light is his self-isolative tendencies.. it's nothing concerning but he is a rather distant individual as i stated previously. it's funny, i think light's character can spark a conversation on just how nuanced the human mind really is. even with everything handed to him the very fact that it Was handed to him (key word also: handed) made way for another mass of frustrations that light decides to keep buried within his unconscious. with the discovery of the death note these frustrations Burst outward and work as the catalyst for some of the root motivators behind kira's plan. god help me and my long-winded sentences.

the very solution kira proposes is proof enough to me that this guy doesnt spend much time fleshing out deeper topics such as... how to "rid the world of all evil" or how such a thing is nearly inconceivable because of the lack of a tangible evil in the natural universe etc. etc. literally a few words in and i can already find the moral dilemma in this argument. and i mean sure it's normal for teenagers, especially teenagers in 2003, to have such extremist beliefs but it's different with light imo. because he is incapable of an open-mindedness broad enough to ever accept the idea that he *gasp* may just be wrong. in fact, he is so incapable of accepting this possibility that he makes murder out to be an act of good. because it's light doing it. and light is a very good boy. if he kills people, it's okay. somehow, he'll find a way to make it okay. it is impressive how much self awareness this guy lacks.

this is a really interesting side to him: he is honestly quite the emotionally avoidant individual. light's feelings are put through a hundred logical filters, he isn't the type to dwell on them as they simply are. it's really cool, the fact that he has unhealthy behaviors like this. in fact, i would usually begin to question if a person like light is mentally disordered in some way, or if the potential for such a problem to occur exists, but that clearly isn't the case. for most of the series he's the very definition of functional, and doesn't seem to take it to the extreme either. well, yes, his work is extreme, but they are within his limitations. save for, you know, being kira at some point.

i think the biggest exception to this idea that he doesn't spend much time delving into serious topics is takada, they did talk about kira a lot but i assume it was sort of an echo chamber situation considering they are both upper middle class teens/young adults with naïve underdeveloped world beliefs that are only further magnified by their similar upbringing . there are also those friends light makes jests with about kira when news about him first starts popping up.... but we see like... 6 panels of them? 3? actually come to think of it we don't see much of light having any meaningful conversation outside of kira-related matters at all. this can contribute to the characterization of him being a rather shallow person but that's subjective ofc.

just think about the picture this all paints... i wish i could find a better way to articulate what im thinking, because these ideas are very visual to me. it's grey, it's muddied, it's routine. auto-pilot, light lives on auto-pilot. up to when he found the death note his life could be considered rather meaningless despite his accomplishments. there was nothing to stimulate him. deep down what he wanted above all else was a real challenge, something to end the futility of his existence. and martyrdom is very meaningful. off this point i can go on a whole other tangent about the tragedy of him finding the note but. i will spare myself that lengthy ordeal.

anyways, i love this guy. i love his ability to twist an action as malignant as murdering tens of thousands of people into a self sacrificial, necessary course of action for the sake of the Entire World in the span of like... a few days (two weeks? three? i forget). to be fair tho this was also partly due to the fact that there juuuust so happened to be a god of death basically using lights life as bait to force him entertain it. which is also painfully enjoyable because it means that all the cards were against light in a way! because that god of death and its own motives are very much outside of lights control.

but yes, anyways, a very commendable "talent" indeed. just look at how desperate he is in the yotsuba arc as well. look at how long a time he was able to totally deny L's kira-power-hopping theory because it could be true. and if it was true, then light isn't the morally righteous person he believes himself to be. it wasn't until months later that he really sat down and tackled the truth of the matter. i could go on for days about how pitiful of a character yostuba light is. or well, i'm not sure if pitiful is the correct word seeing as he does make great efforts to prevail regardless of his situation, and that deserves respect... but that doesn't stop me from feeling a great deal of pity for him.

another great thing to think about in regards to light is... the people he is actually a victim to. which is a bit of a disorienting thought to me, mainly because it is brushed aside by ohba. he is a victim to misa's actions in some ways, he is Definitely a victim to L's actions, and to ryuk's most glaringly. light is basically ryuk's little plaything. i think i'm out of steam so i don't want to bother elaborating on those statements but i have a lot to say when it comes to that as well. by the way, i'm definitely not saying he's a poor soul who was hurt by the people around him and that he never did wrong. i think that's clear but i'm stating it just in case. this is especially true in regards to misa, there's no doubt that he was total trash to misa. misa was also trash to him. i actually quite like misa and light's relationship because of how insidious it is. they are both mutually parasitic in a way. not divorce but not love winning either. they don't love each other at all. they both use each other. yet another relationship of light's that is lacking of any good substance. a lot more sinister than what it seems at first glance. it's great.

that's all. x

[v-era-18]

Red Licorice

Chapter Four: Apparition

‘Billy never held me like that before, and he most definitely never looked at me the way he looked at her in that very moment,’ - Sidney Prescott

It was like that night before, only this time two more victims emerged, alive but their spirits crushed. The Prescott home was flooded with FBI agents whereas the police station was in chaos, mass reporters at every corner trying to get a glimpse of the new victims-the two girls that survived. It was funny, seeing the flashing lights outside with the shouts of questions and reporters spreading false information.

(Y/n) sat in the chair, slacked and unresponsive across from the two officers in the room, officers David Montana and Casandra Williams. The brown skinned woman pushed a cup of hot chocolate her way with a soft smile, she was being patient with the girl seeing as though it was a traumatizing situation. She stayed next to her side and escorted her personally to the police station making sure she was comfortable. The girl had lost both of her parents, her best friend and now was attacked by a possible serial killer, she needed a break.

Willams took in a deep breath before speaking, “(Y/n)- sweetheart- we need you to tell us what happened,” she crouched down beside her giving her hand a soft squeeze. It felt motherly and for a moment the girl's shoulders relaxed.

Silence.

“Did he-did the killer say something about Casey?”

No response.

“Come on (Y/n), we can't help you if you don't say anything,” It was officer Montana this time, an impatient expression on his face. The officer was the second one to read Casey’s diary, he had every right to believe that the girl was a suspect in this case. There were moments of doubt though, (Y/n) was a good girl- he could see it. Was being outed the tip of the iceberg or jealousy?

The afro haired girl looked through the window to Sidney who was currently talking to Tatum. They watched her eyes water slightly before sniffling once more, “It's all my fault..,”

Cassandra paused, “What? What's your fault sweetheart?”

“I split off from Sidney thinking I could outsmart him- I was wrong,” Fat tears rolled down her eyes as she tried to bring the blanket over her soldiers further, not wanting to see an ounce of her skin. “His-his hands…..the knife-”

The woman held the teens hands, noticing her breathing staring to labor, “Take your time. I know this must be hard for you,” Cassandra whispered, she scanned over the girls face and her shaking form before asking, “Did- did he possibly sexually-”

“No. That's the thing-he only injured my leg before leaving me on the sink- I- I don't understand why he didn't kill me.” It was a partial lie, the male did inappropriately touch her, but now that she thought about it the only threatening part about it was him cutting her leg and taking her underwear. She did stab him in the back-literally, it makes sense with him wanting payback.

A deep chuckle cut through the room shocking Willams, “David-are you fucking serious - ?”

“Cut the crap,” The male's voice was stern, walking over before slamming a stack of files on the desk, “No killer would just leave a witness alive. Meaning you must've known them or worked with them.”

(Y/n) shook in her seat, utter disbelief taking over her features, “What? No! He literally-”

“Casey would be rolling around in her grave if she heard the lies you were speaking,” A glare was thrown her way, “If she had one, we’re still examining her body. And the embalming process nearly seems impossible to do.”

The afro haired girl shook her head in disbelief , thinking she should've kept quiet after all, “I know it doesn't make sense! But I'm telling you, he honestly cut me before leaving the bathroom!”

Williams cocked her head in confusion, “What? The killer was with you in the bathroom? Billy Loomis came through Sidney's bedroom window, sweetheart, that doesn't make sense.”

“That's because it couldn't have been Billy-,”

“What's your relationship with Loomis,” Montana cut in.

The girl paused for a moment thinking carefully before speaking, “We’ve been friends since middle school, we don't hang out as often due to our own lives, but he's a good boyfriend to Sid I guess.”

“You guess?”

“Well,” She looked back through the window at Sidney, “Casey did tell me about him possibly cheating on Sid with another girl-didn't tell me who though. I thought it was a rumor.” It was true, although while analyzing Sidney and Billy’s relationship it did seem like it was missing something not to mention they haven't been dating for too long either. Billy started dating Sidney late July and took her out on small dates and even brought her with (Y/n) Stu and Casey. The only downside was that she was a fifth wheel noticing the couples holding each other's hands and whispering with one another. She left early much to the boy's dismay.

David sat down at the desk, placing an arm down with his cheek resting on his fist, “What about a romantic relationship?”

“Ro-romantic?” (Y/n) puzzled, “Me and Billy never dated.”

“Don't have to. You see men-especially boys- have a certain way of operating to get a woman's attention. They can even go to extreme messures-such as dating a friend or fucking a few girls in order to get it. To get you jealous-to get in your head.”

Her breath caught in her throat at what he was trying to get at, “Your wrong-Billy doesn't see me that way. I'm not special, Sidneys a whole package-just like Casey and Tatum-'' The afro heard stopped, a choked out sob, cutting through, “I’m not what he's looking for-”

“But you want him to-”

“No! I know what you're doing! But I honestly don't think Billy would kill Casey! I mean what reason would he have? My best friend barley hung out with him,”

The officers looked at eachother, a silent conversation going on. (Y/n) didn't like it, not one bit. Casey never hung out with Billy, as she always said he was weird-after his mother his attitude turned sour and the only ones who had patience to tolerate it was Stu and (Y/n). He wasn't a bad guy, just had a lot of baggage to deal with.

Montana finally looked back at her, “(Y/n) be honest with us. Did you love Casey?”

“More than the whole world. She-,” The girl's lips wobbled while speaking, “She was that beacon of light I needed each day. A big sister-a other half if you could tell.”

There was a pause.

“I don't mean as a friend or sister (Y/n),”

The girl cocked her head to the side, her face read confusion and sorrow. The two officers in the room only felt worse from the information they had collected.

“What-?”

“ARE YOU FUCKERS SERIOUS?!”

The officers heard the eruption of shouts and slams of desks heading in their direction. Williams immediately got in front of (Y/n) as the girl got up to see what's going on. Through the window she could see a red faced Billy struggling against the officers, throwing punches left and right as his father shouted for him to stop immediately.

But the Loomis boy was relentless, throwing another left hook at another officer after a taser was deployed. He screamed in pain, face twinsting in agony-eyes filled with fury at the situation; the male pulled out the protruding strings a trail of blood seeping his shirt. Shoving another officer out the way Billy made way towards the office, screaming his whole soul with the name that plagued his mind each night; (Y/n) (L/n)

“Billy, you stop this instant!” His father was chasing after him as the other officers tried to recover heading towards the room the girl was in.

Sidney and Tatum watched the scuffle with wide eyes. Upon them arriving at the station Billy practically begged his girlfriend to see him-to talk to him, pushing against officers in order to get to her. However, the boy was going the extra mile for someone he wasn’t even dating- someone he barely talked to or acknowledged. Punching, moving desks and screaming manically in order to get to their best friend.

The best friend who seemed to have all his flaming attention at the moment.

Billy stood in the doorway furious, his eyes filled with malice and rage before locking gaze with (Y/n). He scanned her form looking over her tear streaked face, to the way she covered herself completely with the blanket as she tried to make herself unnoticeable. She watched as the boy's face softened, stepping up to her, he reached out only for the female officer to step in between them.

He simply ignored her and focused on (Y/n), “Are you okay? Did he hurt you-?”

“Mr. Loomis, it is highly suggested you get away from the victim at this time.”

Billy cocked his head in annoyance, “She's my best friend, I'm not leaving till I make sure she's okay. Especially since you are here in this room questioning her over and over when she looks like she's about to have a mental breakdown.” He stepped forward once more, this time a plea leaving his lips, “Please let me see her, there's literally eyes everywhere, I wont do anything.”

The woman paused for a moment before responding, “If it's okay with Mrs (L/n), you're allowed to talk to her. But with me in the room-or nothing at all.”

Billy nodded, taking what he could get. He turned to the girl expectantly, awaiting her answer. It was a long shot, afterall the girl was traumatized from the recent events inside the house. She was supposed to emerge unscathed-shit-they didn't even know that she was even at the house. Sideny was supposed to be alone tonight-not drag their final girl into this shit.

The afro haired girl stared at him for a long moment before shuffling her feet, “It's fine. Billy didn't do anything wrong to me.” It was barely audible by the boy and the officer heard just fine.

Loomis was by her side in a flash, grabbing her face in both hands trying to gain his bearings-the taser and scuffle was starting to take a bit of a toll on his body. The way he was looking at her spoke volumes to the many people in the office-David including who had a smug look on his face before heading out to grab his partner some ice for his black eye.

The boy knows how to throw a punch.

“You okay precious? I just now heard you were in the house, I swear if I had known-,” Billy cut off noticing the fat welt of tears starting up again, his heart nearly breaking seeing how scared she was from tonight. Mentally cursing Stu for his error, the boy quickly pulled her into his arms. Sobs racked through the girl's body seconds at a time, it felt so long since (Y/n) had cried against him like this.

The last time Billy could remember a similar moment was when they were in eighth grade. The girl was wearing a sweater with beat up ripped overalls, her knee and chin were bleeding. Stu was walking beside her with a black eye, he knew immediately the culprit had been dealt with. But that didn’t make them any less angry with that fact (Y/n) got hurt, mentally and physically.

“I-I’m I’m sorry-,”

“Don’t apologize to me, precious, take all the time you need,” Yeah. Billy was gonna let Stu have it when he got out of here, “I need you to remember to control your breathing. You can do that for me right?”

She nodded into his chest, trying to even out her breaths from what Stu had taught her when they were younger. Billy's hands rubbed up and down her back affectionately, whispering encouraging words in her ears as she continued to let tears fall. Once her shakes and breaths were steady, she proceeded to look up at her distant friend. The boy's eyes were scanning her face, using his hands to gently wipe away all the rest of the tears from her face. His hands were soft, no calluses or rough patches-much different from the man who rubbed up and down her thigh.

(Y/n) took a gulp of air, “It wasn't you.”

A pause.

“What?” Billy asked.

“It wasn't you,” The girl replied shakily, “H-his hands had calluses. Your hands are smooth with no bumps, just slightly dry. I managed to stab him in the shoulder-b-but you're not bleeding anywhere.”

Officer Williams eyes widened a bit before grabbing a notepad writing the confession down. Billy noticed this a bit unnerved but remained focused on the girl in front of him, gazing down at the bandaged cut on her leg. It was obvious the cut was deep, Stu wasn't forgiving about getting stabbed in the shoulder no matter how much he loved her. It honestly was conflicting with the position they were in, especially since they thought she would be home safe from the mess.

Fuck. Fuck. FUCK. FUCK!

Billy just pulled the girl back in his arms, his heart beating faster as the guilt started sinking in. Never did he ever want the girl in his mess. it wasn't her fault of what that bitch did to his family-to his life. (Y/n) was the light in his life, even if he didn't show it in the best ways. He never engaged in a normal relationship due to the fact it would mess up the plan with Sidney. The girl wasn't the type to go out with her friends' ex's-so was the afro haired in his arms. Either way, the beginning of the relationship would be a cluster of a mess for what he wanted to accomplish.

“Do you know where you left the knife sweetheart?”

The girl directed her attention to the officer, grabbing Billy’s hand for encouragement, “He took it. He made sure to grab it out of the bathtub before leaving.”

Billy acknowledged that Stu wasn’t a complete dumbass, he knew that the knife was evidence due to the blood from the stab in his shoulder. Slow props to him. Still pissed at the fact (Y/n) got hurt. But this was Stu he was talking about, even though he was the more patient one out of the two of them-he had his limits. The girl pushed him over the edge with her actions.

“Do you remember anything else-“

“Are you trying to cause her to panic more?” Billy snapped.

Officer Williams backed up slightly at the boy's tone, she did realize her error a bit. The girl did just go through a lot tonight, and was a lot more traumatized than Prescott. But it was her job to get as most information out of the victim as she can.

“I apologize, but sometimes it’s best to question the victims while their memory is still fresh with the situation rather than questioning later,”

“She needs support right now-not an interrogation,” Billy tutted simply, “Have you called her aunt?” It was plaguing the back of his mind where her aunt was at his current moment. Gia was protective, she barely let Stu and Billy hang around (Y/n) alone without adult supervision. It wasn’t till they turned seventeen that she was allowed more outside the house.

The prison is home to what (Y/n) called it.

“Miss (L/n) is unfortunately at home waiting for her niece's arrival. We thought it'd be safer if she stayed at home due to the mass crowd of reporters outside.” The officer replied patiently.

“Take her home then!” Billy turned back to (Y/n), searching her face filled with discomfort, “Do you want to go home precious?”

The girl paused for a moment just staring at her friend's face, she pursued her lips together before nodding. She needed the comfort of her room.

Sheriff Burke and Dewy watched the two teens talk through the window, before glancing back towards Sidney and Tatum who seemed stunned and lost for words. The Prescott girl couldn't take her eyes off her boyfriend who fought uniforms in order to get to her best friend. He was still embracing her, whispering things in her ear; things he should've been doing for her - his girlfriend. Not (Y/n).

“Do we have anything else to report?” The Sheriff questioned out of earshot.

Dewey shook his head solemnly, “That ghost mask is sold both at Krogers and Walmart. Neither or keep purchase records.” Which would only make their case harder with finding suspects.

“What about the cellular phone bill?”

“They’re pulling Loomis’ account. But it'll be morning before we see something,” Riley looked back towards the window, Billy was still holding the afro haired girl together. They were standing now and both speaking to officer Williams, but he did catch the frustration and worry written on the boy's face. “You think he did it? (Y/n) said it was impossible due to the killer being with her most of the time he was there. It contradicts Sidney's story with how Loomis entered through the window with murderous intent.”

The Sheriff let out a sigh, pinching the bridge of his nose, “Twenty years ago I would've said not a chance. But kids these days….damn if I know,”

Silence filled the space once the other office door opened leading out (Y/n), Billy, and Officer Willaims in toe. Two uniforms came forward to take the boy away, he simply gave his best friend's hand a reassuring squeeze before allowing them to take him. He didn't bother to look his girlfriend's way either which set her nerves on edge.

Tatum strolled up to Dewey with Sidney not too far behind, “Hey..Dewey. Can we go now?”

“Hold up a sec,” Dewey replied softly. He didn't want to give his sister any special treatment but with the way things are right now, letting up on the teens wouldn’t hurt.

Sheriff Burke sent a questioning look to the Deputy, “She's staying with you?” He gestured to Sidney.

“We haven't located her dad yet,” He replied.

Tatum saw Sidney shuffle her feet in the corner of her eye, “God dammit Dewey!”

Dewey turned to his sister with a red face, “What did mama tell you? When I wear this badge you treat me like a man of the law!”

“I'm sorry, Deputy Dewey-boy but we're ready to leave,” Tatum shot her gaze to (Y/n) who was cowering against the wall, “We all are.” Her brother followed her gaze and immediately understood what she was trying to say.

He let out a sad sigh before turning to the afro haired girl, “(Y/n), ready to go home sweetheart?”

The girl nodded back in response, Officer Willaims gave the girl her card just in case she remembers anything else about tonight. In turn she sent a grateful smile even if it was strained, before following Dewey and the girls to the other exit.

“Are you okay?” Sidney whispers softly.

The girl turned her head to her and shook her head, “No, but I’m trying my best. I just need-I just need some time,”

They finally reached the side door of the police station. Upon opening the door the deputy tried to shield the girls from the impending flashing lights and reporters crowding around the front entrance.

Dewey turned to the three of them, “I'll get the car. You three wait here,” the male took off into the parking lot. It was a good thing the parking lot wasn't too crowded since the reporters and cameraman were mainly focused on the main entrance at the moment. Leaving the girls alone to gain their bearings-or so they thought.

The infamous reporter Gale Weathers and her cameraman made an appearance out of the darkness. The illuminated light caused (Y/n) to squint grabbing onto Sidney's sweater to save face, the sight looked pitiful.

“Hello Sidney,” The woman smiled in greeting, causing the Prescott girl to downturn her lips considerably. She then turned to the afro haired girl, scanning her bloodshot eyes to the exposed bandaged thigh peeking from the slit of the blanket draped over her shoulders, “That looks like a nasty scare you got there (Y/n). Are you alright?”

The two girls said nothing in response, simply staring; one cold, one filled with anxiety. Just like Sid, (Y/n) had her run in with Weathers before, only the interview was when the girl was in her tweens. The hot news around that time was her parents' case being closed due to the lack of evidence from that night of the murder. Aunt Gia had found out the reporter had bought the girl a case of horror movies in exchange for a brief talk about her parents. (Y/n) being a naive girl didn't understand at the time that not all adults had good intentions the hard way; Gia had threatened to sue Gale if she released her book to the public on her parents murder.

Something Sidney's father should have done.

“What happened tonight?” Gale tried once more, pointing the microphone in the girl's direction.

The action caused Tatum to step in between the girls and the reporter, a harsh glare taking on her features. “They're not answering any questions. Just leave us alone okay?”

“It's okay, Tatum,” Sidney stepped forward, a coy smirk on her lips, “She's just doing her job. Right Gale?”

“Yes, that's right,” The woman agreed, her smile faltering a bit not expecting the girl's tone to turn a bit hostile towards her.

Dewey pulls up with the squad car just in time as the mass of reporters start to roll in near the alley seeing the commotion. It would be a bit attention grabbing seeing a police car rolling up on the side of the police station; especially if it meant the killer would be taken away or escorted away from the public eye.

“How's the book?” The girl sneered, she was trying to keep calm, but the way her body shook and her face growing warm it was obvious that she was struggling. (Y/n) had scooted closer to the other two girls as more reporters swarmed in

“It’ll be out later this year,”

“I'll make sure to look for it.”

“And I'll make sure to burn them.” (Y/n) muttered loud enough for them to hear.

Gale turned to (Y/n), “And I'll make sure to send a special copy for your case as well (Y/n). Although it won't be published there are copies that have been printed-”

The reporter didn't get a chance to finish her sentence before Sidney reeled back her arm before smashing it unexpectedly in Gale's face. A shock of gasps and shouts rang out around them from the hit the Prescott girl had landed. The woman fell on the pavement along with Kenny the cameraman, she was clutching her eye breathing deeply-glaring at the group of girls in front of her.

(Y/n) peered over Sidney's shoulder, a faint smile on her lips that matched the girl's satisfied look, “Damn Sid. Nice Hit!”

☿

Sidney sat on the bed staring at the floral wallpaper of the guest room at the Reily home. Tatum was currently in the bathroom finishing up with her face mask, she offered to do hers but it was the least of her worries. Afterall, who could bare to get glammed up after nearly dying from a serial killer.

Her thoughts traveled back to one of her best friends; (Y/n) (L/n). Sideny had met her during their English class in the tenth grade; she could still remember the girl's horrific story she told the class for her project. She earned a one hundred of course whereas Sidney earned a simple eighty-seven for creativity and effort about mermaids.

Prescott had asked the girl for advice to do better for the next project, and the rest was history. Sure there were moments of disagreements ,but they were always light hearted. They never actually held anything against one another like Ttaum and Casey did, sometimes they would have fun on their own and it would be the best time without the other two. It was also the year she met Billy by association; at the time she wasn't interested in the trouble maker. Her dad would've never approved of someone who stayed in detention, and here she was dating him.

If you would even call it that.

After tonight she felt like she was intruding on what was already there between Billy and (Y/n). and she didn't blame her friend on it either, only on Billy since he was the one who pursued her in the first place. Why would he ask her to be his girlfriend if he already had feelings for (Y/n)?

A rebound? Moving on? Rejection? Whatever it was, it left her mind in a tizzy, and her heart aching with rewinding the image of the embrace they both shared in the office.

“God, I loved It!” Tatum emerged from the hallway, jumping and landing back first on the second twin bed with a laugh, “‘I'll send you a copy’ Bam! Bitch went down. ‘Ill send you a copy’ Bam! Sid-SuperBitch!”

Dewey stepped into the doorway with a bag of ice in hand, “Thought you might want some ice for that right hook.” Sidney took the ice in thanks, placing it along her throbbing knuckles, “I'll be right next door. Try and get some sleep.”

As if getting sleep was going to be the easiest thing tonight.

“Any word on my dad?” Sidney asked him.

“Not yet, but we're looking, “The male stepped out of the room, “If you need anything…”

“Yeah yeah yeah…” Tatum waved him off, adding the flick of the wrist for emphasis. Her brother only smiled in response, closing the bedroom door to give the girls their privacy.

“Just another sleepover at the Rileys,” Sidney muttered laying down on her back.

Tatum smiled, “Just like old times, aint it?”

Sidney's face turned grim before rolling on her side away from Tatum, “No, nothings like it used to be.” She didn't want to bring the mood down, but her words held their weight. Nothing was going to be the same after tonight. And no amount of face masks gossip or snickering was going to change that.

Sidney and (Y/n) almost died tonight.

And she still couldn't wrap her head around the fact the masked man was in the bathroom with (Y/n) while Billy had entered her bedroom window. She felt horrible for accusing her own boyfriend after her friend's testimony came to light, but the way her gut was screaming something was wrong-the convenience,the timing was just off and alarming. The worst part was he wouldn't even look at her-he gave all his attention to (y/n) and completely did a one eighty in comparison to the way he was begging for his life earlier to talk to her.

A telephone rings off into the distance causing the girl to grip the pillow tighter.

“Do you really think Billy did it?” Tatum said gently, “It contradicts the scar on (Y/n)’s leg and her interaction with that freak of a killer.”

“He was there, Tatum,” Sidney muttered, “Something seemed so off about the convenience of it all! The killer corners (Y/n) in the bathroom just as my boyfriend conveniently comes in through the window trying to rescue me?” The girl sat up in the bed, brows creased together, “Somethings wrong here.”

Tatum hummed thinking things over, “I knew the guy was too perfect when (Y/n) introduced him to us. He was destined to have a flaw,” the blonde locked eyes with her friend hesitantly, “Are we not going to talk about what we saw happening between them?”

Sidney’s stomach lurched as the image swarmed her mind for a second, “About what? About a friend comforting the other?”

The girl thought if she denied what she saw a little longer she would be able to deny the reality of their situation; that her supposed boyfriend who she's been sneaking behind her dads back was truly in love with her best friend instead of her.

‘Billy never held me like that before, and he most definitely never looked at me the way he looked at her in that very moment.’

She was the other woman. (Y/n) was the endgame-the wife-the girl who should've been sitting at the table during dinner. Not her.

It should hurt more than it did, but why didn't it? Why wasn't she crying?

“Sid,” Tatum whispered softly, “You know what Billy did in order to get to her. Hell, he didn't throw left and right hooks in order to get to you-that one step was enough-”

“Do we have to talk about this right now?”

“No,” Her friend shook her head, “But it will have to be discussed eventually. You and (Y/n) are both good girls, talking it out will probably be a breeze if it's just the two of you.”

Tatum obviously learned her lesson from that night when they were thrown out of the (L/n) residence by Casey. She needed to learn not every girl was out to get her or challenge her the way she thought they did, in school it was a survivors instinct. Not to mention her insecurities while tripping over herself to get Stus attention since eighth grade. So when she figured it was (Y/n)’s fault that the male gaze was traveling elsewhere she let her mind get the best of her.

It was one of the nights she still regrets till this day. She doesn't deserve to be called her friend. Not as much as Casey did.

Sideny nodded with a sigh, “You right for once-,”

“For once-?!”

“I need to talk to (Y/n) about Billy, alone,” The girl finished softly, “I can only hope the truth comes out, and if it's true that they both have feelings for eachother then well-”

A knock on the door interrupts the girl's sentence, Mrs Riley opens the door with a smile, her graying hair framed her face nicely while her eyes held warmth gazing at the two girls. “Telephone, dear”

“Who is it?” Asked Tatum.

“It's for Sid,” The mother responded softly.

This caught the girls attention, a glimmer of hope shone in Sidney's eyes. “My dad?”

Mrs Riley paused and shook her head sadly, Tatum frowned in response, “Take a message,”

Sidney shook her head getting up from the bed, “It's alright. I'll get it,” The girl had another strong hope that it was from (Y/n) needing a bit of reassurance from tonight. They barely exchanged words in the car on the way to her home, the girl would shiver and sniff occasionally, breaking her heart. She blamed herself-she was the one who invited her to her home with no adult supervision.

While Sidney takes off down the hall Mrs Riley looks at her daughter jerking her head in the girl's direction, “How is she?” she whispered.

Tatum shrugged a frown playing on her lips. In an event like this all they could do was be observant and offer support, there will never be a guide or possible instruction to help someone who was almost murdered.

Sideny grabbed the phone from the table at the end of the hall, “Hello?”

“Hello Sidney.”

The girl froze the voice over the phone slithering through her-invading her. Her mouth hung open as her entire body weakened, the image of the ghostfaced killer flashed through her mind along with the crippled state of her friend with a large bandage wrapped around her thigh.

“Nooooo..” She cries out gaining the attention of the two other women in the house. Tatum sprinted down the hall to her best friend's side, watching the girl's shoulders bounce up and down in fear with her face contorted in mental anguish.

“Poor Billy-Boyfriend. An innocent guy doesn't stand a chance with you.” The male taunted over the phone, “At least he had my (Y/n) there to testify his innocence.”

“Leave Me Alone!” Sideny shouted her words together, she was in such hysterics she did not process the last part in his statement about her friend.

“Looks like you fingered the wrong guy….again,”

“Who are you? What the fuck do you want?”

“Hang up Sid,” Tatum hissed, she grabbed her friend's shoulder trying to ease the girl off the phone. If it was the killer then she shouldn't be talking to them as long as she was.

“Don’t worry. You'll find out soon enough. I promise,” The killer snickered into the phone, “I do hope (Y/n) won't be around you next time. My precious has already lost someone dear to her, losing you would be the tip of the iceberg.” The way the male spoke over the phone about her friend sent shivers down her spine; it was nauseating thinking about how the girl was left alone in the bathroom with this creep for god knows how long.

The girl let out a sob, “She’s traumatized, you fucker! You killed someone that was practically her sister, now you're claiming she's dear to you?” Sidney looked around at the windows trying to see in the dark of night to see if thers any glimpse of a white mask, “You better leave her the fuck alone, you hear me? Who the fuck do you think you are?”

Mrs Riley ran to the bedroom door practically begging for her son's attention-banging against the door, “Dewey! Dewey!”

“This is gonna be fun, Sidney,” The killer growled, “It'll be just like old times.”

The line goes dead, leaving Sidney frozen with the phone in hand. Tatum stood off to the side stunned with the revelation, chills going down her spine from the voice she overheard. This was the voice of the man that attacked her best friends? The one that killed Casey?

The silence was cut through with Dewey barrelling out of his room with a gun in hand, he didn't even have time to put pants on, his pizza print underwear on full display, “What? What? What's happening?”

“Really Dewey?” Momma Riley shook her head, gently grabbing the phone from Sidney’s hands-she had a strong grip but with some gentle encouragement they let go. The girl had her lips parted slightly, tears blooming up to her eyes till they loosely spilled over.

Why? Why was she targeted? Who did she piss off so much to be on someone's hit list?

“Let's get you to bed dear,” The older woman whispered before turning back to her son, “Dewey, get your men on the phone and tell them what just happened! They need to be working faster.”

Dewey nodded, he picked the phone up examining it a bit, almost expecting the killer to call again before placing it back down. It was true they did need to hurry. But how much time did they truly have left?

☿

Stu winched as he reached the outside window of the (L/n) residence, inside he could hear the faint cries of the afro haired girl causing his stomach to do flips. He thought back to his actions in the Prescott house and Billy’s harsh tone over the phone; the Loomis boy had practically hissed at him to fix his mistake. Don’t get him wrong, a part of himself feels as though the cut on the thigh was an even edge to the stab to his shoulder. It was hard explaining to the nurses in the hospital on how it happened, not the smartest idea but he couldn't afford to bleed out. Especially since Billy was arrested he couldn't help patch him up.

He could still see the absolute terror on her face along with black nightie loose on her figure. When he and Billy had watched the girl from the trees and side of the house it was practically difficult to sneak around with their boners practically wanting to jump out of their pants. Hence why he took the initiative of seduction a bit in the bathroom, the way (Y/n) looked back up at him-helpless-tears pooling her brown eyes begging for mercy.

Stu wanted to see that expression again on her face.

It was twisted, he knew-to get aroused at the sight-but damn did she look so good. It felt as though they were in a horror porno of some kind. The helpless final girl reaches her limit, unable to run from her doom, the killer giving the ultimatum of sex in exchange for her life. It was a hopeless dream, but he wanted it to be a reality. Billy would hopefully entertain the idea one day once they were all on the same page.

Snapping off the girls window lock was easy, it was a good thing he and Billy practiced for their kills earlier or else it was going to be loud. He made sure to open the window slowly, paying attention to the bed on the other side of the room in the far left corner. From what the male noticed it hasn't changed that much in comparison to when they were kids. The pictures were the same-some added still in the proper place on the mirror, her shoes lined up near her closet mostly consisting of sneakers, and lonely Mr. Creep was on the floor. His left foot was still missing but was sewed together to prevent further ‘stuffing blood’ to spill out.

Stu still had the bunny’s foot in his room in a box of memories underneath his bed. It was an accident that happened, he simply went too far with his teasing and it resulted in a tug of war ripping the fragile stuffed animal apart. He visionised the girl's anguished face from that day; Her mother had gifted her that bear when she was four, and Stu had ripped off its lucky left foot.

Gia had deescalated the situation quickly and said that it might be a stroke of luck instead. ‘All rabbits have a lucky left foot,’ This caused his best friend to think things over; after a bunch of apologies and a long hug she asked him to keep it, saying that she wanted her ‘Stu Stu’ to have the best luck he could ever have throughout High School.

But how much luck did that foot give him really? Luck of blood on his hands? Obsession? A dark desire for all things twisted and morally gray?

Either way, it wasn't like God could talk to him personally and give him an ultimatum to stop. If a voice did speak to him he might listen-maybe his sins would be forgiven. But would the people who made him this way get punished?

He should have never gone to that stupid party.

The boy eased over to the bed, his footsteps were light, no cracks or groans gave way underneath the old carpets floor. Upon getting closer to the girl he took notice of how she was curled up all the way underneath the blankets- a self defense mechanism. ‘If I can't see the monster, they can't see me,”. She was too easy to read, and Stu missed reading her like this.

It only made him want to protect her from the world himself.

Stu started to pull the covers gently only for the girl to shoot up arm reeling back to land a hit. The male was much faster-he grabbed the incoming fist along with her other arm, “Easy, Final girl,” His voice hushed, “It's only me. It's me, Stu Stu. I'm here, he's not going to hurt you. I’m Here.”

It took a long moment before the girl's face went from fear and dejection-to relaxed and tearful. He loosened the grip on her arms and brought her to a gentle embrace instead, rubbing up and down the girl's back as sobs racked through her body. Stu continued to rock her back and forth settling her down, her words of panic and grief were muffled and watery. It only made his heart contort more. This wasn't part of the plan. Shit, this isn't even his plan originally to begin with; it was Billy’s.

When did this all start? Why and when did everything get so fucked up?

[seeinginthedark]

Notes created during my spiritual psychosis.

So we are at a point in our history of humanity where everybody has a phenomenal amount of ancestors and diverse bloodlines.

We have shitloads more ancestors than our ancestors did 200 years ago, 2000 years ago, 2 million years ago. And what happens to a human who’s like a hybrid of all these ancestral bloodlines and DNA coding?

It means that a lot of us technically have evolved or should be evolving to a point where we are magical heroes with magical abilities and a high understanding of spiritual laws. And know how to make things happen that are impossible. This is the sacredness of our existence. Our evolution. It’s our birthright.

“They’ve” (depending on who you think “they” are) made it very hard for us to realise this , through their social programming tactics. To hinder our evolution process. “They” designed the system in such a clever way to oppress us as much as possible making it virtually impossible for the mythical heroes in the population to be born and thrive. “They” thought introducing the birth control pill was a good measure but those pills make women go crazy that’s why that birth control idea of theirs doesn’t work . “They” can’t defeat us.

But we are at a point in history where we are really in a state of constant confusion and delusion and mass ignorance. And programmed. Programmed to the extent that “they’re” happy with. “They” designed this social programming centuries ago. Programmers that come from all different sectors of time and space, dimensions, planets.

We can channel the old gods and goddesses in our bodies. We can summon them with our hearts. They hear us. They send out a call to us when they think we’re ready to accept them. We have to be a brave self aware humans to be able to unlock and navigate in this maze of life. We can go within ourselves and unlock pathways and storylines.

We used to listen to our elders when they passed down the wisdom, the old ways and the creation stories. They used their imagination to fill in the blanks. And taught the younger generation about life and why we’re here, the meaning of life and how we were created. Things to watch out for. How to be a moral person. We used to love that way of receiving information. “They” know that about us. That’s why “they” invented Hollywood. So that “they” could capture our imagination and steer it in a way that is more beneficial for “them”. And what’s more beneficial for “them” is shit for us.

Look at the state of us. We’re right where “they” want us. Divided. Disconnected. Confused. Isolated. Distrusting. Paranoid. Mentally unwell. Self worth issues. Image issues. Body issues. Gender issues. Every type of god damned issue! We’ve been tricked out of our survival instincts. Taking us out of nature and away from our home lands where our bloodlines are buried. With this un- natural colonialism, industrialism, capitalism and globalisation.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the story of Pandora’s Box lately. The box that once opened unleashed all the evils onto humanity. And I’ve been thinking about the hope fairy at the bottom of the box. Hope theory, I’m calling it. It’s a dangerous thing, hope. You have to take a risk. Have to have faith. You have to believe that things are going to get better. Be a light in the darkness. That’s us. Surviving in a world that’s becoming more and more immoral, senseless and detached. I know that some of you are reading this and understand exactly what I’m saying. We are the last hope. We are the hope fairy at the bottom of Pandora’s box. When everything seems hopeless and pointless or terrible and painful and endless suffering, we carry on, we keep going. Keep trying. Keep fighting. Keep hoping. Keep praying. Keep believing. Never give up! We might as well be all that is left of the light. The same light that “they” have been trying to crush and destroy for eons. Again and again and again. And “they” even created a matrix-timeloop-simulation-reality to keep us all in so that “they” can just keep re-hashing it over and over and over again because “they’re” sick in the head, perverted, and want to watch it as content ! You know , like a reality show or The Truman Show, where we are Truman.

So that’s why, we give them a good show. We’re being brave and fearless. I don’t know about you but I’m going to keep fighting evil until there isn’t a body operating for me to fight in.

I sometimes get so dark thinking about all this that I often wonder if hope itself is a delusion. If that makes me delusional, fine. I would rather be this way than evil, corrupted, perverted and exploitative which is what “they’re” grooming us for, ultimately losing our humanity.

#teamhuman #planetearth #goapeshitinthematrix #notafucknstarseed

[warlock2k]

Disney's Poltergeist

In the year 2000, Disney had planned to release their first theatrical horror film for mature audiences. This was a fairly big step for the company, as they'd hoped to usher in a new era by making movies strictly for adults; alongside their usual family-friendly material, of course. On paper, it was a smart move. Disney was a household name well before the '90s rolled around, but they were mainly acknowledged for their animated material, so they wanted to surprise people with newer concepts. However, despite the corporate giant's hopeful mindset, the execution of this idea was a disaster.

According to documentation, written by my own accord, Disney wanted to try something "bold" with their iconic poster boy: Mickey Mouse. No, not by making him the protagonist of the film, but the antagonist instead. They'd planned for this version of Mickey to be a doppelgänger of sorts, acting as more of an influence than a physical entity.

I'm sure you can see the clear nonsense here.

Disney's thought process during this endeavor was a major risk, but they went all out nonetheless. Typically, this process is understandable. If you're trying to pitch a new idea, you need to make a good first impression. However, the executives leading the project clearly weren't thinking straight. Using a lighthearted character like Mickey Mouse as a villain is risky, because most of the time, people won't take it seriously. If the movie was planned to be comedic, then I'm sure Mickey being a slapstick villain would've been passable, but the final product wasn't a comedy in any sense of the word.

Let's rewind back to 1999, specifically the 13th of August, when a test screening for a film called "White Noise" took place. Invitations were handed out to people chosen by the cast and crew, up until the auditorium was full. Various family members and close friends were treated to the end result of strenuous efforts and the occasional sleepless night. This was a big deal for everyone involved in the film's production, so they wanted a packed audience. However, as you're already aware, the event didn't go as planned. There was one screening for the film, and that was more than enough.

Moving forward, I'll be citing the aforementioned documentation word-for-word. Personally, I find it pointless to attempt a summary of the situation. Everything described is exactly what happened. However, before I begin citing said documentation, I want to clarify that the contents of "White Noise" will not be shared. I apologize if you were expecting an in-depth description, but as you read the rest of this article, you'll understand why the information can't be relayed. "Fortunately", I do remember the aftermath very clearly. The following is a printed excerpt from the notebook I used to document my experience in '99. Please read at your own risk, as this may trigger those who suffer from poor mental health.

-

"'White Noise' test screening aftermath"

"After the film had ended, the auditorium went dark, and quickly fell silent. Most of us were in a strong state of shock. Others had understandably fainted, due to the horrors they'd witnessed. After a moment of silence, a truly unpredictable event shook the audience to its core.

In the midst of mass disturbance, the door to the nearby emergency exit began to drift open. Its slow progression caused an overbearing sense of dread. Once again, no one made a sound. It seemed as if this dread was strong enough to restrain even the quietest response. This undeniably sounds impossible, but we knew that something was silencing us by force, and it didn't hesitate to show itself.

When the door had reached the wall behind it, a warm light engulfed the passage, leading to what seemed like a void. It was in this moment when a somewhat uncanny voice came through the speakers, calling for patrons to leave the theater due to an electrical emergency. With haste, several people rushed out of the auditorium, fearing the worst. Despite so many people leaving, some of us stayed behind, with a sinking feeling that something was very wrong. Why would an emergency alert be broadcasted through the speakers connected to the projector? This exact thought sparked unease, and we were right to feel that way.

Once the last person walked through the door, the enveloping light disappeared in a split-second, followed by silence that made breathing sound like wailing. Breaking the silence, a faint sound made itself apparent from outside the room. Growing in volume, it inched closer to the doorway, and started to sound like a broken music box. A dreadful sound to be sure, but its source was far worse.

Shrouded in darkness, a Mickey Mouse costume sauntered into the room, and froze in front of the doorway.

With the music now piercingly loud, I covered my ears to muffle the sound. It was hard to think straight, but I still tried to get a better look at the source of the sound. At first, I thought it was just some jackass trying to prank us. However, the more I looked, the more I couldn't possibly try to explain what I was seeing. The costume was entirely white, as if it were repainted to resemble a ghost. Its stance was unnerving, seemingly frozen in time, without a single twitch or shudder. By the time I'd processed what I could see, I noticed the music changing.

Once a corrupted assortment of notes, it seamlessly shifted into sobs and screams. It was unbearable to listen to, but I couldn't do anything except wait it out. No one dared to move, but it's not like there was anything else to be done. The exit was being blocked by something with unknown intent, and none of us were willing to move from our seats. Surely someone would come to help eventually, so we just waited. Yet, despite my hopeful mindset throughout the chaos, no one came.

I couldn't tell how much time had passed.

Around ten minutes?

Around thirty minutes?

Around an hour?

The constant noise made it impossible to consider a reasonable time frame. I felt like I was going insane, until I had an even stranger feeling. Being exposed to those cries for so long, I started figuring out who they belonged to. The patrons who disappeared into the light never did leave the theater, did they? After all, I didn't hear another door open or close. Maybe, just maybe, the light was the door, and the costume was on the other side. This thought seemed far too outlandish to be true, and I hoped the noise was just scrambling my brain, until I noticed the costume staring at me. I was undoubtedly right about my revelation, and I feared the worst for it.

Petrified, I expected the costume to move toward me, but it didn't. It just stared at me, and after some time, the wailing faded. I uncovered my ears, expecting to hear the other patrons do something, but I couldn't hear anything at all. My first thought was the fear of having gone deaf, until I turned around to check on everyone, and was met with more terror than before.

The auditorium was empty.

I turned back around, expecting to see the costume remaining where it stood, but it disappeared as well. I began to panic, unable to process any aspect of the situation. A nightmare turned into something much worse, and I was the only one there to experience it. I went to cover my face, but I couldn't move my hands. I couldn't feel them either. Looking down to see why, I saw nothing. I didn't see my hands, I didn't see my arms, nor my legs or feet. My body was gone. I looked back up, and my body was suspended in mid-air. The projector lit up, and a pulsating mass of conjoined faces filled the screen. They looked like the other patrons, with eyes darting in random directions every second. Not a second later, my body started clawing at itself, tearing flesh from bone and ripping out nerve endings like ingrown hairs. I tried to scream but nothing came out. I noticed the faces staring at me now, morphing into the shape of the white costume. Without a second to process anything, the costume propelled itself out of the screen and engulfed my body. I couldn't handle it anymore, and I blacked out, waking up in a hospital bed with hardly any memory of the film's contents.

In the following months, the event became a highly questionable rumor. Victims began to show their trauma one after the other, often resulting in suicides or missing persons cases, while known survivors were likely hospitalized. Thankfully, there are individuals alongside myself who have learned to cope with their trauma and losses, but insult was eventually added to injury. Due to insufficient evidence, the test screening was labeled as mass hysteria, with the entire scenario being denied by both Disney and the theater. In addition, no lawsuits against Disney were ever publicized, likely due to being snuffed out, but that notion is theoretical. As for the movie itself, don't hold your breath when it comes to finding undeniable proof. Cameras were prohibited during the screening, and promptly confiscated before entering the auditorium. The entire ordeal was practically scraped from history, resulting in nothing but painful memories for those of us who are still here to speak up.

In conclusion, "White Noise" became a ghost story, with no sound evidence to back up its existence. Those who dealt with their trauma had attempted to spread the word, but it was treated like an off-color joke. This harsh reality showed that nothing could prove the event's existence, nor the toll it took on us. We have to live with being part of an urban legend, keeping our involvement private for the sake of ridicule. While others can enjoy Disney's current movies and shows, any mention of the corporation is an immediate reminder of what transpired, and the image of Mickey Mouse has ultimately become revolting."

-

As you can see, the event became incredibly deranged near the end. While it may seem improbable, the psychotic aspects of the event occured after I slipped into a state of unconsciousness. The part where I described the costume's presence did indeed happen, but the effects of its influence were purely a result of a stress-induced nightmare. CCTV footage of the auditorium revealed the costume's existence, but the remaining patrons and I had passed out from the aggression of the noise before it entered the room. Strangely, the footage wasn't revealed to me until recently, when I decided to start digging into the grave of this whole ordeal. Somehow, I perceived the costume while unconscious, and documented it as though I was awake to see it. However, the rather chaotic aspects of my experience occurred solely while I was knocked out. The costume was in the auditorium for around ten to fifteen minutes before walking out. It couldn't be seen by the cameras outside the room, and the individuals who left after the emergency alert couldn't be seen either. They completely vanished after walking through the doorway, and were never found.

Disney's "White Noise" was an unforgettable experience for the wrong reasons, and the aftermath turned Disney into an unforgivable violator.

[intersex-support]

Hello! I've been nervous to send in an ask for a while now. I've recently discovered that I'm not hormonally intersex despite how much I thought I was, I was born "pseudo-male" and was operated on as an infant to appear female. This has given me a feeling of distress that I haven't been able to shake. It all started when I was reading articles about IGM and people who found out they were intersex and had these surgeries done to them. The further I got into it the more worried I got because it was familiar. Constant doctors visits as a child, having your privates being deeply examined and pictures being taken, I was told by my parents that those things were normal they are just making sure there's nothing wrong that I am functional and all kids go through this. What I didn't know is the wrong already happened. I started to look deeper, stunts sexual pleasure? Got that. Causes nerve pain? Check. Infertility? Found that out when I tried to donate eggs for rent money they also told me that my body just wasn't "capable". I remember all throughout my childhood how much my parents forced me to be feminine, the skirts I was required to put on, the dresses that were for every Sunday, the plethora of pink and just pink. I'm terrified to confront my parents because these are people who believe that trans people should face a mass genocide, but I already know they know and they kept it from me and they've silently used it as a reason to abuse and neglect me as a child. After finding this out so much more makes sense, how much my brother's births are celebrated vs mine, how much they are appreciated vs me, I can now put a label to the face of disgust they make when I wear anything but feminine clothes. I can hear what they think in their heads 'went through the whole process and you still aren't a girl what a waste'

I just wanted to share. I've been suspicious of being intersex for a few years now but I had always thought it was pcos. I got my big confirmation that it wasn't just a few days ago and I'm trying to heal trying not to feel like if I didn't dig my nose into it all then it wouldn't feel violating and I wouldn't have this dread. I want to be closer to my community and I want to find someone like me but that's another thing I'm struggling with because I know there's not many like me who have found out. I just want someone to talk to, someone who knows and who can tell me I'm not alone that this isn't a horror I'm facing alone that they lived through it as well and that I can keep living through it and that I can be proud of my body. I can say all these things to myself and they mean nothing.

Thank you, for reading, answering, even just considering and deleting this ask. I love your blog and I cannot express enough how much it means to me. How much I need this sense of community that you provide.

Hi anon <3

Thank you so much for sharing your story with us. I'm so sorry that you had to go through IGM, uncomfortable and traumatic doctors appointments, and dealing with your family's judgements. You deserved so much better and any rage, grief, and anxiety that you're feeling right now is so valid. It can be such a big shock to finally get the confirmation and then start to look back through your whole life, putting the pieces together and looking at past events through a new light. You're not overreacting and you deserve all the time, space, and support you need to process this new understanding. And you are absolutely not alone. There are mods on this blog who have survived IGM, many of us who have survived other forms of correctional medical abuse and we really get what it's like to find this out and deal with the aftereffects. I know for me, there's been certain times during my intersex journey where I found out new information and it felt like my world had ended, and I couldn't understand how the rest of the world just kept moving when it felt like everything I had ever understood about myself was different. I thought I would never be able to get to a point where I could feel anything about being intersex besides dread, shame, and fear. And there's still a lot of shame and anger that I carry--but that's not the whole story for me anymore. There are days when I can say intersex is beautiful and actually believe it, days when I can feel proud of my intersex body and it's not a lie.

Anon, I'm sending so, so much love and solidarity your way. Nothing that happened to you was your fault--not the IGM, not the doctors appointments, not your parents' reactions and not doing more research and finding out all this about yourself. I really believe that you will survive this and get through this, and that there is always that room for hope that someday, you will get to a point where all of this feels less raw and painful. That doesn't mean that you need to pretend that everything's okay right now if it doesn't feel okay, but just know that being intersex and surviving IGM and medical abuse does not mean that you are destined to feel this amount of overwhelming grief for all of your life.

It's absolutely okay if you don't feel ready to reach out to intersex community yet, but if that is something you want, I want to share some options for you. If you want to join the intersex discord server we run, send an ask off anon and I will send you a link. If you're under 30, Ispace is a Facebook group for intersex people to connect. Interconnect is also an option that has a support group, and also conferences to meet up with other intersex people in person. I'm also going to link this collection of personal stories from other intersex people that was really helpful when I read it early in my intersex journey, but I do want to give a warning that many of them talk about medical abuse and surgery and I know that can be overwhelming.

We're here for you, anon, and please feel to reach out again if you need anything, even if it's just to vent.

Best wishes 💜💛💜

-Mod E

[theeclecticwitchblog240]

Sacred Spaces are a Tool for Manifesting

Let's talk about sacred spaces, and how they are useful. Besides the obvious relief and connection, an altar offers from the outside world, sacred spaces are so helpful when manifesting the life you want. I'm a lazy witch, but if there is one place to not skip corners--it is in your morning mental ritual. A strong morning ritual to calibrate your entire spiritual through your physical body is the foundation for the best outcome to your day. Becoming consistent with my practice wasn't easy (I told you I'm a lazy witch!), but starting with small, consistent steps made it become second nature. And once you ENJOY something, it's no longer a chore, it's a healthy habit.

Our Environment Mirrors Our Mind

Typically, an altar can also be a witch's magickal crafting table. If you are like me and love all the different types of flowers, herbs, oils, crystals, scrying tools, oracle cards, candles, reference materials, etc...you can imagine how cluttered the space can become. I have learned, a witch's altar reflects how focused or cluttered the witch's magick is.

[Note: If you are into chaos magick, take this blog with a grain of salt. Use what is helpful, and disregard what doesn't work for you.]

I used to have a giant altar filled with all my magickal supplies, but I noticed it distracted me from my focus. Much like the inside of my brain, there were too many possibilities for me to pick what I was working on that day! I have ADHD and I needed to adjust. This sounds slightly familiar to my career life as well haha.

When I moved into my new apartment, I loved the outline of an ornate fireplace (although without a pit). I thought what a perfect spot to make a sacred space in my house. I started storing most magickal items to take out as I needed them, and only keep out my the necessities: a silver platter; pictures or statues of deities, ancestors, or guides; a candle holder; the current oil I'm using for the candle; my tarot cards; my grimoire and dream journal; and a silver bell. Anything else I need to dress the candle, prepare a spell, or complete a ritual comes from my broom closet (my walk-in closet where I keep all my magickal items, clothes, shoes, and art supplies.)

Classically Condition Your Mindset

Every morning I turn on Solfeggio Frequencies (to clear the space and classically condition my body into relaxing), light my incense to smoke-cleanse the area, dress and light the candle, and ring the shiny bell three times. I call to my guides, give gratitude, hold a conversation, meditate and journal on any dreams I had the night before, and if the moment calls for it--I read some tarot.

If you aren't a strong dreamer, a manifestation journal works well for this too. Making a routine with your guides is a marvelous manner in which to build rapport. If you come from a religion that uses strict traditions, such as lighting candles during prayer at evening mass, you are already familiar with this process. I also like to clean the space and myself before. To me, this is a sign of reverence and respect. If your space is in the woods and you are connecting to a primal archetype, maybe that would be counter-productive. Use your intuition. Make the ritual your own.

Everything Starts in the Mental Body

Since I have started "flexing" on my morning routine, grounding, and resetting my mental and emotional body, I have noticed feeling stronger in my physical body and day-to-day life. I feel stronger and eager to do the small steps that lead to big goals. And when I don't feel excited or I feel tired, I ask for help from my guides to feel up to the task at hand or the acceptance of pause, if I need emotional, mental, or physical rest. Remember, rest is a non-negotiable part of manifesting.

I am not the author, just sharing the information

Blessed be!

[nymp21]

Their Eternity

Universe : Mass Effect Trilogy.

Pairing : Female Shepard / Liara T’Soni.

Summary : Just after the reaper defeat, Shepard’s body is found. She is alive, but the path of healing is hard. Tranksfully Liara is here to help, and carry her. And, how it could go wrong now the reaper are dead ?

Warnings : smut in futur chapters, injuries, PTSD, violence, gun.

———————————————————————

Chapter 1 : Alive.

Warnings : injuries, hospital, comatose.

The nil. The black silence surronding her is deafening, too heavy. Is that it ? Death ? It’s not that bad. Peace. It’s been too long since she has experienced it. Has she ever knew that calm before ? No. Until now all was chaos, cries, suffering and war. Right now all of it is over ! Finally ! But something is missing in this tranquility. A pair of piercing blue eyes embracing her soul. A mind touching her own, a heart melting with her pulse, a voice calming her cries. A smell enchanting all her senses. A lover who is her everything. Her lover. Her world. Liara.

Alive… It’s painful to be alive, she thinks. Maybe maybe it’s better not to be. This agony is unbearrable, it would be worth it if…

« By the Goddess Shepard ! »

There it is. The voice that she is craving for. Her voice. Liara… but she is still not here, or too far to be reach. She wants to touch her, even if all she can see is black, all she can touch is the ashes beyond her fingers, or what it left of her fingers. She is hearing them tough. The cries of her lover.

« Please don’t go ! Stay with me, be strong my love ! I need you… »

I am here, She wants to say. I am here, I don’t leave you and I won’t leave you. I am

alive.

God yes she is in too much pain to be dead for sure.

« Doctor Tsoni, you have to stay away, we need to operate her… please let us do our job. »

« It’s okay Liara. They got her… we have found her. She is here. They got her. »

« I don’t know if I can Garrus… i can’t stand losing her again. »

« I know… »

And then again, the blackout.

…

It’s a constant bip that wakes her up. The pain is still here, less virulant, but still irrading her whole being. Then she feels it, fingers interlaced with hers. Slowly, she opens her eyes. Blinded with the bright light she doesn’t discern where she is first, however she saw the blue figure across the white of the walls.

« Shepard ! »

« Liara… » she says with a sore voice as she tries to reach her lover’s cheek with her finger, but she can’t move, she is too weak.

« Shhh don’t move my love. You are still badly wounded. »

« What… what happened. The reaper ? Are they ? »

« You did it honey. They are gone. You did it. You won.»

Liara squeezes her hand, her eyes are wet with tears. Happy tears. But Shepard reads more in them : fear, sadness, relief, love. All these emotions the asari went through during past hours, days, months ? For how long has she been in comatose ? She doesn’t know. Shepard can say she is badly injured. The concern she has also read in Liara’s eyes says enough.

« How bad is it ? » she dares do ask.

Liara doesn’t answer first, she seems to hesitate, or to compose herself maybe. But the commandant deserves to know and Liara must think the same because she then tells : « You’ve been burnt. All of your body was calcined, thanksfully the surgery did well. But… until you are up, we don’t know if you can walk again. Your spinal column has been injured…The doctors aren’t sure. »

Shepard process the terrible information. Is that why she is unable to move her hand ? What will she become if she can’t…

Liara caresses her cheek with her thumb.

« It will be okay I promise… we will get through this together. You are a hero. My hero. You will win this battle too. »

Shepard looks at her. God ! how much she loves Liara ! Her soulmate. Her whole universe. She is her rock. She always manages to comfort her to support her. She is indredible. Even in the most dark of the darkness she is the light that guides her soul and heart. How can she be so lucky ?

«  I know i will win. You know why ? »

« Because you are my stubborn sexy commander ? »

The human chuccles. : «  Well sexy… not with all the scars. » Then she looks at her bondmate in her eyes to say : « No, because you are with me. The love of my life. I want to be with you. I want to cherish you, marry you, and have plenty of blue babbies with you and… »

She is cut by Liara’lips on hers. Their kiss is soft but passionate. The asari puts all her sadness all the pain she has been through, all the anger she felt against this world which can’t let her lover alone and in peace, which lets Shepard get hurt, get almost killed again, wich has almost take her away from her again. She puts all her love in that kiss, all her joy to have Shepard at her sides. Then, when they can’t breathe anymore, they separate, but still have their forhead together, eyes close.

« I thought you were dead. »

« I know… but I’m here. I won’t leave you. »

« I remember you promised that before. » says Liara with a poor smile.

« And ? I didn’t leave you, did I ? »

« you’re right. You came back the first time. »

The door opens and few people enter in the bright room. Shepard hears them before she sees them. The strong path of a Krogan, and a breath throug a Quarian mask.

« Shepard ! You are awake ! » says the technicist. « I knew you would make it ! »

« You did better than a Krogan would do ! And that’s a thing ! » Wrex chuckles as he punches gently shepard’s shoulder, althought she winces.

« Careful Wrex ! » Says Liara, putting a protecting hand on her lover’s arms, as if it could stop the pain. If she would be honest, the commander thinks it helped. « She is still weak. »

« Nosense ! » replies the Krogan « Shepard will never be weak. Her strenght is so present that she could be a krogan! »

« Yeah, but I think she would be prettier as a krogan. » remarks Garrus « with all the scars you got, Shepard, you could have many suitors on Tutchenka. »

The commander laughs a little, coughs, winced and then says : « Ladies love scars. Do I look so bad ? »

« Not as bad as usual. » responds the Turrian with a smirk. That’s what she has answered him, when he has been shot on Omega.

« You’ll always be my beautiful commander. » says Liara with a loving smile. « And it’s true : ladies love scars and I love you. »

« I love you too Liara. »

They sink into each other’s eyes perfectly, the green and the blue. The water and the tree. Liara was her ocean of harmony, of peace and love. Shepard was Liara ´s bark. They could spend eternity there, in each other’s soul. How bad the commander wanted to embrace eternity with the asari right now…

« I think we should let Shepard rest. » declares Tali with a smile in her voice. She seems to be far away from the space Liara and her have created, the commander don’t even catch the words, she is too blissed by her lover’s eyes. She doesn’t even see the others leave the room. Then she closes her eyes as the Asari caresses her face.

« Rest my love. I am watching you. You are going to get through this. WE are going to get you through this, I promise. »

And Shepard believes her. Nothing bad could happen, in her boundmatés embrace.

[black-mesa-slut-voice]

YOUR BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO CLASSIC HEADCRAB DOMESTICATION

Click below to start reading this comprehensive document!

Note: All of this is written purely for fun by an aspiring zoologist who simply loves genetics and speculative biology! This is only mildly inspired by source material, and isn’t completely indicative of canon. A lot of these things are just speculative or made up for fun!

If you want to use any of this information for your own headcanons, OCs, or fanart, you are 100% welcome to use it, though I would like to be credited!

If you would like to see more things based on these headcanons, ocs, or simply more things or art I’ve done on this subject, check out my #headcrabguide tag on my blog!

HISTORY

In the wake of the 7 hour war and the proceeding Combine invasion, there was a large amount of casualties. However, not all of these casualties were humans. Animals took a lot of hits as well, and in the remaining 20 years before liberation, the resulting environmental tolls as well as continued extermination caused this sixth mass extinction- arguably just as bad or worse than the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs. Nearly 75% of land animals and over 68% of marine animals went extinct in this time frame. 

The most notable toll was on human-domesticated animals. Because of the Combine influence, any animal that was reliant on human care was almost immediately wiped out, both purposefully and inadvertently as humans were no longer available to care for them. All livestock species and most pet species were completely eliminated, leaving humans with few, if no animal companions.

Humans, however, are a very social species, and are naturals at befriending things that are arguably dangerous. Wolves, cats, and even less common creatures such as foxes, snakes, and spiders were kept and tamed and bred for companionship and work despite their danger. When the Combine forces were driven off and humans were once again allowed to practice the art of domestication, they were left with very few options. Some birds, a few select felines, insects, and alien species were nearly all they had to work with. 

And so, work they did. 

Headcrabs, despite their use as a weapon by the Combine, were one of the first alien species to actually be domesticated. It is theorized that this is because a number of factors- first is that the one of the leading rebellion leaders, Dr. Isaac Kleiner, actually possessed one name “Lamarr”, putting the idea in many people’s heads that they could be tamed and kept. The second was their abundance. They were easy to find and acquire, and despite their danger, could easily be captured. Third, they are very easy to selectively breed and mass produce. Lastly, it was quickly discovered that headcrabs are much more intelligent and social than previously anticipated. 

In the wild of their home planet, Xen, headcrabs actually had a very complex social system and niche. They formed large groups- called casts- that staked out swathes of territory. The leader of the group was called a gonarch. The gonarch was a large, heavily mutated headcrab that was the sole reproducer, similar to that of queen bees or ants. Though it was large, fast, and capable of defending itself, it lost it’s ability to easily feed itself, as it’s mouth became much smaller to make room for the reproductive sac. 

Because of that, the rest of the cast was tasked with hunting and feeding the gonarch in exchange for protection and reproduction. The smaller, albeit still mature headcrabs would go out, and attempt to hunt down anything it could- smaller things were eaten or fed to the gonarch, and larger things that had the right shaped heads could be ‘coupled’ with, fusing the headcrab to it’s host and creating a gonome. Though gonomes were more powerful and capable of hunting larger prey and defending the rest of the cast, in turn, they lost their ability to reproduce. Thus, most casts had one gonarch, several gonomes, and many crabs.

Gonomes could come in any species that was large enough for a headcrab to couple with- and is perhaps why headcrabs were actually so easy to tame. With the right social encouragement, a headcrab can easily recognize humans and other larger creatures as being part of their cast, and regard them in the same way they would a gonome- with social respect and friendliness. 

With a few generations of selective breeding, headcrabs quickly became much more docile due to their natural instinct of accepting oddly-shaped creatures as part of their cast.

CARE AND HANDLING

Despite the generations of breeding leading to a much more friendly, domesticated headcrab, care must still be exercised with them in regards to handling. They are very similar to cats in the fact that, despite their domestication, they can still be wild at nature and will often hunt smaller creatures, and are capable of harming someone if provoked. 

Also similar to cats are their sense of community. Like mentioned, headcrabs can be trained and raised to see certain people- usually a household- as part of their cast. However, this presents a problem with strangers entering their ‘territory’. If not properly socialized, headcrabs can be quite aggressive to anyone they don’t recognize as part of their cast. This is beneficial for those who don’t expect anyone, or want a ‘guard dog’ type of pet- but can be detrimental to those who have friends or family that may come to visit. 

Though headcrabs lack eyes, they are not completely blind. They have subdermal eyes located near the base of their front legs, which can detect lights and shapes. That, combined with their ability to ‘taste’ the air with specialized glands, are how they recognize others and their environment. 

If you plan on having someone visit, it may be best to have something that smells like the visitor on hand for a few weeks beforehand, so your headcrab can become used to their scent. 

For headcrabs that don’t mind activity, you can also take your headcrabs on walks or trips into public to get them accustomed to having strange scents and people around them, leading them to be less aggressive, even at home. Of course, it is always a good idea to have proper restraint for any flighty, aggressive, or even headcrabs that have never been socialized in public before. 

Another good way to prevent injury is physical modification. For headcrabs that simply are rowdy or aggressive- or even just as a precaution for the most well behaved crab- there are several things you can do to prevent injury.

When headcrabs first started being tamed, the most common method of modification was ‘debeaking’. Despite it’s name, it’s actually a misnomer, as headcrabs don’t have beaks, only radial rings and fangs. ‘Debeaking’ was the process of removing all 18 fangs on the underside of the crab surgically, usually when young. This prevents them from growing back and completely eliminates the risk of being bitten.

However, this practice was quickly upturned under the argument of it being inhumane. While the headcrab often doesn’t suffer because of this, as their fangs are only used for gripping prey and not eating it- if done incorrectly, it can be painful in the long run.

One of the slightly more common methods are ‘fang caps’. Similar to claw caps for cats, fang caps are a small, plastic cap that can be fitted over the fangs of a headcrab. With a small amount of specialty glue, they become long-lasting solutions for injury prevention with no physical harm to your crab. Despite the seemingly perfect upsides, there are also precautions you must take. It is possible for a fang cap to become loose or fall off either through being applied incorrectly or simply from wear and tear. Thus, you must always monitor the state of the caps to ensure there are no accidents.

The third option, and the least used, is clipping. Though it does not remove the whole fang, clipping refers to filing down/clipping each fang individually so it’s not sharp. However, this is generally not only difficult, but it’s actually uncomfortable for the crab, and they can grow back fairly quickly.

For headcrabs that are properly either defanged or capped, there is little to no risk of being bitten. If a properly cared for headcrab does attack or try to mount your head, it can simply be pulled off, as there’s nothing allowing it to grip onto it’s ‘prey’.

However, you must still be mindful of the long, sharp front claws. Unlike the fangs, these do not have nerves until very deep in- and thus, can be slightly trimmed and filed with no discomfort on your crab’s end. 

FEEDING

Headcrabs- despite their predatory nature- are not only social, but omnivores as well. This fact comes as a surprise to some people who look at them and compare them to things such as spiders. 

Indeed, though a headcrab is most definitely a predator, they’re more opportunistic than anything. They will often eat nearly anything they wander across, including small creatures, decaying corpses, fruits, fungi, algaes and lichens, and very occasionally some vegetables and leafy matter. 

Most of what they eat is less dependent on taste, and more of their actual physical ability to eat it. Because of their hyper specialized mouthparts, they are unable to chew. Instead, they scrape at the soft parts of whatever is fitted into their mouth with a specialized, rough ring around the inner mouth fitted with a bunch of extremely small ‘teeth’, similar to that of a lamprey. Thus, they can only eat what they can scrape off with that, and cannot chew bones or anything hard or with too much roughage. It’s non uncommon to see a headcrab take something into it’s mouth, such as a small bone or rock covered in lichen- ‘suck’ it clean, and spit it back out. 

Thus, headcrabs can be fed nearly anything that they can fit into their mouth. Of course, that is within reason- it’s always good to look up what is or isn’t toxic to your crab, as well as feed them specialty diets to make sure they get all of the proper nutrients they need without over or underfeeding.

The most common way to feed is with commercial ‘crabcakes’- rounded nutrient blocks resembling a large piece of kibble, that comes in several sizes to fit in any crab’s mouth. Once given, a headcrab will take about a few hours to eat it, and don’t need to be fed again for another few days, or up to a week, depending on activity and how many supplemental treats are given in between. Though it’s perfectly fine to feed them only cakes or only prepared food, the most enriching and balanced option is feeding the cakes once a week, with smaller, daily ‘treats’ of different varieties being given. 

Some of these treats can include:

Pieces of meat (any type, cooked or raw)

Small, whole prey (commercially prepared mice or chicks)

Whole or sliced fruits (apple, pear, etc)

Tubers (potato, sweet potato, carrot)

Hard vegetables / stalks (chopped celery, broccoli, etc)

Mushrooms (anything edible by humans is edible for your crab)

As a special treat, sometimes you can replace a cake with a large ‘prey’ item that would also take several hours to eat. Some examples are:

Large whole prey (Whole birds, large chunks of meat, antlion grubs, etc) 

Large fruits (Melons of any type are a favorite)

Large vegetables (heads of cabbage, heads of broccoli, etc)

Of course, any meat-based items are going to be chosen over non-meat items if offered.

BREEDING

Breeding headcrabs, unlike many other creatures, is generally not something that can be done unless you are a committed hobbyist. Namely because normal headcrabs- even if they are mature- are incapable of breeding whatsoever. The only type of headcrab that can reproduce are the gonarch, the heads of the cast. All headcrabs are biologically ‘male’ until they transform into a gonarch, or lost reproductive organs entirely as a gonome.

Originally a gonarch was produced when there simply wasn’t a gonarch in the group. The largest, strongest individual would then begin to grow and mutate, similar to how many fishes can mutate into a larger or opposite gender if needed. 

However, this ability was removed from the headcrab- along with the ability to create proper gonomes- by the combine when they were being used as weapons. Though headcrabs were efficient at taking care of humans, anything larger and more dangerous threated to get out of hand; the combine didn’t want them reproducing out of control and becoming another threat. Incidentally, this is also when their eyes became subdermal as part of a side effect of gene altering.

Because of this, there are only two ways to breed a headcrab. One, and the most common, is to create an artificial gonarch sack. Blueprints were taken from the combine after their defeat that allowed humans to replicate the same technology that allowed them to mass-produce them before. 

Artificial gonarch sacs are similar to ‘ghosts hearts’ where they are pseudo-biological, and accept any DNA put into it. Thus, you can insert DNA from any crab to become the ‘gonarch’ or ‘female’ DNA, and either get the smaller male to ‘mount’ the artificial gonarch in a specialized area, or do the male portion artificially as well.

The artificial womb also lets you control how many offspring are produced, as normally a gonarch can produce hundreds of crabs from each successful mating- too many, often, to properly take care of.

Much less common is the artificial transformation of a true gonarch. 

Any headcrab can be stimulated to turn into a gonarch with the injection of artificial hormones that trigger the process. It will then take a few weeks to a few months for the crab to transform.

However, this is not recommended for a number of reasons. 

First, they are large. They need much more than a house for their territory- they often need several acres, and if it’s deemed unsuitable for a nest, she will refuse to breed and become agitated. 

Second, they are very territorial, aggressive, and dominant. If you were a gonome to them before, you still are- which means, in headcrab ranks, she is now above you, socially. Even the most docile crab becomes an aggressive, protective creature who will defend her young and territory with her life. Combine that with their massive size, they are extremely dangerous, even to a professional. 

Third, it is very hard to regulate the exact breeding. She will only accept other headcrabs from her cast, and if she deems them unfit, will promptly kill them. And even once they are bred, they can produce several hundred offspring- of which it is very hard to take care of, and even harder to take away from her due to her protective nature. 

Lastly, she cannot feed by herself. She requires being fed specialized food through specialized apparatus- and a lot of it. 

It’s expensive, costly, and overall dangerous. Thus, artificial gonarch sacs are generally the go-to. 

COLORS AND PATTERNS

Just like with previous animals that were domesticated, such as cats, dogs, and goldfish, after a few generations of breeding they began to exhibit unique colors and patterns. After enough time, unique, recognized colors, coats, and even breeds came to be official recognized. 

It was made even easier because breeding for exact genes was made simple by means of artificial sacs. Thus, headcrabs come in a vast array of colors and patterns, some even unique to certain subspecies.

The most common colors are pale, albeit warm shades of tans, yellows, and browns. In more rare cases, they can take a more green, purple, or red tint. 

Tan, ash, sand, and flaxen were the first recognized distinct colors that were bred onto headcrabs. Chocolate and umber quickly arose from the original tan, with rose following not far behind. When rose was cross-bred back with umber, it resulted in lilac.

Golden arose when sand crabs were bred for vibrancy, and sorrel was the result of a cross of golden and umber. 

Flaxen gave way to wheat, and then swamp when bred for the cooler, greenish mutation. 

Patterns, too, were something that quickly came about, not long after the first distinct colors began to be recognized. 

The first patterns that arose were speckled, striped, and Siamese (named after the similar patterned cat).

Fawned came from a recessive mutation that reversed the pigment cells that caused the spotting pattern on speckled crabs, making them appear lighter instead of darker. Pearled arose when it was cross-bred back with speckled- which usually resulted in speckled, but sometimes in pearled. Because fawned is recessive, the only way to get fawned is to breed with another fawned or a pearled. Breeding a fawned and a speckled results in only speckled or pearled.

Snowshoe, similarly, rose from the same recessive mutation, though this time with Siamese. Similar rules apply; though an ‘in between’ similar to pearled does not exist, as they simply neutral each other out. 

Capped rose from Siamese, though it looks similar to bullseye. Bullseye actually came from a very hyper specific mutation of smoked, and is one of the most rare patterns, much moreso than capped or smoked.

Striped crabs are what were bred into both smoke and ticked- with smoke being an increased level of pigment, and ticked being a decreased level. 

Marbled is another very rare pattern with dubious origins. Some say it’s a standalone mutation, though others say it originated with smoke, bullseye, and even speckled. However, none of these are confirmed.

Of course, all of the patterns and colors on the charts above are not every single example- there are many more sub-variations of colors and patterns of each type, these are just the main, conformed and recognized ones. They also don’t include any non-recognized crossbreeds or mixes of colors or patterns that aren’t an established record.

UNIQUE BREEDS

Even moreso than recognized colors and patterns are unique breeds of crabs. Though, again, not even breed pictured above are all of them, these are just some of the more noteworthy examples. 

Truthfully, nearly all crabs are going to be your standard breed, and not one of the ones pictured. Unless it is either obvious or has had a genetics test, it is safe to assume your crab is a standard.

Two of the most recognized sub-species are the racer and the false poison. These were both bred to be inspired by the combine-created species, the “fast” headcrab and the poison headcrab. Their target audience both began for people who liked them in theory or as an aesthetic, but lacked the funds, ability, or want to deal with the much more dangerous and aggressive ‘true’ versions.

Because they were intended for war, fast headcrabs and poison headcrabs lack almost all social aspects that standards do, are much more aggressive, flighty, wild, and dangerous. Not to mention to potent neurotoxin than poison headcrabs excrete, and the vicious teeth of fast headcrabs. Nowadays theyre both often bred for show or work, but we aren’t focused on them here, simply the standard crab.

Pancakes are some of the harder to recognized subspecies, due to their generally unassuming appearance. They’re named so because they’re typically ‘flatter’ than the normal headcrab, tend to range in the golden-sandy color range, and are described as being ‘soft and sweet’. True to that, that is the original purpose that pancakes were bred for- they’re small, lazy, hyper-friendly headcrabs that almost never attempt to show any signs of aggression unless severely pushed. They’re great for households with kids, or simply people who want a slightly less high-maintenance crab.

They can come in nearly any pattern and color, but again, tend to be in the warm, golden-yellow tone range.

Hunchbacks are a much more narrow breed, since it's recessive, and tend to be not as desirable for no other fact than their appearance. Still, that are amazingly unique. Because of the rarer, recessive nature, they generally only swamp/wheat/greenish colors, and only come in a narrower range of patterns, including speckled, smoked, striped, ticked, and marbled. Though, because of the fact that speckled exist, pearled and fawned theoretically could too- there’s simply yet to be documented evidence of a successful fawned mutation.

Nubbed is another breed caused by a rare mutation that has been successfully bred into a small population. It’s very easy to spot because of it; the mutation clearly causing their front claws to be short, or ‘nubbed’. Nubbed can come in any color or pattern, though they tend to follow the standard/less extreme patterns and colors. This is because it was because of a mutation that actually happened really early in domestication, before a lot of colors or patterns were even bred, and is a recessive mutation making it hard to breed with rarer colors and patterns. 

Saddlehorns are an extremly unique and very specialized breed. They’re definitely recognizable by their concave back and the nub near the base of their front claws. They also have a pattern that's unique to only saddlehorns- which is the 'cow spotted' pattern. However, it isn’t just random spots. Though they do have large splotches, they always have a band going around their middle as well. They can come in any pale color, and the markings are usually in the brown to dark, almost black range.

Bunin or “Bubbleheads” are actually a relative of hunchbacks, and not saddlehorns, despite the head similarity. They tend to follow the same rules as hunchbacks, but instead of greenish tones, they come in golds, yellows and warm-orange tones. There has also been confirmed cases of fawned and pearled bubbleheads.

Volkov are a common, albeit specific breed that's bred for it's ferocity, but also it's loyalty. They’re often easy to mistake for a standard, and combined with their relative commonality make them hard to identify to the untrained eye. They appear like standard headcrabs, except they have a slight hunch to them. Their real difference lies in the personality. 

As mentioned, they’re loyal and very attentive to the rest of their cast, but have a ferocity and sharp hunting ability that comes with it’s protectiveness. They’re often used as pest control or ‘guard dogs’.  This makes them suitable for those jobs, but poor choices for people who live in high population areas or have lots of visitors. 

They generally come in browns and blacks, but can truthfully come in any color. They can come in MOST patterns- all but smoked and bullseye.

Batas are another weird breed with a unique patterns, which is the squiggly markings centralized on their rump. They only really come in variations of the color pictured, golds, flaxens, and sandy. Similar to pancakes, they're known for being very complacent with handling, making them good for those with kids or for shows, where the more prominent the markings the better they judge. The difference is the fact that the whole breed itself is prone to many health problems, as it’s very recessive and commonly inbred. Purebreds are pretty expensive.

Silkies or “thinskins” are a breed that came from a mutation that caused their skin to be extremely thin. They're questionable morally to keep, since they're prone to getting wounded very easily, even by their own fangs and claws. Because of this, they have to be debeaked and/or declawed, or must have fang caps at all times and their front claws filed regularly, les they hurt themselves.

They also generally have a myriad of other health problems because of the inbreeding needed to get them, and are prone to several diseases, skin problems, and increased chance of injury. 

They generally dont have any patterns, but come in most all colors. However, because of their thin skin, their yellow blood tends to show through, giving any color a yellow tint- and appearing outright yellow on lighter coats.

Munchkins aren’t as much of a breed as they are a mutation, and can come in any color or pattern because of it. There can even be munchkins of other breeds.

Hookclaws are a very newly recognized breed, and still have yet to be fully explored. So far, they can come in pretty much any color, but they never have any patterns aside from a heavy gradient on their back. More research is being done to try and breed patterns onto them.  

SUMMARY

Despite their nefarious beginnings, headcrabs quickly arose as a very common, domesticated companion in the post-combine years. Though they aren’t for everybody, they make a fascinating, unique pet for those willing to put in the work and research. Or, even if you aren’t interested in adoption; the history and genetics are a fascinating, competitive, and potentially lucrative field for any young entrepreneur. 

So whether you’re looking for a new companion, someone to guard the house while you’re away, or simply a new career in genetics, headcrabs are an amazing species to look into.

[violettelueur]

— JUJUTSU KAISEN EPISODE ONE || RYOMEN SUKUNA

↳ featuring : itadori yuji + fushiguro megumi + gojo satoru + ryomen sukuna from jujutsu kaisen

↳ warnings : mentions of blood + mention of killing + mention of mass murder (word massacres is mentioned) + mention of death + swearing and EXTREME grammar issues

↳ form : story

↳ published : 07 february

↳ pronouns : she/her

↳ word count : 3.8k

↳ synopsis : within the jujutsu world, there were three famous clans to be aware of, the Kamo clan, Zenin clan and the Gojo clan. However, unknown to many sorcerers there was one last family that was known to be apart of the three, only for them to disappear after the golden era leading some to speculate that they had died in battle after the sealing of ryomen sukuna, but....

↳ next episode : for myself

↳ barista’s notes : to be honest with you guys, this little imagine here is such a mess and i had fun writing it since it have me an excuse to watch the first and a tiny bit of episodes one and two of jujutsu kaisen again ʕ￫ᴥ￩　ʔ 

BEFORE READING, I NEED YOU TO BE AWARE OF THIS:

1. all the ‘curse spells’ mentioned in this are related to Bleach (their use of Kido - credits go to: Tite Kubo) so these ain’t my original ideas since i started this at like 11pm on a saturday night. 

2. there is some dialogue missing since this is from your perspective as a reader and not Fushiguro’s or Itadori’s 

3. as you all know, the storyline isn’t mine, it belongs to Gege Akutami 

4. this whole thing might be confusing and please don’t expect a part two because i will do it when i am ready or feel like i can at the right time ʕ ᵒ ᴥ ᵒʔ 

5. i don’t know, if i am going to add this onto my masterlist since this was just for fun to be honest!

thank you so much for taking the time to read this and i hope you enjoy your free cup of classic black coffee (jujutsu kaisen) ʕ•ᴥ•ʔﾉ♡

“L/N, are you going to come with us?”

Looking away from the window you were viewing out from, you paused sipping from your carton of orange juice before turning your head to quickly discover two female students looking at you with anticipation in their eyes only for you to look at them in some sort of confusion. 

“Come one, don’t tell me you didn’t hear about it? Coach Takagi and Itadori are competing!” one of the girls complained, obviously slightly annoyed at your oblivious nature to the news that was going around the school at this moment in time.

“Competing for?” you then questioned, as you stood straight from your leaning position causing the other female student to then rapidly answer by saying, “Coach is trying to requite Itadori for the nationals, so if he wins then itadori has to join the track club to compete!” 

‘Huh? What a drag’

“So do you wanna come to the track field with us to see who is going to win?” the two students asked again in a desperate tone, leading you to look at the window you were previously looking from to see the exact location that they had stated. “I’ll watch from here, it has a higher and wider view, so I would have a better look” you replied, before pointing at the track field that was on the other side of the glass causing the students to look out before nodding.

“We really want to see it up close, so we’ll see you tomorrow yeah?” the first female student asked, leading you to smile and nod at them before seeing them rapidly take off to the track field trying to make sure they arrived before the competition started.

Turning your smile back into a straight line, you turn back to the window that you were looking through before being interrupted while placing your drink’s straw between your lips letting the sweet but citrusy juice flow down your throat. Admiring the view, you decided to let your eyes roam free for a bit to see if there was anything interesting to observe before the supposed ‘competition’ started, which then led you to pause at the sight of the closed rugby field down below.

Coming out of the ground was a horrific creature with four arms before climbing up the pole revealing its large teeth leading you to stare at it with complete boredom as you then mentally took a quick note to exorcise it later when the school closed. However, what also came into your sights was a single male student down before staring at the same curse you were observing causing you to continue analysing the situation.

‘Can he see it? I don’t recall a student here having any curse energy’

From what you could tell, the student had black erratic hair with his hands in his pocket but from what you could see that other’s couldn’t, there was a faint but noticeable aura of curse energy surrounding his body generating a feeling of curiosity but nervousness within your stomach as you place your empty carton away from your lips. Suddenly, the male turned around leading you to have somewhat a clearer view of him, only to discover that he also had a pair of emerald eyes which then made you come to the conclusion that he wasn’t a student from the school. How could he? You could tell this ‘student’, and yourself was the same age meaning you would have at least seen him once or twice down the hallways and there was no new information about a student coming in, if there was, it would have been a buzz.

‘Don’t tell me one of the clans managed to find out about me?’ you anxious thought, leading you to take a short step back ensuring this sorcerer didn’t have a vivid view of you when you did of him. Hearing some cheering, you turned your head to the other side to find a small crowd forming with a metal ball being flung as two students ran out to measure the length between the dip of the sand from the coach indicating to you that the competition had started.

“14 metres!’ the one student shouted, leading to a round of applause from the audience spectating the event. However, from what your ears were managing to pick up, there were cheers for Itadori leading you to wonder if you could recall the classmate they were shouting for.

“Ah~ Itadori Yuji ha?” you rhetorically asked the air around you, not expecting an answer in return. Itadori Yuji was a first-year student like you were, member of the small occult research club with second years Sasaki and Iguchi when he could be in any athletic club if he wanted to. However, understandably you knew some people would rather do something than what their natural talents indicated. Once again, you saw the metal ball being thrown - this time from the pink-haired students - only for it to land that the corner of the football goal, yet what was the shocking thing was that the metal of the goal was bent leading you to look at the sight within widened eye - of course, you knew Itadori was fast and strong but not to the extent of what you had just witnessed.

“Wow, no wonder he was called ‘Tiger of the West Middle’,” you muttered under your breath before quickly reverting your eyes to find the sorcerer you were wary of. Surprisingly, he was now on the track field looking upon the competition mixing well with the other students like a little chameleon. Although, before you could continue to observe the student trying to see what his intentions were, Itadori suddenly ran past him with his large backpack on, only for the erratic-haired sorcerer’s eye to suddenly widen the second they crossed each other leading him to reach out for your classmate. However, there was only dust to be collected as Itadori was suddenly out of reach.

“Just what are you trying to gain, sorcerer? It’s already a drag that you’re here,” you quietly mumbled irritation before turning away from the window you were gazing from to collect your school bag from your classroom since you left it there to not have the burden of carrying it on your shoulder. However, what you didn’t notice was the same sorcerer peering up at the same window you were looking from with perplexity painted on his face.

‘Was someone watching me?’

                                              ꕥ

“Don’t tell me someone got a hold of that damn finger?” you angrily stated, as you suddenly felt an immense amount of pressure invade the school causing you to wonder if there was anyone within the school with you right now, as you began to increasingly worry about whoever got a hold of the special-grade object that you found a few nights before.

“I put a protective seal on it, who the hell broke it!?” you muttered, as you panicky ran up the stairs trying to follow the presence of the object you were desperately trying to get a hold of before forcibly pushing a door open leading it to smash against the wall as you continued to sprint across the halls.

As you quickly turned the corner, you saw a large curse blocking the path leading you to instinctively flow your curse energy flow to your hand to the tips of your finger as you began to confidently recite the spell you were about to cast after you had finished drawing the symbol with your curse energy in the air.

“Disintegrate, you black dog of Rondanini! Look upon yourself with the horror and then claw out your own throat! Binding Curse Spell number nine: Geki!” you chanted, leading to a thin light aqua aura of curse energy to surround the curse causing it to become completely paralysed. However, before you could cast another spell to destroy the curse, there was a sudden interruption causing you to look at the person in complete shock as they flew into the corridor from outside the window only for you to discover it was your own classmate.

“Itadori!” you screamed, only for him to grab what seemed like two people away from the curse as it was still immobilised from your spell leading you to turn to the side to find that it was both Sasaki and Iguchi in his arms causing your eye to further widen only for you to be then distracted by the curse being blown away to your direction leading you to use another spell to make sure you were caught in the process.

“Binding Curse Spell number eighty-one: Danku,” you hurriedly stated, leading to a large rectangular defensive wall to shield you away from the decapitated parts of the curse as well as the technique being used for it to explode the way it did. Unexpectedly, once the pathway was cleared you suddenly came eye to eye with the sorcerer you were peering down on the track field this afternoon causing a wave of uneasiness to consume your body. 

“Who are you?” he questioned leading to the two dogs beside him to growl at you showing their sharp canine that could easily pierce your skin if he commanded them to. Slowly, your hand moved to the hilt of your katana that was hanging horizontally on your back, before quickly coming to the conclusion that it wasn’t difficult to slice the two dogs down if you desired to.

“Shikigamis huh? I should just cut the user down before they could reach me, then they would disappear’

“Oh L/N? What are you doing here?” Itadori asked in shock, leading you and the sorcerer to look at him before the sorcerer suspiciously asked, “you know who she is?”.

“She’s a student at my school, she is in the higher class since she’s smarter than me,” Itadori explained, as he took the time to check on his two club members with a sincere look on his face to then discover that they were unconscious with Sasaki in a decent state with Iguchi in somewhat the same condition but with injuries to his face. Letting your shield gradually disappear, you slowly walked up to your senior as you crouched down to hover a hand over his face letting a flow of curse energy begin to heal his wounds.

“Itadori, how the hell did they get the finger?” you angrily questioned the boy while continuing to heal your upperclassman causing him to look at you in shock - due to your acknowledgement of the object - as he caught the cursed object that slipped out of Sasaki’s pocket once he picked her up in a bridal style. 

“How do you know about it?” the sorcerer then asked, only to be quickly silenced when you gave him a heated glare only for itadori to then explain that he was the one that picked it up for them since they wanted to sneak back into the school to unwrap the talisman for research for the occult club leading an irk to appear on your forehead. “Wasn’t there like a talisman paper placed on the door? You know like those like sheet of paper with Ancient Japanese writing painted on it?” you asked in a stern tone as you completed the healing process only for itadori to give you a questionable look.

“There was a hint of paper being there, but it seemed like it was ripped off,” itadori answered wearily, leading you to look up at him with enlarged eyes as you let out a breath of complete shock.

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN RIPPED OFF?” you screamed as you rushed to your feet before grabbing the collar of his classic yellow jumper. From what you could recall, there was no possible way for the seal to be completely ripped off by the hands of a normal person, not even a simple sorcerer could even go through the barrier you had placed on it leading you to turn to the sorcerer, who was looking at the argument that was occurring right in front of his face.

“Was it you? No, from what I can see, you ain’t even a high enough grade to even go through it...Ah shit,” you cursed as you let go of Itadori’s collar before beginning to try to think of all the possibilities that could have happened that led to this accident.

“So, is this it Fushiguro?” Itadori asked the sorcerer, completely ignoring you as you were in a state of shock and confusion on what was going on. “Yeah, that’s the special-grade curse object, Ryomen Sukuna’s finger,” the sorcerer confirmed with Itadori as he then quickly mentioned, “it’s a miracle that it didn’t get swallowed, thanks to L/N curse technique back there.”

‘Fushiguro huh? Not Zenin, that’s a relief’

“Why would anything eat it? Does it taste good?” Itadori asked in curiosity, leading you and Fushguro to look at the boy with a questionable look on both your faces.

“Don’t be stupid,” you and Fushiguro simultaneously stated causing both of you to look at each other in shock before you then explained, “you’d do it to gain stronger curse energy. It’s dangerous, so hand it over to Fushiguro, it’s best to have him keep hold of it since the seal I placed was broken.”

“Sure, sure,” Itadori casually said, as he outstretched his hand to pass the finger to Fushiguro. However, before the sorcerer could take the object away from Itadori’s gasp, a large hand began to reach down below the two people causing you to look up in fear before instinctively pushing the two boys away from the area it was trying to target.

“RUN!” you screamed, before the ceiling crashed down between both of you, leaving you completely alone and vulnerable as the dust invaded your sights. In a panic, you swiftly grabbed the hilt of your katana to release the blade from its casing revealing an all-black weapon your hands, but once the smoked clear you found Fushiguro trapped in the hands of the curse before being forcibly through to the concrete wall causing a few hints of blood escaping from his mouth, to which lead to the two dogs that were protecting Itadori as well as the two second-year to disappear.

‘Shadows? Don’t tell me…’

However, before you could even complete your sudden thought, there was a sudden flash of lights blinding you before the whole side of the school to be destroyed along with Fushiguro, who was thrown across. In a state of terror, you rushed outside before using your speed to jump up the height needed before stabbing back of the curse’s head with your katana before quickly retreating back, leaving it there as the curse screeched in pain while preparing another curse spell to use to finish off the monstrosity.

“Destructive Curse Spell number seventy-three: Soren Soka-” you screamed, but you were interrupted once you suddenly found Itadori aggressively punch the curse’s head leading Fushiguro, who was laying down on the ground with blood pouring down his face to angrily shout, “Itadori! Why can’t you understand to take those two and run?!”.

“You’re in big trouble yourself!” Itadori screamed back, before being swung around as he then suddenly was being dragged along the metal railings of the balcony before his body was then swung into the air.

“Only curses can exorcise other curses! You can’t beat it!” Fushiguro argued back, only for this attempt to fall on death’s ears as itadori continued to fight against the curse as he masterfully dodged its attacks before playing his own as he kicked its ruby eye.

“Besides, I have my own troublesome curse already!” Itadori declared, causing you to look at your classmate in complete annoyance since you didn’t have a single clue on what he was rabbling about. As of right now, all you were wondering was where the cursed finger was since the last time you had seen it was in Itdori’s possession. 

Suddenly, before you realised it, the mentioned cursed object had slipped out of Itadori’s grasp causing you to quickly stand up on your feet to jump across the cure to reach it. On the other hand, it seemed like the curse was blocking your way by how it used both its arms to capture Itadori leading to the student to jump as high as he could to catch the finger by the grip of his teeth.

“You idiot!” you screamed, as you tried to concentrate your curse energy to flow to your palms as your katana was still within the curse’s head. “Hand it over to me or you'll be eaten, too!” Fushiguro yelled in a panic as he finally got up on his feet to chase after the wanted object.

Slowly, you raised your right hand before using your index finger to use it as a guide to where to aim your next spell at the finger without damaging your schoolmate in the process. “Destructive Curse Spell number one: Sho,” you quickly chanted leading to a small amount of curse energy in a concentrated manner to shoot from the tip of your index finger, yet before it even had the chance to hit the finger away from Itadori’s teeth, he threw thing finger up in the air using the force of his head leading your curse spell to be a futile attempt.

“There is a way to save everyone! I just need some cursed energy right. Fushiguro, L/N?!” Itadori cried out, leading you to again attempt to shoot the cursed finger away from where you assumed Itadori wanted it to go, while Fushiguro looked upon the situation in complete fear of what was going to happen.

“Don’t..Don’t do it!” Fushiguro shouted in a hostile tone, only for Itadori to swallow the special-grade cursed object causing you and the other sorcerer to look at the scene in complete disbelief.

‘He’s going to die, that’s a deadly poison..but...there’s a one in a million chance’

Suddenly, the arms of the curse disintegrated into small particles of flesh before Itadori landed on his feet, only for the curse to attempt to attack the salmon-hair boy again, leading to being completely destroyed with a single wing of an arm to which caused your katana, which was stuck within the flesh of the curse, to fly into the air before landing with a loud ‘clunk’. 

Yet, that wasn’t your main concern.

Your feet were glued to the ground as you looked upon the sight right in front of you. Fushiguro was staring at the same scene with dread flooding his green eyes as Itadori was now covered with the black markings of what you both come to know from basic jujutsu knowledge.

‘Y/N dear, I’m so sorry for putting you through this, if Sukuna ever comes into this era, it is your duty as a sorcerer and the only offspring of the L/N clan to exorcise him, promise me that please?’

‘Why.....why did you have to die mother?’

“Ah, I knew it! The light feels best in the flesh,” ‘Itadori’ declared, as he then processed to rip his yellow hoodie in excitement before brisking his flesh to the moonlight that was shining right above him. “A cursed spirit’s flesh is so boring. Where are the people? The women?!” ‘Itadori’ questioned before jumping onto the railings as he continued his speech, “what a wonderful era to be in, women and children are crawling everywhere like maggots. Marvellous! It’ll be a massacre!”

Without the acknowledgement of who you deemed to be Sukuna and Fushiguro, you slowly raised your right hand with an open palm as you began to whisper another curse spell to make the exorcism a little easier for you, “Binding Curse Spell number sixty-three: Sajo Sabaku''. As you closed your palm, there was a sudden manifestation of a yellow electrified chain being created as it loosely surrounded the King of Curse before tightly securing its place around his body.

“Ah-” Sukuna said in surprise before taking a step back from the balcony to observe the yellow chains that encaptured him. “L/N!” Fushiguro shouted as he looked at you with widened eyes surprised at how you figured out how to retain him so fast.

‘At this rate, he should be somewhat easier to exorcise, Itadori has only one finger within his system, it’s going to be okay right?’

However, before you could even comprehend what to do next as your tactic you suddenly heard a change in tone of voice. “What do you think you’re doing with my body?”  Sukuna asked, only for you to realise that it was Itadori who was speaking at this moment in time, “give it back”.

“How are you able to move?” Sukuna questioned his vessel back, as he was in pure confusion on how the human still maintained some control of his body. “I mean, it’s my body,” itadori answered back, only causing you more confusion on what was going on since Sukuna’s markings were still visible to his body.

“Don’t move! You’re no longer human,” Fushiguro stated in a serious tone, as he crouched down before moving his hand in front of him as he processed to make fists. 

“Under Jujutsu regulations, Itadori Yuuji, I will exorcise you as a curse!” Fushiguro announced, causing you to look at him with surprise painted upon your face. However, since you were beginning to lose a certain amount of curse energy, your chains slowly began to disappear leading Itadori’s hands to now more freely while Fushiguro’s worries about you begin to increase.

“Wait, really. I‘m just fine!” Itadori stated in innocence, as he raised his now-free hands as if he was surrendering to the sorcerer while his markings began to fade gradually. “More importantly, you and I are both pretty beat up, let’s go to a hospital,” Itadori declared as he was worried for the male right in front of him. On the other hand, you suddenly realise that there were shadows slowly swirling around Fushiguro leading to your assumption earlier to be true.

‘Fushguro is a Zenin...I..have….to’

“What’s the situation?” 

All of a sudden, a new voice came into the area leading you to turn your head to the side to find a rather tall male standing next to Fushiguro. From a quick glance, you could immediately inform yourself that had spiky white hair with a black blindfold covering his eyes, as he carried a paper bag on his arm while wearing a similar outfit to Fushiguro meaning he was another sorcerer.

“Gojo-sensei?! Why are you here?” Fushiguro asked in surprise, as he turned to look at what you assumed to be his teacher leading to the shadows around him to immediately disappear from sight.

“Gojo…” you muttered under your breath as you looked at the two male sorcerers right in front of you in horror as you came to the realisation on the situation you were facing.

‘Mother…..I’ve been found…..’

© violettelueur 2021 : written and published by violettelueur - do not steal or repost

[maulusque]

Clone genetic enhancement ideas

So the clones were genetically enhanced, but i don’t really see any writers (in fanfic or in published stuff) really exploring what that MEANS beyond “clone very stronk”. Here are some ideas that would actually make clones significantly different from just a regular-ass human in peak condition. 

-enhanced senses: eyesight, hearing, etc. I’m talking eyes like a HAWK

-better reflexes

-quicker information processing

-can hear sounds of higher and lower frequency than standard humans

-can see light of a broader spectrum than human standard

-learn quicker, retain information and skills better (potential problem: if you learn something the WRONG way, that way might stick really well)

-photographic memory (really useful for memorizing layouts and maps)

-immunity to various diseases

-can tolerate a wider range of temperatures and environments

-increased stamina and strength baseline. Clones can just run full-tilt for hours and hours and be like “ah a nice stroll”. Over long distances, they can out-pace jedi in the same way that humans can out-pace horses.

-higher tolerance of certain poisons/toxins (clones can straight-up drink ethanol, and get maybe a little tipsy)

-bodies respond quickly to physical stress, and slowly to the absence of it (basically, this means that physical conditioning results in stronger muscles and a stronger cardiovascular system really quickly, and it takes MUCH longer for a clone to lose strength and conditioning due to not exercising than standard humans. Think how much valuable training time is saved if they only have to go on a run like, once a month in order to stay in shape)

-increased ability to function through intense pain and acute injuries. Basically, semi-disabling the pain system so it’s less distracting. Probably not good for the survival of the individual in many situations, but an advantage on the battlefield. 

-heal faster and better, with fewer long-term complications. Clones can dislocate their shoulders and NOT have the joint be permanently fucked up, because the Kaminoans re-designed the whole damn thing to suck WAY less.

-actually, unique internal anatomy. There’s probably a lot about the human body besides the shoulder joint that is actually just really stupid, and something no intelligent designer would actually build. So the Kaminoans can fix a lot of that stuff. Better knees, maybe. Stronger ribs. Maybe Cody punches droids not just because he’s a mad bastard, but also because his metatarsals are literally as strong as steel. 

-Hearing loss/hearing damage? No problem, your ear can regrow those little hair-thingies that help you hear. 

-Of course, it takes energy to maintain muscle mass, which is why human bodies lose it if we’re not using it. Clones need significantly more calories than standard humans. However, their digestive systems are enhanced to extract calories and nutrients from food much more efficiently, so food goes much farther. Potential weird side effect: maybe clones only have to poop like, once a week?

-You could probably extend that into increased ability to tolerate long periods without food/on low rations, despite the increased need for calories. 

-wouldn’t it be NEAT if the kaminoans somehow designed self-repairing DNA. This would mean that others couldn’t take a DNA sample from a clone and modify it to create their own clones (basically, it protects their product. It’s like DRM for clones). This ALSO means that clones couldn’t get cancer, and that they’d be immune to radiation poisoning. So a clone could just walk up to a sphere of uranium at critical mass and pick it up. Maybe with oven mitts on if it’s hot. (this would also make it harder for a rapid-aging cure to be developed, but uhhhh fanfic writers find a way)

- “bred for obedience” I think most of this would have to be accomplished through tightly-controlled messaging and cultural norms as the clones grow up- basically, enshrining obedience as a desirable and almost sacred trait, to be prized higher than anything else, including the lives of your brothers. In the same way that we hear stories of people sacrificing their lives to protect their loved ones, the clones would grow up hearing stories of soldiers sacrificing their brothers’ lives to obey an order from a superior. 

-SOME of the “obedience” thing could be engineered, though. Humans are already super social, but it would probably make sense for the clones to have an even greater need for social bonds. This would make for greater teamwork and coordination, and better unit cohesion, since the clones would be more inclined to prioritize friendship/agreeing with someone over winning an argument. It would also make it so they’d bond with their natural-born generals more easily, so they would obey them not just because they’re supposed to, but because they’d be much quicker to see them as a friend, and someone who’s trust they want to earn, someone they want to incorporate into their group and make happy.

-consequently, clones who find themselves alone do NOT do well. Isolation has a much more profoundly negative impact on clones than on regular humans.

-Originally, clones designed to operate alone or in small teams would not have the social enhancement- ARC troopers, spec-ops teams, etc. There wouldn’t be much of a noticeable difference in everyday interactions, but they’d also be vaguely weirded out by what they interpret as aggressive friendliness from their brothers, and their brothers would think they’re a bit shy and standoffish. 

-actually this social modification would make it MUCH harder for clones to kill people. REGULAR HUMANS are already super bad at killing people- i remember reading this article about how as soon as soldiers have to point their weapons at actual people, their aim gets mysteriously much shittier. Even when compared to situations that are exactly the same, except they’re not shooting at other humans. So reconcile this how you will, idk.

-I imagine a lot of these enhancements would be accomplished not through DNA, but through microorganisms. Retroviruses could explain the DNA resistant to modification, and the increased healing speed, and possibly some disease resistance (do i know anything about retroviruses other than a vague concept of what they are? no i do not. will that stop me? also no.) Their metabolism can be partially explained through specially engineered gut microbes.

-not sure how they’d go about making clones “resistant to any stress”, because you can’t exactly turn off the trauma response in the brain without breaking a bunch of other things. They could probably do a bit of fiddling to make clones more resistant to chemical imbalances, and therefore more depression-resistant. I think most of the “stress-resistance” would have to come through training. Either they train the clones to basically suppress everything, which might work alright in the short term. OR they actually have systems in place that help prevent the development of things like PTSD and help treat trauma. Meaning the clones are literally trained in self-care, positive self-talk, talking about their pain with their brothers, and having community rituals around things like death and grief. I don’t think that’s super likely because one thing that’s integral to those concepts is the concept of “i am a person and i have worth, and if i feel angry about something bad happening, that is ok and valid” and considering that a whole lot of bad things happen to the clones all the time and their childhood is a whole boatload of bad all happening at once, i don’t think the kaminoans would want the clones realizing “hey wait a minute i’m a person and i don’t deserve to be treated this way and it’s ok for me to be mad at you”. 

- the clones were supposedly engineered to be “less aggressive” but i think there was literally nothing more to that than a cover story for the control chip. The clones wouldn’t be raised with a lot of the aggressive western concept of masculinity, where anger is the default reaction to like, everything, and your personal pride is extremely important and also fragile (no offense lmao). So you wouldn’t have clones posturing and getting angry over perceived slights and fighting each other all the time, like everyone in-universe apparently expects to be the case. Anyway, why would you want your soldiers to be less aggressive? they’re literally supposed to fight and kill the enemy. You want them fully capable of getting angry, anger is the human response to fear and danger that lets us DO something about it. 

-obviously the biggest component in how they behave would be how they are raised, but that’s an entirely different post

-Specializations! I imagine that initially, the Kaminoans had different clones with different traits engineered specifically to fill certain roles. However, as the war went on, they struggled to keep up with demand and had to start shoving clones into whatever roles were needed (hence Fives and Echo becoming ARCs, despite not being engineered as ARC troopers). 

-Command clones would have better abilities in the executive function parts of the brain that deal with extrapolation, planning ahead, spatial reasoning, etc. They’d also have increased visual pattern recognition (like a pigeon)

-search-and-rescue troops would also have the pigeon pattern recognition abilities. The coast guard literally strapped pigeons to helicopters who would tap a button when they saw orange in the water, because they were better at spotting it than humans. Pigeons can detect cancer in microscope images of cells, because they’re that good at pattern recognition

-Pilots would have hella reflexes, excellent spatial awareness and spatial reasoning skills, much greater ability to process visual information, stronger hearts and blood vessels (to resist greater Gs of force), and they’d also be much shorter, to better fit into a cockpit. Which reminds me of Axe, that poor bastard from Ahsoka’s squadron over Ryloth who was almost eight feet tall. rip poor Axe, how did you even become a pilot, you long bastard.

-medics who can smell certain diseases. If you want to get a little bit out there, make the medics able to purr so they can sooth stressed-out patients. 

-infantry would have even greater endurance than everyone else, as well as greater tolerance for, and ability to, remain constantly on alert.

-ability to fall asleep at will? that would be super dope.

-maybe more efficient sleep, so to an adult clone, 4 hours of sleep is genuinely sufficient.

-concept: clones can sort of turn down their bodily functions- slow their digestion, heart, lungs, the whole nine yards- to last longer in adverse conditions. Sort of a half-hibernation (or quarter hibernation- they’d still be able to talk and think, but they’d feel very lethargic). They wouldn’t be able to function very well, but it would be great for things like enduring intense cold, periods without food, low-oxygen environments, and it would be especially useful if you were wounded and waiting for help, since you could slow your circulation, meaning it would take you a lot longer to bleed out. This state could be triggered by a combination of physical actions such as sitting or lying still, breathing slowly and deeply, and focusing on slowing the heart down (humans can actually slow down their hearts consciously if you practice at it, this is basically that, but turned up to like 1100).

-one thing that never made sense to me was the whole “we’re running out of jango fett’s DNA, all the new clones won’t be as good, and we have to stop ventress from stealing the original DNA” because like, can’t they just, get the EXACT SAME DNA from the clones?? you know, the exact genetic copies? With all the enhancements already done? But now my idea is that the kaminoans have engineered the clones so their DNA straight up can’t be copied. The clone’s own body can obviously replicate it, but if you take a sample and try to extract the DNA, it just self-destructs or something. This is to protect their intellectual property, but also means that they literally have to use a couple of Jango Fett’s actual human cells for every single clone they make (and the fact that they then have to do all the above enhancements to every single embryo helps explain why there’s so many small mutations, such as hair color and height). So they kinda shot themselves in the foot with that one. 

-of course since things like ADHD and autism have a strong genetic component, the kaminoans could theoretically engineer those out of the clones, but actually FUCK THAT so for whatever reason, that’s just not something they are able to do, and neurodivergent clones are absolutely a thing

[felassan]

Dragon Age development insights from David Gaider - PART 1

This information came from DG on a recent SummerfallStudios Twitch stream where he gave developer commentary while Liam Esler played DAO, specifically the mage Origin. I transcribed it in case there’s anyone who can’t watch the stream (for example due to connection/tech limitations, data, time constraints, or personal accessibility reasons). A lot of it is centered on DAO, but there’s also insights into DA2 and DAI. Some of it is info which is known having been out there already, some of it is new, and all of it imo was really interesting! It leaps from topic to topic as it’s a transcript of a conversational format. It’s under a cut due to length.

Note on how future streams in this series are going to work: The streams are going to be every Friday night. Most likely, every week, they’re going to play DAO. Every second week it will be Liam and DG and they’ll be doing more of this developer commentary style/way of doing things, talking about how the game was made as they play through, covering quirks and quibbles etc. Every other week, it will be Liam and a guest playing a different campaign in DAO, and Liam will be talking with them about how DA changed their lives or led them into game development, to get other peoples’ thoughts on the series (as it’s now been like 10 years). Some of these guests we may know, some we won’t. When other DA devs are brought on, it’ll be in the DG sessions. They hope to have PW and Karin Weekes on at some point. Sometime they hope to have an episode where they spend the whole time going through the lore.

(Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6)

[wording and opinions DG’s, occasionally LE’s; paraphrased]

DAO’s development actually finished up around April 2009. They then put it on ice for around six months before release. Human Noble is DG’s favorite Origin. It’s one of the ones he wrote. He also wrote the Dalish Origin as well (Tamlen is his doing ;__;). DAO’s temp name during development was Chronicles. DG has never played any of the DA games after they were released. He played them pre-release loads of times, when they were half-broken or incomplete etc. This stream is his first time seeing everything played after completion.

NWN: Hordes of the Underdark was the first game where DG was a/the lead writer, in charge of other writers, as opposed to a senior writer. It was pretty well-received. In the fall of 2003, BW were just finishing up HotU when James Ohlen came to DG to talk. BW had been having issues during the development of NWN with the IP holder for D&D Wizards of the Coast, so they were interested in starting their own IPs that they would have ownership over (and also for financial reasons). JO said to DG that one of these new IPs would be fantasy and one would be sci-fi. He knew that DG was more fantasy-oriented, and so asked DG if he wanted to take this on. DG was down, and the first thing to figure out was what that fantasy IP was going to be.

JO gave DG an atlas of European history, which he still has, and said that he wanted him to make a fantasy world that is reminiscent of medieval Europe and reminiscent of D&D - “make it like D&D but not, file off the serial numbers really well”. This worked for DG because he was pretty familiar with D&D and there were also lots of things that he didn’t like about it and wanted to change. So DG went off and for the next six months worked on creating a setting, beginning with documentation and the map. This was kinda strange because they had no idea at that time what their story would be. JO was very interested in having a “genetically evil” enemy in the setting (like an equivalent to orcs). DG wasn’t a big fan of this and his initial go at the setting omitted this (i.e. darkspawn were not a thing) and was a lot more realistic. JO insisted on adding them later on.

This period of development wasn’t actually a good process. There were other people who were working on the project who were designing the combat side. Looking back, DG feels that they should have put their heads together a lot sooner. The combat designers had various ideas for various prestige classes and subclasses, and DG would be like “these are nowhere in the setting [lore]”. He tried his best to add a few of them after the fact, which is why we see things like DA’s version of the bard archetype. The combat designers and artists originally had a vision in mind of a game that was much more along the lines of the type of fantasy you’d find in the Conan the Barbarian world - bare-chested barbarians, sorceresses that show a lot of skin, a grimdark world with barbarian hordes. They were just assuming that’s what it was going to be. At this point in time DG had never thought, “Oh, maybe I’m responsible for communicating my ideas to them” - he’d never done this role before and was just told to go create the world. He created world-building documentation and would send out emails saying “I’m making this documentation, please go ahead and take a look”, not learning until later on that nobody outside of the writing team really likes reading such documentation. He learned tricks later on like making the docs more accessible, less dense and wordy, and overall easier to peruse.

There was no real ‘vision holder’ for DA. Mass Effect did a much better job of that. Casey Hudson was the project director and the vision holder for ME, and he had the power to enforce a set vision of what was and was not ME. ME therefore ended up having a bit more of a coherent vision. DG was in essence the vision holder for DA, but he didn’t really have the authority to enforce it on the artists. The DA teams ended up spending a good 3.5 - 4 years of the ~6 years of DAO dev time going in circles, not exactly sure what they were going to make, the various people working on it having different ideas of what ‘kind’ of fantasy they were going to make. The writing team were leaning towards LoTR; the artists were leaning towards Conan; at one point one of the project directors was leaning towards a point-and-click Diablo-style action adventure; and nobody was overriding anybody else.

The fans who hang out on the forums and in similar places have a very different idea about what kind of game they like and want to play versus the telemetry BW get from the public in general. As an example, fans on the forums tend towards playing non-humans and feeling that playing as a human is boring. Forum-polls reflected that, but BW’s general public-telemetry shows that around 75-80% of the playerbase played a human in DAO. Elves were at 15% and dwarves 5%. In contrast, in the core/forum-based fanbase, the human figure dropped down to 30%.

DG originally wanted Zevran to be a gay romance (he has talked about this before). He asked JO if he could do that pretty early on, thinking of Jade Empire which had same-gender romance options which were really popular. BW were surprised about that, and DG had no idea that the JE team were going to do this. For DAO, he had an idea for an assassin character. He had been reading about how the CIA and KGB would often recruit gay men to be their assassins, as they didn’t tend to have family ties. DG thought this was really interesting. JO was cool with the idea on a conceptual level, but thought that the work that would end up going into it would be better served if those characters could be romanced by both male and female PCs. Zevran and Leliana weren’t intended to be bi, they were “bi out of convenience”, but at the time these sorts of things (representation and such) didn’t enter into the equation as much as it does today. DG wrote Zevran in his head as being romanceable by men.

DG would ask the hair artists, “Why all the mullets?”, because he never understood that, and he’d get “a sort of shrug response”, and an indication that “it’s easier to model, I guess?” Having hair which is loose, in the face, in locks, coming over the shoulders etc wasn’t really supported at this point by the tech or the engine. Hence, they ended up with like five different versions of mullets. On the subject of the engine, for the first half of development they were using an upgraded version of the Aurora engine from NWN, and it was not good. Several years in they decided to switch. Trent Oster was in charge at the time of making a new proprietary BW engine. At the time it wasn’t ready yet, but the DA team decided to grab it, use it and hammer it into the DA engine. That engine had “so many little weird quirks”, like lighting on skin not working properly and looking bad, and one of the issues was hair. It was supposed to be BW’s proprietary engine but it really wasn’t optimized for RPGs and didn’t include a dialogue system. They had to custom-build the conversation system. (At the time Trent didn’t think BW should be doing RPGs anymore, which is a whole other story of its own). DG recalls programmers complaining about things in the engine that weren’t ready for ‘prime-time’. Even compared to games released concurrently, DAO’s graphics were a bit dated.

For the worldbuilding, they had an internal wiki and they kept everything on there. They ended up with a lot of legacy documentation on there very quickly. Eventually they solved this by hiring an editor whose sole job it was to wrangle the documentation. DG started work on the setting in the same manner in which he’d embark on starting a homebrew - ‘so like, first, here’s a map, oh, I like this name, vague ideas, a paragraph on each major nation, a rough timeline of the history, expanding, and it just growing from there’. After about six months, they brought on other writers, and by then he had around 50 pages of documentation. This 50 pages was a minute amount compared to the amount they had generated at the time of release. Originally, they weren’t sure where in the world specifically the story would take place, so DG made sure to seed potential and brewing conflicts throughout Thedas. They settled quite quickly on the new Blight starting in Ferelden. Once they established that, the writers went to town on taking Ferelden specifically and blowing it up detail-wise. Jennifer Hepler was in charge of the dwarves and Orzammar. Mary Kirby was on Fereldan customs and traditions.

The first version of the setting was more grounded in realism, almost like a post-fantasy. The dragons and griffons were extinct and a lot of the things that were thought to be fantastical were thought to be over with. During development, they started clawing these things back. They brought back dragons because the game was named Dragon Age (lol). DG was approached like, “Hey, we named the game DA, can you bring back dragons and weave them into the story more powerfully?” Wynne’s writer Sheryl Chee had a bit of an obsession with griffons and was often like ‘omg, griffons :D’, and this is the origin of Wynne’s dialogue with the Warden about griffons.

KotOR was the first time BW had tried to do a game that was fully voiced-over. For KotOR, BW sent the work of casting, direction and so on down to another studio in California called Technicolor. BW had little say in the process then and when they got it back, “it was what it was”. By the time they got to DA and the first ME, BW had a good system down for recording and VO had become an important thing in games at the time. BW are really one of the premieres for this, a lot of actors really like acting on BW games as they get a lot of space to act where they wouldn’t normally be able to do so otherwise. DG has learned a lot from Caroline Livingstone on how to encourage the best performance out of an actor. For DAO, DG worked together with the various lead designers and Caroline to decide on the auditions, casting etc. This was one of DG’s favorite things to do.

Gideon Emery as Fenris, GDL as Solas and Eve Myles as Merrill were times where DG had written the character and then went to Caroline and said “I have an actor in mind for them, can you check it out?” These were specific times where he was able to secure the actor he wanted. This didn’t always work out, for example there are times when actors aren’t interested or have no time due to scheduling conflicts or were too expensive etc. Eve and GDL were DG’s roommate Cori’s idea. Cori was a big fan of Torchwood/the actors from Torchwood, and worked as an editor at BW for a long time. Gideon was DG’s idea after playing FF12. For DAO, DG didn’t have any specific ideas in terms of actors. Casting Morrigan was the longest, most drawn out process.

The Circle went through a whooole process during worldbuilding. Initially, mages in the game weren’t supposed to have any “fighting magic”. The restrictions were originally such that in the lore, they didn’t teach mages that. Mages weren’t taught any magic that could kill people, only ‘indirect’ forms of magic that could support others. However, [during what sounds like] playtesting it was asked “Why can’t I cast a fireball? I just want to cast a fireball”, so the writers had to go back and rework how magic in the lore worked completely.

Flemeth was originally going to be voiced by Shohreh Aghdashloo, and she was totally on-board, but unfortunately because of DAO’s development delays, she was unable to attend the new recording time as she had a conflict in her schedule (she was filming House of Sand and Fog). Shoreh was quite disappointed about this and her family had been so excited that she was going to be in a video game. When the movie was finished, Shoreh came back to BW and let them know that she was still available, and this is how she ended up in ME2. For a while they were trying to find an actress with an accent that authentically mirrored Shoreh’s. Out of the blue around this time, Claudia Black’s agent sent BW an audition tape of her. At the time Claudia hadn’t done any games but wanted to get into it. The tape was of Claudia doing a beat poet rendition of Baby Got Back. DG still has this tape. DG was a big fan of Farscape and on listening to the tape, it clicked right away in his head that Claudia would be perfect for Morrigan.

The Fade ended up being a big irritation for the writers. They wanted the PC to be able to assume different forms and such while in there. A lot of this stuff proved too difficult for the combat designers to work out, and so it ended up getting changed a lot. They had a hard time coming up with gameplay that could work in the Fade. The mage Origin is DG’s least favorite of the Origin stories, as he’s really dubious about the Fade section in it. It didn’t work out like how they had pictured it in their heads. By the time they got to DAI, that’s when the Fade really looks like how the writers first described/envisioned it. By this point the artists were more keen to give it a more specific feel. DAO was made at a time when ‘brown is realistic’ was a prevailing thing in games dev.

The experience of a mage in the world isn’t represented or conveyed very well to the player when the player is a mage. The experience of the player when they’re playing a mage or have a mage in their party doesn’t really match up with how the world lore tells them how dangerous mages can be - for example, how they can lose control and so on, we never really have an example of a PC mage struggling with being taken over by a demon. This was originally supposed to be a subplot in DA2 for mage Hawkes, in one of the last cuts. In Act 2, mage Hawke was originally slowly being tricked by a demon in their head that they thought was real, only to realize at the last minute. Mouse the Pride demon in the mage Origin is the only time in the entire series that they really ever properly demonstrated how demons can fuck with [PC] mages. Also, PC templars were originally supposed to have a permanent lyrium addiction that they needed to ‘feed’, but this was scrapped as the system designers weren’t keen on it and felt that it was essentially handicapping the player. 

Mages were originally also not supposed to be able to deal with pure lyrium (it would ‘overload’ them). There is a plot where mage PCs run around touching lyrium nodes to refill their mana bars. On this DG was like “Wtf is this?” The designers said that it works, and DG said “but it flies in the face of the lore”. This instance is an example of how the DA team was working where the various departments (writers, artists, designers etc) all had their own ideas about how the game and its world would work and never overrode each other (see above). DG feels that DAO is a little contradictory in that way. It’s only after the game came out that a lot of the people on the team really “bought into” what they’d put forward. This got easier as they went on, with people involved buying then into the things that make Dragon Age, Dragon Age. At one point, not everyone on the team was even aware of those things.

DG relates that originally, they would ask the artists, “Ok, can we get a village?” and said village once created would be quite generic and non-specific to DA. The writers would try to relate how things are in the DA world and list things that would be found in a village like this specific to the DA world, and the artists either didn’t read it or had their own ideas (DG isn’t sure which), and nobody was around to tell them not to do that and that they should do it differently. Everyone having their own ideas like this is why we ended up getting something that is this sort of “cobbled together half-Conan half-LotR mish-mash”, and after a while this sort of became DA’s “thing”.

Initially, BW had concepts drawn up for a lot more different creatures. After they went in circles for those years and consequently ran out of time to do all the models, they had to cut these concepts down more and more. Demons were among the ones that were the first to go (this is why we have situations like a bereskarn as the Sloth Demon in the mage Origin). The original concepts for things like spirits of Valor and Sloth demons were really good. Early on, JO made a list of D&D creatures that he liked. He picked the ones that they were thinking of doing, sent them to DG and said to make a “DA version of this”. For example, D&D succubi essentially became Desire Demons. Desire Demons were originally patterned off Sandman, neither male nor female yet really alluring, acting more like a genie and trying to ferret out mortals’ inner desires (which are not necessarily sexual in nature), without being overtly sexual. The artists’ version came back and that was basically the model seen in-game. The writers were like “What is this, this is nothing like the description?” and the artists responded that on the list from JO, it was included, in that you had to click on “succubus” to get to the Desire Demon description, so they had just read “succubus” and done their version of a succubus. The artists did loads of great work, but this was one of the instances were DG was like “???” By then, it was too late to change it. The writers were able to encourage them to make Desire Demons a little more fearsome, so that made it in at least.

The mage Origin was one of the more contentious Origin stories. It had like 4 different versions written of it over time. It was often the case that BW would hire someone, and writing an Origin story was their first test. Three different writers came in and wrote a version of the mage Origin and those versions just didn’t work. Finally they passed it to Sheryl Chee and she wrote it. The Origins were the parts of the game in general that were written/rewritten the most often. There were several others that got written that they discarded. 

Duncan was slated for death from Day 1. When DG writes a story, the thing he does first is pick out the big emotional beats that he wants, such as deaths. He decides these ahead of time and the stuff in-between comes later and is more often changed. Oghren was also originally supposed to die, but this ended up getting cut. DG related a story of how Oghren came to be: At the time, there was a phase JO went through when he thought everything had a formula that it could be done by. One of these ‘creative forumulas’ was that all such IPs had a two-word name that they’re known by, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Dragonlance (being Dragon-Lance). This is how ‘DA’ and ‘ME’ came to be. One of the formulas he wanted to implement was how to distill the ‘comedy character’, like Minsc or HK-47. These characters were very popular with the fans and JO was certain that there was a way to figure this out to create one for DA. At the time, DG argued with him a lot about this. JO insisted it could be done. DG was originally supposed to write this character but ended up not doing so. JO came up with a list of comedic archetypes and had DG write a blurb about what kind of character each could be. These were then sent out to the team who voted on which was their favorite. This process eventually resulted in an archetype basically called ‘The Buffoon’ (think Homer Simpson or Peter Griffin, the kind of guy people laugh at because he’s such an oaf).

At this point ‘The Buffoon’ wasn’t named or made a dwarf yet. JO came to DG to write him, but DG said there was a problem which is that he hates this archetype. Homer and Peter are characters that he despises. DG is a professional writer, but this was comedy (outside of his areas of strength), and he felt the best he would be able to do is write a character who makes fun of this archetype and lampshade that. Comedy is something that has to come from within the writer. Oghren was given to someone else, and he ended up getting rewritten again anyway. By the time they were working on Awakening, DAO had not yet come out, and the assumption prior to the game going out was that Oghren was still going to be the most popular character from among the followers. The comedic character that ended up being the most popular along these lines was Alistair, which was interesting as he wasn’t intended as a comedic character, “so shows what we know”. DG was dubious that Oghren was going to be popular, because “he was kind of pathetic, honestly”, but that was the thinking at the time. Thinking he would be well-loved is why he was in Awakening.

On Alistair, any character DG writes is going to be sarcastic. At the time DG had made it a sort of personal challenge to recreate Joss Whedon’s dialogue patterns in his characters. Alistair was a sort of mish-mash of Xander from Buffy and maybe Mal from Firefly. DG wanted to see if he could do it, so Alistair was kind of quippy and self-deprecating. DG never really considered this to be Alistair’s main personality feature, but when other writers wrote him, they often had him doing this, as they liked the trait so much, and so this is how Alistair ended up as he did.

On dwarves, the dwarves being cut off from the Fade is very much baked into who the dwarves are as a race. There’s a specific reason why. This has been hinted at so far and it’s likely to come up in the future. DG had various ideas for some things that he wanted to include with the races or the way the world works etc. Some of them ended up never happening or some are mentioned only as part of the lore (templar lyrium addiction never coming up in gameplay is an example of this). Dwarven history and the nature of the dwarves is one of the things that survived pretty well though. DG calls Jennifer Hepler “mistress of the dwarves” and says that she did a really detailed, amazing breakdown of their history. After Jennifer left it was Mary Kirby, and DG feels that they did a good job of maintaining how dwarves were, in terms of both how they’re often presented in fantasy and yet also quite different in DA. Orzammar is one of DG’s favorite plots all together. You can really tell that Jennifer Hepler really enjoyed the dwarves and brought a lot of love to that plot.

DG draws a distinction between DA fans and the unpleasant people who harassed Jennifer Hepler.

They managed to keep the Tranquil in. There was a while there where they were going to be cut. At the same time, DG regrets that they couldn’t solve the making of the player more aware of how mages are dangerous, thing. Players could make a cogent argument like “they’re not that dangerous, look at me [mage PC]” and the writers were like “well... yeah, that is fair”. It was a case of showing one thing and the player experience of it being another. DG feels that this made the templars come off worse than they are. DG feels that they are being massively unfair and too extreme in their approach to the problem, but the problem itself is a real thing. He feels that there’s some merit/truth in the argument that mages are oppressed, but he looks at it more like an issue like gun control rather than as treatment of oppressed people, saying that we don’t have an example in real life of oppressed people who can explode into demons and cast fireballs and so on.

There are some funny pronunciations that worked their way into DA, and the reason for a lot of them is as follows: the writers had to create a pronunciation guide for VO, because otherwise you end up with a lot of inconsistencies. (Some did still slip through). The guide was online, and if you clicked on a word, an audio file for it would play. Jennifer Hepler was in charge of this and did a great job, but has a really strong NY accent, and in some cases the ‘NY-ness’ of her pronunciation endearingly worked itself into things (the way Arlathan is sometimes said is an example of where this happened sometimes).

Sometimes the writers trying to communicate the “hotness” of a character to the artists didn’t go smoothly. The writers would sometimes say things like, ok, this character is a romance, they need to be hot, and the designs would come back looking “like Burt Reynolds”, and the writers would be like “???” And then a character that wasn’t particularly intended to be hot, as in that wasn’t mentioned at all in the descriptions of them, would come back “accidentally hot”, and the writers would be like “Why couldn’t you have done this when we were asking for a character that was meant to be hot”, and the artists would be like “What?? He’s not hot”. And this became a thing (lmao - this discussion was prompted by DG being asked “Was Duncan meant to be that hot?”, for context). Some of the artists were so paranoid about their [in]ability to judge actually-hot characters that when it was time to pick an appearance, like for Alistair, they gathered up all the women at BioWare, and DG (“resident gay”) into a room to show them an array of faces and bodies like “Is this hot? Is this hot?” DG and co would sit there like, “How can you not tell? Is this a straight man thing?!” Anyways, this is why oftentimes we ended up with characters who are accidentally hot.

Over time, the writers realized that the way they communicated to artists needed to be managed better. The words they would use would have different connotations to them the writers, than what they did to the artists. For example, for Anders’ design in DA2, he was supposed to be “a little haggard”. When DG thinks of haggard, he thinks ‘a little tired, mussed hair, looking like you’ve been through some shit’. But the artists based on that produced concepts with super sunken cheeks, looking like he’d been terribly starved. The writers needed to develop a specific vocabulary for communicating with the artists, as artists think in terms of how something looks, but writers are thinking in terms of what the character “is”. Anders’ description talked about his history a lot, and the one visual-type word that jumped out was “haggard” due to its visual connotations. “A lot it came down to the writers being up their/our own asses.”

When they got to DAI, they had figured out that the way to get best results on this front was /not/ to have the writer go off and develop a long description and pre-conceived notion of what the character looked like in their head. In such scenarios artists don’t feel that they have much to contribute to the process or an ability to put their own stamp on who this character is and make them interesting to them (the best, most interesting characters are when people at all stages of the pipeline properly get to feed into it). They learned that the better solution was to bring the artists in earlier, and to give them little blurbs, and not name the character but give them an ‘archetype’-sort of ‘name’. For example, Dorian was “the rockstar mage”, “cool”, “Freddie Mercury”. The writers wouldn’t be sure that a particular concept would ‘hit’, so at this stage they would offer an array of options and sit the artist down and walk them through the concepts. The artists would then provide a bunch of sketches and it would go back and forth, with both taking part in the character creation process together. For the first two games, the writers were “really hogging” this process to themselves. They got better at not doing this and better at communicating with the artists by DAI.

There were a lot of arguments about how mages in DAO had a lot of specific lore words like “Harrowing”, “phylactery”, “Rite of Tranquility” etc. There was concern that this would be too confusing for players to understand and that it was too complicated. DG says that thankfully he put his foot down and pushed for this stuff to be kept. A lot of fans assume that as lead writer DG had all this influence, way more influence than he could possibly exert on a team. He wasn’t even a lead, he was a sub-lead, under a lead designer. He only had so much say. If the lead designer or lead artist wanted to do something differently, often there was not much he could do. Hence he had to pick his battles carefully, choose the important ones to fight. The mage vocabulary thing was one of these.

Templar Greagoir’s name is pronounced “Gregor” and it comes from a place in Alberta near where DG lived.

Codex entries are usually one of the last things that get done in a project like this, and so all of that kind of textual lore comes in super late and is super punchy as by then the writers have written so much and are exhausted. They had to find a way to make this process cute or interesting or fun for themselves, which is why a lot of entries are quite fun to read. Sometimes a writer would make a joke for banter [irl], and it would end up making it into an entry.

Only Morrigan and Duncan got unique body models in DAO. The companions all have custom-morphed heads but not custom-morphed bodies (Morrigan not included here). This is why every model has a necklace or a collar right at the point where they had to be attached to be a body. These sometimes used assets that couldn’t be used by the PC but were not unique to that character. Duncan probably got a unique model because he was in a lot of marketing/promotional material. Qunari were originally conceived as having horns.

Most people didn’t even finish DAO once (public telemetry again here), only approximately 20-25% actually did. The devs try not to read too much into this kind of thing, but the telemetry does tell them where a lot of people stop playing the game permanently (they call these “drop-off points”). One of these points in DAO is the Fade during Broken Circle. Sometimes when people interpret this data they involve self-serving biases, but it was generally accepted that the Fade there was too long, too complex, not interesting enough, etc. [source]

[Part 2]

[Part 3]

[Part 4]

[Part 5]

[Part 6]

[‘Insights into DA dev from the Gamers For Groceries stream’ transcript]

[angelofsmalldeathandthecodeine]

Disasters and Detentions

Request: “Hi! Can i please request A fred weasley x reader (I love my boy fred lol). With the angst prompt 16 and fluff prompt 12 and 9 please? Tyty i love your writing!”

(”Why do you care?”/”Oh my God! you’re in love with him”/”God, you’re so fucking cute”

Pairing: Fred Weasley x Reader

Word count: 1.9k (I got excited or whateva)

A/N: These were suchhh cute prompts to work with, I really love writing the twins in a school enviroment it gives me good vibes :) ALSO this is so long but like I said before, the twins x fluff = a dream.

The Triwizard tournament was all anyone had been talking about recently, and while you could admit it was an exciting year for Hogwarts with the Yule Ball too, you couldn’t help but get tired of everyone’s eagerness – even those too young to participate.

You sat with your friend Hermione, completing work, and simultaneously watching as students in their sixth and seventh year entered their names into the goblet, each time admiring the flicker of the sapphire blue flame.

“Isn’t he dreamy” Hermione commented, gazing at Cedric Diggory who had just placed his name into the Goblet, receiving a warm welcoming from the inferno, indicating acceptance.

“I guess” you said, looking up towards harry noticing he had the exact same grin on his face as yourself. You both knew exactly what Hermione was trying to do and by the looks of Ron it had worked.

You understood why all the girls would swoon over the older, prince charming-like Cedric, but you had someone different in your thoughts…. much different.

Suddenly the room was filled with clapping and cheering as if Gryffindor had just won the Quidditch Cup.

“YESSS” you heard the raspy laughs of what could only be Fred and George, running into the hall with a test tube each. The way the light hit Fred’s copper hair as he ran towards the goblet had caught you in a trance. His Hazel eyes, his bright smile and pale complexion… it was all you could focus on.

Suddenly you were met with a hand being waved across your face which disrupted your line of sight and snapped you back into reality.

“What on earth has gotten into you” Hermione asked, with a puzzled expression on her face.

“uh, nothing just tired” you replied in an attempt to draw as little attention as possible to what was actually distracting you.

“Well lads, we’ve done it” George announced to the mass of applause “cooked it up just this morning”, as soon as you heard Fred’s voice you couldn’t help but swoon at the sound, gaining another weird look from Hermione.

“It’s not going to work” Hermione sung, in a rather condescending manner.

Before you knew it, you were inches away from Fred, who had accompanied his brother in lowering himself to yours and Hermione’s level.

“Oh yeah?” Fred asked, patronisingly back whilst leaning an arm on your shoulder. You weren’t sure what to do in that moment other than freeze and try not to make any eye contact. You could feel your palms get sweatier by the second and your breathing start to increase at a stupidly rapid rate.

“And why’s that Granger?” George then asked, with sole focus on beating Hermione in this sort of battle of ‘who’s right’.

Strangely you thought could feel Fred’s eyes, looking you up and down, which only caused your body to tense up even more than it was before.

You zoned out completely every word that Hermione spoke, only being able to pay attention to the arm that rested on your shoulder and the lips that were inches away from your face.

“Ah but that’s why it’s so brilliant” Fred said, this time you had gained some confidence to look slightly in his way to which you were then face to face with his mischievous grin.

“Because it’s so pathetically dim-witted” George over emphasised in Hermione’s scolding face, causing you to giggle like a schoolgirl.

God, how pathetically dim-witted of you.

Fred and George looked at each other before rising to their naturally giant-like height in high spirits of just winning an argument against Hermione Granger.

Whilst putting a thumb over the test tubes to shake them you couldn’t help but kind of worry about Fred. It was such a strange feeling, you knew how much of a prankster both him and his twin were, but the potion was dangerous, and not nearly as dangerous as if they managed to enter the tournament itself.

“I hope he’s alright” you accidentally mumbled under your breath, causing a slightly aggravated Hermione to snap back.

“What, Fred? Why do you care?” she replied, meeting your gaze focusing on Fred.

There was silence for what seemed like forever, you didn’t know what to say and didn’t want to make it obvious, “I don’t I just, uh, I made one of those potions myself at home, nasty things” you settled with.

Yet, you were forgetting who exactly you were talking to, they don’t call her the brightest witch for her age for no reason. Hermione looked at you, who then looked at Fred, who seemed to be looking in your direction and suddenly the light bulb inside her turned on.

“Oh my God! You’re in love with him!” Hermione gasped, giggling in the process.

“Shh Hermione!” you attempted to reduce the chances of anyone hearing the truth, especially that of Fred.

“Ready Fred?”

“Ready George”

“Bottoms up” the twins sang in unison which helped distract Hermione from the information that she had just heard. Fred and George proceeded to jump into the ring of fire that guarded the Goblet, letting out a very confident “Yesss” that got the crowd going once more.

Putting their names in the fire seemed to actually work, gaining a repeated and very smug “Yeahhh” from both the twins – yet there’s one thing you had learnt during your time at Hogwarts, and it was that Hermione was always right.

Instantaneously there was a flash of blue light and before you knew it both the twins were rolling around on the floor with white beards, rather resembling Dumbledore himself.

You couldn’t help but really belly laugh at their stupidity as the crowd chanted “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

“Detention! The both of you!” McGonagall’s voice went straight though you, yet you continued to laugh at the twins’ misfortune as she attempted to separate them.

“And I suppose you find this funny miss Y/L/N” McGonagall’s eye caught your line of sight, “then I shall see you in detention with these two buffoons”

You groaned at the thought, which seemed to only antagonise her further “Oh and since the three of you are in Gryffindor, 10 points from Gryffindor” she spoke in a high tone, which earned a groan from the majority of the room.

 \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/

Later that day you had found yourself in the detention hall with both Fred and George, alongside a few other misbehaving students. Don’t get me wrong, you had sat through your fair share of detentions, it was just that this year you had promised yourself that you would try and reduce the amount of time you had to spend with Professor Snape.

After what felt like an eternity, Snape put his head down to mark some work and you felt like you could finally breathe.

A paper bird landed onto your desk, bringing you back into the real world.

The note simply read:

‘I’m sorry for getting you into trouble’

You turned around discreetly to be met by Fred, who gave you a gentle smile, and in turn you were holding in quite possibly the biggest smile you have ever had before.

“God, you’re so fucking cute” you mumbled to yourself whilst reading the note, but before you knew it Fred’s message started to disappear, and the ink began to write the last words you spoke.

Of course, Fred had used magical ink. “oh no no no” you began to panic quietly, frantically trying to think of a spell that would erase the words on the note. Yet, your anxious mind only hindered your time and the note began to transform into a paper bird and fly behind you towards Fred’s seat.

You started to sink into yours, literally face palming at the thought of Fred reading those words. You were so embarrassed that right then and there you had sworn you just wouldn’t open your mouth for the rest of the year.

Since you hadn’t got another note back and you hadn’t turned around to check, you prayed that the paper bird had just got lost on the way back to him.

Once detention had finished you collected your books and rushed out of Snape’s classroom, faster than you ever had before.

“Oi! Y/N! where you off too?” Fred’s voice unexpectedly called after you, causing you to freeze in your tracks.

“Just uh, the common room” you replied without looking back to face him, maybe everything was alright after all, and maybe Fred really hadn’t seen your note.

“Great, I’ll walk you”, you heard Fred’s footsteps get closer and closer to you, before finally gaining the courage to face him in hopes of his cluelessness.

“Oh by the way, this is for you” Fred opened his two hands to reveal a paper bird, pecking at his palm, “couldn’t have gave it to you back then of course, Snape was watching me like a hawk” he laughed before allowing the bird to flutter into your hands.

Your heart sank at the thought of opening the note, with a sick feeling in your stomach.

‘Y/N,

I had no idea you felt that way, but in that case… You’re way cuter’

You giggled slightly, feeling a sense of relief yet still feeling extremely anxious. Fred Weasley thought you were cute. You couldn’t believe it.

Finally looking up from the note, you noticed Fred’s hazel eyes staring longingly into your own, and you couldn’t look away.

You watched as he lifted his hand to your cheek, pushing back the hair that draped slightly over your face. The brush of his fingers on your skin felt so soft and warm, yet your gaze remained. In that moment you felt no sickness, no heart sinking, and no anxiety… just butterflies in your stomach and a sense of serenity.

“Is this okay?” Fred asked, and with one nod from you he began to lean in closer, causing you to slowly press onto your tip toes to make his job a little easier. This time he lifted his right hand to cup your face completely.

Upon instinct you closed your eyes, feeling your face be lifted towards his. You could feel the warmth of Fred’s breath grow closer, placing your hands on his lower torso where they would naturally reach.

The moment was perfect, and without a second thought your lips met Fred’s in a soft exchange. The initial kiss allowed you to linger for a moment, digesting the feeling of not only his face against yours but his fingers entwined in your hair.

Your lips were left cold but sweet as you breathed into Fred, causing him to place a second kiss on your lips returning the warmth you had just felt. This time you felt the corners of Fred’s mouth curl into a smile which made you do the same.

Pulling away slightly and starting to land on the heels of your feet you began to open your eyes slightly, seeing Fred’s adorable smile with his eyes closed. He began to pull you up again ever so slightly, eyes still closed.

“Hang on, just one more” he seemed in a trance, and giggling you put your hands around his neck to which he lifted you gently. The third kiss was as good as the first and second, and with that you were placed onto the ground, spiritually and physically.

You and Fred giggled at each other when finally opening both your eyes to see each other again. You felt Fred’s hand snake down your arm to meet your own hand, locking his fingers between yours.

You looked down at the floor and bit your lip at the afterthought of the moment, gripping Fred’s hand tightly as he let out a heavy breath.

“I bloody love detention” Fred announced as you walked hand in hand towards the common room, giggling.

[insomniac-dot-ink]

Is it wrong to lie to children?

A personal essay on reconciling with a shitty childhood and the question: is it wrong to lie to children?

It’s perplexing to have a shitty “unorthodox” childhood because initially I tried to throw out everything about It. Toss out the plumping and the rafters and the roofing, dispense of every single part of my upbringing I could get my hands on and not look back. Naturally, this approach didn’t work. It wasn’t even a real possibility. You’re still haunted by it, a ghost in the bones of a house, a foundation that remains long after the builders have left. That’s part of recovery too, to look at that ghost, to look at those bones, and keep saying: I see you, I see. I let you in. You sit with it and accept, accept, accept.

The really terrible part of this, the part where I don’t throw away the baby with the bathwater, is that you then have to raise the thing, deal with it. You have to do the hard work of parsing through the endless bits of self and placing them in “keep” piles and “discard” piles. I want to keep my mother’s kindness. I want to keep my father’s sense of humor. I want to discard the isolation. I want to discard the delusions.

But then there are these weird . . . “I don’t know” things. The things I am unsure if they helped me or hurt me. As I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten more and more of those “I don’t know” categories piling up. I’ve worked my way through most of the more obvious ones and now it’s all grey and mushy and as cloudy as a London winter. Recently, more than anything, I’ve been grappling with the fact my mother believed it was wrong to lie to children. She believed, in her flower-child way, that it was unethical in all forms.

I never believed in Santa Claus. I’m sorry to say I was a pretty obnoxious kid too because I would preach on the playground about how there was no Santa and there had never been any Santa. Which was a bit harsh, but in my defense I was under the impression these people were suffering from some sort of collective mass delusion. They were being lied to. And lying was wrong.

Is it wrong to lie to children?

I’ve known about sex since I was around 5 years old. I don’t remember why I asked, but it was something about where babies come from and so on. Most parents talk about a stork or love or some other abstract side-step. My mother described the anatomy to me and showed me a scientific diagram of the process. She told me that a sperm meets an egg and fertilizes it so the baby can grow. I learned most of this in scientific terms and was surprised when none of my middle school friends knew how a penis worked.

Is it wrong to lie to children?

When I was 9 or so our cat was eaten by a coyote. I asked my mom where he went and she said that he accidently got out the night before. She said they looked for him all morning, but it was too late. She didn’t use the word “gone” or “passed on” or “he’s in a better place now.”

She said he was dead. I said oh. She asked if I wanted to see him. I said yes. For the record, I am not actually sure if 9 year-olds should see corpses. That is neither here nor there. It was something that stuck with me though, the body of my cat with his tummy ripped out. I had never seen intestines before. His eyes were open.

But there was something cathartic about digging the grave. About helping pick up his little stiff body by the feet and placing him inside. There was something about piling on the red dirt as the sun set and letting the tears fall.

People on sitcoms hate talking about death. It’s understandable, it’s not funny, it makes for good dramatic irony when the kid asks “Where’s Socks?” and the parents go “Uuuuuh. He ran away.” I’ve never felt more alienated at those points. My cat died. He was eaten. I saw his body, and I buried it. Sometimes I think I wouldn’t want to be told he ran away-- that he had a choice in whether or not he left me.

Is it wrong to lie to children?

For a long time I thought the entirety of my childhood was wrong and bad, because I was miserable and broken at the end of it. I will assure you, my parents fucked up time and time again. But sometimes I have to stop and keep asking: Was this the wrong part? Was this the part where they fucked up? Was any part of this valuable? It’s a hard process to comb through an entire life and decide which bits are worth keeping, and if there are any silver linings.

So here is one: I am an honest person. I am a crooked person too, unsure of where to place my feet in social situations, picking my way through others normalcy. I do not readily share information, I am not forthcoming, and it’s a slow burn for me to open up about anything.

However, I notice time and time again that strangers will share personal things with me. I don’t mean for it to happen, but there’s just this pattern in my life. I once went on a car ride with a girl I barely know from my debate team. She described how she wanted to lose her virginity, she wanted it, but was scared God would be angry. That she’d be dirty afterwards. I told her that that was impossible, sex was just an act, it had no eyes, it had no priestly robes, or bearing on her soul. She cried. She said she hadn’t told me anyone this before.

I had a friend in high school who was struggling with an eating disorder, people had tried to get her to talk about it before, but I was the first person she admitted it to. In the hallway, sitting, just discussing nothing, and out it comes: I’m scared to eat sometimes. I was on a city bus and an old woman struck up a conversation with me. Over an hour or so, and she ended up telling me her fears for her own daughter going away to college. Her fear of growing old and passing on. Her problems with sleeping as she lay awake and dreaded it.

People have told me about their problems with substance abuse, their struggles with sexuality, and childhood trauma. People spill to me and I sit there thinking: Why? Sometimes I think it’s my gender or just how people are, but it always feels like I’m missing some part of the picture. Why do people open up to me, unprompted, all at once? Why me?

Is it wrong to lie to children?

Recently, I was reading a memoir set in 2001 where two young kids ask the narrator, their mother, about 9/11. They asked what happened to the people on television who were jumping off the building. Where did they go? The mother says this: They were caught. There are people-catchers that flew and saved them. Everyone is okay.

This story was meant to be heartfelt and lyrical, relatable. It ended like this: It is the job of mothers to offer gentle lies.

I had to stop reading because I was suddenly lost in a white-hot rage, unexpected, knee-jerk. How could she do that? I found myself frothing. They trusted her with answers and she lied. How could she? I knew it was irrational. It was silly even. This was a sweet story. It was meant to be heart-warming and framed in a way that suggested this is what all mothers do. This was what they needed to do. 

I felt my own mother, pumping through my veins, furious that these elementary school students were being betrayed. I stopped myself of course, I knew it wasn’t reasonable. I wasn’t raised “correctly.” I had no legs to stand on.

But still, is it alright to lie to children?

I am once again faced with that unending dilemma: how to throw-out those parts of myself that don’t work and keep the ones that do. It’s difficult to say, because in some ways I agree with my mom. How can I not? But death is cruel. Sex is weird. Santa Claus is a beautiful lie.

And what’s wrong with lying? I still don’t know. What’s wrong with letting them never hurt? Never knowing the pain or gross parts of the world? What’s the harm in letting them make-believe?

But sometimes I think about all those people who have cried to me. All these unprompted confessions come with an unspoken plea: I hurt. I am afraid. I am so scared. It’s all so heavy, these painful truths.

And some part of me stands there, the part my mother raised and says: there is nothing in this life that is too shameful. There is nothing in this world that is unnatural. There is nothing in this life to lie about, even to children.

Is death too painful? Is sex too gross? Would you tell an adult that a man lives in the North Pole and watches them?

I asked my mom, years later, when I was less furious and able to talk with her again without screaming, about why she believed all this. She had told me about it since I was very young, but I never asked why. She shrugged. She said: children are people, aren’t they?

I still don’t know what to do with this.

Children are people, but they are not adults. They shouldn’t be exposed to “adult” things, right? But is that line so concrete? Is the word “adult” just a mask for the greater word, the one we really mean? We all agree: honesty is good. Lying hurts. But it’s alright to lie to kids, because in many ways they aren’t people yet, they aren’t people yet, they don’t count.

I am admittedly an argumentative person. I was on the debate team, mock trial, United Nations, I studied political science in college and fought with every single one of my professors I thought was wrong. And I stood in that playground, age 6, and told every single one of my classmates Santa wasn’t real and I wouldn’t stop. The truth was important. And my mother, no matter what, thought I disserved it.

I often felt tiny and powerless as a kid. Terrified and holding myself together by shoestrings. I often felt there would be nothing better in the world than to be grown up. Not for the money or the dating or the job, I just wanted to feel like the hurricane would end. That one day I could stand on solid ground again. My friend often says: I wish I could be a kid again, ya know? No responsibilities. Just bliss. I want to be a kid again.

I can’t relate. I never have. I’ve been busy weeding through the pipes and lighting and the carpentry of my upbringing and asking myself: is any of this worth keeping? Is any part of me built correctly? There are no right answers.

But still, I am haunted. I sit and ask myself in circles: is it alright to lie to children?

------------

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[comehomeducklings]

Present [Part 1] (Obsession)

A/N: Please don't copy, redistribute, and/or post my work on this site or any others. This has taken my time and creativity to come up with the story's characters and plot.

Also, I swear my writing gets better. It's a little rough right now but I'm planning on rewriting them.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

Tom Riddle's Moodboard

Main Character's Moodboard

~////////////////𓆙////////////////~

1943 ~ 6th year

No sound above whispers could be heard throughout the great hall. The food on the table hasn't been touched by a single hand. The very thought of eating churning all our stomachs. Not during these times. Our heads turn every now and then, afraid of what might sneak up behind us. The death of Myrtle and others has shaken the entire school. A murderer is among us, trust is such a foreign concept now.

Dark purple eye-bags lay beneath every single student's eyes. No one is allowed to go home for the holidays. They aren't allowing us to leave, we are stuck in this cloud of darkness and uncertainty. No owls are supposed to be sent out. As the head girl, I'm responsible for every student's life and responsibilities. I have to know where everyone is at all times. It gets tiring at times, but necessary nonetheless.

A nightly routine consisted of all my dormmates huddling around each other. No sleep would come to us all night. We wouldn't move from the same spot until light shown from the windows. Our beds are all pressed together in the farthest corner of the room from the door. Our wands never leaving our hands in case of danger. Every little sound made from the outside provoking us. Even to the point of going mad. Potions used to stay awake, slowly wearing off as the morning arose. No sleep, we can't afford that luxury anymore.

I would leave the dorm to wait at the portrait for our assigned house professor to come. They would tell me it was safe for everyone to head to the great hall to get breakfast. As soon as they were done I quickly went to everyone's dormitory to wake them up, if they even slept at all. I would then inform them that it was safe to step out of their dorms. After everyone got situated I would have the students form a line and lead them towards the great hall. 1st-3rd years would occasionally hold the folds of my robes. Fearing that when they blink I would be gone. Leaving them alone to deal with the dangers that lurk in the school.

Not once have I lied about how they are going to be all right. That would be cruel. These students don't seek pathetic nurturing words, they want a protective force watching over them. So many clubs and activities have been canceled. Hogsmede and quidditch proving as a prime example. No one complained though, quidditch players too afraid to even step out of the castle's walls even if they were allowed.

Back to the present, I hold my good friend's hand as she slightly shakes from anxiety. I can see it in her eyes, the doubt of making it alive eating away at her brain. The spark once present in her shiny green eyes being blown out. Amelia, her name being. She's been biting her nails again, to the point where it had bled. This can be backed by the dried-up blood that is present at the tip of her finger's nail.

A booming voice can be heard, "You are now being dismissed to head to class, your houses head girl and boy will be assigning the group you'll be heading off with."

First period has been removed from every perfect and head's schedule. During this time we search the whole castle for any wanders. We make sure everyone is where they are supposed to be. If someone got lost or went to the wrong class we escort them to where they need to be.

After every class, students have a limited amount of time to get to their next lesson. Although, perfects and heads get more time to make sure everyone is where they are needed quickly. Then we hurry to our class after scanning the halls swiftly.

The once safest school of the wizarding world giving birth to the dark ages. More bodies have been found littering the schools. Most of them not found until their ghosts appear before us. Every single one not knowing how they died. Like the murderer is invisible upon meeting the victim. I originally suggested it could have been done by poison. When the bodies were checked, no traces of poison had been traced.

Professors have been waiting for the person who is responsible to slip up, to give us a clue. I don't think that will happen though. The process of these killings has been too thought out and well planned. I wouldn't be surprised if these mass killings have been planned months before, even maybe years. I've been talking to the ghosts to try and gather all details, even the potentially useless ones. When our headmaster made us heads keep tabs on everyone, the killings stopped for a short amount of time. It was like the mastermind was creating a way to best us, to get past the "little inconvenience." It didn't take long for them to find the weak parts in the plan.

What we have got though, is that every single student killed has been a muggle-born. A classic case of an unfair stigma around the poor wizards and witches. They never were able to catch a break. Amelia, one of my close friends in the friend group. She's a muggle-born, hence the shaking of her hands. I've been keeping a closer eye on her, she doesn't leave my side. She comes on my patrols so I can keep her in my sights, with of course the permission of the teachers. There are only two times that I can not watch over her. Those two times are covered by my other friend Devyn, a pure-blood. She also helps keep her safe, not letting her go anywhere by herself. The two times are because she's in two different classes than I am. One of them being a study hall.

~////////////////𓆙////////////////~

"Professor, how will this class help us now? Reading teacups for predictions should be the least of our worries right now," a student at the back of the room exclaims.

"The said predictions could lead us to the future before it happens. Our worries lay exactly what will happen in the future. If anything, this is one of the most important classes we'll take this year," I say, continuing to read the teacup.

"Precisely, thank you. Now go back to studying, I'll be coming around to view your interpretations."

My tea leaves look more like a blob with a cross going through them. A weirdly shaped blob. I already know there is a cross, but what about the blob? I tried shaking it a little, looking at the leaves from different angles. I already crossed off a club, falcon, and the sun. It could be an acorn, but I see a slight hole in the blob.

Could it be...

"A skull that is." I jump at the sudden voice near my ear. My teacup almost falling from my grasp.

"Pardon, a what?"

She points towards two holes in the blob, one of them I just mentioned, "I saw you already found one hole, there's the other. How it's shaped could be a little difficult to see since the cross is through it, but it's there."

The professor takes the cup from my hand and lays it on her desk. Some of my classmates look at me in curiosity, but they soon lose interest and go back to their own tea leaves.

A cross and a skull, that sounds about right to how my school year is going so far. I scan my book to see exactly what they mean.

A skull, danger in your path.

A cross, trials and suffering.

"What d-did you find?" A Hufflepuff boy to my right asks.

I don't want to scare the poor boy, he's already frightened enough as it is. If my future got around to the school, everyone would start being concerned about me. I'll barely get any of my duties done if I didn't already get it taken away for my safety. Last thing I need right now is even more panic.

"Nothing much, the future is still a little foggy."

"That's, um, good. I couldn't really read mine either," he chuckles lightly, almost seemingly forced.

Our professor claps her hands together, "Class is dismissed, read up about your predictions if you haven't already. No homework today."

I gather my books and push in my chair. Right before I could reach the door where other students are waiting, the teacher stops me.

"I'll have to tell the headmaster about this, I shouldn't keep it a secret."

"No, please don't. If you must, only tell Albus. I can't have this messing anything up, I'll become vulnerable."

The professor looks around the room, her eyes wandering franticly. I'm sure I am asking a lot from her. I really need her to keep this a secret.

"Oh alright, you're my best student. I just would hate to see anything happen to you. I'm informing only Albus to see if he can keep an eye on you."

"Thank you so much, I swear I'll be careful." A huge weight is lifted off my shoulders. I can't be worrying about my future when I have to worry about everyone else's.

I leave the classroom and start heading to my next class. Potions have always been one of my favorite classes. Mixing a bunch of toxins into a pot is a specialty of mine. I'm quickly scanning the halls for any wanderers, making sure everyone is at class. My feet take me to Potions in a hurry. I don't want to miss much, trying to make the class as informational as possible.

"You shouldn't be running, you still have 3 minutes of checking the school."

It's always him, I even tried changing routes to avoid him. His idiotic smirk, thinking he actually did something. All he did is waste my time and train of thought.

"I'm allowed to run Riddle, it's not a rule. I already checked the halls I was assigned, did you?" I really have no energy for this.

Tom peers down at me, somehow still wearing that infamous smile. Eyes bright, filled with mischief and knowledge.

"I have, double-checked as well. I'm sure you only checked once. Such irresponsible actions, I still wonder how you nabbed the head-girl spot."

I choose not to answer, not giving in to his baiting. Does he think I'm that stupid? That easily bothered by a simple test of my patience.

"You could have just said you wanted to walk me to class Riddle. No need to be shy with me."

"Shy, a concept I would not know of. Might as well bring you to class, since I'm heading there myself. Wouldn't want you to be in danger, since you consistently prove you can't handle a simple check of the hallways."

"I told you Tom-"

"Once is not enough, you should know that by now," he interrupts me, feigning a sudden serious facade on.

We start heading towards Slughorn's room. I'm a little behind his figure. Mostly looking down to make sure I don't step over his feet and fall. He sometimes walks with me, very confusing if I may say. Hating my skills, probably still hates me. You can often find us arguing if we are ever partners in class together. The usual game we play, how many questions can we get right by the end of class. Last time he won by one point, my sour mood not helping the atmosphere.

"You look rested, more than me at least," I smile tiredly. My whole body slightly sagging forward from exhaustion. He looks as proper as someone could be. His skin is a little pale though, brighter than usual. Almost like he was sick, his eyes look darker too. More sunken in, the shape of his skull more prominent. His looks still annoyingly well presented.

"Yes, you do look rather tired. I see other things have prioritized above your looks."

This man, the audacity of this man. The only reason I'm not at the top of every class. Our number 1 student count being evenly split. I have to bite down on my tongue forcefully to not say anything back. I'm too tired to truly come back with anything witty, so I choose to save myself from the embarrassment. Instead, I slightly step on his robe on the ground causing him to trip up a little.

He quickly sends a warning glare my way and then continues walking. I smile slightly, knowing even if it was petty, it was worth it.

Riddle doesn't even hold the door for me when we walk in. Causing it to slam dangerously close to my face.

"There you two are, I was afraid you weren't going to make it," Slughorn exclaims excitedly. "Turn your textbooks to page 246, we are going to learn how to make a Polyjuice potion!"

I glance at Tom, his eyes only focus on the words before him not realizing my gaze is on him. I wonder if he'll make this a competition as well. Knowing him, as well as me, anything but competition is out of our character. He looks up catching my eyes, I tilt my head. Trying to silently communicate from afar.

His head turns to Slughorn, then back to me. He nods his head and that's all it takes for both of us to come to an understanding. Whoever can answer the most questions, and create the best potion gets bragging rights.

I don't intend to lose.

[hermitcraftheadcanons]

Hermitopia AU Masterpost 1 [COMPLETE]

This is a gathering place for the events of the Hermitopia AU, as well as art and writing resulting from it (art and writing listed at the bottom). Please read the AU introduction and rules here before submitting! Feel free to join the discussions on the HCHC discord server!

(Disclaimer/PSA: All points are asks contributed by the community, the mods take no credit for the ideas within them)

If you would like specific credit in the masterpost, please sign within the text of the ask! (A dash and a signature at the end should do.) Asks not signed will be treated as anonymous.

Summary posts:

Not all elements of plot and character will be summarized, but here are a few basic things you may want to be familiar with before submitting an ask! (Unless you are purposely aiming to create an [ALTERNATE] idea for a Hermit)

1 - Starting positions and each Hermit's powers (based on the submissions from Day 1)

Summary post 2 - Interpersonal connections (based on Day 1 and 2 submissions)

Make sure to check out the second masterpost here for more up to date information, including newer art and writing!

Asks:

- (copied ask) [summarized mod comment]

- Hermitopia | Scar was experimented on by Cub. He gained dangerous powers and wings that resemble a dragon’s, but he keeps both hidden. Unless someone makes him angry. He has no idea who gave him his powers. Eventually he and Cub decided that they wanted to control things beyond their corporation, so Scar ran for mayor. (there are things to fill in but im lazy) [Scar assumes he got the powers in an accident during research. He enjoys having them but has no idea that they were intentional.]

- Hermitopia AU team ZIT is a superpowered crime-fighting trio!

- owing to a very particular set of guidelines he put in place, Joe can now copy powers if he sees them in use and can reverse-engineer how those powers are used. needless to say, this is massively overpowered in the right hands.but it got worse. at some point, there was an... incident... on ConCorp grounds, something to do with a mass amount of entities causing time dilation -- and Joe was caught in the thick of it, unable to be rescued for a while.the problem is, he got out by piecing together how the time dilation worked.needless to say, Joe... has a ridiculous powerset. so he chooses largely not to use his powers anymore unless it's absolutely dire or petty enough to shrug off as a random occurrence. nobody needs to know that one of the most powerful Unaffiliated in the city is standing right in front of them... especially not ConCorp.

- doc was a former high ranking employee of concorp before he volunteered for an experiment and it went horribly wrong. since then, the company has tried to erase any evidence of his existence. doc is now seeking revenge for all that the company did to him and is determined to tear it apart

- HI ok follow up asks will be sent later when my thoughts are coherent but concept: cleo has like super messed up healing powers where she can make healing go Too Far. also i pin her as unbound, considering, like, everything - shovel-shuffle

- So, his power was meant to be super-regen, right? except things don't always quite go to plan. Someone volunteered for the powers surgeries and is arguably dead. Etho is a name shared by the many many clones that developed themselves out of the leftovers. They're not quite individuals, not quite a hivemind. Any one of them has no fear of death because the others will continue, but they all act independently around their overarching goal. (which I won't snitch about) - DragonKay

- Bdubs was a hero. Key word? Was. He climbed the ranks through the government, he was a loyal and dutiful member of society, and he used his plant manipulation powers to subdue evil-doers without hurting them. But he’s always been a friendly guy, and he couldn’t help himself—talking to the Unrestrained, especially those in custody, was interesting! ...but it’s a slippery slope to walk, being friendly with the enemy and not sympathizing to their cause. Nobody knows where he is now, but there are rumours of a vigilante with similar abilities, and his three compatriots, two of whom he helped escape from ConCorp... They call themselves the nHo. - slimetek [Bdubs deserted Concorp while helping Doc escape after his experiment went wrong]

- Concorp managed to make a device that allows animals to speak or translate their thoughts into writing. This means that the good old mayor Scar has a certain cat giving some advice on how to run the city.

- Iskall is an assasin/mercenary against their own volition. An accident they'd rather forget almost killed them, and in exchange for their freedom and free will they got to live as a cyborg. Though its hard to forget with the implant that covers their eye and the limb of cool metal hanging at their side - @ghastly-ghostie [Iskall works for Concorp off-books, bound by the debt owed to them for the life saving experimental modifications]

- so I think grians original powers could be like cloning, but something goes wrong and the clones are different people. as a result of the duplication process, some funky magic rocks are made. the clones decide to take most of the funky rocks and run off, leaving grian with one rock that gives him some new abilities and the clones' rocks give him others. also uhh mechanical wings bc yes. so grians plot is him trying to find them while also causing problems on purpose. infinity stones. update to my grian ask from earlier, I had better ideas: the rocks are old like magic things that grian finds before the cloning and ends up collecting, but his clones snatch them - simplyskipper [some of the alternate Grians are aligned with different factions in Hermitopia, while the locations of others are farther or unknown]

- Hermitopia- Impulse has solid-light powers. He has golden crystals implanted in his hands, which he can reflect light through to solidify it into all sorts of shapes. This can be used to make barriers, projectiles, and much more, though more detailed constructs take more time.- @mleemwyvern

- Hermitopia AU Poultry man is a well-known chaotic neutral leaning towards good, as a one of the unrestrained.

- I think Team ZIT should be a little be wild card-y, that's how they act after all! [they are employed by the government for standard crimefighting, but they don't always take Scar's word at its intended meaning and often play a bit on the chaotic side when given instructions]

- [Hermitopia AU] False is an antihero/vigilante type who's specialty is not defined by powers or the such, but just... the absolute skill of being able to dual wield two (more sci-fi era) short swords. Maybe someone upgrades them to be "enchanted" (electrical, fire, etc. something that tech could do well probably). She's willing to be paid-for-hire, but if you go past her moral line she's also willin' to backstab you. -- @cheshire-vex [she's a free agent who sort of drifts between Concorp, the government, and whoever else will pay her on a job-by-job basis]

- Hermitopia impulse has more connections then one may think. He has ties to people pretty much everywhere, for reasons unknown. There is a 100% someone will come and greet him wherever he goes. [the greetings are usually friendly]

- Hermitopia Au! Keralis is a hero who most people wouldn't expect to be too skilled at fighting. His power is similar to hypnosis so he has no need to get very physical. Yeah, that changed when some bastard villain decided to attack his friends shop. [that incident caused his employer Scar to realize his untapped potential for protecting people and assign him to a few more high-stakes jobs]

- Hermittopia!TFC was one of ConCorp’s first experiments and as such his powers are a bit less...refined then the others. He has geokinetic powers, allowing him to psychically control rocks and other earthen materials. He used to be one of the VEX programs top graduates, but has since parted ways with them for unknown reasons and now operates his own plans of keep crime in Hermitopia under control. -lechairpourriedegrianri [he is considered Unaffiliated and both Concorp and the government largely leave him to his own devices, since he is helping to keep the city together]

-Wels doesn't have powers. He does have a super-suit made of fire and heat resistant carbon fibre (like the material used for the space shuttle) and has a built in hologram projector. One time, he used the hologram projector to project an image of himself, which everyone thought was a clone. He didn't have the heart to tell them otherwise. (AKA everyone thinks Wels has powers but he doesn't) -Silverwolf53 [he got the suit in Project VEX]

- To follow up on the Impulse ask- Team ZIT are a space-themed superhero team. Government-aligned, at least for now.Tango has meteor-like powers, he can shoot fire from his hands and feet and often uses this to propel himself at high speeds. Zed has gravity powers! He can increase or decrease the density of any object, to the point of making small black holes. They all have space-themed costumes, and it was probably Zed's idea. - @mleemwyvern

- TFC was the first participant in project VEX

- Grian was an attempted success. It fixed some problems with Etho's unintended cloning, but at the same time created some problems of its own, seeing as the clones appeared to have a life of their own.It's fine, though. It's probably fine

- I would say Grian is unrestrained, a bit like Etho, Chaotic in his own way. Does not activily Try to hurt people, but does mostly what he wants for fun.-Ciara

- Xisuma is a civilian- he has hero friends, but despite all their teasing he’s never wanted to go through VEX training. But in the night, the unrestrained Void walks the streets [Void is a symbiotic creature made of nothingness that uses Xisuma's body as a substitute physical form]

- Bdubs was such a good man... he could be trusted to look after Doc, couldn’t he? Somebody had to oversee him, somebody who was reliable and would never, ever consider betraying the mayor and ConCorp...They let their guard down, and Bdubs got curious. Bdubs made a friend.And then they lost him.- Slimetek

- The hels hermits are considered evil by default. How do you spot these clones, how could you protect yourself? Well in the past it was a lot easier, just look for their red eyesNowadays contacts exist but that doesn't stop people trying to call the police on tango, calling him a hels. Hes netherian, they have unnatural eye colours and their iris fills the entire eye, hes not evil but if people keep doing this hes gonna be!

- Beef woke up from his brain surgery to receive telepathy powers, took one look into the mind of the overseer, and noped put of there as fast as he could go.He's on very public record. After all, the mind control he may be capable of is a very convenient explanation for anyone who turns against concorp... ~DragonKay

- Hypno can’t control minds.They say he does. It’s why he’s named Hypno, after all.In reality, he can’t control people like that... but he can control what they see.Your best friend might look like your greatest enemy. A pit of lava might look like solid ground. A 100-foot drop might look like a step down.It’s a good thing he’s a hero, and a good thing he keeps his true powers hidden beneath a guise of low-level hypnotism. There’s no telling what he could do if they let him go. [he works for Concorp, helping to protect VEX trainees from people trying to harm them before they get a chance to finish the program, as well as keeping other resources safe]

- The 9th Street Incident [referring to an earlier Impulse comment] was a friendly greeting. That particular version of Etho just thought that drawing weapons would be a friendly greeting for Impulse, but Tango and Zed seem to disagree

- They still don’t trust Bdubs. He was with the government for a long time, and things are hard out there on the run. Besides, they don’t know what he got up to there. ConCorp could have any sort of information on him, something that might scare him back.Bdubs understands this. He doesn’t want to go back. He’d hate to go back....but they think he will, and maybe there’s something he’s not telling them. An ace that ConCorp has yet to play.- Slimetek

- Mumbo works for concorp as an engineer specialising in robotics, most recently taking on the task of maintaining Iskall's cybernetics that somehow they just keep damaging. Iskall assures him they're just.. very clumsy. So far Mumbo hasn't caught on.

- Ren's power is that hes a werewolf, but he only found out when he was in his late teens with his childhood friend Iskall. He still feels guilty about it, he did kill his best friend afterall. Or so he thinks.He's lived off grid ever since, too overwhelmed with grief and guilt to rejoin society. Most assume he's dead too - @ghastly-ghostie [Ren dropped Iskall off to Concorp as a last ditch effort, running away before he could see whether they took his friend in or not. They did, starting Iskall's plotline. Iskall told Concorp about Ren's abilities, triggering a panic in the Concorp ranks at the fact that Ren is a superhuman being created by some force other than their own project]

- Where does Void come from? The same place all powers come from.Little did they know, something survived the crash and has taken a human host. Maybe it's not the only one...No, that place is not Concorp. Concorp's original goal was to develop technology by reverse-engineering from a crashed alien spaceship. These aliens did gene-editing the way some people do nose jobs, so they adapted that technology, too.~DragonKay

- i've already said a bit about it in the discord but i have hermitopia cleo brainrot. joe being there was able to save her by giving her the regen powers along with her puppeteering telekinesis power. anyways cleo is presumed dead, sent by concorp into a mission as fodder basically until zit could arrive. but now there's is one (1) bitter undead vigilante against concorp that is presumed dead

- Stress’s name has a few meanings in relation to her. Whenever she gets too angry or /stressed/, she transforms into the StressMonster, a monster that feeds off of other people’s stress to become more powerful. Luckily, the monster is rarely seen, but does terrible things when she is. She’s one of the most feared creatures in Hermitopia. Stress hates her and tries her best to hide her from her friends, but it can backfire sometimes. - @guster-animations

- to follow-up on Joe being presumed dead: remember the time dilation incident he was stuck in? ConCorp figured it was best to cut their losses and not try to send anyone in to rescue him -- it would be a pointless mission. so they abandoned him, quietly announced that he had died in the line of duty, and put the affected area under high security clearance in order to prevent any future accidents. they figured he was already dead. and Joe figures, given that they up and abandoned him, maybe it's for the best that they continue to figure just that. he changed his last name to "Hills" -- a joke about the biome containing the time anomaly -- and otherwise proceeded to stay under the radar. he still uses the time dilation area as a base of operations, sometimes; it's very useful to have a hideout that people physically cannot get into/out of without his direct assistance. is he nursing a grudge, coming up with some convoluted scheme to get back at the paramilitary group for abandoning him? or does he just want to live a relatively normal life off the grid? who knows. that's the Joe [REDACTED] Hills difference. -@betweenlands

- False has some big scary power that is almost Eldritch she just happens to prefer a sword and doesn’t really care for who she works for as long as they’re paying... (they don’t need to know of the power that had harmed the ones she loves the most)

- Keralis once encountered Void sulking around where Xisuma worked. So fearful for his friend’s safety, he used his power on Void and told him to go away. Apparently the charm is still active, because if Void spots Keralis anywhere, he’ll turn tail and run. No, it’s not because he’s scared. Absolutely not.

- Grumbot serves as a sentient supercomputer created by Mumbo for Grian. Grian is using Grumbot for... various activities, all of which harmless, but a certain evil clone [Helsknight] has reverse engineered the technology. Concorp would like for Mumbo to give them the tech, but mumbo stuck some eyes to the computer, got emotionally attached, and refuses to give up his baby boy.

- When Impulse hears his friend/colleague Bdubs has been "taken over" by the mind-controller [Beef], he wants to go on an off-the-books mission to rescue him! Just giving up like they were told to isn't in his nature.Of course the rest of ZIT are with him. Heroes save people! It's what they do!~DragonKay

- Hermitopia is a mixture of sleek futuristic and cyberpunk in terms of style. It really depends on where you live and work (ik this doesnt include any hermits but whatever) - @ghastly-ghostie

- I wonder if Cleo's overactive healing powers affect herself and if any injuries she receives immediately heal over like wolverine or deadpool

- Ren used to be friends with Cleo too, but then she died. Strangely enough, she died on the same day that Ren killed Iskall. Ren’s lost all his friends. It’s hard living in isolation when there’s no one left that even cares about you. (Unless— no, that’s impossible.)

- I was thinking about Biffa, like you do. And Biffa would totally be some robot that was created by Project VEX in its early stages, however they realised fast that it was easier to use humans and give them powers, maybe its not their strong suit with robots. But Biff went sentient and glitched and was scrapped so hes just out there doing his thing. Hes a wildcard and plays for which side he wants at the time, sometimes he'll help or sometimes hes the one causing trouble. He looks pretty similar to a android like in Detroit:Become human but hes a bit uncanny and eerie, maybe its the eyes or the blood red armour. Powerwise, he's got more strength than a human does, mainly because he isn't limited like others are. try not to get punched by him, it'll hurt! [He's convinced Concorp will destroy him if they find out he's alive and Unaffiliated] -lucodak

- Going off of my thing about hermotopia impulse having friends everywhere....this may include the nho. Okay, they beat him to a pulp on one of his solo patrols once, but theey felt bad n patched him up! He has to keep it a secret. He brings them dinner alot. And checks in on them.

- Beef is the perfect cover-up for Bdubs’ desertion. ConCorp doesn’t want any other employees getting bright ideas, now, do they? Nor do they want employees getting nosy and trying to figure out where Bdubs went. They don’t have to tell people what Beef’s powers are. They just release that he developed powers after brain surgery, and a rumour that he was spotted lurking around before Bdubs suddenly betrayed ConCorp... and people draw their own conclusions. -Slimetek

- xB is pretty sure he’s supposed to be evil.I mean, that’s what sentient AIs usually end up being, according to a quick internet search. And yet he’s... not. Or maybe he’s just on the wrong side. - Slimetek

- Yes impulse is friends with the nho....what he doesn't know? He's....easily susceptible to hypnosis. Very easily.......Of course, after impulse is basically a very tired n warm cuddle bug, so, cuddle piles tend to happen after all information is spilled. He must've fallen asleep at their apartment again! Whoops! But it's okay.....they take good care of him if he does! [Beef is using his mind reading ability on Impulse without his knowledge, to make sure that he hasn't spilled their location and to predict the government's next moves. He feels slightly bad about it but feels that it is necessary for the nHo's survival.]

- So far, Grian has only ever encountered two of his clones, NPC Grian and Robot Grian. Technically three, if one were to count Ariana Griande. Grian doesn't really, but some do. [Ariana Griande is a popular musician in Hermitopia who is building a career using the magical stone of voice enhancement she recieved through the cloning process]

- To handle the two Grumbot issue: the one working with Helsknight can be Jrumbot, a legion of robot drones meant to work as Grumbot’s physical form that ended up being hijacked by Helsknight and turned against ConCorp

- There...aren’t a lot of “normal” animals left in Hermittopia. ConCorp took one look at the animals populating the city and decided that, hey, they could make some improvements. Species after species, they modified their behavior, appearance, internal structure, whatever they could fix, tweak, or add. They were just improving their lives and the lives of the citizens of Hermittopia, after all, but the new animals quickly outcompeted the old for resources and habitats. And if it makes it easier for ConCorp to stick a camera in one or two of them, or set up robotic animals to keep a better eye on the city, no harm, no foul, right?(Bonus: there is one (1) singular cat left in Hermittopia, resulting in a spy movie-style heist where two teams of Hermits attempt to “rescue” the cat simultaneously. The cat keeps wandering away from both teams. Shenanigans ensue)- Adonis [the cat is Jellie, who orchestrated the competition between Team ZIT and Cleo and Joe for her own entertainment, getting away from both parties in the end]

- The Leak:Not all mutations are the result of controlled experiments! If some alien tech got away from the crash site, concorp never would have picked it up. It might have got into nature, not as refined as they made it in the labs but causing little changes here and there. Ren may have become a werewolf from being bitten by a mutant wolf~DragonKay

- Impulse is able to use his powers to create illusions or male things appear invisible! Sort of. After all, light dictates what we see. It takes a lot of focus, though, so it's not that practical. -@rayveewrites

- The one thing Hels wasn't able to steal was the cloning technology, hence his hostility with Concorp -- he needs the cloning device, because how else is the void going to get a body of their own? - SilverWolf53

- *glances at the hermitopia werewolf ask* okay but what if the same mystery people who made ren into a werewolf also created jevin, and maybe Etho? idk if either of them have been given any hermitopia headcanons yet lol. but im sure the same people who made a werewolf could make a sentient slime (or perhaps rescue one) or make... whatever etho is. [Since the "second organization" is an incorrect assumption believed by Concorp, Jevin was created when he came in contact with a waterway contaminated by The Leak. Concorp assumes he was created by an opposing organization and not by accident, and therefore would like to bring him in along with Ren.]

- hermitopia - mumbo and grian were friends back when cloning experiments were still happening (or . as friendly as you can be with someone who's treating you like a lab rat), but after everything went wrong and grian escaped, mumbo has his memories wiped nd thats why he's trusted w iskall's stuff? bc he inherently remembers working on high-level things without knowing where he learnt it - muscle memory, yk?anyway massive angst with grian maybe recognising mumbo, but not the other way round, and trying to rekindle their friendship? and that's where grumbot comes in? -gin [Mumbo's memory was wiped so that he would forget the deadly purpose of Iskall's cybernetics, which he was working on at the same time as the Grian project in the background. Mumbo does not remember creating Grian's mechanical wings or Iskall's arm and eye, and he has no memory of either individual previous to "meeting" Iskall as the person assigned to his repair and upkeep.]

- Etho doesn't so much have powers as he is powers. All the powers the ‘original’ had went into creating him; now he just exists, as whatever sort of being he is. Not a human one, that much is obvious. ~DragonKay [Etho has no powers beyond the hivemind and his training, due to the error in the experiment that caused the clones]

- Mumbo started the button as a joke. A nonsense social expirement to see how much people want worthless signs of status. Unfortunately things got out of hand, and violent too. But hey! It's not his fault that the five special anomalous stones were misplaced into the prize dispenser! It was just chance that they fell into the hands of the clone of the worst gremlin in the city! Don't fire him! [He was not fired, but Cub was Decidedly Unhappy with him for a good long while]

- Void mostly trashes ConCorp facilities- trying to figure out if any of his siblings survived the spaceship crash, but occasionally he’ll pilfer from a bakery, because X is a health nut and Void just wants a gods damned cookie [Void very much dislikes unseasoned chicken]

- If the Stress Monster gets too big, too dangerous, Cleo is sworn under oath to Stress to zap her with her healing powers. Cleo doesn’t like to do it, overhealing a stressed Stress makes her so calm she gets knocked out for a couple of days, but Stress can take a small comfort in the fact that at least one person out there can stop her

- Ooh with the self healing Cleo she'd be able to develop a small amount of super strength, with how the mind keeps from going full throttle because it would destroy the body once she gets over it it's hysterical strength whenever she wants [it is quite painful, but a good backup plan]

- Being a hive mind of disposable clones that can spawn new copies at will, it can sometimes be hard for the Etho Entity to remember that it is indeed a big deal for other people when they get hurt. This can make him come off as callous to those around him, placing him firmly in the "villain" category in most citizen's books, but he really doesn't intend any harm!

- Grian used to be tall, but then the cloning happened. With each clone they stole a little bit of his height making him the short man he is today. He needs to capture those clones and get his height back. [Grian isn't entirely sure how to accomplish this, but he's dead set on trying! He misses being tall!]

- While Grian was perfectly fine with Ariana Griande living her own life, he did insist on one thing.Her "older brother" getting backstage access whenever she was on tour. He's very proud and supportive of her and her music career.

- Mumbo is perfectly content working in tech, watching the other hermits get up to crazy shenanigans. Except of course, there was that one time he was out testing some new gear and accidentally saved a crowd from some villains... and there were all those times after too...But hey! It’s not his fault that people like him, and he certainly isn’t going to get caught by Concorp during his after hours activities. [Mumbo considers himself an accidental hobbyist, not thinking he has the nerve or the skill for proper hero work. Time will tell if he's right about that or not...but unfortunately, he probably is. This should be fun.]

- There’s still some people overseeing VEX, even over Cub. They’re the ones that push Cub to do certain experiments or to scrap one. They’re the ones to give Cub the decision for Iskall’s life debt. Scar was under them too for the longest time, but eventually he wanted out. Cub still wanted in. They were still in the right, right? That’s what they tell him. He’s starting to doubt it. [Cub is way too invested in everything he's built to even think about going rogue now, but he does resent and occasionally question the judgement of his superiors increasingly as his project begins to fail more and more often. He also fears that Scar's shift in career will be seen as a betrayal, rather than as a tactical attempt to gain the company influence in the government.]

- Been thinking about the impulse + nho asks and just,,, what would happen if concorp/the government found out? It cant be good with interrogation/hypnosis on both sides (incase you cant tell,, the brainrot got me as well) (apologies if this is a mess im excited) [Hypno is assigned to set up an illusionary conversation to make Impulse reveal nHo location to Concorp and government agents while thinking that he's actually talking to the nHo in a random encounter]

- The one mind Beef can't read is Etho's. Their hivemind is just too weird for him to comprehend. If he ever tries to listen in, it sounds like just a bunch of static from an old TV.

- for hermitopia au!: Out of most of the heros, the most reckless may be team zit. sure they tell themselves they'll plan out missions but it's hard when they share a braincell and tango just runs in. impulse and zed share a look everytime and have to run after him to make sure he doesn't get too hurt or overwhelmed by the enemy. in their defence its hard to plan ahead against an enemy when you dont know what they are thinking.-lucodak ["You might not have known what they were thinking, Tango, but we'd generally like you to know what you're thinking!"]

- i bet ConCorp really wants to make it out like theres some secret shady organization creating all these people with mutations, rather than their own operatives deserting and their own failure to contain dangerous chemicals... whether its malicious coverups or just ignorance to the fact they messed up, wonder what would happen if that sort of thing came to light...? [If they found out that the unintentional superhumans were a result of the poorly-contained crash site? Cub would lose his job...maybe worse. If Cub found out (and he hasn't, yet) he would do everything in his power to keep that information from his superiors.]

- (paraphrased) Impulse accidentally walks in on heroes and agents breaking down the doors of the nHo's hideout and confronting them. Scar claims that they did so on information Impulse himself provided and thanks him for his service. Impulse, feeling confused and betrayed, resists Hypno's attempts to illusion him back to Scar's side and flees the scene with the nHo, knowing very little other than the fact that he doesn't want to be manipulated by the government any more (and still not knowing that Beef has been reading his mind)

- Impulse may have been labeled a traitor. But do you really think that Impulse, secret rebel, starting to learn how dangerous and corrupted Concorp really is, wouldn't let his best friends know about the danger they might be in? I think Team ZIT is more loyal to each other than to the government. - @mleemwyvern [ Impulse's first stop after escaping with the nHo is to find a place to secretly meet Tango and Zedaph and tell them about the way he was tricked. It takes a lot of explaining and a lot of trust, but they eventually decide to believe his claims and are left with a choice: will they openly go rogue and become a target along with Impulse and the rest of the nHo, or are they better off using their established image and reputation to keep an eye on the government heros' movements from the inside?]

- (two asks combined, paraphrased) Ren runs out of supplies and decides to head back into the city, confident in his ability to stay off the grid after so many years of experience and such a long time away. Once there, he runs into Doc, and they hit it off quite quickly. However, the more Ren talks the more Doc realizes - with his ex-Concorp knowledge - that Ren matches the description of Iskall's main target exactly. He warns Ren, who is then faced with the knowledge that Iskall is alive and assigned to kill him...so many questions and so many tears to follow...

- Why did Hermitopia start needing heroes? When the Unrestrained started to appear, if course. Why did the Unrestrained start to appear? A question asked a little less. When did the VEX program start? When did they start taking more risks? When did they stop caring about certainty and safety and shift towards trying to push boundaries they weren't ready to? People can be so enamoured with the concept of superhuman abilities, something bright and glorious and good- and perhaps they could have that too- they don't ask all the right questions. It's all an elaborate game of damage control, don't let the flashy heroics fool you, they've made mistakes, terrible, terrible mistakes, and now there are villains running loose with powers they fooled ConCorp into giving them. Are they villains? Are they victims? Does it matter? They're causing problems. [Project VEX has developed into a solution to its own problems, a self perpetuating cycle...one that Cub, as a businessman, is very familiar with. It's what keeps the wheels of industry turning. It's what keeps innovation creeping forward. It wasn't intentional, not this time...but if it keeps his project alive, he'll take it.]

- One time, Jevin had narrowly dodged being captured by Concorp. He was laying low in the forest out of town, when he had a run-in with some sort of wolf creature. Thankfully, claws and teeth couldn't exactly hurt him anymore, so he just played dead until it gave up.When the moon set, the wolf-thing slowly transformed into a human being. Ren was horrified at the thought he'd lost control and hurt someone- again- but Jevin assured him he was fine. Jevin got the feeling that the werewolf needed a friend, and Jevin himself needed a place to stay for a while... -RayveeWrites [Ren and Jevin are not currently in the same location, but they each have a means of contacting each other for help if needed]

- Worm Man wasn't a well- known super, but plenty of people have noticed that he seemed to vanish at the same time Team ZIT first started active duty. Those people have also noticed that one of the members has a very similar power set to WM.Officially, that's just a coincidence. Officially.-RayveeWrites [Zedaph was trying to get some unofficial practice while still in training in the VEX program]

- A common misconception is that Bdubs conjures up his vines from nowhere. He can't.Like any plant, his vines grow from seeds. They grow unnaturally fast, when Bdubs wills it, but they have to come from seeds. Where do these seeds come from, you may ask?Well, a long time ago, Bdubs ingested some strange fruits. Somehow, in wild defiance of human biology, the seeds contained in those fruits worked their way into his muscles and germinated. Some of the roots worked their way into his brain and fused into it; the rest spread through his muscles, grew beneath his skin, coiled around his bones. Thanks to the way the vines connected to his brain, Bdubs is able to command the vines, and their magic, at will.The vines produce seeds; some stay in his body to replace the old ones when they die, and most work their way into a pair of 'seed pods' in his wrists. Bdubs provides the nutrients, the energy; the vines provide the seeds, the magic. As an extra bonus: if the vines were to be totally removed from Bdubs' body, he would be at best extremely weak, and at worst dead. The vines have grown into his muscles, to the point where they've essentially replaced them in some areas. It's fortunate that they connected with his mind so early on, otherwise he'd be dead. -RayveeWrites [Concorp developed the fruit, and the fact that Bdubs is evidence of the unlikely success of that experiment makes them all the more angry at his betrayal]

- A lot of excellent xB information (it's too long to copy but please read it it's very good)

- Iskall has exactly one (1) failed assignment. That assignment? The kill or capture of Stress. Stress and Iskall have been, or should it be were now, friends for a very long time, since before Iskall even met Ren. So one can imagine the stress this causes Iskall, to be told to kill his one remaining friend that he knows is alive. Of course, this stress is quite enough to to Stress's Stress Monster into one it's strongest yet seen forms, allowing for Stress to then get away. (1/2)(2/2) Of course, Con Corp doesn't- and can never- know the true reason that Iskall cannot kill or capture Stress. If they knew, if they subjected Stress to the same hell he's in- no, that cannot happen. So Iskall hires False to protect Stress, to interfere whenever they send him on a mission for her. Luckily, False is good at keeping secrets when she wants to, and this one she'll keep. But as far as Con Corp knows, Iskall has severe stress and trauma from being a cyborg, and that's why he fails. [This all adds up to a monumental waste of Concorp's time and money, which also results in False getting payed, so all parties involved are happy except for Concorp >:)]

- Impulse would take a bullet for his teammates, and he knows they might be about to take one for him, keeping him updated on what's going on government side of this... slander. Still, Tango and Zed are great actors, and if he didn't know better, he might be a little worried they would *actually* be hunting him down in the name of justice [Tango and Zed are now being sent on missions to retrieve Impulse, which they must pretend to lose believably. They occasionally overestimate their friend's abilities and give him a few more close calls than he'd like, but overall the ruse is holding up.]

Writing:

- Wels, Hels, TFC, and Grumbot

- Bdubs Concorp promotion and desertion

- Joe Hills in his time dilation hideout

- Etho clones, ZIT, and the nHo

- Keralis and Void

- [ALTERNATE] Reveal of Impulse's situation with the nHo

Art:

- Impulse suit design

[stillgirlfrommars]

you’ve got news

So, I already talked about this with @missmorwen​ and I know I don’t have the time to draw and make an actual comic out of it, BUT I cannot stop thinking about this SamSteve-post-engdame-fix-it story (with a dash of BuckyNat, ‘cause that’s just who I am) which is kinda crack and very rom-com (a bit you’ve got mail) inspired and doesn't make much sense, because... PLOT HOLES but * sigh * I kinda wanna share at least the idea so - bear with me:

So, instead of Nat dying, Steve sacrifices his Captain America powers on Vormir and comes back as Skinny!Steve and starts running a political blog called you’ve-got-news in secret, uncovering all kinds of shady business/corruption and becoming the bane of existence of every politician and greedy CEO - but it takes a while for his friends to figure out it's him who’s running that increasingly popular blog (which the new Captain America is actually a big fan of ;)). And the way that happens is as follows:

So, Steve almost died at the end of Endgame. The idiot (affectionate) of course still wanted to fight Thanos, but even with Thor’s Hammer, he took some serious, serious injuries which led to a tough talk with Sam, Nat and Bucky

Like I imagine, that while Steve would not have any regrets whatsoever about giving up his powers, he would still need some time to come to terms with the fact that he won’t be able to participate in the action like he used to. Even though, he actually wants and knows... it’s time to ... start something new, it’s still a process. So, there he is, trying to figure out who he is without the mantle of Captain America, re-defining the way he can and will fight against bullies in the future (cause there is no way he’s gonna stop that).

And to the surprise of everyone, Steve actually doesn’t press for participating in Avenger-style-fights anymore (he still does some of the practical mission planning and shit like that) but most importantly, he starts taking up new hobbies, like cooking or old hobbies like drawing - and he seems happier than he has in a long time, and yeah maybe it’s a bit too good to be true, if Sam starts thinking about it. But, hey, Steve finally seems to be happy so -

Meanwhile, Sam still becomes the new Captain America, and Steve is there while he is adjusting, finding himself in that role. He is there when Sam needs to talk things through, and yeah, it would still be a process like in tfatws series, but ... a little bit less alone, I guess. 

So, the new Captain America fights alongside Nat and Bucky - and it’s good, they work surprisingly well together, but also: those two are stuck right in the middle of a weird assassin!flirting situation (I’m imagening a lot of veeery intense staring at the other while cleaning their weapons or beating someone up, innuendos en masse, dark humour etc.). And frankly, it’s getting on Sam's nerves because they seem to be so oblivious about the whole damn thing. Neither of them is actually admitting to anything, no, they are too busy teasing him about the ‘crush’ he has developed on that mysterious dude who is running the famous political-youve-got-news-blog that gained momentum a while ago and is currently keeping all the corrupt politicians and CEOs on their toes.

So, yeah, Sam might have been caught a couple of times reading or reciting from that blog because - it has actually turned into a pretty efficient way of mobilising people to demonstrate for change and it did give him some tip-offs in regards to who the bad guy really was and yeah. But it’s not a crush... Sam just really likes reading the blog posts, okay. That dude seems pretty cool and they share the same moral code, so... whatever.

What Nat and Bucky and Steve don't know (and he’ll never tell them), is that Sam is actually kiiiiinda already frequently talking with the guy who runs the blog. Anonymously on both ends, of course (because for good reasons both of them are pretty careful about giving away information concerning their identities). And in a way that whole anonymity-thing makes it a lot easier to talk about stuff he finds harder to admit to the people who he knows directly. So, you could say, blog-guy has kinda become Sam's internet friend, but not his crush, no.

Honestly, the crush he is more concerned about (that he also isn't planning on telling anyone about any time soon, cause Bucky would just tease him and Nat would start scheming) is, well, it’s Steve. Because, damn, he likes their get-togethers a lot, the meals Steve's cooking are honestly to die for. They watch baseball together, they do museum-trips... And the way they can talk about (almost) everything... He just feels understood and... yeah, loved (maybe not in the way that he wishes for, but still) and it’s nice to see Steve so happy and okay, maybe it’s getting a bit out of control because Sam took Steve with him to visit Sarah and his nephews and Sarah kinda saw right through his act of ‘hey, this is my best friend’ and ‘what do you mean, I don’t have feelings- okay. Yeah maybe I do’ and told him in no uncertain terms to fucking do something about it and get his shit together.

The thing is, he’s got it bad. But Sam is also torn, because this is the best fucking friendship he's ever had and he does not want to jeopardise that. So, in the end he ends up talking about this with his Internet friend... about how he kinda has this huge crush on his best friend, and his Internet friend is like, ‘TELL ME ABOUT IT, big fucking same here UGH. And I feel like I’m being SO obvious about it all. It’s honestly embarrassing. My other best friend keeps teasing me ‘bout it and tells me to just go for it, but that guy still hasn’t managed to ask out the girl he’s interested in, so, what does he know, right?’. And Sam laughs - at least he’s not alone.

So the days go by (Sam’s pining only increases, Steve took him to a wine tasting the other night and he almost... in his drunk state... almost... but he didn’t) until one day, while blog-guy and Sam are chatting, all of the sudden the blog-guy is like, ‘Shit, I think someone's breaking into my apartment’ and then like, ‘Okay, yes they are’ - and Sam's like, ‘call 911′, and blog-guy writes back ‘mmh think I can handle them’ (and Sam’s like ‘WTF... I know way too many people with zero regards for their own well-being, myself included’)

But then blog-guy is not answering anymore, so Sam frantically calls up Nat who rushes to his flat and Sam says: ‘You need to find out where that IP adress is located ASAP - the dude with that famous blog is in danger.’

And Nat does that multitasking thing where she’s working on the problem while ribbing Sam about the fact that, apparently, Captain America's Internet bestie is that famous blog dude, and- 'Are you sure it’s not a crush?'

But after another minute, Nat sighs and is like, ‘I can't find the location, this thing is encrypted af, it’s impossible.’ Suddenly, she notices something about the setup of the encryption and-, ‘Hang on a second, it was me who set this up for someone back in 2011.′ And as she slips on her jacket, she says to Sam, ‘Come on. I know where we have to go!’

So they make their way to what turns out is Steve's (!!!!) apartment and find him in the middle of a fight against over half a dozen heavily armed people, and yeah - he’s actually doing pretty okay for himself ‘cause he outsmarted a couple of them, but also- they kind of outnumber him, so Nat and Sam get to work.

And Sam doesn't even have time to fully register what that means re:blog-guy until they have successfully defeated the bad guys. After that's done, Steve is like, ‘Thanks guys, but how the hell did you know I was in trouble? Nat... you didn’t bug my apartment, did you??’

And Nat tstsk and then she just laughs because this is priceless and OF CoURSE it is Steve who is behind that blog... (she's a bit mad at herself for not figuring it out sooner, and a bit sad that Steve didn't feel like he could tell her, and that he assumes she has is flat bugged but, also,... kinda impressed.) But then she looks at him with a warm smile on her face, shaking her head, saying, ‘No, I didn’t, Steve.’ Her gaze wanders back and forth between Steve and Sam and she humms- 'That actually makes so much sense oh my god.' So, she leaves them ‘to talk’ ;) and for Sam to explain everything’ - and then it’s just the two of them.

And Sam does explain everything and is like, 'So you're that Blog dude, erm...' He's scratching the back of his neck, cheeks flushed, 'Turns out, we've been talking for months over that blog of yours. I'm (insert-Sam’s-username-here).'- and Steve's eyes go wide and you can literally see him processing that information right then and there and he's sputtering out a light laugh, and he's like 'Hang on a second... I... umm, okay, I gotta ask. So, that best friend you've got a crush on...' Well, it’s now or never -'Is you, yeah..', Sam admits and starts, 'and....' They both laugh again and Steve nods and just says- 'yeah, it’s you, too.'

And then they kiss and yaaay, happy ending!!!

And then the epilogue would be about them having a nice dinner with Bucky and Nat a couple of months later, and the whole time, Sam and Steve are being very much in loveTM. The three guys are standing in the kitchen, while Natasha is in the bathroom and Bucky's making a funny quib about how sickeningly cute Sam and Steve are together - and Sam, well, Sam just raises his eyebrows and is like, 'You know what, you're not allowed to say anything bout that, you and Romanoff have been acting waaaaay worse over the last year. At least we got our shit together in the end, what's your excuse, you are obviously absolutely in love with her!', and of course Nat chooses that exact moment to enter the room, hand on Bucky's waist, dropping a kiss on his cheek and is like, 'What do you mean, we've been dating for 6 months?' And Steve laughs and Sam groans bc .... he loves his friends, he does, but clearly, CLEARLY they ALL have to work on their communication skills!

The End.