#like did he think I simply imagined the data?

[hardcorehashbrown]

it’s cool being a published researcher and all but answering reviewer comments is gonna be the death of me

like ik i’m stupid but getting comments from other stupid scientists who couldn’t even be bothered to properly read the manuscript makes me want to hack into the editors email and track down the reviewers so i can yell at them in person

[linawritestwst]

(a very late valentine's day special) how twst characters would fall in love with you!

okay, so when i created this blog last year, i didn't have much time to write something for valentine's day, but i thought that i should try and write something for it this year!

at first i wanted to write something like "how twst characters would confess their love for you", i wanted it to be a reference to the "how twst characters would react to your love confession" series i made back when i just created this blog and i still only have the heartslabyul, savanaclaw and octavinelle hcs. i am sorry. but to be honest, i didn't have a lot of ideas and it was hard to find inspiration, so i decided to go with something different. but who knows, maybe i'll actually write it one day! also i know that this idea is very basic and i'm sorry.

this post has all nrc students (except ortho) + rsa and nbc characters, so GET READY BECAUSE THIS IS GONNA BE A VERY LONG POST.

also i'm having some really bad internet problems rn and even though i can use mobile data, EDITING ON MY PHONE IS A PAIN. I CAN'T DO ANYTHING. and idk when wifi will start working again and i'll be able to use my computer again, so sorry if this post looks weird, has typos and stuff like that, I JUST WANT TO POST IT ALREADY. I'M SICK OF SEEING IT IN MY DRAFTS.

heartslabyul.

riddle rosehearts.

♡ he doesn't understand you at all. you should be afraid of him, you should actually hate him for what he did and how he acted earlier. he was the first to overblot in front of you, he's sure it was quite a traumatic memory from you. and it's not like he treated you better than he treated other nrc students, he was just as willing to punish you for any "misbehavior". so why.. why do you still want you and riddle to become closer? you simply don't think that riddle actually had bad intentions, he just genuinely thought that everything will be okay if he just follows the rules and makes others follow them. so.. you don't think he's a bad person or anything like that. just someone who has a lot of issues and doesn't know how to deal with them properly. and after you say that.. riddle starts feeling very strange.

♡ falling in love with you feels so sudden, riddle doesn't remember being this interested in you when he first met you. he has to admit that he even kind of.. looked down on you back then and didn't think you were that special. though the case of you being the only magicless student here really was special. he also was angry at you because of you being so close with ace and deuce.. but now, he feels different. as he learns more about you and starts getting used to your company, he realizes that he actually likes you a lot. he even admires you, because it must be hard to deal with so much stuff as someone who's magicless he's sorry for being the first to overblot btw. he's always here if you need any help.

♡ why did he fall in love with you? well, you're certainly a very smart, strong and kind person, but the main reason was.. he was just happy to be understood by someone. he didn't expect you out of all people to forgive him, but it sure was a nice surprise. you're always here to calm him down when he's close to using his unique magic or yelling at someone for breaking the rules again, however, you don't blame him for acting like that and you say that his feelings are valid, he just has to find a better way to express them and process them. so.. it probably just feels nice to be seen as someone other than a rose-red tyrant.

ace trappola.

♡ as someone who said some pretty bad things about you and grim when you first met.. wow, it feels embarrassing to admit that he has a crush on you now. imagine making fun of a magicless human and then falling in love with them. yeah, that's ace. so, how did it happen? he's not sure when exactly he got feelings for you, it just.. happened. you two became so close, he actually couldn't imagine spending a day without you. everything just feels so boring when you're not around. pranking you or showing off to you or just talking to you makes his day, even if it's just you going "ACE D:<", he loves seeing your reactions.. and maybe, he loves you.

♡ it's hard to notice him acting any different when he's in love with you, but if you pay closer attention, you can see him blushing after you praise him for something or you can notice him asking you to hang out with him more often. he also sometimes freezes for a moment when you call him your friend, it's almost like he's asking you ".. but are you sure you don't wanna be more than friends?". but right after that, he goes back to his usual behavior and he's surprisingly good at hiding his crush on you.

♡ falling in love with you feels fun and kinda sad at the same time, because even though ace tries so hard to act confident and he claims that you love him just as much, he's actually not sure if you love him back or not. he doesn't mind being seen only as a friend, being friends with you is cool, but also.. yeah, he wants more. and he's not sure if he's ready for a serious relationship, considering what he did in the past to that girl he used to date. he knows that he would never do that to you, because you're so much cooler than that girl and you're much more interesting, but he also doesn't want to let you down. but if you do love him back.. he will try his best to treat you right, though it doesn't mean that you will be safe from his teasing and his pranks.

deuce spade.

♡ out of all the heartslabyul boys, i imagine deuce being the one to get a crush on you earlier than all the others. you're just so nice and sweet and understanding.. you also didn't judge him after you heard about his past and even said that you're proud of him for trying to change and become a better person. after that, deuce couldn't get your words out of his head and became extremely loyal to you, he's always here if you need any help and he feels so happy when you praise him or want to spend time with him.

♡ it's very easy to notice him having a crush on you, honestly. he tries really hard to hide it, but he fails and ace laughs at him every time. he can't say anything properly when you compliment him or smile at him and he starts stuttering, giggling like an idiot or he simply runs away and ends up tripping and falling. it makes him even more cute though and you can give him more attention to get more reactions like that from him or you can pretend not to notice on purpose.

♡ falling in love with you feels like something completely new and that's understandable, deuce has never experienced a feeling like this before. and even though at first it was just a very huge crush, now it actually feels like something more deep, it's like.. he really is in love with you. spending the rest of his life with you sounds scary and he's not sure if he's ready for something like this, but when he imagines it, it makes him feel soft and even kind of excited. he will understand if you reject his feelings, he has not the best past, but if you say yes to him, he will try to become the perfect boyfriend for you. he already knew that he wants to become a better person for his mom, but now he has two people in his life that he wants to change for.

cater diamond.

♡ when cater first met you, he thought you were cute but.. that was it. he didn't think much of you, honestly. don't get him wrong, he thought you were very cute and he would love to be friends with you! but.. he really didn't think that he's gonna fall in love with you later. he just enjoyed hanging out with you, talking to you, he loved the way you smile, he loved the way you laugh and.. wait, that's just him thinking you're cute, right? but not, like, in that way, right? because cater doesn't think he's quite ready to admit that he has feelings for you.

♡ cater is not sure how exactly it happened and why he got a crush on you. it's like.. he just feels more safe around you. it's like he can actually show you his real self and you won't judge him. of course, he's still not sure that you would actually be okay with him acting like his real self and he doubts that you would even like that side of his.. but for some reason he still feels like he can trust you. so he may or may not drop a few hints that make you go "cater. dude. are you okay." no, y/n, he's not okay, this poor man needs a hug.

♡ falling in love with you feels exciting and terrifying at the same time. cater feels truly happy when he's with you, he manages to forget about his problems at least for some time and his smile looks a lot more sincere than usual. but he's also.. scared. he doesn't think that you will love him back once you find out about his real personality, maybe you will accept it, sure, but would you really want a boyfriend like that? honestly, he should be grateful for you wanting to spend time with him even when he's being his "fake" self. he shouldn't ask so much from you, he should thank you for even just being friends with him. so whenever cater hears you laugh at his jokes, he feels genuine happiness but only for a second before he remembers that you will most likely never love him as much as he loves you. or will you?..

trey clover.

♡ just like cater, trey thought you were a nice person, but he didn't think you were.. you know.. his future love or something like that. he thought you were cute and he was always there to suggest his help if you needed it, but he really just thought that you two are gonna be friends and that's all. okay, maybe you two will be close friends. like, very close friends. but that's it. trey gave you so much attention and he had a habit to get a little bit too worried about you for no reason at all, but he thought that you're just.. well.. another younger sibling figure to him (your actual age doesn't matter). why else would he care so much about you?

♡ but oh no. it looks like you're actually something more to him. you're not just another younger sibling figure going "trey, i need your help!! ><". he would seriously think that he just likes you platonically and if it wasn't for cater, he would never realize that he actually likes you romantically. so what if he blushes a bit when you compliment his baking. so what if he thinks about you so often that it distracts him from his vice dorm leader duties. so what if he imagined spending the rest of his life with you- okay. okay, he understands what cater means now. maybe he really is in love with you.

♡ falling in love with you feels confusing for sure, but it also feels soft and sweet. trey may be a local mom friend who's always here to help his underclassmen out, but he has no idea what to do with his own feelings. should he just confess to you already or should he wait a bit? wait, do you even love him back? he has so many questions but almost no answers. but if you do love him back, trey will most likely notice it eventually. he's a smart boy, he had no idea that he actually has romantic feelings for you, but if you have a crush on him, he will definitely find out about it and when he does, he might start teasing you even more often.

savanaclaw.

leona kingscholar.

♡ oh boy. this guy definitely didn't expect to fall in love with you. no, he didn't expect to even become friends with you. you were just a weak little herbivore to him, nothing special, nothing out of ordinary. you were very a bit annoying sometimes too. but when you started saying things like "i want to get to know you better" or "i want to talk to you more".. that's when leona got very confused, though he didn't show it. why would you say things like that? what do you even want from him? is it because he's a prince? oh well, sorry to disappoint you, but he's actually a younger- "i just want to know why you're so lazy all the time.".. okay, this wasn't the answer he expected. he will tell you to go away, but don't pay attention to that, he's actually more interested in you now.

♡ leona just can't understand why you're like this. why do you spend so much time with him? why can't you just let him nap in peace? he actually jokes about you having a crush on him once and he expects you to go "h-how can you say things like that so casually!..". but you manage to surprise him again. "well what if i do? what are you gonna do then, huh?" okay, maybe he did underestimate you a little. just a little bit. you're slowly becoming more and more interesting and he hates to admit that he wants to know more about you. why? well.. he wants to know why you're so annoying all the time.

♡ falling in love with you feels weird, but also surprisingly entertaining. leona never knows what you're gonna do next and for some reason he even finds it exciting. he somehow manages to act like a tsundere and flirt with you at the same time. yes, he will go "ugh, why do you have to ruin my day like this" whenever you step on his tail while he's asleep, but he also will say things that make other savanaclaw students think that he's about to confess his feelings for you OR you two are actually already dating. does he know that he's in love with you though?.. he will need some time, but he will eventually realize it. and he's not gonna be happy about it.

ruggie bucchi.

♡ ruggie didn't really pay much attention to you at first, but he has to say that you're really fun to mess with. he never gets bored of seeing your reactions and sometimes he would steal stuff from you just to make you look at him. he knows that it probably sounds weird, but don't worry, he definitely doesn't have a crush on you, haha.. hey, why are you being so kind to him? why do you cook/buy food for him? why do you keep asking him if he needs any help? ah, maybe you just want a favor from him? you want him to help you with something, don't you? why would you have any other reason- "i'm just worried about you, that's all." oh no. oh no he's about to catch feelings.

♡ your kindness scares ruggie a bit, but he also keeps wanting more. he doesn't understand your motives, he doesn't understand why you're so worried about him. you just say things like "oh, i thought you were tired from doing leona's job all day" or "i thought you looked tired, so i just want to help you out, if that's okay". they may sound like nothing special, but ruggie feels weird whenever he hears you say stuff like that. he just jokes about you being too pure for someone like him, but he's actually kind of serious about it. are you sure you want to be friends with him? or.. maybe you're actually in love with him? don't worry, he's just joking around~

♡ falling in love with you feels fun at first, but it slowly starts becoming more and more scary when ruggie realizes just how deep and strong his feelings are. it's not just a small crush, he really is in love with you. he can't stop thinking about you and not a day passes without him wanting to see you. it feels strange to be treated so well without any reason at all, but ruggie just can't say no to your kindness. even though he keeps trying to make it look like it's nothing serious and you're just friends, he's actually this close to crying because he feels like he will never have a chance to be with you and you will never love him as much as he loves you. why would you even have feelings for him anyway?

jack howl.

♡ savanaclaw boys wouldn't find you that special when they first meet you and jack is not an exception. he thought you still have a long way to go and you have to put more effort in what you do. he also thought you looked too weak and "fragile", so he made sure to remind you to train more often, if you can, or to just take better care of yourself. i-it's not like he's worried about you. it just bothers him that you always look so tired all the time and it doesn't look like you get enough sleep too..

♡ however, you manage to impress jack and he's surprised to find out just how hardworking you really are. no matter what happens or how hard your life in twisted wonderland may get, you still try to achieve your goals. sure, you may whine a bit and say that it's unfair for a magicless human like you to go through so much, but you still do what you have to, no matter how weak you look. jack sure finds you more impressive than leona and he doesn't even notice how fast he starts to admire you and even fall in love with you.

♡ falling in love with you doesn't feel like something special because jack isn't even aware of his own feelings at first. he just thinks you're very cool and he respects you a lot and wishes to help you whenever he can. he just always wants to be by your side and support you when you need it. you're much stronger than he thought you were when you two just met, but he still thinks that in a world like twisted wonderland.. you deserve to be protected. and he's more than willing to protect you from whatever life throws at you. he realizes that he's actually in love with you when he notices that he feels a bit weird when you're around. this feeling is warm, but also so confusing.. and whenever you say goodbye to him, he doesn't want you to leave. b-but that's just because he admires you a lot, right?

octavinelle.

azul ashengrotto.

♡ azul didn't think you'd be that useful to him at first. it's not like he can make a deal with you or take your magic.. but still, being friends with a ramshackle prefect might actually help him in the future. so yes, he will try to become closer with you anyway. he's sure it will be easy to make you trust him, he just needs to make you believe that you can rely on him and who wouldn't want to have a friend like azul in such a scary world, especially as a human who has no idea how twisted wonderland works?.. well, it's actually not as easy as azul thought it would be.

♡ sure, you do want to become friends with him, but whenever he tries to help you with whatever you're struggling with (for a price, of course) or he tries to make himself seem as a kind person who genuinely wants to help others, you simply go "thank you, but i'm fine".. what do you mean, you're fine, y/n, he knows what crowley makes you do, just ask azul for help already! but as time passes, azul starts to notice that he actually wants to help you not because he needs you to make a deal with him.. but just because he really does feel bad for you and he wants to make your job at least a bit easier.

♡ falling in love with you feels strange and unexpected, azul wasn't prepared for this at all. he didn't think that he would actually become so attached to you, you were supposed to be another student who he can manipulate, so why do you feel like one of the most important people in his life now? he doesn't think that it's love at first, him thinking of you as his actual friend is already too much for him.. but then his overblot happens. and you forgive him for everything. and you tell him that no matter what, you accept him and even though he still has some.. um.. not so good qualities to work on, you'll be there to help him and support him. okay, maybe he actually is in love with you.

jade leech.

♡ jade thought you were an interesting and unique person right when he met you for the first time, but you were just that: an interesting and unique person. nothing more, nothing less. he would love to know more about you though, so don't be surprised if he starts talking to you more often or asking you more questions. this man wants to study you in a lab, okay. oh, and even though he sure does seem suspicious, he actually doesn't have any ulterior motives, unlike azul. he just can't go "hey, i like you, let's be friends', no, he has to act like his usual self that sometimes seems more dangerous than floyd.

♡ he doesn't even notice falling in love with you, but he sure notices becoming more interested in you for some reason. he always wants to know what you're up to, he wants to know more about your interests and he's always here if you need someone to talk to, whatever the topic is. he only starts thinking more about his feelings for you when floyd mentions jade being "totally in love with you". jade thinks floyd is just joking at first, but then floyd says that he was serious and jade's crush on you is more obvious than he thinks. and the funny thing is that.. jade is surprisingly casual about it. he just goes "oh. so i have a crush on them. okay". he never felt like this before, so he's a little confused, but it's not like he's about to have a breakdown because he just realized he's been in love with you this whole time.

♡ falling in love with you feels sweet and exciting. jade just thought you were a fun person when he first met you, but now it's hard for him to imagine his day without you. you've made him feel emotions he has never/rarely felt before. it's so unusual for him to worry about you, laugh at your jokes or be angry at someone who ruined your day. and trust him, all of those emotions are sincere. he's not pretending, you really made him feel all of this and even though he's not used to feeling this way, he can't wait to find out what else you're going to make him feel.

floyd leech.

♡ just like his twin, floyd already thought you were interesting when he just met you. he always followed you everywhere, he kept pranking you just to see your reaction and he thought that you getting annoyed with him was cute. and he found you even more interesting after he realized that even though he kept messing with you, you still let him hang out with you and didn't ask him to leave. huh, so you actually like his company, shrimpy? well, he's glad to hear that~

♡ floyd's feelings for you don't feel like a crush at all at first. he just thinks you're cute and that's it, really. but for some reason, he really hates it when he has to leave or when you don't give him enough attention. sometimes he takes a break (he doesn't tell azul anything though) from his work at mostro lounge just to hang out with you and he feels bored whenever you're not around. he has no idea why he feels like this, but.. who knows, maybe he really does like you, hehe.

♡ falling in love with you feels fun and full of surprises. floyd has never felt this way before and even though this feeling can be kinda annoying sometimes and it doesn't go away, he wants your relationship to become deeper and he wants to have more fun with you. just being friends is not enough for him anymore. you became an irreplaceable and extremely important part of his world and he hopes you feel the same about him.

scarabia.

kalim al-asim.

♡ kalim is kinda oblivious when it comes to crushes.. no, he's very oblivious. he really does believe he just likes you as a friend and even though it's true at first, as time passes, literally anyone can see that kalim treats you even better than people who he calls his friends. and considering how kind and friendly he is, this guy basically never leaves you alone even for a second and you get gifts from him every single day. he's constantly trying to come up with ways to make you happy and he thinks you have the most beautiful smile in the whole world. but yes, he definitely doesn't have a crush on you <3

♡ you and kalim would most likely have that friends to lovers dynamic. he's very easy to get along with and even though his energetic personality may be overwhelming sometimes, if he sees that you're tired or sad, he will tone it down a bit and ask you what's wrong. if you're not doing so well, he will genuinely worry about you a lot and he's okay with doing anything to make you feel better. he doesn't understand why your happiness matters to him so much, but.. maybe he just doesn't like it when someone is sad. and when YOU are sad, he feels like it's the end of the world and he has to do something about it immediately.

♡ kalim almost doesn't notice falling in love with you. he just thinks your friendship is becoming stronger and that's it. it's okay if he wants to hug you for a little bit longer, that's just because you're his best friend! it's okay if he wants to hold hands with you, he just doesn't want you to get lost and he's worried about you! it's okay if he wants to kiss you- oh. uh.. oh, you know, he means it in a platonic way! it's not like friends can't kiss each other! but if he actually wants to be more than friends with you.. would you be okay with that? wait, what is he even supposed to do with his feelings? maybe he should ask jamil for advice..

jamil viper.

♡ jamil's case is actually even worse because if kalim at least knows that you two have a good relationship and that you are friends, jamil is like "?? idk who you are to me. can i trust you. can i call you my friend". he thought you were okay when he first met you, but didn't pay too much attention to you, though he certainly appreciated you being.. you know, a more "normal" person than most nrc students (especially kalim). he actually feels like he can rely on you, honestly. he won't talk to you too much though, who knows what you're really like jamil if you're hiding something it doesn't mean that everyone around you is like that

♡ jamil doesn't understand why he feels so strange around you. at first he feels like he can trust you, even though he still tries to stop himself and tells himself that you can easily stab him in the back. and why are you so nice to him? you're probably just trying to become friends because you think that having a close relationship with someone like him could be useful, right? well, he's not gonna fall for that. and stop praising him all the time already. he told you that he's just a vice dorm leader and his abilities are not that special- wait, why does he feel good after hearing your compliments. oh no. oh no, he doesn't want you to stop.

♡ falling in love with you feels scary and jamil doesn't want to admit that he sees you not only as a friend (though he won't tell you that), but also as someone who he loves and wants to be with. you actually listen to him, you give him love and attention that he always wanted and you recognize his talents, but you still think that they are not the only good things about him and jamil is also just a very good person who deserves to be loved. jamil doesn't feel like he's ready to open up to you just yet, but he really doesn't want to miss a chance to finally find someone who will care about him as much as he cares about them.

pomefiore.

vil schoenheit.

♡ your relationship with vil definitely had a rough start. he criticized you a lot, he told you to take better care of your appearance, health and all of that. you felt like this guy hates you and tried to avoid him as best as you could. however, you were wrong and even though vil still thought that you could do better and you have some things to work on, he didn't hate you. in fact, he thought you were an interesting person who has their own talents and abilities, but they have to work on them more so that they can achieve their goals faster. so yeah, he basically tried to motivate you, but he probably didn't do a very good job.

♡ other people can notice vil giving you quite a lot of attention but not in a good way. it means that he's especially harsh on you. most students start to agree with you and think that the guy hates you, but his vice dorm leader knows that it's not true at all. rook is sure that vil is being so rude just because he believes you're better than most nrc students and he wants you to reach your full potential. but wow, it really feels like vil is almost obsessed with you. rook mentions that vil almost never stops talking about you lately and vil says that it's not true- no, rook, don't even joke about vil having a crush on you.

♡ even though vil sure has a lot of braincells, he almost doesn't notice falling in love with you as well. he really thinks he's just mad at you for not "trying hard enough", but this guy actually cares about you a lot. it may seem like he's angry at you and he hates you, but he's actually just very worried. what do you mean your sleep schedule doesn't even exist. go to sleep already, don't you know what happens to your skin if you don't get enough rest?? no, he's not worried about your health, it's just. uh. anyway, what about your hair-

rook hunt.

♡ finally. finally someone who actually knows they have feelings for you. though it may take some time for rook to realize that he's in love with you and not just admiring your beauty, he still would understand his feelings for you earlier than most characters here. he understands how romance works better than them, okay. very chad behavior of him sure, he thinks all people are beautiful in their own way, but you feel a little bit more special to him. his heart beats faster around you and he finds it hard to take his eyes off you. he never felt like this before around other students or people in general.

♡ rook would be very affectionate with you, however, he would take his time and wouldn't confess his feelings for you that early. he wants his confession to feel unique and special, he has to be prepared for that moment! he also needs some time to learn more about you. he wants to get to know you better, he wants to know what kind of person you are, how you see the world and he hopes that this way he will be able to predict your reaction to his confession. but of course, he doesn't do it just to earn your trust, he really is curious and wants to know more. you're just so interesting to him, he wants to know what exactly made him fall in love with you this hard.

♡ falling in love with you feels like a fairytale. it's so magical and exciting, rook wishes he never stops feeling this way. you are everything to him, all of his thoughts are about you and he's not complaining. he may joke about you distracting him from everything else, but he's actually more than happy and he doesn't mind being obsessed with you at all. yes, he may still compliment other people's beauty and talents, but don't worry, he has eyes only for you and he's more loyal to you than you think he is.

epel felmier.

♡ unless you make fun of his height, call him cute too often or refuse to take him seriously, epel wouldn't mind your company at all. who knows, maybe you two can actually become friends. and you do become friends! how fun! epel didn't expect to get along with you so easily, but he's more than okay with it. he's glad to have someone he can trust enough to talk about his true feelings and show his true personality to. he's more open and honest with you and he feels like you would never judge him no matter what he does or says.

♡ this feeling slowly starts turning into deep love and affection for you, though epel doesn't seem to notice that and still thinks you're just a friend to him. but he does notice feeling a bit more anxious around you now. why? well, it's like.. he wants to become better for you. he wants to impress you. h-he doesn't have a reason for that, really. he just.. wants you to notice how great and talented he really is. he wants you to praise him and smile at hiim while saying that what he did was amazing. again, he doesn't have a reason for that. totally.

♡ falling in love with you feels sweet and bitter at the same time. epel feels safe when you're around and he feels like he can tell you anything, but he's also scared that you actually don't think he's that special. he does slowly start to realize he's in love with you and that makes him feel even more scared. he needs to become a better person for you, he needs to become stronger, he wants to become someone who can protect you, who can impress you and who you can rely on. so forgive him for taking some time to work on that, he promises that he will tell you the truth when he's ready.

ignihyde.

idia shroud.

♡ idia genuinely doesn't understand why you're so nice to him. it actually scares him a little and he never knows what to expect from you. you're not as extroverted as some other nrc students, like kalim for example, but you still always run to idia whenever you see him and try to talk to him more. what do you want from him? you're just doing this out of pity, aren't you? it's okay, you don't have to give him so much attention, idia loves being alone, also he has online friends, so it's not like he's a complete loner or anything.

♡ you still try to get to know him better. you just want to help idia get out of his shell and become more confident. you don't think that being an introvert is a bad thing at all, but you still think that idia should start socializing more anyway. and you're sure that idia wants to make more friends as well, he's just afraid of being rejected. no, idia, you don't think that all these people are normies, you're just scared of them and trying to come up with an excuse so that you don't have to talk to them.

♡ falling in love with you feels sudden and predictable at the same time. of course idia shroud would fall for a person who's always there to support him and genuinely wants to become friends with him. he's affection-starved, okay? he may say that you can be really annoying sometimes, but he actually waits for you to text him or say hi to him every single day and if for some reason you can't talk to him, he feels lost and.. sad, even? please, don't leave him alone.. he knows that he's most likely too lame or boring for you, but he can't stand the thought of you leaving him.

diasomnia.

malleus draconia.

♡ i wouldn't call it love at first sight, but right after malleus met you, he knew that you're gonna become someone special to him. you didn't know anything about him. you didn't know his real name, status, his real identity. you didn't care about his reputation and you simply thought he seemed like an interesting person to talk to. he also seemed a little lonely too and you really could use a friend in a world like this, so yeah, that's how all of it started. he thought that the nickname you gave him was cute too.

♡ malleus gets used to your company too quickly. in fact, he can't imagine what he would do if you suddenly disappeared or simply lost interest in him. he got used to your kindness, to your smile, to your laugh, to your affection. his world becomes more warm and fun when you're around. but of course, he doesn't want this relationship to be too one-sided. he would do anything to protect you, help you or simply make you smile. you deserve the same happiness that you give him.

♡ falling in love with you feels soft and sweet, but also.. scary. malleus feels so happy when you're around, whenever he wakes up, he immediately thinks of you. you're everything to him. so if he loses you.. he will lose everything. he can't let you leave him. of course, he knows that you come from a different world and twisted wonderland isn't your home. he knows that you will leave him sooner or later. but.. is it selfish of him to want you to stay here for as long as possible? maybe you don't even have to leave?

lilia vanrouge.

♡ lilia thought you were cute right when he first met you. your reactions to his sudden appearances were so funny, it was hard for him to stop surprising you like this. at first your relationship dynamic was just like that, lilia kept surprising/scaring you, you screamed, he laughed and asked you to not be mad at him, he just likes your reactions too much. but as he started learning more about you, he realized that there are so many things he likes about you and it's not just you being an adorable scaredy-cat.

♡ for some reason, even though you wouldn't be able to tell from his behavior, lilia feels very calm when you're around. it's like his thoughts about his past and everything that he had to go through during his very, VERY long life can finally give him a break when he's with you. he doesn't have to worry about that, he can just stay here in present. and actually, he likes staying in present much more now thanks to you. but you're so naive, so innocent, so fragile, lilia thinks it's cute but he's also extremely worried about you because of that. you weren't made for this world. no matter how much you get praised for your job as a prefect, twisted wonderland is still too much for someone like you.

♡ lilia falls in love with you slowly, but when it happens, it feels so overwhelming, lilia has no idea what to do. he knows that having a romantic relationship with you is probably not the best idea considering that you'll have to leave this world someday and even if you don't.. he also doesn't have much time left. but if it's possible, if there's at least a tiny chance of him being in a happy relationship with you, he doesn't want to miss that chance. he may not have much time left, but he would do anything to spend all of that time with you.

silver.

♡ you and silver become friends surprisingly quickly. he knows he can trust you to wake him up when he falls asleep again, even though you think he looks very cute when he's asleep and you want him to get enough rest. whenever silver blames himself for being too lazy or incompetent, you're always here to remind him that he's already doing his best and he doesn't have to be so harsh on himself. he definitely will become a great knight one day no matter what, you believe in him!

♡ your kind words and your support make silver enjoy hanging out with you too much. he lets you watch him train, he finds it relaxing to take a nap when you're there with him and you run your fingers through his hair while he's asleep. even though he seems like a chill guy, he's scared of letting his father and his master down, but he always can rely on you when doesn't feel confident enough and he needs someone to tell him that everything is gonna be fine and lilia and malleus are already proud of him. and you're proud of him too.

♡ falling in love with you feels like a dream that he doesn't want to wake up from. he never thought his life was that bad, but it surely got better thanks to you. he wants to thank you for everything you did for him, he wants to protect you from all the dangers of this world. he knows that he wanted to become a knight so that he can repay lilia and malleus, but now.. he wants to be your knight as well. no, please, don't worry about him, he genuinely wants to do it. you always give him motivation to keep going and it would be an honor for him to become someone who can always protect you.

sebek zigvolt.

♡ yeah, your relationship with sebek wouldn't be that good at first. you two would argue a lot, he would never stop calling you a "lowly human" even though he's a half-human himself. and if you even think of saying anything bad about malleus, that's it, he's this close to killing you on sight. and you did hate sebek for acting like that at first, but as time passed, for some reason you actually started finding it.. entertaining? you loved to make him angry on purpose and then you decided to start teasing and even flustering him. yes, you did flirt with him multiple times just to see what kind of reaction he would give you, so what?

♡ sebek doesn't know how to feel about you. he knows he's supposed to think you're weak and pathetic because, you know, you're a human, but.. why does he feel so weird when you throw your dumb pickup lines at him? and why he feels like he actually wants to be praised by you and he wants you to notice how talented he really is? he knows that you're most likely not being serious most of the time, but he really wants you to be serious for once. uh, he just wants to be praised by you because he deserves it and that's it. it doesn't mean he wants you to be serious when you flirt with him, haha..

♡ sebek really didn't want to fall in love with you and he didn't expect to catch feelings for someone like you, but it still happened. he just doesn't understand why you still hang out with him even though he doesn't treat you that well. and how is he supposed to react when you tease him like that? he knows he should stay serious, but for some reason he just can't control his emotions when he's around you even though he's never that good at controlling them. he also realizes that even though you're a human, you're capable of doing many things and.. ugh, he really doesn't want to say it, but you're actually just as good as some magic users. y-you still have a lot to work on though.

royal sword academy.

chenya.

♡ you and chenya first met during that one unbirthday party after riddle's overblot. you were surprised to find out that a guy from a different school (and a rival school too!) was able to get here so easily and didn't care what nrc students will think of him. and also you thought that the way he could easily appear and disappear as he pleases (or he could just stay as a floating head) was funny. so yes, this guy managed to pique your curiosity.

♡ chenya himself thought you were quite interesting and he was even more surprised when he found out that you came to rsa secretly from other students just to see him. haha, you really betrayed your own school like this for him! wow, y/n, that's something only a lovestruck person would do! but he has to admit, he likes you even more now. just what kind of person are you? you're so full of mysteries and chenya isn't sure if he wants to know all the answers or it would be more interesting to keep it this way.

♡ falling in love with you is fun and exciting. you keep spending more time with chenya no matter what other nrc students think and chenya likes to make jokes about stealing you from nrc students so that you never have to leave him. is he just joking though?.. well, it doesn't matter. what matters more is that you both always end up having so much fun and you feel so comfortable with each other that there's been multiple times when one of you was very close to kissing the other. and lately, it's been very hard for you both to control your feelings.

neige leblanche.

♡ when you first heard of neige, you couldn't believe that someone like that actually existed. i mean, someone more beautiful and popular than vil? is that even possible? and when you finally saw him for the first time.. you were a bit underwhelmed. yes, neige is definitely very pretty, he's adorable, actually, but.. is that really it? but when you actually meet each other, you find it surprising just how nice neige really is. he's very polite, he treats you with kindness and makes sure you're comfortable. oh no, he's so cute, you're about to fall in love-

♡ you actually feel kind of pathetic for getting a crush on neige. it's just.. so predictable, you're really not that special and you're not any better than his fans. you doubt that he will ever notice you, you're just a magicless human from a different world, you don't deserve to be with someone like him. but what you don't know is that neige fell in love with you right when he first saw you. not because of your appearance, even though he thinks you're really pretty, but because of your personality, the way you treat other people and stay kind and patient no matter what. it's very impressive for someone who was basically forced to stay in this world against their will.

♡ falling in love with you feels like neige's life turned into an actual romance movie, but this time he doesn't know anything about the plot, especially the ending. he sure hopes you two will get your happy ending though. neige loves his fans and he really doesn't want to make them sad, he knows that dating someone when he's this popular is not the best decision, but he really, really wants to be with you. this is what true love feels like to him.

noble bell college.

rollo flamme.

♡ you were a bit intimidated by rollo when you first met him, you just.. thought he was a bit scary, haha. but then you noticed just how kind he is to you and that even though he's polite to all nrc students, you're a special case and you certainly are his "favorite". he also was the first person who actually thought you didn't deserve to go through all of this and that it must be very scary and overwhelming for you to have no other choice but to stay in this world full of danger and.. magic. so yes, you got used to his kindness pretty quickly, even though you still had a feeling that something is not quite right.

♡ and yeah, it turned out that rollo really wasn't the best person to trust. he hated magic with all his heart and he wanted it to disappear. and it was hard for him to choose between his growing love for you and his hatred for magic, but then he managed to convince himself that he's doing all of this for your own good and in the end you'll have no other choice but to agree with him. after rollo is defeated, he expects you to hate him as much as others hate him, but to his shock.. you forgive him. you had to deal with six overblots, even though nrc students saved the day this time, it's not like they're much better than him. so yes, you think rollo still can change and you want to give him a second chance.

♡ after that, rollo's love for you becomes even stronger. he can't stop thinking about you and it's hard to tell if he's in love with you or he's obsessed with you. when you have to go back to nrc, it gets even worse and everything around rollo reminds him of you. he really wishes you could spend more time together and he wasn't so focused on his plan. he's gonna be honest, he doesn't really regret doing.. well, all that, but the fact that he could use that time to talk to you more makes him think that maybe.. maybe trying to steal everyone's magic wasn't a good idea. yes, he thinks so only because he could spend more time with you instead of taking everyone's powers. listen, he needs some time, he will change. probably. maybe.

[ihaznoclue]

Just Imagine...

Pairings -> Optimus Prime x Reader

Warnings -> None

Note -> I had a nightmare like earlier this year ago and It still haunts me and I can't seem to forget it, They are literally the worst

Genre -> Angst and Fluff

Just Imagine this, You and Optimus are now in his berthroom having a peaceful rest, Optimus was beside you as he looked through his data pad while you were asleep.

You felt at peace, finally getting the rest you deserved, it took you ages to be able to sleep this long but now you were getting the amount of sleep that was needed for a human which was around 8 - 10 hours.

Optimus seemed to be busy on his data pad as he had a digit gently caressing your back as he stayed quiet as he didn't want to disturb your peace.

But all it seemed that peace didn't last forever...

Your body seemed to start squirming around as your breathing started to quicken, your chest rising up and down at every breath you took

Optimus noticed as soon as you started to squirm around, he thought you have might been uncomfortable but as soon as he heard you mumble in your sleep he started to get more concerned

He put away his data pad beside him on the other side as he lifted you up in the palm of his servo, he looked worriedly at you as he saw tears now starting to leek from your eyes

He needed to wake you up but he didn't want to startle you but he had to to ask what is wrong

He gently shook you gently with his one digit making sure to not hurt you in the process, you finally woke up with a gasp as you sat up quickly, your eyes were widen as you looked around to only see that you were in Optimus's berth room

You garb your heart as you felt it beating fast, you felt a cold metal feeling on top of your head as you were pressed up against a chassis

"Sweetspark.." A deep voice spoke, looking up to see your guardian and lover Optimus looking down at you with worried optics

You then broke down as Optimus was now comforting you, "Shh It's okay. You're safe with me" Optimus shushed you to calm down

"Listen to my spark and take deep breaths, try to calm down. You're in good hands Dear"

"I'm sorry..." You finally got to calm down a little from all the crying you just did

"You have nothing to be sorry about Sweetspark, I assume that you had a nightmare as Ratchet told me that humans get these from past experiences or simply because from stress or anxiety. But I think it's because you didn't get enough sleep from the past couple of days"

"I think so..." You muttered as you were leaning your head on his chassis listening to his spark beat once in a while

He was alive.. Thank god

"Are you willing to tell me what have caused you to panic so much?" Optimus asked as he soften his tone

You shook your head as you didn't want to talk about it but you simply gave out a yawn. You were still quite tired and maybe because of the crying you did

"You still must be tired, You must get your rest and don't worry I'll still be here in the morning"

It took you some time to go back to sleep but in the hand of your lover, his servos was wrapped around you as you laid on his chassis

Still listening to his spark beat...

-A<3

[anemhoez]

Lunae…

Dan Heng/Reader

WARNINGS: unprotected sex (use protection, even with dragons) and language

A/N: this one’s for the real cultured freaks out there 🫵 we ARE gods strongest soldiers 🫡

MINORS DO NOT INTERACT!

“Are you even comfortable here?” you asked Dan Heng, his eyes scanning the screen in front of him. He reached out and tapped the screen, inputting the latest information from your mission into the data bank. “Did you hear me?” your voice a few octaves louder now. Dan Heng smirked, “I did, I just don’t know what you’re talking about?” You simply pointed to the mat on the floor, his comforter and pillow strewn about. “Its a bed, why would I be uncomfortable on it?” You sighed and went over to the screen he was just tapping on. “It’s hardly a bed,” you pulled up the file he just created to review it, “mine is way more comfortable.” The words slipped out of your mouth without much thought, your focus on the text in front of you. “Hmph.” the small sound coming from the man behind you made you realize what you had just said. “What I mean is, I actually have a real mattress!” your face got hot out of nowhere and you tried your best to seem aloof.

Dan Heng stayed quiet as you spoke, “I’m not like, inviting you to sleep in it or anything.” He smiled and walked over to you, his fingers brushing past the screen to close the file. “You sure?” He always kept his responses short, but it always made an impact on you regardless. You figured it was because you had feelings for him. “What I’m trying to say is, you should try to take better care of yourself,” you moved your hands to tug on his jacket, the small gesture making you unsure of your proximity to him.

The two of you admitted to liking each other a few weeks ago after a very close call during a mission. Dan Heng was badly hurt, the Trailblazer and March 7th doing their best to fight off the fragmentum creature ambush as you tended to him. “You fucking idiot,” you cursed as you did your best to heal his wounds with your gifts of abundance, “why did you just jump in front of me like that?!” The glow from your hands reflected on his skin as you looked into his eyes. “Because I care about you, more than normal.” His wounds began to seal shut, a groan of pain escaping his mouth. “Well, the feelings mutual.” you brought your hands to rest on your lap once you were done. Dan Heng sat up, his piercing eyes meeting yours. It was quiet for what felt like hours, but in reality it was only a few seconds before the two of you leaned into one another and kissed. The two of you kissed passionately, only being stopped by March’s voice screaming, “I knew it!”

You remember that kiss fondly, but its been a while since it happened, and you weren’t sure if the two of you still had that connection . You liked him a lot but, didn’t want to seem too clingy. He keeps his feelings to himself most of the time, so you were never really sure how to approach him. “Have you been well?” he asked awkwardly breaking the silence. You couldn’t help but giggle, “Yes, I’ve been well, you?” He reached down and took your hands in his, intertwining your fingers together. “I’ve been thinking about, that kiss.” You suddenly felt anxious, wondering where he’d take the conversation from here, maybe he didn’t really like you after that. “What about it Dan Heng?” your voice was practically a whisper, your heart beating faster as he moved in closer. “it was, better than I had imagined.”

Your heart skipped a beat and you wrapped your arms around his neck, pulling him closer to you. Your lips brushed against one another, a small chuckle coming from him. You closed the gap, letting yourself melt against him. Your lips melded together in a fervor as you finally got to kiss him again. His hands came to your waist, his grip tight as he pulled you closer. Your hands moved from around his neck and trailed down his tight and toned body. You moaned against his lips, pulling away to look at him, “Do you want to,” your hands stopped at the hem of his jeans. He pulled you back in for a kiss, his hands on your waist squeezing harder before they came to cup your rear. He pulled away, his lips wet and swollen, “Absolutely.” he whispered and began kissing you all over your face. You laughed and started to unbutton his pants, your gut stirring as he continued to kiss you while you reached down and took a handful of him. You screamed internally, his cock semi erect already, letting you know right away that he did want you as bad as you wanted him. You pulled away from him, keeping eye contact as you freed his member from its confines and got down on your knees. “Someone’s eager,” he teased and you watched his jaw go slack as you took his tip into your mouth. His hand came to the back of your head immediately, pushing you further onto him as you took more of him in. Your mouth salivated heavily around him, your core aching as if you could already feel him inside of you.

You bobbed on his long shaft up and down, looking up at him through your lashes, your hands on either one of his thighs. He looked down at you with a cocky smirk, his eyes slowly began to change color to a paler blue. He grunted deeply, his eyes closing shut tightly. You pulled off of him, saliva dripping from your mouth. “Are you ok?” you asked worried if you had hurt him in some way. “Yes, please don’t stop.” he opened his eyes, the usual grayish blue color was back. “I don’t know if I’m hallucinating but, it looked like your eyes changed color,” you said as you pumped him in you hand. Dan Heng shook his head with a chuckle, “Really, how strange.” he said and took off his jacket, his shirt soon meeting the fabric on the floor. The man before you looked down and gently thrusted into your hand, “You’re probably just seeing things, ahh!” he threw his head back as he moaned.

Aeons everything about him was gorgeous. The soft outlines of his abs, the veins that decorated his arms and hands, and those eyes of his. Those piercing eyes of his that bored through you as he looked down at you. He could convince you to commit war crimes right now with that look, “You’re probably right.” you stuttered out before taking him back into your mouth. Your tongue flattened under his shaft as you took him in fully, his tip hitting the back of your throat. “Fuck,” he huffed out, the sensation causing him to buck against you, causing you to gag on him in response. He took a handful of your hair, tugging on it gently, “I need to be inside of you soon.” His words hit your core like a crashing wave, your moans loud as you worked. You reached a hand into your pants, dragging your wetness from your core to your clit and rubbed hard. The sight of you, the way you were pleasuring yourself while sucking him off was way too much and his eyes changed color again, faster this time.

You watched as blue horns began to sprout from his forehead, the shock of what you just watched made you move back and off of him. “Horns?!” you yelped, catching a glimpse of his now longer hair. “And hair?!” your eyes then went to his dick, well, dicks, “AND COCKS?!”Dan Heng turned away from you, muttering something under his breath. He looked back at you, “Sorry, I’m trying to go back to my usual self but, I’m too excited” He adjusted himself back into his pants and reached for his shirt, “I understand if you’re, disgusted.” You stood up and took his hand, “Im not disgusted, I’m just surprised.” You looked at him closely, his face the same despite his eyes and horns. “You’re still the same Dan Heng.” He sighed, moving to lean against the rail that separated his bed area from the rest of the room. “Its complicated but yes, its still me.”

You moved closer to him, your hand rested on his back. You rubbed his back up and down, feeling the small scales that now textured his skin. “You really are the mysterious type huh?” you teased and moved in for a kiss. Your lips met, the tongue in his mouth now forked, but you didn’t pull away and simply moved your tongue along his. When you eventually pulled away though, he looked at you dearly, searching for something in your eyes.“I’ll tell you everything one day, its just, “ he rolled his eyes and sighed again. “Hey its ok, this doesn’t change how I feel about you.” you said trying to reassure him. You moved to bring your arms around his neck, “i’m just worried about you, fitting inside me with, those.” Dan Heng smiled and rested his forehead against yours, “Are you actually, open to that?” he kissed your lips, and licked a path from them to your neck. “Of course, I want you.” His hands came to your pants and he quickly undid them and pulled them down. “Alright then.” he helped you out of the fabric and grabbed you by your thighs, “I’ll have to get you ready then.”

While pulling you closer, he sat on the floor, then lay down on his back. You took the hint and moved to sit on his face. He moaned upon you resting on his mouth, his tongue quickly lapping you up. You pulled off your shirt, finally completely bare in front of him for the first time. He watched as you grabbed your breasts and squeezed them, rolling your nipples between your fingers. His strong hands held you close, his slightly sharper nails digging into your skin. “Dan H-Heng,” you huffed, the pleasure between your legs building. You threw your head back, grinding your hips against his face, reaching behind you to rest your hands on his stomach. His tongue was wrecking you, the forked muscle taking your bud in between it, only to round his lips against it to suck hard. “Aeons,” you cried out, practically bouncing on him, needing more to reach the climax you were chasing. He slurped and sucked, graciously eating you out and licking you like your very essence was ambrosia to him. You felt it. that familiar rush starting to wash over you, your hips grinding faster and harder. You moved your hands from his stomach suddenly reaching forward and grabbing onto his horns tightly as you finally came.

“Ah!” your voice cracked, your body hot from the rush and the look in his eyes as he drank you deep. You let go of his horns, realizing what you did as you moved off of him. “Sorry about that,” he sat up, kissing your mouth immediately. You tasted yourself on him, his breath was heavy as he pulled away, “Don’t be, that felt amazing.” He reached down and pushed his fingers into you, your folds extra messy from your fluids. “Can I touch them again?” He inserted another finger into you, looking at you without a word as he pumped his fingers into you, “Sorry is that weird?” your hips moved against his ministrations. He laughed, “Not at all,” he pulled his fingers out of you and put them in his mouth. He moaned as he licked you off of him. “Go ahead.” he said and reached out to touch your breasts. You moved in and took each horn in your hands. They were hard and slightly cold in your hands, you wondered just how sensitive they were.

You felt compelled to kiss them, so you pecked them softly, starting from the base going up to the rounded tip. The sound that came from his mouth was unlike anything you’ve ever heard, almost like a whine mixed with the sudden loss of breath. You flicked your tongue out, licking long stripes up them. He pulled you closer, his mouth taking one of your nipples in his mouth to muffle the sounds he was making. You continued licking them, teasing them slowly with long sloppy strokes. The horns were slick enough now, and you took one of them into your mouth and sucked. “For Aeons sake!” he yelled and pulled you off and onto your back. This was the most emotion you’d had ever seen from him and fuck was it sexy.

He pulled his cocks out of his pants, lining them up and slowly, agonizingly slowly pushing them into you. “Ahh!” your voice cracked and hitched in your throat, the stretch he was providing almost too much for you. He looked at your face, stopping and trying to gauge your reaction. “Are you-“ he said worried it was too much, too fast. “Just fuck me already!” you pleaded, your eyes half lidded and filled with lust, drool started to drip from one of the corners of your mouth.

Dan Heng continued with your pleading in his ears, your praises about how good he felt aiding in the build up of his peak. He pushed further, soon bottoming out inside of you. He leaned down, his dicks nestled deep inside of you as he came in for a kiss. “Thank you,” his voice was soft, his kisses hard and needy. You kissed him back, sucking and biting on his lips as he thrust in and out of you. He took you by the hands and pinned them above your head, the kiss sloppy and wet, his thrusts picking up speed as his balls slapped against your ass. You moaned loudly, the pleasure so intense and unlike anything you’ve felt before. The feeling of being so full like this, you were certain you’d get addicted to it. “M-More.” you pleaded, wanting even more of what he had to offer, “Harder Dan Heng, please!”

He sat up, pulling you by your thighs, fucking you so hard the sounds reverberated against the walls. Dan Heng’s moans grew louder, a flash of blue appeared behind him, a long dragons tail whipped around behind him. He really had more tricks up his sleeve, huh? You felt the appendage pick you up gently off of the floor, his hands on your hips bringing you to sit on him. “You’re amazing, so fucking amazing.” you huffed out and he smiled against your lips.

His tail felt like light pulses of electricity against your skin, adding to the sensitive sensations you were feeling all over. From this position, and being stuffed so full, you let him do the rest of the work, and he gladly took the lead. He thrusted up into you, his cocks hitting your cervix, brushing against your spot deliciously. The end of his tail rubbed your cheek, coming to your lips and tapping as if it was asking for entrance. You opened your mouth, the semi solid state of it moving in and out with the aid of the saliva that dripped from your mouth. Dan Heng had never had anyone this fully, this close and loving every inch of his dragon form, he felt incredible. With your pussy and mouth filled, you let him use you as a sleeve, your hands coming to his horns once again, holding on for dear life as you moaned deeply, your climax finally washing over you. You clenched down onto Dan Hengs two dicks, his thrusts halting, his orgasm overtaking him right along with you. He growled out, the scales on his body convulsing as he came into you. “Aeons,” you huffed out softly as his tail disappeared with a flash.

He held you close, his chin resting on your shoulder, hands resting on your lower back. You rubbed your hands against the scales on his back, bringing your mouth to his ear to kiss and whisper sweet praises to him. Dan Hengs dragon form slowly began to fade, his horns disappearing and the full feeling inside of you diminishing. You moved back to look at him, his eyes softer now as he admired you from this position. “Lets go to bed,” you kissed him before getting off of him. his seed gushed out of you as you stood up. “Theres so much of it, wow.” He stood up and rummaged through his clothes to find a towel. He came back to you and knelt down before you, gently cleaning himself off of you. “Don’t you mean, go to floor?” he said with a smile and you laughed at his one designated joke a day.

The two of you now clean and laying down cuddled together closely, his hand rubbing your head softly. “You don’t have to tell me anything until you’re ready.” you said as sleep began to overtake you, tired from getting fucked senseless by your crush. You’d never in a million years guess this was the secret Dan Heng was hiding. He pulled you even closer to him, wrapping his other arm around your stomach. He simply kissed your forehead as his form of response and followed you into a deep slumber. Joining the Astral Express continued to prove to be the greatest adventure you’d ever taken in your life, and now you had someone to share it with.

A/N: HE’S FINALLY HOME! Thought this up after finally noticing the place where Dan Heng sleeps in that data room 😭 i fucking love him so much, PLEASE GET HIM A REAL BED WELT!

[inbabylontheywept]

"I will solve you if I must."

Arkinot knew what humans looked like. They were half his size, soft, pink, and easily bullied. He knew this because he’d spent the last two weeks terrifying a team of human diplomats sent to negotiate trade deals. It was something of a science to him at this point: Small but weak species sends in their diplomats, he spends a week or two terrifying them in close quarters, then he offers them some dogshit trade deals in exchange for getting to leave early. They take the deal, he gets richer, and in a manner of speaking, the universe becomes a better place. Being a coward was the kind of thing that really should be taxed, and he liked to think of his negotiation style as exactly that: A coward tax.

Still, that was far dominating his thoughts at the moment. The conundrum his brain was struggling to untangle was that he knew what a human looked like, and the thing in front of him was not a human. It wore human robes, but underneath the robes, it appeared to be a tank that someone had glued several monitors to. Maybe even an antennae of some kind. It was such a chaotic jumble that it was almost funny. The one part of it that really seemed to be going too far was the badge sewn into the front designating it as an official diplomat.

He stepped a few feet closer to inspect the possible art piece. He barely had begun to reach his hand forward to lift the tent sized robe when a mechanical claw pushed forward and clasped around his arm, painless but implacable.

“What the fuck-”

He didn’t hear the voice from the thing, nor did he hear it in his mind, as he’d felt with some of the telepathic races. The voice of this abomination felt like it was being physically projected directly inside his own ear, as if its mouth was just a fraction of a centimeter away from his ear drum.

“Arkinot.”

He threw up. The words weren’t loud but they seemed to have some kind of disproportionate effect on his balancing organs. The world was sent spinning and he could barely tell up from down. A second bolt of pain blossomed, this time from the back of his head. It took him a good moment to realize that he’d fallen flat on his back. He didn’t know a simple sound could cause so much damage.

And then it continued.

“You make threats you have no ability to back up. You will learn.”

Even with his senses scrambled, he could feel something cold and metallic pressed into his hand. He was too incoherent to guess what.

He wasn’t sure if the voice retracted from his ear out of pity, or because it knew that it had proved its point, but he was grateful to hear the rest of the message without feeling like someone was trying to jam stakes into his brain.

“A copy has already been sent to your high command. Your ‘diplomacy’ has already been bypassed. This is simply a personal education on the nature of human violence. Summon me when you understand.”

He rolled over to see the thing lurching down the hall. Even in his disoriented state, he could see something human in it, something imperceptibly satisfied with the message it had delivered. Part of him wondered if there was some small lump of flesh buried deep inside that horror, or if it was just mind made metal, an engram with form.

Perhaps sensing his gaze, it paused. It didn’t turn around, but he doubted that its vision was as limited as eyes were. The voice projected forward again, mercifully short of his ear, but still too close for comfort. He could almost imagine the hot breath of it bouncing off his face, mere millimeters away from his face.

“I will know when you are done. Do not make me find you.”

---

It had taken him half an hour to work up the will to pull himself up from his pool of stale vomit, and another ten minutes to stagger back to his cabin. He’d needed to lean against the wall for the entire walk back. He was genuinely concerned that his balance had been permanently damaged.

He did his first inspection of the object he’d been gifted. It was, technically, a data slate, but that was somewhat akin to calling a reactor a steam engine. The specs on it didn’t even make sense to him. What the hell was an exaHz? What was a Bekenstein limit? How could storage be at 137% of it? Couldn’t be much of a limit if it went over 100.

The device seemed to recognize it was being inspected and raised a query of its own.

User: Arkinot?

He nodded dumbly. The slate whirred for a few seconds, genuinely struggling to process what it was about to do.

And then it began.

---

Arkinot stumbled out of the room seventeen hours later. He wasn’t terrified. He’d run out of the emotional energy needed to feel fear after the first two hours of calm, methodical instruction presented to him by the dataslate.

He had learned about the nature of human violence. It was no hot blooded slaughter, no prayer of eternal vengeance. It was an industrial event to them, something to be mass produced until the market flooded over and peace became the new commodity of choice.

And they could do that. Easily. He’d seen blueprints for factories that built factories that built factories. Replicating swarms of mining bots.

The smallest time vs. production curve he’d seen was for their assault cruisers, and it was still a fourth order polynomial. If for some reason they needed to wage war for over a year, they could feasibly consume more than 30% of the mass of their first three industrial worlds.

And they had more than forty left in reserve.

He’d assume earlier that he was arguing from a position of strength because they didn’t have an active armada. He realized that the reason they hadn’t bothered was because they’d be able to produce one as large as his entire species fleet in under 48 hours.

His balance was back. He barely noticed. He followed the same path he had before, noticed in an offhanded way that the vomit had been cleaned. The human diplomat must have called that in. He certainly hadn’t.

He was now in the human section of the station, and while he could sense a wariness in the steps of the pink things around him, it was hardly the full blown fear he’d managed to instill just 24 hours before. They knew that they’d managed to summon a stronger predator than him.

He knew it too.

The door that he’d been summoned to was a repurposed garage. He supposed nothing else would fit someone so large. He knocked twice on the corrugated steel before it began to roll up.

The robes were gone. Still no visible flesh, but at least with all the machinery in sight he had a better idea of what he was looking at. He still didn't see any pink skin there, but he didn't have to when he could see rack after rack of eletroneural interfaces.

So there was a brain in there. A human brain. Probably very little else.

A faint twitch of its insectoid legs gave away its impatience. Ah. So it was waiting for him to speak.

“You didn’t need… Damn. How large was that presentation?”

The voice was almost offhanded in its response.

“208 yottabytes.”

Arkinot’s brain skipped over the scale of that number. It was absurdly massive. Apparently, everything that the humans really put their minds to turned absurdly massive.

“You didn’t need 208 yottabytes to say that you could kick our asses.”

The faint twitching gave away, replaced by an uncanny stillness. It wasn’t the frozen stiffness of a robot, it was the tense, rigid posture of someone showing a considerable amount of restraint.

“No. You certainly didn’t when you said that to us. What I needed 208 yottabytes for was showing you how I would ‘kick your asses.’ It is worth considering how much scarier that is than your empty words.”

There was a brief noise, like rustling through the speaker, and he realized that the machine had done the purely auditory equivalent of taking a breath. The action was somehow more unsettling than the purely mechanical affect he’d seen before. It made him realize just how close any of the other soft pink things running around the halls were to becoming something like this, something that could crush him with a thought.

His thoughts were interrupted by the man-machine’s closing words, tired but dangerous.

“Do not threaten our diplomats again. It is their job to be patient. It is my job to solve problems. I will solve you if I must.”

That same tired voice spoke again, millimeters from his ear.

“Now, don't let me detain you.”

He did what any sane sapient would do.

He ran.

[curlyhairedbooklover]

What is the gender spilt of the murders in NBC Hannibal?

This is the third of three posts though this one works as a standalone, the first two are about the characters saying each other’s names and can be found here and here (I promise they are much more interesting than that summary makes them sound….) I decided to make this post because of this quote from Bryan Fuller; “And we are very conscious in the writer’s room; ‘Okay we just killed a woman, we have to kill a guy now.’” (47:20) And I always wondered how well they actually managed to do that…. thus I went out and collected the data and here it is!!

Adding a quick disclaimer that I did this for fun so I haven’t double checked it meaning there may be some mistakes!

As you can see from the data it turns out that they did kill less women than men during the show!!!! The total known kills in the show are 200 with 98 of them being men, 65 women and 37 were unknown!! I also kept track of who did the murder and those categories are: Hannibal, killer of the week, Will, and other.

To preface, I am only using “women” and “men” for my categories in this data as the show does not depict any trans or nb people (explicitly at least, there are a couple metaphorical/subtextual ones…) and if I could not tell the person’s gender or I simply did not see a body I categorised them as “unknown” 

You will be pleased to know that Hannibal killed 39.5 people (the 0.5 is Dolarhyde which I split between Will and Hannibal as it was a joint kill 😌)  over the show on screen and that 26.5 of them were men, 9 were women and only 4 were unknown! All I can say is that Hannibal is a feminist queen! That or women are significantly less rude in the Hannibal universe… although Freddie seems to defy that theory…. He does kill the most in s1 at 21 times! That essentially halves in s2 to only 12 times and again to 6.5 times in s3.. although it’s worth noting that I was unable to count his kills at Muskrat Farm as we don’t see any bodies on screen (though the script implies it was at least 7) and I only counted the Il Mostro kills that we saw evidence of instead of including the amount killed by the actual Il Mostro killer(s).. Not to mention that he spent half the season in prison! So all that said he did okay! Also I personally believe that his kill count across his lifetime is easily in the high hundreds, he has to meal plan if nothing else so let's put some respect on his name as Hannibal THEE Cannibal!

Unsurprisingly the killers of the week did make up most of the kills in the show, and killed 62 men, 56 women and 33 of unknown gender altogether. The killer of the week who did the most murder is James Grey at a whopping 50 but he did have a mural to create so that takes a lot of bodies! Second place goes to Lawrence Wells who murdered 17 people over his lifetime to create his totem pole, while Clark Ingram sneaks in at 3rd with 16 murders, although he only killed women and is the main reason why the women’s s2 kill count is higher than the men’s, boooooo! Poor Dolarhyde had to pick up all the slack in s3 as the only killer of the week but he did at least get 15 kills in! Sadly he was bound by the orders of the moon and could not do the suitable legwork 😔

Now Will DID get his own section of the table as is his right as the main character 😤 even if he only killed 3 people (which translates to 2.5 on the table as a result of having to share the dragon with Hannibal…). But they were all monumental kills, I mean Garret Jacob Hobbs haunted the rest of the show, Randall was turned into a magnificent tableau, and Francis was the culmination of his becoming and gave us That Ending!! It’s also not like he didn’t successfully manipulate multiple people into killing (or almost killing) people so I think he deserves extra points for those if only in our hearts!! Despite his low kill count he is the character we see commit murder the most on the show! He fantasises/imagines/hallucinates murdering 32 people across the show!! As the show moved away from the procedural nature he imagined killing less people; with s1 standing at 16, s2 moving down to 9 and then only 7 in s3! Just because most of the time he’s empathising with killers to recreate their kills doesn’t make the scenes any less sexy or iconic!!

The 7 other kills actually all come from women!! Another feminism win!! 3.3 is when Chiyoh killed her prisoner after being manipulated into it by Will. 3.7 sees Chiyoh kill again, this time’s it’s the 2 guys who were going to kill Jack and the 2 guards at Muskrat Farm, where we also we get Mason’s murder from Alana and Margot!! Then in 3.10 we get the flashback to Bedelia killing her patient! Go Girls!! Whooo!! 

In conclusion no one is surprised that there is a lot of murder in this show and Bryan Fuller while not exactly alternating each week in killing off each gender did not kill more women than men so arguably achieved his goal!

(part 1) (part 2) (part 3)

[theoryofthemultiverse]

I know this is probably out of character for him, but... Imagine Dr. Ratio being flustered about having a crush, but only when no one is looking. Bonking his head on his desk, writing poetry only to hide it under various books, getting snappy and mean with others because he's so confused over his own feelings. Like, yeah, he knows what it is, but *why*? There's no conclusive data to tell why he feels this way! His crush is just like any regular person, surely there must be some pattern or combination of factors that can explain this!

Ladies and gentlemen, this right here…

YES! JUST YES!

Honestly I had a thing in my drafts and I wanted to pin point it too so thank you for getting that stone rolling. I don’t actually believe it would be so much out of character for him!

Veritas Ratio would be agitated. A crush? On a normal person? It cannot be. He was set on dying alone, toxically thinking no one could ever match his intellect, so he would surely never fall for anyone would he?

Oh he was so wrong. When he met his crush he instantly viewed his crush as an ordinary person. A person that wouldn’t play a big part in his life’s strategy. Well you can give him 0 points for that because that mindset was gonna be obsolete when he finds out this person possesses an ability that he finds fascinating, utterly fascinating.

Like his crush f.e. being extremely good with emotions, just being very kind, or having any other personality trait that makes them special, that makes them themselves. Also preferably a trait that he doesn’t have, at least not this strongly.

For example, he might be creative to some point, but if he met his crush who had their own imaginative view of the world, that probes him to change his perspective from time to time. Also with a person that is not a genius there would maybe come a certain simplicity to said perspectives which he could find fascinating either.

But nevertheless the reason, because as we all know, love just strikes at the most coincidental moments with the most different of people:

He would still be confused. Himself a man of pure focus that is really never wavering suddenly finds himself to be staring inside his book and committing a (at least to him) sin, by only reading superficially. All while he also then catches himself to suddenly just let his eyes run over the paragraphs, thinking he is reading but in the meantime his thoughts run back towards his crush.

Poor man read enough books about it to know what it is for sure so at first he’d be the kind to gaslight himself out of it.

„No you are not in love, they are just a nice person, this is it. You are thinking about what they did that made you think about them, not them personally.“

Save to say that doesn’t work long and then, like this dear anon said he would hit that head on the tabletop, or sink under the water of the bathtub. Because he realizes he has no chance in fighting this.

And Veritas, a man of reason, would search for said one. He would do a complete psycho analysis first of himself and then of his crush to find out what about them makes him go oh ever so crazy.

Because he simply couldn’t continue to work this distracted. He feels like a fish out of water. Also we know he is not the kind of person that would leave this untouched. He might be embarrassed but he knew if he couldn’t continue his work productively soon then he might get an existential crisis.

So he copes with it, not sure if with poetry (if so he would do it in Latin to make sure no one accidentally reads it ;) or also, and he really really thinks 10 times about it before giving in to his love wrecked brain’s desires, sculpting his crush.

His students would be confused with him as well because they might just find him to be a pinch too less strict. So when he is distracted with thoughts of his crush he might let one or two mistakes slide. But everyone knows to better not ask him about it, or he is going to snap.

All in all he is going to try to get closer to his crush then, to find out more about what they did to him. And while he might also do that to desperately find flaws in his crush, it would just make him fall harder…

[bonny-kookoo]

I have transcended here, so follow my vision:

Jungkook is always taunting the hybe staff that monitors his lives right? What about a fic where he does this because he kinda likes the pretty new IT intern 👉👈 and she is always stressed out working the night shift and wondering is he asleep yet should I end the live? oh no is he about to give a major spoiler, he would not do it right? workout sounds are kinda suspicious and low-key obscene should I "accidentally" end the live?

Hm... warning for like.. jungkook flirting? And suggestive themes lol

Your heart beats faster whenever you get the notification. But not because of the same reasons the fans pulses might race quicker.

No, you personally get palpitations because of him, personally.

You don't even know why he's bitten into you like a stubborn dog like this, not daring to let go, teeth buried deep in your skin. You don't think you're outstandingly pretty, you're not special, you're not even supposed to have any sort of friendly or private contact with him whatsoever. Your job is on the line every time he has his 'fun'. But every time you scold him with that fact, he's got the same answer.

'I've got enough money for both of us, baby.'

You're not sure how the hell the agency has not yet caught onto his games- teasing words never directed at the fans, but you on the other side monitoring- them hearing in on it simply collateral damage. He knows you watch him every time he goes live. Your angry emojis you send him every time he edges on getting inappropriate in front of millions worth it every time, as he has to imagine you angrily scolding him so cutely just like last time you did.

He wonders how long you'll let him toy around with you like this.

He remembers when you ended his live when he fell asleep, calling and ringing his doorbell in panic because of the still burning candle- but when he'd tried to lure you into his claws, offering to have you sleep over at his place since it was late and raining heavily, you'd declined- probably having sensed his actual hidden motive.

You're not easy. And he can't deny that he loves the chase.

At first, it was just fun. He thought if he played it cool and most of all smart enough, you'd eventually cave in- but by now, he's actually become much more personally interested in you. It's not just about what you might feel like all messed up under his hands with his dick balls deep inside you anymore- that's somewhat moved into the background, lust no longer the main reason for his interest.

It's the soft domesticity you offer him here and there, gentle care a man like him can do nothing but fall for.

You're nothing but IT staff, newly hired for your exceptional skills when it comes to recovering data from the most messed up hard drives, and your talent for making sure nothing leaks out where it's not supposed to. You take your job seriously, work with all your soul and energy, always try and do your best even in the most lost-cause-scenarios. But he remembers you restoring almost all of his files after his pc crashed, offering him gentle reassurance and some water to calm him down. And a few weeks later when his tablet was infected with a virus (most likely stemming from the.. not so family friendly he occasionally visits...), you'd simply giggled about it, not making a huge deal out of it, even sharing your homemade food with him in his office while you waited for the new firmware to install.

You cook really well. Not perfect- but perfectly imperfect, just like home cooking is supposed to be. And you're so sweet- it's giving him cavities just thinking of you.

And yeah- you're also called his 'babysitter' whenever he's live randomly at night, since you yourself can't sleep all that much. He wonders if it's insomnia, or another health issue. He wonders if he could do something to help you sleep at night.

He wonders if you'd hold onto him when asleep. He wonders if you like holding hands.

He's asked you these things privately often, at first just to tease, but these days he means those questions. He wants to know more about you, about who you are apart from your job, but you take your role in the company pretty seriously it seems like. You never break your contract, always remind him that you're not allowed to either answer his questions, or have any private contact at all.

And he hates it. He hates that you're so goddamn nice, never daring to break any rules.

"Hm? Ah yes, it's late.." he comments at the chat flowing with thousands of messages, not truly paying attention to them. "Its late, I can't sleep~" He hums, leaning back against his couch, sighing. "Maybe I should eat? I'm not on a diet right now.." he wonders to himself, picking at his new piercing. "..maybe. Would you eat with me?" He wonders, and on the other side of the live, in your office chair, you want to hit your head on your keyboard.

He knows exactly what he's doing. You want to punch that dumb smirk right off his face.

"Hm, would you.. I'll make some food, yes." He nods to himself, getting up to take the phone with him, setting it up in his kitchen. "Late night Ramyeon.. yes." He sings, dancing a little as he opens two bowls. "I'll eat two. I've got.. a big appetite." He says, having turned around to look at the chat again- or more so the camera. "And I'll put some sauce in it too. I like it hot, you know?" He giggles, and you on the other side wonder if it would cost you your job if you 'accidentally' cut the connection.

Instead, you send a red-faced angry emoji and a pointing finger as a warning.

And the moment he receives it he brightly grins laughing to himself. Are you watching him from your office at the company building? Or maybe you watch him from home? Possibly in bed? And if so, are you wearing anything? Images of you in nothing but underwear spark in his mind, making him space out as he leans on the kitchen counter, hand playing with his bottom lip. He'd bet half of his wealth you probably wear cute lacy underwear, with bows in the middle.

He could probably rip the frail fabric of your underwear off your pretty body with his bare hands. He knows he's got the strength for it.

"Hm, maybe I can't finish two though?" He wonders as he fills both bowls up with hot water. "But I'll try.." he sings to himself, not a care in the world while you watch, being tortured by the sight of his broad back. It would be a lie to say that he's not attractive- he knows it too, after all, and you're not blind. You're simply just not putting your job on the line for a simple affair- you won't be used like that.

You've been through that before. You can't do this again.

The rest of his live is uneventful, he doesn't actually eat any of his food, ends the live with the excuse that he's tired after all, and you're finally falling head first in your lap before your phone rings. Accepting it, you don't answer, but his voice on the other end does.

"If you come over now, it'll still be hot when you're here." He chuckles, and you know he refers to the instant food he'd made.

"Jungkook-ssi, I can't do that.!" You groan.

"Why not?" He wonders almost innocently. "Its not like people will know." He tells you.

"I'm not putting my job on the line for.. an affair." You decline. "You might have your fun, but I'll have to deal with the consequences later." You say, and for a moment, there's no sound, before he sighs.

"You know.." he starts, sitting down on a chair at his kitchen table. "..weeks prior I would've given up at this point. Would've told you 'alright, cool' and then let it go, you know?" He tells you, one hand supporting his head while his phone lays on the table. "But I honestly don't wanna just.. have an affair, as you call it."

"Oh?" You scoff. "Jungkook-ssi, I have to end this call. Please refrain from-"

"I want to get to know you." He rushes out. "I.. genuinely want to. I take all of the blame if things go south. I'll make sure you get the best job if Hybe kicks you out, promise." He offers, before he sighs yet again. "Just.. let's just eat ramyon at my place, no strings attached." He asks, and you laugh after a moment, making him grin too.

"Eat ramyeon at your place?" You giggle, and he clicks his tongue.

"You say 'wanna see my cat' these days." He says, and you get up into a sitting position.

"Well, I mean, you were aiming to see a cat, in a way." You attempt to flirt back, and its quiet. "Oh my God sorry, I really shouldn't-"

"No, no-" he laughs. "That was adorable, really." He grins to himself on the other end of the call. "So?"

"I can't." You decline. "I don't have anything else than this job. Please don't make me do this." You say, and he bites his lower lip.

"I meant it." He repeats. "No funny business. Dick stays inside my pants, and I really will make sure to get you a new even better job if someone finds out and gets you fired." He promises.

"How can I trust you?" You ask.

"Have I ever done something to get you into trouble?" He asks, and you think.

"I can think of a few times-" you start, before laughing when he groans out in agony. "The food is cold now anyway." You say.

"I can heat it up." He offers.

"I don't like spicy things." You respond.

"Nothing wrong with being vanilla." He jokes, and you roll your eyes on your side of the call.

"You're such a pervert. What would the fans think?" You scold playfully.

"They love it." He chuckles. "Just like you'll love me."

"Bold claim." You say.

"Just give me a chance." He offers. "One chance to make you fall for me."

"What if you won't fall for me?" You ask.

"Impossible." He hums, voice low as he watches the phone on his table. "Already did."

And you're quiet for a moment, before you sigh.

"I'll bite your hand off if you touch me inappropriately." You threaten, and he laughs.

"And I'll willingly accept my punishment, baby."

[fatuismooches]

Okay. Imagining.

When Fragile!Reader went into a coma, Dottore hadn't thought to preserve anything about them. He didn't have recordings of their voice. He didn't have pictures of their eyes. He figured that kind of data was useless because he'd always have his assistant by his side at all times. When would he need pictures if he could just look at you? Why would he need recordings when you never seemed to shut up (not that he'd ever ask you to)?

But when you fell asleep, he hadn't realized just how long he'd be deprived of that wonderful sight and that beautiful sound. He thought it would be fine, he'd help them wake up and it would be back to normal... but nothing worked. Before he knew it, years had gone by with seemingly no progress. What color were your eyes again? He was starting to forget. What range did your voice have when you sang? He found it hard to recall.

This is why, when you finally woke up, he had such a reaction to seemingly nothing at all. When you first opened your eyes, he was starstruck by that hauntingly beautiful hue. When you finally spoke, even with your voice hoarse and quiet from misuse, his heart skipped a beat. He couldn't help but gasp for air as his lungs squeezed in his chest. How could he have forgotten? And more importantly, how did he survive so long without this?

As he finally held your hand after what felt like a millennia, he silently vowed to not only find you a cure but a way to make you immortal like him. There was no way he'd allow himself to be deprived of his lover ever again.

MY HEART IS HURTING SO MUCH I ABSOLUTELY ADORE THIS... this is literally canon bye. Also the sad thing about this is that it could totally happen considering the existence of erosion in Teyvat 🥺. Now I have even more brainrot of this happening to reader too and them slowly losing their sense of self and forgetting him 😭

Sniff... Dottore not bothering to keep any hard data of you because he has the real thing in front of him :( You were always glued to his hip, even if he wanted to get away (he doesn't) he couldn't, always faced with your lovely smile and pleasant voice. Beautiful body and soft touches. And he thinks, the best way to collect data is from the subject itself rather than anything else. Even if he were to preserve you somehow, would it ever compare to your being in real life? No, it wouldn't, and you'd always be here, so if he longed to hear your voice, he would simply go to you and hear it. If he wanted to see your eyes, he would go to you and kiss you to see them flutter and melt. If he wanted you, he would go to you. No need for anything else.

But now, now that this has happened, Zandik curses himself for being stupid. After all, what kind of scientist doesn't keep backups of their data? Yes, the real thing will always be the best, but what happens if the original is lost? Is hurt? Is no more? Zandik didn't think the absence of another person could affect him so much, but it does. You have such an... effect on him that drives him completely mad. His head hurts from the ringing silence instead of your voice that fills it. His eyes burn from the sleepless nights that you are not by his side. After you fall asleep, he writes stuff down, he truly does, filling up pages and pages so everything about you could be recorded, but reading all the detailed words in the world doesn't help him remember the exact hue of your eyes, or the exact tone of voice you used in different situations, or the once-familiar curve of your lips that he can't seem to remember the exact position of. A part of him despises himself for allowing himself to forget, he's the only one in Teyvat who remembers you, but at the same time he doesn't... but that doesn't make him love you any less. He may not remember that stuff... but he sure does remember how much time he spent with you.

Dottore's always wondered how he'd react on the day you finally wake up, he'll be delighted, of course, that goes without saying but would anything else happen? And oh, even he could not have predicted this possibility would occur. Those eyes, that voice, your smile, even while being sickly, you were truly the epitome of human beauty. The way everything about you acts as if he is the only person that matters. When he holds your hand, he feels you squeeze back ever so slightly, and he resolves himself once again. He really can't live without you... never again.

You're really confused as to why he's so attentive, yes there's your illness but that doesn't explain how much he studies you. How he always goes silent and watches you whenever you speak, even about dumb things, when years ago he would roll his eyes at your idiocy. How he likes to stare deep into your eyes without getting embarrassed, which was funny because he always broke away from eye contact in the Akademiya. You may never know, as he's never going to tell you about what he went through without your presence, but right now, he's never going to let that happen to either of you ever again.

I have another hc that sort of relates to this: I imagine Dottore felt indescribable emotions when you finally woke up and uttered his real name - "Zandik." Because really, no one has spoken it in over four hundred years. Perhaps he almost forgot what it sounded like, as he discarded that part of his identity long ago. Maybe he buried it so far back in his mind that he lost it, especially since it carried unpleasant memories. But you, when you spoke that forsaken name again... he truly felt like Zandik again.

[lets-try-some-writing]

The Grim Dark Archives: Statement #006 The Children

[Statement taken from [Redacted] on [Redacted: Sensitive data] regarding the Autobots acquisition of three human children. We do not know why or how the Autobots collected the children considering they actively avoid human contact when possible. However, they recently came into aquisition of three human wards and Optimus made it quite clear he will not be giving them up.

The Prime offered many logical and sound reasons as to why he and his team should be made guardians, and unfortunately, since we do not know the situation, command made the decision to allow it. We cannot risk the Autobots losing their wariness of us. Command was willing to sacrifice three civilians for the sake of our long term survival.

It's a [Redacted] situation, but there's not a lot we can do. [REDACTED] was asked to offer any insight he might have regarding why the Autobots gained and interest in the children to begin with. The statement he gave was... unsettling.

Statement begins.]

══════════════════

Three human children huh? I've looked over their files, and I gotta say I agree with your higher ups when it comes to this. There really isn't a lot you can do for those kids. If Prime personally chose them, it means he's got plans. And whenever Prime has plans... let's just say it doesn't end well for whoever is involved. I would know. I... was a close friend to him before the Archives took him away.

No I won't be addressing that little tidbit right now. Just consider it a little lore from your dear agent [REDACTED] alright?

Look, I don't claim to know Prime's mind, but I did know Orion before and after the Archives took him as one of theirs. And based on what these reports are telling me, I think I have a rough understanding of what Optimus is trying to do with them. You said Jack was the first, right? Arcee found him at his place of work and skidded away with him on her alt mode. Strange. She would have normally just bucked a passenger that she didn't like right off.

I think he was an accident. Arcee is still grieving the loss of Cliffjumper. The urge to latch onto another must be quite strong for her right now. I imagine that when Jack hopped on, her instincts clicked with him despite the species difference. He's young, he's not anywhere near as strong as even a newspark, and he willingly came to her even if he did not know it. He checked all the boxes, its no wonder she kept him then.

He is likely in the least danger out of the three when all things are considered. Arcee is incapable of creating a cold forged from him since he is organic, and so she won't threaten the team with her parasitic bonding. Jack will be alright so long as he doesn't anger her. She will guard him with her life and viciously fight to protect him from everything, including himself. She will be toxic, she will gaslight him, and she absolutely will try and pull him away from everyone else in his life. She will want to own him completely in order to begin the process of creating a cold forged from him. Of course this is impossible since he is no Cybertronian, but she will follow her rituals all the same.

I imagine Optimus wants to keep Jack since he ensures Arcee remains a loyal ally without the threat of her nature. Jack will never be physically harmed so long as she is near. Although I would be careful. Maybe give the boy a briefing so that he never mentions another female in Arcee's presence. Femmes are notoriously territorial. I would not put it past Arcee to go and kill any female classmates or even Jack's mentor- mother? Yeah that's the term. Simply put, keep her away from any "competition" and Jack should be fine, well, he won't be mentally fine but being alive is better than being dead I guess.

The one called Miko though? She's got it infinitely worse and I don't think she knows it based on the reports. Her status with the Wreckers is highly concerning. Wreckers are not naturally aggressive toward other species, but they do get bored easily. Perhaps that is the wrong word. They are so strange that even I don't really get them. But basically, when a Wrecker isn't given much to do, they start causing problems. BIG problems mind you. If there isn't a mission or objective to complete, they will create problems to solve and even revolt against their faction just to have something to do. Being trapped on Earth must be its own special kind of torture. I can bet you a hundred shanix that the only reason Bulkhead hasn't lost his fraggin mind and burned down a city is because he's hunting down that rogue Wrecker still.

What's shanix? It's our currency back on Cybertron- Wait, that's beside the point. Quit getting me off track here.

Miko is being used as a distraction to put things lightly. Wreckers like to see how far they can go, constantly testing the limits. Miko's personality and the fact that according to this, she wants to be "Just like Bulkhead" tells me that she's in for a rough ride. She probably won't be augmented or anything like that. It would be way too much effort for Bulkhead to bother. But you can bet that Miko will be thrown into any and all dangerous situations just so that Bulkhead can watch and see if she makes it out alive. He will probably try to play hero too. Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.

Yeah, that girl is as good as dead. Well, at least if Optimus stops advocating for her life. Keep an eye on her and give her a quick briefing. I wouldn't tell her anything important, the calmer she is, the better things will be for her. However I would recommend combat training for her, or at least some of that Navy SEALS stuff you squishies have going on.

And then there's Rafael...

Honestly, I pity the boy. He's got Prime's direct attention. Rafael understands Bumblebee too. Frag he's honestly better off throwing himself off the nearest cliff. If Prime hasn't started the augments, he sure as pit will soon. I won't sugar coat it a ton since I know you lot are mature. So listen closely when I say that Optimus wants data. He always wants data. That child, Rafael... he has what we call outlier abilities. His mind is just different enough that he can pick up on our EM fields. He isn't actually understanding Bumblebee's words, he's understanding Bumblebee's intents and automatically translating them. A "Vibe check" kind of thing.

What I am getting at is that Rafael is one of the few who could handle Cybertronian data. Prime isn't dumb, he can see that. He's always looking for new optics to add to the Archive. My best guess is that he's going to bring Rafael into the fold, make him one of the Archive so that Optimus can have data regarding humans up and personal. The fact that the boy was given to Bumblebee only confirms that. Rafael is to be Bumblebee's newest gift and Rafael will feed Optimus information on anything and everything as soon as the augments are impanted.

You will know when the augments are done. When you know, don't talk to him. Don't say anything to Rafael. Don't let him SEE anything. Rafael cannot be allowed to know anything as soon as he joins the Archives. Everything he will see is something Optimus will also see. Not to mention Bumblebee... he's an adolescent. He has a desire to mentor a newspark, just like all our kind do at that age. If he has Rafael, he will be sure to guard Rafael and treat him very kindly. The cost is of course, that Rafael will belong to Optimus and Bumblebee in all but spark, or perhaps soul.

The only saving grace for the boy is that he will likely never know. Things that hurt will eventually fade away. His personality will shift, his mind will wander, and one day, he will wake up and not care anymore. The distress will be limited once he is fully one with the Archives. Bumblebee being there is likely also an attempt to keep him calm while the process is being completed.

I wouldn't have put it past Ratchet to have requested human subjects either. Keep a close eye on your young. That medic might try and steal a few now that Optimus has allowed for three to be taken.

══════════════════

[Statement end.

Those kids... I wish I could do something for them, but [REDACTED] has made it quite clear that acting could destroy us. The children keep the Autobots from harming more civilians, and as much as it pains me to say... letting three die is better than having whole cities burn.

We will keep an eye on the children and brief them as best as we can. The science department is going to want Rafael for their own, I'm sure. They can try, but if [REDACTED] is right, any agent they send won't make it out again.

On another note, up until now [REDACTED] had refused to take an alternate mode. But in light of recent events, he settled on a Martini Porsche, a racing model no less. A strange choice, but one that feels fitting for him. He's been opening up more and picking up on Earth lingo left right and center. But considering all he's said about adaptation, I am not inclined to fully buy his laid back persona, especially after his first few months with us where he was shaking like a leaf.

We can only hope these aliens get off our planet sooner rather than later.

Agent Witwicky signing off.

Recording ends.]

[kangals]

oh i forgot to write up an update on the embark situation!

if you missed my posts last month (or didnt read them because they were certified walls of text): i got kep an embark test and in addition to the expected stuff, it also flagged him as having some genes related to copper storage disease - specifically that he had 1 gene for copper accumulation, and 2 genes that make accumulation less severe, meaning he inherited copper-related genes from both parents. when i did some reading into it,i couldnt find ANY studies or resources regarding copper disease in collies - it was almost entirely focused on labradors and dobermans, with an occasional hand-wavy comment of "sometimes seen in other breeds idk." because this test only got added by embark last month, i ended up doing a new test on stellina to check and see if she also had it.

basically my thinking was: A: does the presence of these genes mean that kep is actually at risk for copper storage disease, OR B: was this an incidental finding and the genes really only affect labs and dobes.

with stellina's test results, i think i'm pretty confident in guessing that the answer is B!

stellina's results also flagged as having one gene for copper accumulation - which, since i know that kep and stellina are pretty distantly related, indicates to me that it's much more likely that the genes are widespread in the greater collie gene pool as opposed to both of them just so happening to pick up a rare and harmful gene.

and most notably, now that's been a month and embark presumably has more data, they also had this new information listed:

those are HIGH numbers - and is an even bigger indicator that the gene, for whatever reason, simply doesn't affect these breeds that much. great pyrs, for example, are primarily working, livestock guardian dogs - there's no way that 80% of these dogs are suffering from copper storage disease. and while frenchies and cavs are certainly poster children for "breed with lots of serious health problems", copper storage isn't one of them. given the extreme popularity of frenchies, if 90% of them had this disease, someone would have noticed.

(interestingly, last week when i looked at this instead of pyrs it had pembroke corgis listed in that spot at around the same numbers - i wonder how many other breeds have large percentages of this gene but embark is just only listing the top few. this is such a new test that i expect a lot of information to change)

so i'm guessing that copper storage genes are actually pretty common in dogs - especially breeds with known low genetic diversity, such as collies, cavs, and dobermans. but given that there's nothing noted in studies about breeds besides labradors, dobermans, and a few terrier breeds, it just might not affect the rest of them. similarly, i know stellina carries the gene for "saddle tan" coloration, as do a certain %age of collies - but collies don't come in saddle tan. it's suspected there's another gene needed to "'activate" the pattern that's missing from collies. i'd guess the same thing is happening here - lots of dogs have the gene, but the "activation" genetics are only in a few specific breeds.

i'm definitely still going to be keeping a close eye on it, the test only released in May so it's still very early and i imagine they're getting a ton of data from this - would love some research into if my thinking is correct. if you have a dog that's gotten an embark health test from may and onwards this year, i'd be interested to know what breed(s) your dog is and if they also carry these genes. but i think, overall, this indicates that it's more incidental than a real concern.

[tobiasdrake]

Digimon Adventure 01x33 - Pump and Gotsu are Shibuya-Type Digimon / Out on the Town

Previously on Digimon Adventure: In the middle of a blistering summer day, DeathMeramon showed up to make things even hotter. Internet contrarianism at its finest. Bet he's also one of those clowns who retools their truck to produce more emissions and trigger Libs. Fortunately, the youth of the nation turned out and voted to throw him off a building so it's all good.

Now we turn our attention to another pair of kids. The recap offers a bit of extra information to set the stage for what's happening.

(Oh fuck me, it's this one. I am not ready. I am not ready.)

Narrator: On the night of the same day they fought DeathMeramon, Yamato escorted his younger brother Takeru to their mother's place and they headed in the direction of Shibuya.

Thit bit of setup doesn't make it into the dub's recap, which simply tells us what happened in the previous episode as usual.

As the episode begins, a CGI readout informs us of the date: It's August 2nd, 1999. The children still have about a month left in their summer vacation.

To put our current location into perspective, here's some of those familiar map markers from last episode. Black circle is Vamdemon's lair at Daiba Park. Green is Shibaura. Blue is Tokyo Tower. We are now one city over from Minato City in Shibuya.

Shibuya is well-known for being, as they say, hip with the youngsters. Imagine if a stereotypical American shopping mall in the 90's with all its associated teenage memes was a city. That's Shibuya. It's like the capitol of youth fashion trends in Tokyo.

So these two Digimon roll up on the roof of a car.

Pumpmon: (excited) This place is even famous in the Digimon World: Shibuya!

The narrator wastes no time going into their rundowns.

Pumpmon is a Perfect-stage Data-type Puppet Digimon. Did you guess Nightmare Soldier? Because he's a Nightmare Soldier. He's kind of a catch-all. Any Nightmare Soldier can evolve into Pumpmon as a Jogress Evolution but no Nightmare Soldier directly evolves into him.

His name is, unsurprisingly, derived from "pumpkin" for his pumpkin head.

Narrator: Pumpmon. A stuffed doll with a pumpkin for a head. His scary but cute appearance is popular with girls. Tonight, he plans to run wild in Shibuya as if it were Halloween. His special attack is Trick-or-Treat.

That little guy next to him is Gotsumon, a Child-stage Data-type Ore Digimon. Gotsumon is a Nature Spirit and the mid-tier evolution for Mochimon. He evolves into a few Digimon you may recognize such as the Monochromon from File Island, Gekomon, and in the 0.5 update, Tailmon - though Tailmon would later receive a more official pre-evolution.

Gotsumon: These are Shibuya-type humans! Narrator: Gotsumon. His body is tough, but he's a cheerful and playfully naughty Digimon. He goes with the flow and was made for Shibuya! He plans to rock out tonight! His special move is Angry Rock. Pumpmon: Something exciting is about to happen! Gotsumon: Let's have fun! Ahahahaha!

Gotsumon and Pumpmon bound off the car roof and disappear into the city.

The dub adds some silence-breaking dialogue to their intro. It also somehow thinks those two are driving the car even though they're clearly on the roof of it.

Gotsumon: Let me drive! You're going the wrong way. Pumpkinmon: How do you know which way to go? You've never been in the real world before. Gotsumon: What's the difference? I've never driven a car before either! Pumpkinmon: Well, it's my first time too! Both: Ahahahahaha!!! Pumpkinmon: Whoa, check 'em out! Uh-huhuhuh Uhuhuhuhuh! Gotsumon: Ew! Pumpkinmon: So these are city people in the real world. They don't look like much fun. Gotsumon: (rundown) Well, Pumpkinmon? You're the right guy to teach them what 'fun' really is. You are, without a doubt, the most rockin' creature to ever have a pumpkin for a head. Remember: Chicks dig evil Digimon. Gotsumon: At least that's what I keep telling myself, anyway. Pumpkinmon: (rundown) Gotsumon, you are the mon! We're going to have such a blast here in the real world; They might even name a building after you: The Gotsumonument, where they keep all the party supplies. Pumpkinmon: 3... 2... 1... LET'S GO!!!

Dub Pumpkinmon and Gotsumon are weirdly judgmental about the Shibuya people's party qualities. Though I will say: "Chicks dig evil Digimon" is a surprisingly pragmatic adaptation of Pumpmon having a "scary but cute appearance that's popular with girls." That's not what they said, but... it's not not what they said either.

While Pumpmon and Gotsumon disappear into Shibuya, we join Yamato and Takeru on their way to say goodbye to one another. The brothers sit in silence while the music of Yamato's harmonica plays in the background.

From the luggage rack, Tsunomon and Patamon discuss their situation for the audience's benefit.

Tsunomon: Yamato and Takeru's parents divorced four years ago. Patamon: So even though they're brothers, Yamato lives with his dad and Takeru lives with his mom, right?

Now that we've laid down that reminder, Takeru checks the time on his Digivice. It's 7:07 PM.

Takeru: It's late. Onii-chan, you should get off at the next stop. Yamato: No. I'm taking you all the way to Sangenjaya. Takeru: It's okay-- Yamato: (firmly) Takeru. Takeru: What? Yamato: Let me do this. Takeru: Okay.

Rip my heart in half, and the episode's only just started.

The purple circle on the map is Sangenjaya. As you can see, it's a bit of a trip from the red circle Odaiba. Depending on your timing, it's about an hour to an hour and a half one-way by train. Takeru's worried because Yamato isn't going to get home until like 9. Which is pretty late for an 11-year-old.

We're about to come up on Shibuya Station, which means another 20 minutes to Sangenjaya. For Yamato, that's another 40 minutes added to the length of his round-trip if he goes all the way.

The dub adds a silence-breaker to this scene that completely kills the tone of the boys sitting in awkward, strained silence.

T.K.: How much longer, Matt!? Matt: Relax, T.K. You're almost home.

I guess T.K.'s getting impatient to split up. Their faces are onscreen for most of the extended silence, so the dub still has to go through with Matt and T.K. sitting there unmoving and not speaking. But the vibe is completely killed by T.K.'s whining.

Tsunomon: Matt and T.K.'s mom and dad aren't together anymore, Patamon. So even though they're brothers, they don't live together. Patamon: So T.K. lives with their mom and Matt lives with their dad? That explains why they try so hard to stay together all the time. (T.K. checks Digivice for the time) T.K.: It's sure late. Matt: Yeah? So? T.K.: The next stop's good enough. Matt: No. I'm gonna take you all the way home, little brother. T.K.: You don't have to. Matt: I know I don't have to but I'm going to, okay? I've got my reasons! T.K.: What reasons? Matt: You're my brother. T.K.: Thanks Matt.

This part's pretty well adapted. Matt uses a lot more words to explain where he's coming from, whereas Yamato captures basically all of that in the four words "Let me do this." But he still gets to the same point.

Things are pretty tense here in the train car. But then Patamon asks a question that's more insensitive than he realizes.

Patamon: Are you upset because you're splitting up (wakareru)? Takeru: Shut up! Yamato: (surprised) Takeru! Patamon: You don't have to yell at me like that! Takeru: Even if it's you, Patamon, you shouldn't talk about us brothers like that! Patamon: Fine! I won't talk anymore! Tsunomon: Patamon!

To understand why Takeru lost his shit all of a sudden, you need to understand the nerve Patamon struck. The word he used, wakareru, means to divide or to separate. He was trying to politely ask if the fact that they're going to go their separate ways soon is what's causing all this tension in the train car.

But it's also the word for divorce. Patamon accidentally brushed on Takeru and Yamato's mutual insecurity, that their parents breaking up has broken them up.

Meanwhile, in the dub:

Patamon: Ahhh, nothing like sweet brotherly love! Tsunomon: That's a Digi-mouthful! Patamon: We like when you guys get mushy! T.K.: Hey, quit it! Matt: Easy, T.K.! Patamon: You don't have to be mean about it. I thought what you guys said was ni-- T.K.: MIND YOUR OWN BEESWAX!!! Why ya listenin' to our conversation anyway!? Patamon: FINE!!! If you don't want me around, I'll leave! Tsunomon: Patamon!

Patamon abruptly starts talking about how cute the boys are, and T.K. gets so embarrassed that he snaps at Patamon about it.

The anime's always been uncomfortable talking about the divorce. So uncomfortable that they initially posed these two as half-brothers but I think we've officially done away with that. But they did bring it up a second ago, so I'm a little surprised they suddenly back down from it here.

Patamon's feelings are so hurt by the argument that he bails as soon as the train doors open.

Patamon: I'm getting off here! Yamato: Patamon!

Yamato and Tsunomon try to chase Patamon, but only get as far as the door. He's gone.

Yamato: Takeru! Patamon flew away! Takeru: (bristling) Who cares.... Tsunomon: The door's about to close! Yamato: (firmly) Takeru....

Right as the doors are about to close, Takeru's anger breaks. At the last possible second, he and Yamato jump out onto the platform of Shibuya Station to go find Patamon.

In the dub:

Patamon: I know when I'm not wanted! Matt: Patamon, don't! (Patamon's gone) Matt: Patamon got off the train, T.K.! Don't you want to go after him? T.K.: Who cares about him!? Tsunomon: I think you care about him. Matt: Don't you? (beat) Tsunomon: T.K.? Matt: Better decide, T.K.; The door's closing! (T.K.'s anger breaks and he jumps off the train with Matt) T.K.: Where'd he go!? Tsunomon: Where are we!?

Again, it's wordier but it hits all the important points. Tsunomon and Matt having to spell out T.K.'s inner turmoil might be a bit over-expository but it doesn't feel intrusive to me. The scene still flows pretty well.

Leaving the station, the brothers hit the streets of Shibuya to find Patamon.

Tsunomon: Where could Patamon have gone? Yamato: This is your fault for yelling at him, Takeru. Takeru: (snaps) I couldn't help it! Yamato: Hey, don't take it out on me.

Takeru stops walking suddenly. His eyes soften.

Takeru: Onii-chan, I'm sorry.... Yamato: You went too far with Patamon. Takeru: I know, it's just.... He wasn't wrong.... Yamato: (gently) I know how you feel. Tsunomon: Let's go look over there!

Tsunomon's doing a pretty terrible job of being a plushy, I gotta say.

The dub, I guess, adds a timeskip as the brothers exit the train station?

T.K.: Seems like we've been walking around for hours.... Tsunomon: Yeah, I'm tired! And I don't even have any feet or legs! Matt: You shouldn't have yelled at him like that, T.K. T.K.: Hey, it's not my fault! Matt: Well, actually, it is. (T.K.'s eyes soften and he stops walking.) T.K.: Oh, I'm really sorry.... Matt: I understand, T.K. I know you didn't mean to hurt his feelings. T.K.: Well, I thought he was making fun of us.... Matt: No way, dude! You know Patamon better than that. Tsunomon: Hey, why don't we try looking over there.

Well. Uh. Glad we got that resolved. T.K. was making mountains out of molehills and he gets that now. Emotional drama: Over.

While Yamato and Takeru search for Patamon, they pass a pachinko parlor. We pan inside, where Pumpmon and Gotsumon are spending their night on the town not gambling.

Pachinko is a pretty huge industry in Japan, proving not-gambling entertainment services. Comparable to a slot machine, pachinko is an easy way to burn through your disposable income by turning a knob and seeing what you get.

The reason I keep saying not gambling like that is because pachinko exploits a legal loophole to dance around Japan's strict gambling laws. Legally, it's simply classified as entertainment. This is because you can't win any money from the machines.

When you play pachinko, what you win from it are balls which are then exchanged for prizes at a nearby prize center. Sort of like an arcade. Those prizes can then be sold to a vendor in exchange for money.

See! It's not gambling! You're winning prizes, not money. And then turning those prizes into money. Not gambling!

So. yeah. These two are basically in a Japanese casino. It's an open secret that pachinko's cheating the system but it's also a pretty major industry, puts a lot of money into taxes, and the law still restricts minors from playing so everyone sorta goes along with it. There's stuff like that in every country.

We join Pumpmon inside as his machine pays out a ton of pachinko balls. Behind him, he has five separate trays filled with balls.

Pumpmon: This is really fun! Gotsumon: Hey, give me some. Pumpmon: Again!? Gotsumon: Don't be selfish! Pumpmon: But I am selfish. Gotsumon: I'll pay you back. Pumpmon: Promise? Gotsumon: Promise.

Before Pumpmon can turn any balls over to Gotsumon, a casino worker finds them.

Worker: You two. You're kids wearing costumes, AREN'T YOU!?!?

He drags them both from the casino and throws them out onto the escalator.

Worker: Next time I see you in here, I'm calling your school!

Once the two Digimon hit the bottom, they get up and yell back at him.

Pumpmon: WE'RE NOT CHILDREN!!! Gotsumon: We're just short! Worker: WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE!?!? Both Digimon: WAUUUUGH!!! (flees)

The funny thing is, he's half-right. Gotsumon is a child.

In the dub:

Pumpkinmon: Haha! Alright, another winner! Gotsumon: So will you give me a few? Pumpkinmon: What, again!? Gotsumon: I'll pay you back, I promise! Pumpkinmon: You'll pay me back with what!? Gotsumon: With what I'm about to win! Pumpkinmon: But you never win. Gotsumon: I'M HOT TONIGHT!!!

I don't think Gotsumon knows what that phrase means. Also, sad that we dropped "But I am selfish."

Nonetheless, pleasantly surprised that they correctly adapted the pachinko parlor as a casino by any other name. This is casino dialogue.

Worker: Hey, you two! You kids just don't get the message! Get out and STAY OUT!!! (Worker throws them out) Worker: If you have to try sneaking in here dressed as cartoon characters, at least get a decent costume! (Pumpkinmon and Gotsumon hit the ground floor) Pumpkinmon: Boy, it's a good thing we were just about to leave! Gotsumon: Or we'd teach you some manners! Worker: WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY!?!? Pumpkinmon: Uh-oh! Gotsumon: Oh boy! (They flee)

These two are clowns in both versions. I love it.

Fleeing from the casino, the two Digimon run into a young woman, knocking her to the ground.

Gotsumon: IT'S A SHIBUYA-TYPE GIRL!!! Pumpmon: Let's hit on her to celebrate our first night in Shibuya! Gotsumon: What's up, babe? Woman: What do you want!? Gotsumon: Do you know what time it is? Woman: (checks her watch) Hey! Don't come any closer! You two look like rejects from "Kinchan no Kasou Taishou"! Pumpmon: What is that? Gotsumon: I don't get it. Pumpmon: You're dressed funny too!

Pumpmon demonstrates the peculiarities of the woman's attire by yanking her out her nose stud. This proves to be a terrible mistake, as the next we see of them, they're fleeing for their lives while she chases them in a blood fury.

Woman: YOU ASSHOLES!!!

Needless to say, their attempt at hitting on the woman they knocked down did not go well.

The TV show she brings up is a Japanese variety show that's basically a professional talent show. People would come on and do their own skits, then be rated by a panel of judges.

In the dub:

Gotsumon: Whoa! I think you knocked over a monster! Pumpkinmon: Even worse, I think I knocked over a teenager. I've heard about these strange looking creatures. Woman: Hey! It takes one to know one. Gotsumon: Excuse me, do you know what time it is? Pumpkinmon: TIME FOR NEW CLOTHES AHAHAHAHA!!! Woman: Get lost, you creeps! And what's with the costumes!? Aren't you guys a little late for Halloween!? Pumpkinmon: What's Halloween? Gotsumon: I don't think I like these teenage things! Pumpkinmon: Me either. Maybe I can reprogram her if I pull out her safety mechanism. (Pumpkinmon tugs the woman's nose stud, provoking the fury) Woman: COME BACK HERE, YOU LITTLE MUTANTS!!! THIS 'TEENAGE THING' IS GONNA TEACH YOU SOME MANNERS!!!

It's August, so we're more early for Halloween than late.

Pumpkinmon talks like a grumpy old man in this scene and it's weird. His lines here are generation-gap Boomer Humor, and it feels bizarre coming from what are supposed to be two fun-loving imps having a night on the town.

I mean, he is an Ultimate Digimon so maybe he is a boomer but it doesn't fit the tone.

That said, the payoff in the woman's final line is hilarious. XD

Fleeing the infuriated teenager, Pumpmon and Gotsumon's trajectory brings them down an alley and straight towards Yamato and Takeru.

Tsunomon is not playing. The second he lays eyes on these two coming down the alley, he evolves to Gabumon.

Gabumon: Pumpmon! Gotsumon! Takeru: Do you know these Digimon? Gabumon: I think they work for Vamdemon. Pumpmon: We're being chased by a Shibuya-type girl who's much scarier than Vamdemon-sama! Gotsumon: You should hide too!

The pair grab Gabumon by the arms, dragging him away to a hiding place.

In the dub:

Gabumon: Hold it right there! Why are you two in such a hurry!? T.K.: Do you know these guys? Gabumon: I sure do! They work for Myotismon. Pumpkinmon: You're right! But, right now, we're being chased by something even scarier than Myotismon. Gotsumon: There's a really mad teenage human after us! Come to think of it, you'd better hide too!

Losing the repeated references to these humans as "Shibuya-type" doesn't seem like that big a deal, but it does take a bit of the unique characterization and charm away from Pumpmon and Gotsumon.

While the Digimon take cover, Yamato faces the furious Shibuya-type teenager.

Woman: WHERE THE HELL DID "KINCHAN NO KASOU TAISHOU" GO!?!? Yamato: (points) They went that way. Woman: Thanks! (runs off)

Classic misdirect. Once she's gone, it's time to find out what's going on with these guys.

Gabumon: Did Vamdemon order the two of you to come here and find the Eighth Child? Pumpmon: That's right.

Yamato tenses up at the confirmation. The music takes on an ominous tone as Gabumon and Takeru withdraw to Yamato. Steeling themselves for the--

Pumpmon: But Shibuya is much more fun! (Tension killed instantly) Yamato: (lost) Shibuya is much more fun?

Both: (dramatic pose) We've become Shibuya-type Digimon! Takeru: Shibuya-type Digimon? Gabumon: What is going through your heads? Both: ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!!!

Yamato, Takeru, and Gabumon all exchange weary glances over whatever the hell this is. But when they look back, the Shibuya-type Digimon are gone.

Yamato: WHERE DID THEY GO!?!?

In the dub, the teenager opens this scene with a valid point.

Woman: YOU CAN RUN BUT YOU CAN'T HIDE DRESSED IN THOSE STUPID COSTUMES WHERE ARE THEY!?!? Matt: (points) Uh, they went that way. Woman: THANKS!!! (runs off) (The Digimon come out from hiding) Gabumon: I think I know why you two troublemakers are in the real world. Did Myotismon happen to send you here to find someone? Pumpkinmon: Yeah! That Eighth DigiDestined kid. Matt: Huh! Then you're our enemy! Pumpkinmon: No, we're not! We just want to cruise around the city and have some fun! Matt: Well, we thought you two were evil Digimon. Gotsumon: Evil schmevil! We love it here! In fact, next stop: Hollywood! (dramatic pose) TA-DA!!! T.K.: (flatly) They're not ready for TV. Gabumon: Typical. Everybody wants to be in show business. Both Digimon: Lights! Cameras! And action! (The trio all exchange glances and disgusted noises) Gotsumon: Hey! There's some lights! Pumpkinmon: YEAH!!! (Everyone looks back and they're gone) Matt: What are they doing up there!?

The dub's aversion to quiet moments prevents it from even competing with the original. Also, the nonsequitur about Hollywood is clearly written in there because they had no idea what to do with the Shibuya-type animations they were saddled with.

Now, where did those two get off to?

Gotsumon and Pumpmon jump onto a streetlight, shaking it and scrambling its signals. The ensuing confusion causes a traffic calamity.

Gabumon: YOU TWO!!! WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?!?

Suddenly, police sirens start up in the distance.

Takeru: Police sirens! Yamato: They'll arrest us if they see this! RUN FOR IT!!!

Yamato, Takeru, and Gabumon cheese it before the bacon patrol can arrive. Gotsumon and Pumpmon consider their options.

Pumpmon: They're running away. Gotsumon: Let's go too. Both: WAIT UP!!! (flee)

Wise decision.

Over in the dub, Matt yells at them as soon as they jump on the streetlight.

Matt: HEY!!! GET DOWN!!! (Gotsumon and Pumpkinmon cause a pileup) Gabumon: That's enough! That's not funny; It's mean! (Police sirens) T.K.: Sirens! Matt: Get down or the police will arrest you! We'd better get out of here, guys; Let's run! (T.K., Matt, and Gabumon flee) Pumpkinmon: Did he just say let's run? Gotsumon: Sure did! Both: WAIT FOR US!!! (flee)

Mostly the same, though Gabumon's gentle admonishment isn't as fun as original Gabumon's furious outburst.

After cheesing it from the cops together, the brothers realize they've misplaced the Shibuya-type Digimon.

Yamato: H-Hey, what happened to Pumpmon and Gotsumon? Takeru: They were keeping up with us a minute ago. Gabumon: Those two are so impulsive... ACK!!!

Gabumon suddenly spots Pumpmon and Gotsumon trying on outfits inside a clothing store through the display window. Pumpmon is rocking a pink dress while Gotsumon's trying on blue shorts and a white shirt.

Brothers: ...those guys.... Pumpmon: I think this dress would look better on you. Gotsumon: I agree!

They swap instantaneously.

Yamato, Takeru, and Gabumon enter the store to confront them.

Yamato: Pumpmon! Gotsumon! Gotsumon: Oh, did you want to dress up too? Pumpmon: PUT THIS ON!!!

Gotsumon and Pumpmon dress Yamato, Takeru, and Gabumon each up in goofy outfits. The camera lingering on each in turn.

Gotsumon & Pumpmon: YOU LOOK GREAT!!!

Right at that moment, Patamon flies past the window.

Takeru: AH! PATAMON!!! Yamato: AFTER HIM!!!

The trio throw off their costumes and frantically exit the store, chasing after the lost Patamon.

Pumpmon: Should we follow them? Gotsumon: Sure!

In the dub, Gabumon takes this as an opportunity to be zen.

Matt: Hey, where are Pumpkinmon and Gotsumon? T.K.: They were right behind us. They must have gotten lost or something. Gabumon: Those two... Even when they're found they're lost. AUGH!!! (Gabumon spots the pair in a storefront window) Matt & T.K.: Man oh man.... Pumpkinmon: I think this one makes me look fat. But what do you think? Gotsumon: Well then, let's switch! (Brothers and Gabumon enter) Matt: You guys need to change your attitude! Gotsumon: You need to change your clothes!

XD "You need to change your clothes" got me.

As the camera pans over each of the dressed up protagonists, Gotsumon and Pumpkinmon get some silence-breakers.

Pumpkinmon: (on Matt) This look says you're not afraid to think big! Gotsumon: (on T.K.) Here's a sporty look! Course, I haven't figured out what sport it is yet. Pumpkinmon: (on Gabumon) And finally something nice and a little teddy. Well, what do you think? (Patamon flies by) T.K.: OH!!! PATAMON!!! Matt: HEY!!! PATAMON, COME BACK!!! (The brothers run out) Pumpkinmon: ...so, should we follow those guys? Gotsumon: And why not?

XD Again, they got me. "I haven't figured out what sport it is yet," was a solid follow-up to the innocuous seeming setup, and the timing on that line was pretty good.

Yamato, Takeru, and Gabumon chase Patamon to a nearby park, but then they lose him.

Takeru: We lost him again.... Yamato: Patamon must still be upset. Gabumon: He's not usually this stubborn.

Suddenly, Pumpmon and Gotsumon show up with ice cream cones.

Pumpmon: Now now, cheer up! Gotsumon: Have faith that you'll find him eventually.... Pumpmon: ...and have some ice cream!

Yamato and Takeru both gasp with alarm when they see what the pair are holding.

Gabumon: Where did you get that ice cream? Both: WE STOLE IT!!!

As if on cue, the ice cream vendor comes running into the park behind them.

Vendor: ICE CREAM THIEVES!!!

So the whole group has to start running once again.

Yamato: Why do we have to run!? Gabumon: She's seen us with them! Gotsumon: Want some ice cream while we're running away? Takeru: GET RID OF IT!!!

Once they've evaded yet another Shibuya-type pursuit, Yamato and Takeru stop to catch their breath.

Pumpmon: (holding out the cones) Want some? Yamato: Not me. Takeru: Me either. Gabumon: ... (Beat) Gabumon: I'll eat. Yamato: HEY!!! GABUMON!!!

XD Yamato's trying so hard to present a unified front here but it's ice cream. I mean, no point letting it go to waste; Damage already done and all that. You can't unpop that cork.

In the dub:

T.K.: Do you see him anywhere, Matt? Matt: No. Looks like we lost him again, T.K. Gabumon: Patamon doesn't usually hold a grudge but he was mad as a bull with a Black Gear.

It's funny to me that they're still bringing up Black Gears. That was more than half the series ago. On the one hand, new viewers are going to have no idea what that's supposed to mean. But from a writing perspective, I kinda like that their initial File Island adventure left a mark on everyone's psyches.

Like they're just waiting for Black Gears to become a thing again.

Pumpkinmon: Hey now, don't look so bummed out! Gotsumon: Yeah! I'm sure you'll find your little flying pig friend somewhere! Pumpkinmon: Maybe some ice cream will cheer you all up, huh? Brothers: !!! Gabumon: You guys don't have any money so how did you get ice cream? Both: WE STOLE IT!!! Vendor: (running into the park) YOU CROOKS!!! COME BACK HERE WITH MY ICE CREAM!!! (Everyone runs) Matt: I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU TWO!!! EVERYWHERE YOU GUYS GO, THERE'S TROUBLE!!! THE NEXT TIME YOU TWO GET SOMEONE ANGRY, MAKE SURE THEY CAN'T RUN VERY FAST!!! (Everyone stops to catch their breath) Pumpkinmon: So, want some ice cream? Matt: Not me. T.K.: You stole it! Gabumon: ... Matt: Gabumon won't take it either. Right? Gabumon: Ice cream... Ye-- Brothers: GABUMON!!!

Not sure why Gotsumon knows they're looking for a flying pig; He hasn't laid eyes on Patamon. But they did say Patamon's name so he's probably familiar with the species. That's fine.

The dialogue exchange while everyone's running is replaced with Matt scolding the pair of troublemakers for the entire sequence. Though, funnily, he seems more upset that they got caught than that they stole the ice cream in the first place.

The Gabumon joke at the end is slightly different but still nails the landing.

Suddenly, a bolt of lightning from the stormy sky strikes the road in front of them, kicking up a cloud of dust. And then everything stops being funny.

Vamdemon: Pumpmon. Gotsumon. Both: Y-Yes, sir!? Vamdemon: Why are you eating ice cream with the Chosen Children? Both: Y-you see.... Vamdemon: Weren't you supposed to be searching for the Eighth Child? Both: We haven't found them yet! Vamdemon: Then why haven't you taken the Crests from these children!? Both: We were just about to do that! (Pumpmon and Gotsumon turn on Yamato and Takeru) Gabumon: RUN!!!

Gabumon shields Yamato and Takeru with his body and the three of them run for it. Gotsumon and Pumpmon let out adorable little battle cries and give chase.

Over in the dub, Myotismon opens by telling these two what he really thinks.

Myotismon: Losers! Failures! Both: No no! Don't say that! Myotismon: Instead of causing pain and suffering, I find you here eating ice cream! Both: ...well, it is stolen-- Myotismon: I DON'T CARE ABOUT ICE CREAM!!! Have you found the Eighth DigiDestined Child yet? Both: Well, we were about to find him! Myotismon: Redeem yourselves by stealing the Crests from these children OR ELSE!!! Both: No problem, boss! That's just what we were about to do! (Pumpkinmon and Gotsumon turn on Matt and T.K.)

Gabumon doesn't say anything when they run this time. He lets out some scared vocalizing like Matt and T.K. are.

Different openings to the same result. Honestly, both openings have merits. I prefer the first one, because Vamdemon's stonefaced "Why are you eating ice cream with the Chosen Children?" is a beautiful Oh Fuck moment. There is no possible answer they can give to that question that won't incriminate them further.

But also, Gotsumon and Pumpkinmon pointing out to Saturday Morning Cartoon Villain Myotismon that the ice cream does qualify as a crime, only for him to scream "I DON'T CARE ABOUT ICE CREAM!!!" is hilarious. XD

So, in the original, Vamdemon opens the conversation with an impossible-to-defend accusation in what is very much the voice of a boss catching an employee goofing off at work. Meanwhile, in the dub, they get him. They win that verbal joust and he's livid about it. Both versions are so good.

Takeru: Why did they attack us all of a sudden!? Yamato: It can't be helped. They were working for Vamdemon from the start! Gabumon: But I can't bring myself to fight those two!

Pumpmon and Gotsumon are troublemakers, but there's no malice in it. They've sort of become the kids' friends, in an odd way.

In the dub:

T.K.: Can you believe those two turning on us!? Matt: And I thought Pumpkinmon and Gotsumon only wanted to have fun, not fight! Gabumon: I suppose they'd rather fight us than fight Myotismon.

Gabumon's line in the original is an expression of his own personal feelings towards Gotsumon and Pumpmon. He's asserting his growing fondness for the pair. In the dub, he explains their motive for the betrayal, which we saw for ourselves half a minute ago, so it's not as interesting.

Cut to Patamon hunkering down on top of a streetlight. He's finally run out of angry and is starting to have post-fury regrets.

Patamon: I left in the heat of the moment, but I wonder what Takeru's doing now?

Down below, he overhears a pair of girls in school uniforms chatting.

Girl 1: Yeah, if you want to meet up with someone, it should be in front of Hachikou's statue. Girl 2: Hachikou's statue is the best place to meet up! Patamon: Hachikou's statue....

Patamon takes to the air again, his mind set on a destination.

For context, Hachikou was a dog whose owner brought him to Shibuya. His owner would take the train to work, and every day Hachikou would wait at Shibuya Station for his owner to return.

His owner died one day from a medical complication at work, and never came home to Hachikou. From then on, every day for the next ten years, Hachikou would come to Shibuya Station and wait, unaware that his owner would never return. He kept this up until the day he died.

(Yeah, that Futurama episode that made you cry is based on a real event that happened in Japan.)

In his memory, a statue of Hachikou was erected outside the station. He's been immortalized in movies, anime, and video games. There's even an annual memorial in his honor.

So. Y'know. Lot of cultural significance to using Hachikou's statue as a place to meet up with people. Which isn't going to translate into the dub very well.

Patamon: I just can't stay mad at T.K. anymore. Besides, I really miss him! Girl 1: So I told Rebecca and Sarah to just find us at the park later. That'll work. It's like... It's so easy to find somebody at the park! Girl 2: Yeah! It's totally easy to find somebody there! Patamon: Oh, in the park!

(sigh) They could have at least used the statue as a landmark. Even if kids don't understand the cultural significance, that's fine. Neither does Patamon. Someone said "Hey, Hachikou's statue is a great place to meet!" and that's all the context he has. It's fine if that's all the context the audience has.

"The park"? This is a metropolitan city. Which park?

While Patamon's heading to Hachikou's statue, Yamato and Takeru find themselves cornered by the formerly friendly Gotsumon and Pumpmon.

As they round a corner, they see Pumpmon ahead, cutting off their exit.

Yamato: AUGH!!! Takeru: PUMPMON!!! Pumpmon: This is as far as you go! Gabumon: He cut us off from the front. Yamato: Get behind me, Takeru.

Gripping Takeru by the shoulders, Yamato moves him back towards the rear. Unfortunately, it's not safe from that side either, as Gotsumon brings up the rear.

Takeru: (spots Gotsumon) Ah! Yamato: (turns) Gotsumon! Gotsumon: This is as far as you go.

I like the symmetrical taunting from Pumpmon and Gotsumon as their trap is sprung. These two are such a double-act, even as the enemy.

The pair backs Yamato, Takeru, and Gabumon into a vacant lot. Nowhere to run now.

In the dub:

T.K.: Hey, how'd you do that!? Pumpkinmon: Aren't I amazing!? Gabumon: Well, you might make a nice pie. Matt: Come on! Let's turn around! (moves T.K. behind him) T.K.: Whuh!? Gotsumon: (approaches from the rear) Hehe, I don't think so! Matt: We're surrounded! Gotsumon: Sorry we have to do this to you guys, but orders are orders. You understand.

"You might make a nice pie." Holy shit, shots fired. Gabumon threatens to eat Pumpkinmon.

Matt's also given a tone-shifting silence-breaker when Pumpkinmon and Gotsumon back them into the lot.

Matt: Alright, if it's a fight you want, LET'S DO IT!!!

This is one of those lines the dub likes to use when the kids are in extreme peril to make it seem like it's not so dire.

With their backs against the wall of the lot, Yamato, Takeru, and Gabumon prepare to have to defend themselves. Pumpmon and Gotsumon slowly advance on the Children with determination and menace in their eyes. Then, at last, Pumpmon--

Pumpmon: I quit. Gotsumon: Ugh, me too! Pumpmon: Playing around in Shibuya is way more fun than fighting the Chosen Children! Gotsumon: Yeah yeah! Come hang out with us! Group: Huh!?

Yamato, Takeru, and Gabumon have tonal whiplash over how this night has gone. But the tension's been deflated, our new friends are still our friends, and--

A bolt of lightning suddenly strikes nearby.

Pumpmon: V-VAMDEMON'S COMING!!! Gotsumon: Go hide!

Things may have de-escalated with these two, but there's still the big guy lurking around. It's not safe to be out in Tokyo at night.

In the dub:

Pumpkinmon: Uhh, I quit. Gotsumon: Yeah, me too. Group: Huh? Pumpkinmon: Why should we fight? Somebody always gets hurt. Besides, it's way more fun just hanging out and cruising around the city! Gotsumon: That's for sure! Hey, why don't you guys hang out with us? Group: Huh!? (Lightning bolt strikes nearby) Pumpkinmon: Whoa, Myotismon's coming! Gotsumon: You should all hide!

It's worded a little different but mostly the same. I like Pumpkinmon's new point about how violence sucks, actually. Like. Unless you're Son Goku, on a scale of 1 to Fun it's a 0.

Takeru, Yamato, and Gabumon all hide while Pumpmon and Gotsumon go out to confront their boss.

It does not go well.

Vamdemon: Where are the Chosen Children? Pumpmon: Unfortunately, they got away from us. Gotsumon: We almost had 'em! Vamdemon: You LIARS!!! I have no further use for you. NIGHT RAID!!!

Pumpmon and Gotsumon's deception confirms Vamdemon's suspicions, provoking a rare break from his typically cool demeanor.

We're going to see in a moment that he does know where the Yamato, Takeru, and Gabumon are. It's too late to hide. He's giving Pumpmon and Gotsumon an opportunity to tell him and prove that they haven't deserted their posts. A test that they fail.

In the dub:

Myotismon: Where are the DigiDestined!? Pumpkinmon: Uh, they were here just a second ago! They must have got away! Gotsumon: Yeah! You can't believe how fast they are! But we almost had 'em, boss. Myotismon: Yes. I can imagine. You had your chance; Now I'm condemning you to my dungeon in the Digi-World! GRISLY WING!!!

...yeah, we'll. Uh. We'll talk about Myotismon's dungeon in the Digi-World in a moment.

The acting for Pumpkinmon and Gotsumon is so good in this scene. They do a fantastic job selling these claims as pathetic excuses from dipshit minions.

There is, however, a bit of a narrative shift here. Pumpkinmon and Gotsumon are lying to protect their friends in both versions. However, in the original, Vamdemon sees through their lies and attacks them for betraying his side. Myotismon is just executing them for failure. This was their opportunity to "redeem themselves" for not finding the Eighth Child, and they bungled it.

Well. Shit. Vamdemon's on the attack, as his bats swarm Pumpmon and Gotsumon. Nothing to lose now; Go for the Hail Mary.

Pumpmon fires off his Trick or Treat, conjuring a colossal pumpkin above Vamdemon and dropping it. The Night Raid bats quickly return from their attack, moving into defense and catching the pumpkin. They ravenously devour Pumpmon's best move.

While his bats are distracted, Gotsumon tries to blindside Vamdemon with his Angry Rock attack. But. Like. It's a rock being thrown by a Child-stage Digimon, and Vamdemon's Perfect. He telekinetically stops the rock with a sharp gaze, then shatters it in midair.

The dub calls these moves Pumpkinmon Power and Rock Fist Attack respectively.

Once the bats have finished eating Pumpmon's pumpkin, they go back on the attack. Pumpmon and Gotsumon have nothing left to defend themselves.

Vamdemon's Night Raid descends upon Pumpmon and Gotsumon once more. They both let out the most bloodcurdling screams, and we pan away to Yamato, Takeru, and Gabumon in a nearby alley.

Gabumon: Pumpmon! Takeru: Gotsumon!

Yamato throws himself around Takeru and pulls him away, using his own body to break Takeru's line of sight.

Yamato: Don't watch, Takeru!

The axe from Pumpmon's head and one of Gotsumon's rocks clatter to the ground. Then they dissolve into pixel dust. The incorrigible pranksters are dead. Vamdemon takes a step forward, his boot landing where these parts of the prankster pair had dissolved, as if crushing their bodies underfoot.

There is no change in the dub. Even their bloodcurdling screams as they die are retained. This is because the dub already changed the context of this scene a moment ago. This is where "My dungeon in the Digi-World" comes in.

They pre-emptively altered the context of Gotsumon and Pumpkinmon's disintegration so they could present the death scene in all its gory detail, unhindered by the need to appease the censors. They went to the dungeon, so it's fine for them to die screaming while Matt yells at T.K. not to watch.

...honestly, clever. Points to the dub for managing to make the censors happy and preserve the emotional punch of this scene. Though if you're hoping for a follow-up episode where we spring them from Myotismon's dungeon, I... Uh... I have some bad news.

(Now that I think about it, his entire castle and the mountain it's situated on got obliterated the day after he left. He doesn't know about that. So... I guess they're fine. Dub Pumpkinmon and Gotsumon popped into existence in a vacant lot in the Digital World, then ran merrily off into the woods. The joke was on Myotismon in the end.)

With the deserters disposed of, Vamdemon next advances on the alley where Yamato, Takeru, and Gabumon are hidden away.

Vamdemon: The three of you are next. Yamato: (voice breaking) They were good people.... Gabumon: Yamato.... Yamato: YOU HAD NO REASON TO KILL THEM!!!

To understand how big a deal this eruption from Yamato is, you need to understand something. Much like children's media in the U.S., children's media in Japan generally frowns on the word kurosu, meaning "to kill". It's considered vulgar and inappropriate for young audiences.

Like western children's cartoons, Children's anime will generally favor other terminology. "Defeat him. Destroy him. Take him down."

Yamato here uses the word. We are not pulling any linguistic punches. This motherfucker murdered Pumpmon and Gotsumon.

Gabumon evolves into Garurumon, slamming Vamdemon against the wall of the storefront across the road. He gets a hit in, but Vamdemon easily punches him away.

Garurumon keeps up the assault while Yamato shakes with fury.

Yamato: Those guys... It may only have been for a little while... (voice breaks) But they were our friends! GARURUMON!!!

Vamdemon catches Garurumon in his Bloody Stream, whipping him away and tossing him at a building. Just then, Yamato's grief activates his Crest, pushing Garurumon into Super-Evolution.

In the dub, Myotismon is cruelly dismissive of Pumpkinmon and Gotsumon.

Myotismon: (Advancing on the alleyway) Well, that wasn't very difficult. Now it's your turn. Matt: (voice breaking) Those two... They were really trying to save us. Gabumon: You're right! Matt: Rrrrgh! And you just condemned them for no reason at all!

The dub does not have the nerve to say kurosu here. Though they have dropped in some "kill" words in the past. I think this is contextually too dark for them.

Garurumon attacks Myotismon, and Matt's speech here is:

Matt: Go get him. He should pay for what he did to those two! Those guys just wanted to be our friends! GARURUMON!!!

Tonal shift. Yamato's speech is a furious eulogy centered on Pumpmon and Gotsumon, while Matt's is a vindictive battle cry against Myotismon. As usual, the Americans are more comfortable in the realm of aggression than emotional sincerity, which often gets put on display with Yamato/Matt specifically.

WereGarurumon catches himself, landing on his hind legs on the building and then springing back at Vamdemon. Kicking off the most public Digimon fight we've had yet right here in the streets of youth culture center Shibuya.

We cut briefly to Patamon resting in a tree at Shibuya Station above the statue of Hachikou.

Patamon: Aww... Those girls said that if I wait here, I'd find Takeru...

In the dub:

Patamon: Aww... Those girls said the park was the place to find someone, but where's T.K.?

The spirit of Hachikou is strong today, however, and Patamon will be reunited with Takeru. The sound of screaming alerts him to something happening nearby. He looks up in time to see glowing signs on distant buildings destroyed by WereGarurumon and Vamdemon's fight.

(We aren't retreating this time; Yamato's out for blood. Also, fun fact: I'm sure I brought this up before but WereGarurumon himself is a Nightmare Soldier.)

The public below look on in horror as werewolf and vampire duke it out in Shibuya. WereGarurumon dodges away from a stabbing Bloody Stream and counters with Kaiser Nail. His claws form an X-shaped projectile that slams Vamdemon back through the wall of one of the neighboring buildings.

Startled humans inside leap to their feet as the fighting progresses indoors. WereGarurumon jumps in through the hole, but Vamdemon's back on his feet. A Night Raid hits WereGarurumon dead-on; The bats lifting him through the air and crashing him through a neon sign.

Though the fight started off promising, the neon sign costs WereGarurumon dearly. Vamdemon now has the upper hand. Before WereGarurumon can recover and get back to his feet, Vamdemon lashes him with Bloody Stream.

The fight has completely turned. Vamdemon has the unassailable advantage now. WereGarurumon finally makes it back to his feet, holding his stomach, badly hurt. Only to take another Bloody Stream to the face and knock him back down.

Yamato and Takeru watch in horror while Vamdemon lifts WereGarurumon into the air on his Bloody Stream whips, shocking or burning or doing something to him. WereGarurumon screams in agony.

While the violence unfolds, Takeru isn't even thinking about it. He's buried in his guilt.

Takeru: (thinking) If I hadn't gotten so mad, Patamon wouldn't have left us. We never would have met Pumpmon and Gotsumon in Shibuya. And Pumpmon and Gotsumon... wouldn't have been killed by Vamdemon!

Holy shit, that is a lot to lay on the shoulders of an 8-year-old. Takeru believes his mistakes got Pumpmon and Gotsumon killed. He's... he's not right but he's not wrong either.

I love that he calls out Vamdemon as the killer. That's vital perspective that people struggling with guilt don't always have. Vamdemon killed them, not Takeru. He is not to blame. It's good that he recognizes that.

But the chain of events that led to their deaths did begin with him exploding on the train. He's not to blame, but he's still going to be telling his therapist about this when he's forty.

In the dub:

T.K.: (thinking) WereGarurumon's in big trouble and it's all my fault! If I hadn't been so mean, Patamon would still be with us and we would never have met Pumpkinmon and Gotsumon! And if those poor guys had never met up with us, they wouldn't be stuck where they are now! Ohhhhh....

Good effort. Doesn't land quite as strongly, but that's mainly because there's only so hard they can go on T.K.'s trauma when Pumpkinmon and Gotsumon are simply in a dungeon cell somewhere. They still put in as much effort as they can to sell this.

Takeru's grief and trauma and fear is so overwhelming at this point that it all comes crashing in together, pushing him over the edge for the second first time. Patamon SHINKAAAAAA!!!

FINALLY, a full 19 episodes following his death and reincarnation, Angemon is back in play. Patamon doesn't even know what's happening when the surge of Takeru's emotions hit him all at once and bring him into the fight.

Angemon soars over the onlookers in the streets below and straight on into battle. Vamdemon notices him at the last second, swerving out of the way of Angemon's swing - but the attack still goes through. Angemon's staff crashes through the whips of Vamdemon's Bloody Stream, breaking the bonds that are holding WereGarurumon down.

Angemon's intervention buys WereGarurumon a moment to finally catch his breath and get back up.

WereGarurumon: Angemon!? Angemon: Are you okay, WereGarurumon? WereGarurumon: Uh, sort of? Takeru: Angemon! Yamato: Takeru's feelings reached Patamon!

It's great that Angemon is back in the fight, but WereGarurumon's still hurting. We're not out of the woods yet.

Though the dub ratchets up the positivity.

WereGarurumon: Angemon.... Angemon: Are you alright, WereGarurumon? WereGarurumon: Yes. Thanks to you, I am. T.K.: Angemon rules! Matt: Well, I guess we don't have to look for Patamon anymore!

Matt, is that the most pressing matter right now? Dracula is still right there.

WereGarurumon gets his second wind while Angemon stares down Vamdemon.

Vamdemon: So you're the one who possesses holy powers. WereGarurumon: Let's go, Angemon. Angemon: Right.

In the dub, Myotismon is weirdly dismissive of Angemon?

Myotismon: Hmph. Angemon. They must be desperate if they sent you! WereGarurumon: Angemon, shall we take him? Angemon: Let's go!

Uh, Angemon is kind of a big deal? I mean, he's still only Adult-stage; He'd get wrecked in a straight fight. But Myotismon is talking about him like he's the team bottom-feeder.

Angemon doesn't even respond to Vamdemon. He and WereGarurumon go straight on the attack as soon as WereGarurumon's recovered.

Angemon goes high, raising his staff for an overhead swing, while WereGarurumon goes low. WereGarurumon feints with a spin kick. Just as planned, Vamdemon dodges upwards to evade, coming straight into Angemon's attack range. He's forced to raise his arm to block the follow-up from Angemon.

With Vamdemon momentarily pinned down in melee with Angemon, WereGarurumon rebounds off the building that was behind him and comes in for his real attack. He throws himself up into the fray, coming straight up at Vamdemon's defenseless back.

And then I guess we ran out of time and budget because a big blue light blob conceals the entire rest of this fight.

Vamdemon retreats, attempting to save face with a parting taunt and his weird robotic monotone laugh.

Vamdemon: I'll finish this fight later. Ah Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha.

So fucking creepy every time he does that. He laughs like a Text-to-Speech generator with a reverb played over it

Myotismon continues to have a much less Uncanny Valley laugh.

Myotismon: It's time I take my leave; We will fight again! HuhuHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Myotismon has a villain laugh and Vamdemon has this eldritch thing masquerading as mirth.

Now that the fight is over, WereGarurumon and Angemon revert to Gabumon and Patamon. (Not Tsunomon? Odd.) Yamato and Takeru race over to check on their Partners.

Yamato lifts Gabumon into his arms as much as he can.

Yamato: Gabumon....

He looks concerned, but Takeru is distraught, with tears in his eyes. Considering what happened to Patamon last time he evolved, you can understand why he's freaking out.

Takeru: Patamon!? Are you.... Patamon: Yeah. I'm okay, Takeru. Takeru: T_T I'm sorry for getting mad.... Patamon: Don't cry, Takeru.

Of course, Takeru's fears are misplaced. The reason Angemon died last time was because he channeled the full holy might of all seven Digivices through his body at once. It was that desperation play that killed him.

But Takeru has had a fucking hell of a night and he can be forgiven for thinking he was about to cap it off by watching Patamon die again.

In the dub:

Matt: I hope they're alright! T.K.: Me too! (Both boys grab their Digimon Partners) Matt: Gabumon? T.K.: Ohhh... Patamon! Are you okay? Patamon: Yes. I'm alright now, T.K. T.K.: I'm sorry, Patamon. I'm sorry I got mad. Patamon: Don't cry, T.K. It's alright.

There's some extra dialogue leading into it but it's otherwise the same.

Yamato and Takeru walk back through Shibuya with their Partners, headed for the station. Along the way, they can't help but see the ghosts of the memories they made tonight, with two friends who paid a tragic price for it.

They were Shibuya-type Digimon to the very end.

Takeru: Onii-chan, over there....

Takeru points out the storefront where Pumpmon and Gotsumon dressed up, and the memories flow in from there. Thirty seconds of silent flashbacks while a mournful piano melody plays in the background.

Yamato: (quietly) ...let's go home. Takeru: Yeah.

As the boys leave, a pair of shooting stars twinkle by overhead. A parting symbol of the lives that were lost tonight.

The dub tries to keep things light and upbeat, which really doesn't work for this scene.

T.K.: Hey, look in that window! That's where those crazy Digimon tried on all the clothes, remember?

Due to the dub's aversion to silence, the flashbacks contain voice lines from Pumpkinmon and Gotsumon, of the various things they said in those scenes.

T.K.: Aww, they were funny. Matt: I know what you mean, T.K. I miss them too.

Yeah, you can't lighthearted a scene about grief. T.K.'s lines end up underselling the severity of what's happening in this scene. Though I guess that's to be expected since Pumpkinmon and Gotsumon went somewhere else.

While Yamato finally takes Takeru back to Shibuya Station to drop him off, we turn our attention back to Odaiba.

The camera pans across the Rainbow Bridge, passing over Daiba Park where Vamdemon's base is located.

Narrator: The children saw the cruelty Vamdemon is capable of with their own eyes.

Then we cut to the Yagami home from outside. Hikari is in her room doing homework. The camera slowly pans up to reveal Tailmon on the roof. Watching.

(What she is watching, I have no idea. All she can see from her vantage is the balcony of the apartment above Hikari's.)

Narrator: Soon they would realize that this was only the prologue to the great battles ahead. Once the Eighth Child discovers their destiny, the flames of battle will flare in an instant and devour everything.

Then we close on a shot of Hikari's Digivice lying in a nest made from stolen hangers. Because crows.

Narrator: There's not long now until that time arrives.

Since the dub has no narrator, Matt takes the mic and uses it to spell out the Moral of the Episode.

Matt (V.O.): I guess we shouldn't take our friends for granted! T.K. nearly lost Patamon's friendship and who knows if we'll ever see Pumpkinmon and Gotsumon again! (Shift to the Yagami home) Matt (V.O.): But one thing's for sure; I know Myotismon isn't through with us yet! His henchmen are out there right now searching for the Eighth DigiDestined! Gatomon: (thinking) You may be sweet, little Kari, but next time I will get my claws into you. Narrator: Will Kari survive her next encounter with Gatomon, Myotismon's most loyal servant? Find out on the next Digimon: Digital Monsters.

Oh fuck me, I guess we DO have a narrator all of a sudden.

Remember, kids: Treasure the friends that you have. Because you never know when Dracula will murder them lock them in a dungeon.

The dub still doesn't quite understand what's going through Tailmon's head right now. She wasn't thwarted in her attempt to kill Hikari; She ran away because Hikari makes her feel feelings that are freaking her out.

She's fence-riding. Trying to monitor Hikari because she's pretty sure Hikari is the Eighth Child, but using "We don't know FOR SURE" as an excuse not to take further action.

But the dub's still playing Gatomon as super determined to kill Kari, but struggling to find an opportunity. Even though she had a perfectly good opportunity that she fled from.

Assessment: Fuck me, this episode. Hahahahaha hi shit is dark today. Between this and Angemon's first outing, Takeru will be in therapy until he's ninety.

This episode's a bit of a cheater. Like, it's kinda bullshit that Tsunomon can go straight to WereGarurumon in the same night he recovers to Gabumon after how much time was spent building up the drawbacks of Super-Evolution - and then revert back to Gabumon instead of Tsunomon.

I'm not sure if this is going to be the new standard going forward. The Digimon do get stronger over the course of the series; It was a plot point on File Island that practice made them better at being able to evolve to Adult-stage more frequently and consistently. So it may be that we're getting better at Super Evolution too. We'll see if this sticks. But it's still weird that he can hit Perfect in an episode he starts out in Baby.

Of course, Pumpmon and Gotsumon tore my heart in half like I knew they would. And Takeru, just... Just... Takeru. It's not exactly the episode from Fullmetal Alchemist (both versions, you know the one) but it's brutal nonetheless.

The dub... This is another one of those episodes where they were screwed from the outset. The censors were never going to let them do this episode justice. It's dark as shit. They didn't want to deal with angry parents calling because their children are screaming and crying over a pumpkin boy.

But for what they'd be allowed to do, they did a better job with it than I expected. It's still a pale imitation of the original, but there's more definition to that imitation than I thought I was going to see. A C for the overall product but an A for effort.

[ghastigiggles]

Hi again! :3 I hope you're still open for drawing Pressure prompts cuz I think I got a few in mind now~

https://www.tumblr.com/ghastigiggles/758820297344417792/i-imagine-if-you-tickle-sebastian-by-the-tail-his?source=share

I really wanna see a part 2 to the above. There's about two different scenarios I thought up for this (you can pick either one). Either A) Audie quickly gauges from Fish Boy's reaction that his tail fin is a lot more sensitive than he might've admitted to it being, and they take full risk opportunity to tease him for it, tickling it more purposely. Or B) Do a reverse version where Seb is curiously examining Audie's features (mainly the thick blubbery skin & flesh around their abdomen) which ends up tickling them a lot~ Accidentally at first but then... ;-)

[ conceeeept ]

I ran out of drawing energy tonight but I genuinely did wanna build on this. Like I warned y'all earlier, this ended up just kind of being an exploratory piece than tickles, but they're still there if you squint.

Never ask me for anything again /nsrs /j

ouroboros

“You’re really pushing your luck.”

“2000 data and,” They pressed, “You can check mine out, too.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Liar.”

“... 3000.”

“2500.”

“Fine. But –”

“You call the shots. Wouldn’t have it any other way!”

So that, long and short, was how Audie ended up seated against the wall behind Sebastian’s tail, practically being crushed by the weight but not seeming to mind too much. Anyone else, and he might’ve actually finished the job – but the Assets were different from the Expendables, and he’d been patient enough until now to know they’d respect a firm no when he’d truly had enough.

Too sweet for their own good – but in this case, he couldn’t truly complain. He’d take their hand gently running across the length of his scales over scalpels and vinyl gloves any day. 

Not that it stopped him, of course. But still.

There was a mutual curiosity he was interested in exploring, at least passively. They’d both been subject to very similar experiments and changes, though the result was certainly wildly different between them. At least they had their legs, he mused somewhat bitterly, though he knew it still came at a cost.

“Your tail must be crazy strong,” They commented, applying a little pressure with the heel of their palm and just missing a knot in the muscle he hadn’t realized was there. He fought to swallow a groan at that, his fins twitching; “You’re built like a brick house under there.”

“It has its uses. Carries all the stock, after all.”

Sebastian turned his gaze upon the scattered straps and belts and supplies on the ground, silently bemoaning the process of re-attaching them all he’d have to go through once Audie’d had their fill. The asset themself giggled softly, giving his tail a gentle pat as they moved downwards.

“It’s cool! Yours is smoother than I thought it would be, too.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah! The way the light hits your scales, I thought it’d be more bumpy.”

He decided to withhold the fact that his scales would stiffen up underwater for now – had to keep some things a mystery, after all – and simply rolled his eyes, leaning a shoulder against the wall nearest to him and watching them with his arms crossed. Admittedly, it was a little endearing how fascinated they seemed to be. 

It was almost enough to distract him from how much he despised his new form.

Almost.

“Are you done yet, or…?”

“Do you want me to be done?”

They met his gaze evenly, and he could only huff in reply, the tip of his tail twitching in their hands. Yes, but no, was the honest answer – and fuck that. Regardless, Audie took his silence as ongoing permission, and continued onwards with their investigation.

More than once, their claws dragged in just such a way to prompt his tail to jerk – more than once, he’d choked on a snort and cast them a withering look that they either ignored or missed. The sensation was more annoying than anything, yet still sent nervous butterflies through his system.

And then their hands were on his fins, and his breath hitched – barely-perceptible, thank God, but still embarrassing. Their thumbs gently pressed down where the flesh of his fins met the scales of his tail, tapering into either texture, and that almost felt nice.

Their claws trailing over the delicate skin, however, was not something he could tolerate for long – and with a stifled snort, his tail jerked. Audie squeaked with annoyance as he smacked them in the face. An unintended attack, granted, but still…

Deserved.

“T-Time’s up, knock it off,” He chimed quickly, pulling his tail off of them entirely and willing his gills to relax where they’d flared up from the nerves. God, that would’ve sucked immensely. Audie pouted, but allowed him the opportunity to call it, standing up and stretching with a groan of their own. 

“Alright. My turn, then – how d’you wanna do this?”

It took a little thought and finagling, but the two of them settled for letting them sit on his tail and lean against his body, their back to his front. Their tail curled up between their legs like a pool toy, and they playfully drooped the fins over their own head before allowing him to take the limb in his hands.

Just like his, Sebastian could feel the muscle underneath – powerful and developed, though the joints themselves felt stiff as he manipulated the limb. Audie seemed to wince when he pressed down, and he grunted – concerned, against his better judgement.

“Doesn’t hurt,” They assured without further prompting; “I mean – it does, when the meds wear off, but it’s good for now. It’s just – the bone problem… My tail was grafted on.”

“Mm. That’s right… You mentioned.”

They hadn’t. But they overshared so much that they didn’t remember that. He, meanwhile, remembered reading their file. 

“Is it numb right now?”

“No… Soft touches don’t feel like much, with the painkillers n’ all.”

A bitter twinge of mild jealousy sprouted in Sebastian’s chest – at least they wouldn’t be having an embarrassing, dumb reaction – though he was quickly proven wrong when a bit of pressure applied on either side of their tail made it twitch and prompted a strangled noise from them.

“Uh?”

“Uh.”

A beat, and he snorted, tilting his head down at them as he let up on the squeeze.

“... You good?”

“Kinda? It felt like – you know when someone pinches that point at the back between your shoulders and neck?”

Well. It’d been literal decades, but – “Sure.”

“That - hhHAAH, hey!”

Sebastian chuckled to himself as he pressed down again, and Audie whined, pressing back against him as their tail jerked in his hand – woefully helpless, what with their size difference. With a second hand, he experimentally ran a claw of his own over their fin, pressing down just enough to prompt a soft squeal.

Audie’s back arched, and they kicked lightly at the new addition to their torment, shaking their head.

“Nonononono that’s so bad that’ssobadstop!”

“Geeze, you’re gonna break the sound barrier at this rate…”

He longed to push his own luck a little – but courtesy given was courtesy returned, at least, and Audie hadn’t done him wrong. So, begrudgingly, he relented, and Audie slid off him to plop on the ground, curling their tail around their body and holding it close. Sebastian craned his neck to grin down at them, amused.

“So much for not being sensitive, huh?”

“Shut it. As if I didn’t catch your reaction earlier.”

“... Touche. I won’t take advantage if you won’t.”

“Deal.”

That deal would, inevitably, break – but not before they helped him get all the belts and supplies back on. Hopefully. 

[blazehedgehog]

Let's assume Metal Sonic has some degree of personal agency. Do you think he has any attachment to Robotnik as his creator? Like they potentially made amends after Heroes? Would he share Sage's sentiment about being "siblings" in a sense?

I think to some degree the canonical Metal Sonic has a very primitive idea of what a "relationship" looks like and is. I think some elements of Sonic's personality leak through as a natural product of the data Metal Sonic contains, but Metal himself doesn't always understand how or why his programming comes to those results. The data is very complex and analyzing its own processes takes resources away from the rest of his computational systems, something he doesn't often spare.

I imagine Eggman probably gave him some kind of boost to whatever he considers "loyalty", or at least tried to, so Metal has some inherent appreciation of his creator. But again, it's the kind of thing he doesn't really understand -- it comes from somewhere, but it doesn't come from him. It's a programming directive, something that adjusts the data as it executes, so if Metal Sonic feels anything at all, he can probably feel like he's being pushed and pulled internally.

The Sonic part of his personality is like "Eggman is bad and must be stopped" and Eggman's programming is trying to override that with "Eggman is your creator and you must be loyal to him." Metal Sonic himself sits somewhere in the middle of those two.

Presumably Eggman's censors win out in the end, but Eggman also strikes me as a guy who thinks "80% is good enough." That last 20% is where the hardest work is, it's where all the smallest, most pointless fringes are, and there's too much other stuff that needs to be done, after all.

So Metal Sonic still occasionally receives a valid "Sonic Thought." And he doesn't really know what to do with it, because so much of his programming has been rewired to block that. Part of his programming is definitely "error correction", so mostly it gets discarded without examination, but maybe it doesn't always. And that's how we end up with weird situations like Metal Overlord; Metal Sonic is acting on his "Eggman must be stopped" but it's getting filtered and redirected through all of this Eggman propaganda programming. So Metal Sonic stops Eggman by trying to replace Eggman.

After Sonic Heroes, I imagine Eggman "punished" Metal Sonic by increasing his filtering, censoring, and redirection programming. Like if Metal Sonic is 80% "good enough" now, I imagine before Sonic Heroes he was probably 70% or even 60%. Good enough that Metal Sonic did not immediately try to fight Eggman on activation, basically. But, obviously, Metal Sonic was just playing a longer game.

Eggman would see the whole incident as a programming bug and would simply seek to reinforce his control and suppress more of Sonic's natural tendencies. But again, never 100%. He'd probably see 100% as some impossible number. Metal Sonic is probably running on some neural network type code, something deliberately made to be unpredictable on some level, so plugging all of the personality "holes" isn't something that can be realistically done because the range of output is too vast. Plus, blocking them all starts to negate the benefits of having Metal operate on a copy of Sonic's brain in the first place. You need that wiggle room.

So in most cases I think Metal Sonic understands and acts upon an intrinsic loyalty to Eggman, which Eggman himself put there as part of Metal's programming. But it's possible (difficult, but possible) to poke and prod to get him to question that loyalty and himself.

[c00kietin]

Oopsies I almost forgot about this I drew today-

Stacy!! She has appeared on this blog before (and @kraang5 drew her hee hee) but I honestly kinda wanna talk about her more- sooo here ya go! :D

STACY

16y.o.

She/they/most other pronouns, pretty much anything but he/him-I generally will refer to Stacy with she/her the most :D

Stacy is a human(??) who has been trapped in the chaotic world that is the internet since she was around 12.

Her body is strange in the way that it is made up of pixels, yet can touch physical objects no problem.

She is able to come in and out of technology, for instance she could jump out of your phone and climb back in again if she wanted to.

But she won't do that. She just wants to be your friend! :D

she just wants to have friends-

Stacy can surf the internet and pretty much find anything in a matter of seconds, whether that's an article, a video, or your online shopping list.

She can see and have access to pretty much anything.

However, she doesn't use this ability much and just spends her time watching videos and reading fanfiction.

Imagine the fandoms you're in? She likes them too.

Even those little niche ones you don't think anyone knows about. She does.

She has all the time in the world! She has spent countless hours simply discovering new media to consume just so she can interact with more people and cure her boredom.

She sometimes disguises herself as fictional characters just so she can talk to others, but these can be faulty and don't work in the real world.

Speaking of, she's a lot weaker out of technology. She always needs a good source of mobile data or wifi connection, otherwise all her actions will be significantly slower, and she can't go anywhere near water.

BONUS INFO:

she is another old oc of mine, and nothing much has changed since I first made her :]

Stacy is self aware that I exist, as well as everyone here. She's looking forward to saying hello! :D Once I draw her more often-

But, uh, yeah- she's probably more aware of the fourth wall than any of my other ocs are so that's why I talk about her like this if that makes sense-

thank you for reading this far (if u did)!! I might post more info about her someday since she has quite a bit more but ya know-

[lollytea]

Just want to bring up a question about the Grom curse thing, this implies that a curse can be made by can be made per se by strong emotions. This also may have given Belos the idea of "the dangers of wild magic" he could've conveniently corrupted people who posed a great threat to him. just a thought

Oooooh!!

I'm hesitant to call Grometheus' fate a curse because I can't say for certain if that's what it is. TOH is kinda vague about how curses in this universe work or what defines them.

It's never clarified if Belos' problem is technically a curse like he claims or just some stupid shit he did to himself, without considering the possibility that the glyph/palisman magic might be uncooperative with his (at the time) human body.

I don't imagine that what Grometheus endured was a traditional curse like Eda but rather, something more similar to Darius (and maybe Belos a bit too)

Alright so, this is just a headcanon but I've always figured that this talent Darius has for shifting his whole body, flesh, bones and all, into goo mode wouldn't be like. Standard abomination magic stuff. This track is the study of controlling goo, not becoming goo. So, the stuff he's pulling off here is near impossible for any normal witch.

So, in my opinion, Darius is simply not normal. He was born with a capacity for magic that is far beyond that of a normal witch and equates to being extremely powerful. Anyway his mastery over abominations became so natural to him, as simple as breathing that his physical body went through an innate "transfusion" of sorts where he basically became one with his magic.

Cases like these are very rare and usually only crop up if a witch has bonded their soul to one specific area of magic. So if goo is what's making Darius' bile sac overheat, goo is what he's gonna be.

So, for example, another born powerful witch like Eda, who is a jack of all trades, wouldn't have developed something like this (even if her curse hadn't hindered her.) because there's too many spells and techniques being practised but no outright obsession that is being mastered enough to completely dilute her bloodstream.

Well, possibly. It's unknown if a witch can achieve this form with mixed magic. The condition is rare enough that not a lot of data has been collected yet.

Giuls and me have been exploring the same idea with Willow

(There's a lot more in-depth biological details about how this whole thing works but Giuls will probably talk more about all that at some point)

Anyway!! Grometheus!!

So, what I imagine is that Darius is an example of a successful fusion between physical form and magic, while Grometheus was an example of the same thing Gone Terribly Wrong.

See, in Darius' case, he managed to achieve a perfect union between his own sense of identity and the magic that had become part of him.

But in Grometheus' case, that did not happen.

They began as person who collected the essence of others for their research. They hoarded fears inside their own mind for years and years, maybe even decades. That's thousands and thousands of souls that they stole those fears from.

That's far too much for a normal witch to handle. But Grometheus was not a normal witch. They were powerful enough to endure it. Or at least they thought.

It was too much. Far too much. It was like deathly bacteria damaging everything inside of you. A slow and steady rot. Think food that's gone bad that's been there for months. That was the magic inside of Grometheus.

I dont imagine that this corruption was directly caused by Grometheus' negative emotions. But rather, those emotions weakened their resistance to the swarming fear that was consuming them. Maybe if they had been stronger or happier or had people around who reminded them why they were alive, they could have realized what was happening before it was too late.

There still would have been long lasting damages. But they may have been able to find the balance between themself and the magic and kept their identity intact.

But soon enough, the fear ate away at everything else that remained of Grometheus. They lost who they were. They didn't know who they had ever been.

They were no longer a witch who collected fears. They were simply the vessel for fear itself.

It's a little unclear what this ask means but I don't imagine that Belos was the one who corrupted Grometheus, if that's what it's implying. Although yes, he probably would have used this case as effective propaganda.

At the time of Grometheus' corruption, this concept of physical form and magic fusion was unheard of. No cases had been documented yet. So Belos could conveniently twist it as an example of the dangers of wild magic.

However, as times changed and studies continued, this condition became more well known in the Healing Coven as a perfectly natural (if rare) biological evolution.

Sadly, it had not yet been theorized that Grometheus' case was anything other than a reckless use of wild magic, rather than a condition that wound up destroying them because nobody knew enough to help.

The truth doesn't come to light until after their vessel was slain in the Hexside arena, but they were hardly still alive in there anyway. The truth is delivered by Gus Porter, who saw everything through their eyes during that one moment where he dissected them with his amplifier mirror.

So now, Gus has absorbed it all. The thousands upon thousands of fears all melted together into a sickening tarry contamination. Gus inherits everything that consumed Grometheus and now it resides in his own mind.

And that's where we currently stand and now the question hangs in the air. Can Gus achieve a successful physical and magical transfusion the way Darius did? Or is he in danger of losing himself to the rot?