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kaesaaurelia · 4 months ago

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So as a disclaimer echoing OP's disclaimer, these are MY headcanons and I've read a lot of really cool stuff that didn't fit them, but in 2012 I wrote a HDM fic for Yuletide and because I can't write fic without doing some kind of unreasonable research, I read every single fic tagged with the fandom on AO3 that wasn't a crossover with something I didn't know. Most of them were daemon AUs and not really fic about His Dark Materials [sidenote: please do not tag this way? there is a whole "Alternate Universe - Daemons" tag you can use if you're not writing HDM fic], so I found a LOT of different takes on daemons and a lot of them were really neat, and most of them I didn't quite agree with in my headcanon, but there's some super cool stuff out there.

A few memorably unusual daemon stories:

The Asteroida series is a BBC Sherlock Daemon AU with endgame Mycroft/John/Sherlock and there is some VERY weird daemon stuff going on.

Dinosaurs in the Architecture is a HDM fic (not a daemon fusion) about an OC whose daemon settles as a dinosaur. This is inconvenient both in practical ways and for theological reasons.

I have kind of a weird headcanon for daemons, I am realizing, which is that while they are representative of a person's soul, I think that it isn't always immediately apparent that they've settled (although it is for Will and Lyra) and that they usually settle into a form they were accustomed to taking already, rather than snapping into a form that perfectly encapsulates the person.

I also think the forms they're able to take is maybe limited by the person's knowledge of the world? So maybe infants start out with daemons that can change to either of their parents' daemons, and then "learn" new forms as they encounter new people and their daemons, and real animals. But I think at some point in the book Pantalaimon briefly turns into a very small dragon -- not implied to be a real creature anywhere in HDM -- and I think it's a struggle for him? And at least once Lyra tells Pan to "stop showing off" all his forms, so I think it's likely that changing into a particular form involves a certain amount of skill and effort.

So I could see, for example, a very educated medieval child having a daemon that spent some time in the form of a mythical creature, or even the weird medieval version of a real animal the bestiary illustrators had never seen, but it would be very difficult and unless the child and the daemon practice a lot it's not going to be an everyday form. (And it's probably not going to be a dragon, unless they were a very edgy child.)

Then again, this is somewhat contradicted by canon -- not the original trilogy, but in Once Upon a Time in the North Lee Scoresby mentions he didn't know Hester was an Arctic hare until he went to the Arctic, and that he takes it as a sign that's where he belongs. So I don't know.

Anyway, disregarding Lee and Hester (which I know I do ill-advisedly -- they are great) I think this MOSTLY rules out a lot of the unusual daemon types you bring up, but doesn't rule them out COMPLETELY. A kid who's passionate about dinosaurs might have a daemon that settles as one, but I think the daemon is going to be more practiced at other forms, ones of living animals that it doesn't have to extrapolate a whole form for. (And the dinosaur daemon is going to look the way the kid thinks dinosaurs looked, not how they actually looked -- which means for someone of my generation it probably wouldn't have had feathers.)

And while (as the tags of the person I'm reblogging this from) canon mentions a sailor whose daemon was a dolphin, so he spent all his time at sea, I think a benthic ocean daemon is wildly unlikely because who is bringing a child to the deep ocean so often their daemon habitually becomes a blobfish?

(That said, I had that thought and then also immediately had the thought of a 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea daemon AU where a. the marine ecology is more correct than Verne's, who I don't blame for not knowing what he was talking about but it's so much weirder than he had it, and b. Captain Nemo's daemon is something from the deep sea, and whenever the Nautilus surfaces he has to leave it behind like a witch's daemon, making him even more of an uncanny social outcast.)

I can also see someone who grows up on a farm having a draft horse or an ox or something else impractically large, that would definitely make their life more difficult in terms of, like, sleeping arrangements, and would also immediately out them as having been from somewhere rural if they moved to a more urban area.

I also think this mostly rules out a lot of animals that aren't charismatic megafauna, but rules them in in certain circumstances. We know there's a journalist with a butterfly daemon in canon, and I can see butterflies, bees, and maybe dragonflies and grasshoppers being common, but not houseflies, mosquitos, ants, or cockroaches (because those generally aren't well-liked) and I can see, like, rhinoceros beetles not being that unusual of a daemon form in Japan because beetle fighting is traditionally a spectator sport there (iirc Pokemon was partly inspired by this? which is why in the low-level areas there's all those small children who are SUPER EXCITED ABOUT YOU FIGHTING THEIR BUGS) but not a lot of other places. And playing into this -- daemons are representative of the person's soul, but what it says about them is going to depend heavily on cultural context. So a dung beetle daemon says something very different about a person now vs in ancient Egypt, and a snake daemon might signify wisdom or immortality or deceit depending upon which set of myths they've grown up with. Hell, that hypothetical medieval child would be heavily praised for having a pelican daemon (because pelicans represented the self-sacrificing nature of Christ, for reasons I could get into but won't) and nowadays most people would be like "the bird so dumb it'll try to eat a capybara? that bird????"

Anyway, this is all to say, I think "rules" for daemons more reflect societal expectations in a way that's reminiscent of heraldry. There are strict rules in heraldry about how you can't have a metal on a metal, but like -- you can have that. You can physically make that happen. Nobody does it, but you can, it's just that the authorities who keep track of crests won't accept it. And because Lyra's world in the His Dark Materials has such overbearing authorities, we don't see people with daemons outside their stations -- dog daemons are for servants, except for when they're "scary" dogs, then they're for soldiers, while the fascinating explorer types who don't fit into their society well have exotic daemons from faraway places (Hester, as mentioned before, and Stelmaria, Lord Asriel's daemon, and Mrs. Coulter's golden monkey) -- but I wouldn't entirely rule out a dragon in another setting, even if it's a setting where dragons aren't real.

This does complicate things a little bit, in that I'm reasonably sure if our world was exactly the same except it had daemons (how could this be? I don't know, just go with it), it would leave things open enough that there'd be a nonzero number of people whose daemons settled when they were in the throes of deep enthusiasm for some kind of media property with imaginary animals -- Pokemon, Neopets, etc. -- that their daemons spent days practicing the forms of, and a much, much larger portion of people for whom the symbology is informed less by tradition and more by pop culture. Spiders might have connotations of being poisonous and secretive, like spies, or wise crafters, or tricksters always outsmarting themselves, but for a certain subsection of the population, we can add "hapless nerd who believes that with great power comes great responsibility;" there are at least three people with red-tailed hawk daemons who overidentified with Tobias from Animorphs; whatever's going on with Warrior Cats (I was too old to have gotten into Warrior Cats), etc. Not to mention all the sports teams mascots.

I will admit, part of me finds this distasteful -- there are so many real animals that are super cool and that I'd love to envision as daemons -- but I think in fandom we kind of want rules like "no imaginary animals," "no extinct animals," etc. because we want to know that we're making a character special but not TOO special. A daemon is a type of OC, after all, and you don't want your OC to stick out too much in the world they're going to live in. But daemon AUs that do give the characters special daemons often go out of their way to talk about how weird and bad they are to have -- which is kind of funny because it's usually something super cool-looking -- they're always albino or leucistic, or large predators, or something. And the more I think about it, I think if we're going to toe that line, we might as well a. embrace the cool stuff, and b. embrace it enough that also sometimes characters have "special" daemons that are less badass and more unbelievably dorky.

So I'm still on this daemon AU kick, and I can't stop thinking.

What are the limits?

It's generally accepted that a daemon is an animal representation of the soul, right? So, you know, we've got birds and mammals and reptiles and insects.

But what about fish?

Obviously there's an issue here of, you know, environment, and if your soul literally can't survive in the air while you literally can't survive in the water, there's a problem.

But, hey, if it's small enough, you could have a little fishbowl for your daemon to live in. Hamster ball, but filled with water, rolling along at your heels. Fishtank on wheels that get tricked out like dudebros soup up their car. And maybe, if you're from a particularly sea-faring culture/lifestyle a water-bound mammal like a dolphin or an orca could make sense. And then there's things like sharks, which have so much symbolism attached to them that it seems a real shame to have to rule them out. (Someone who's particularly driven or ambitious having a daemon that would literally die if it stopped moving is a bit of symbolism I'm going a bit feral for, tbh.)

I think we have to rule out the deep sea creatures, unfortunately. Fishbowls and/or living on a boat wouldn't really solve the problem of pressure, and someone with a blobfish daemon would, uh... be in trouble.

And if we're talking about things that can't survive in the same atmosphere as humans, what about internal parasites? Like flatworms. I think it's safe to say that having your daemon parasitizing your intestine kind of defeats the purpose of having an external manifestation of your soul, but... There are species of flatworm that aren't parasites, so... do we just rule out all flatworms, or are the non-parasitic ones okay?

And speaking of flatworms, what about size? I've read some fun stories that deal with the issues that might come from having, say, an elephant daemon. It's not quite as dramatic as the issues of having an aquatic daemon, but actually, similar adjustments would have to be made to your living situation to cope. But, of course, it could be done and I don't think anyone's trying to rule out animals on account of how big they are, but I think it's safe to say that microscopic daemons are out for the same reason that internal parasites have to be.

There's a nice solid rule I can settle on; a daemon has to be a visible animal.

And, in point of fact, I think it's safe to say it has to be an animal. We can rule out trees and plants and even fungi.

So what about coral?

It's an animal, and if we are allowing for some aquatic daemons, then should coral be an option? Or are its vibes too plant-like to qualify? Do we rule out sessile animals like we ruled out microscopic ones? As much as I find the idea of a coral daemon absolutely hilarious, I am going to come down on the side of animals that are too much like plants are a no.

So a daemon has to be a visible, mobile animal.

But what about the ones that only move very slowly? I don't think we're ruling out sloths, but in the continuing vein of torturing myself considering various aquatic daemons, there's starfish and sea urchins and hell, even most bivalves can move at least a little, right? (Correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't done that research yet.) And there's a lot of fun symbolsim to be had, there, I think.

And what about extinct creatures?

I think it's safe to say that mythical creatures are a no-go, unless this is a 'verse where those animals are real, (oh, boy wouldn't that confuse people in a world like HP where most people think dragons and unicorns aren't real, but people still wander around with dragon and unicorn daemons) so we can ammend our rule to visible, mobile, real animals, but could we go so far as extant?

If yes, that would have interesting world-building implications. Where's the cut-off point? Can we rule out dinosaurs because we don't/didn't have enough information for a daemon to settle into a form that wouldn't be technically mythical? But then, what about animals that go extinct within human history? What about all the people who had mammoth daemons or dodo daemons as those animals were dying out.

Would conservationists study daemon statistics to see if an animal has really gone extinct? Would an animal's extinct status get over-turned when a kid's daemon settled into that form? Honestly, I like this enough that I've convinced myself that, at least barring some very unique circumstances, extinct animals are not allowed.

So, it has to be a visible, mobile, extant animal. That can exist in proximity to humans.

Oh, and should probably add; visible, mobile, extant, and non-sapient.

You can't have a human daemon, or an elf or a dwarf or a fairy daemon even if they exist in that world, and if this is a 'verse with dragons who're more than just exotic magical animals, you can't have a dragon daemon. (Obviously, if your fairies are more like magical bugs than tiny people, then fairies would be a valid daemon.)

...I'm still on the fence about whether a daemon should have to be air-breathing or not. That kind of rule would still leave marine mammals available for the fun world-building of how people adapt to that kind of handicap. (...Do you think people with aquatic daemons would be considered disabled? Oooh, what about people with really big daemons? I mean, presuming such a thing is comparatively rare, people probably wouldn't be building schools with a mind to allowing elephants or giraffes to wander the corridors.)

Disclaimer! This is for my own creative process, and not intended to limit anyone else's creative flair. And, honestly, I'd love to hear other people's takes on what does and doesn't qualify for a daemon.

#kaesa additions #text #meta #fandom #his dark materials #sorry this got super fucking long #and went places I wasn't expecting

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lordxgrinnyxboy · 4 years ago

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watching london tgm! pt 2!

they actually carry clarence in in his coffin????

Kupsak sounds Different

OOOOOOOOOOH THAT WAS OSRIC’S VOICE THAT DID THE “Will our land at last be free” LIKE THE LINGERING ECHOES OF THE TRELAW SPIRIT. NICE.

the voice he used leaves me with no doubt he could’ve been another amazing Gwynplaine.

“Get out” WAS OSRIC LITERALLY THERE DID OSRIC STRAIGHT UP GO BUST A FUNERAL

OOOOH IT’S THE TRELAW REBELLION NOW. SPECIFICALLY THE TRELAW REBELLION. THE REBELLION BELONGING TO TRELAW.

for just a second i was living in a world without Barkilphedro but there he is, man, there he is. i was surprised to see him.

ooooh. oooooh “Angelica has not emerged from her chambers for almost exactly 20 years, during which time, she has not uttered a single word” WHAT?

DON’T SEND SPIKE TO GO GET HER WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU

off topic but getting back to the previous post if the “father she’ll never see” was part of the inscription and Ursus gave it to her then he’d know about it so it can’t be that did the MOM get her a necklace that said she’d never see her father??? was the mom like “ope we gotta pack up and sail away without your dad but lemme get you a cool trinket first” or was there no inscription and Ursus is just assuming that it was the dad who gave her the necklace but it was actually the mom and the mom got a necklace for Dea without telling Ursus but hold up aren’t they poor? wouldn’t somebody have known? do they have separate bank accounts? did the mom say “well I got our unborn child a present but it’s a surprise you’ll find out later” why a necklace that says “dea”? did the mom name her without consulting Ursus? how’d she know wh-? was she going to name the baby ‘Goddess’ regardless of gender? (valid?) was she asking a goddess to protect the baby??? did she have the baby, immediately go get her a little trinket, and then freeze to death? was ‘Dea’ a deliberate move or was it just the last name trinket in the shop? Were all the “Makynzeiye” necklaces taken? I Have Questions About This Necklace

anyway

the other version always makes me feel almost like Barkilphedro murdered the king himself. i don’t get that so much in this one but i do get the impression he Knows What He’s Doing with this speech and is Doing It On Purpose. Having A Good Time, as it were.

angelica????

oh my

“SWWIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINE” uhm

b-bird noises?

ooh she’s actually. calling out the corruption of her father. good girl angelica.

“I will make this country great again” did they. have. to say that. did they have to. was it necessary. why make me think about that man. why do that to me. london has no rights u-u

wHAT we’re back in the cart? No JoJo?

london gets rights for the fact that Gwyn’s crouching. that is a very good crouch sir, perfect.

“with mojo and father...GAH” oh gwyn :(

that hit him so hard so sudden like :(

FIDDLIN WITH THE BANDAGES IS CANOOOOON IT’S CANOOOOOOOON I AM VALID! I’M VALID! I KNEW IT! I THOUGHT SO! YES. YES. WOOHOO

gwyn your arm

the drama of that dismount. the delicate self-yeet. incredible.

WHY IN HEAVEN’S NAME IS YOUR SHIRT TUCKED IN YOU STOP THAT THIS INSTANT

“please help me find” gwyn what is she supposed to do, google it?

CROUCH

oh here we go

that was terrifying jojo

jojo that was terrifying

the dance is. worse.

pleeeease no please no please no pl

where did she get that

i am scared for my life rn

JOJO STOP

ohhh i’m dreading Brand New World. can’t believe i’m gonna have to watch Gwynplaine Trelaw literally be killed for sport. she’s gonna snap him like a twig 😭

JOJO I AM BEGGING YOU TO PUT THAT DOWN

i am so scared of this jojo i am so

oh JOJO’S gonna offer to make the scuttling dream a reality???

book canon right there

😱😬😭

in this one she literally warns david personally to his face he’s got no excuse let’s go david wygd

but sure let’s go to the fair

i don’t hate this david but he’s like the mellow, zero-energy edition.

he bouncin

he’s turned into a starfish???

i hate Bristol!Jojo’s costume so bad but dang if i haven’t gotten used to it and now this one’s a little weird

i’m not strong enough tbh

dirry-moir just crouched and i’m gonna have to sue for copywrighte on gwynplaine’s behalf. i’ve apparently lost my ability to spell

idk man these people are just incredibly scary

oh thank goodness that part’s over

london!gwyn looks like a hobbit that’s been stretched out. like a screenshot of Mr. Elijah Wood in Unexpected Journey, but it’s been pasted into MS Paint and then stretched out a bit and then squished down and stretched out again and somehow pasted back into the movie.

i am genuinely so grateful we get another cart scene. i need time to recover from never seen a face.

the dynamic feels different in this version

awww the shoulder pat :3

this Gwyn is a whole other person. he’s both Calmer and More Wound Up. at the same time.

😭 he just 😭 literally choked 😭 i can’t 😭 he just fell right over 😭 wilted like a flower 😭 howm i supposed to cope with this 😭

Don’t pat him so hard Ursus for pity’s sake DX

aw we’re not doing Born Broken in front of an audience this time? rights are evaporating.

is Gwyn even alive rn i think he straight up died

did he take the medicine yet?

Ursus are u touching his face?

HE’S HAVING A WHOLE SEIZURE

What Was That Move

i have lost my ability to exhale

i think Gwyn’s doing a physical impersonation of a fish being mercilessly dragged from a lake by a grappling hook thrown from a moving speedboat

i do like how Ursus crouches down to their level while they’re on the ground

love how Mojo looks over like “are y’all seeing this”

LOOK AT THE SMILE OF YOUR MOTHERL

THAT’S WHY URSUS FREAKIN SNAPS

Ursus is holding Gwyn by the wrist and just shaking his arm as punctuation like “I CANT tell you ANYthing you DON’t already KNOW” URSUS STOP

GWYN TRIED TO PULL AWAY AND URSUS YANKED GWYN’S ARM

URSUS YOU HAVE NO RIGHTS

i mean i always thought the near hysteria was valid and acceptable but you know what Gwyn is MORE than allowed the “NOOO NOT TODAY” line. he can HAVE IT. understandable. he did nothing wrong.

someone’s drinking a beer

i’m sorry but the way he just climbed through that curtain was hilarious

it’s too calm. mr. maskell you’ve got three seconds to lose your damn mind and go absolutely OFF

BOING BOING BOING BOING BOING

CLAP

twinge

this one doesn’t have enough hysteria but it gets points for being even more boneless

lost an elbow again

here we go his brain’s going AGSHAFUIABNAVSBKJAG AGFYAIAFIguAI here we go it’s happening i can see the sparks

MR MASKELL PLEASE

GWYN YOUR ARMS

YOUR SPIN GWYN

that right there was what medical professionals commonly diagnose as a Religious Experience.

his pantlegs are even shorter in this version

OH HE JUST YANKS THE BANDAID RIGHT OFF.

jojo please

hangon i gotta go back and see him in Zero Bones mode one more time that was actually so personal

i must say that rewind was Flawless. without even looking i took it back exactly to him coming through the curtain. at myself goodjob man

i would like to formally apologize to myself for just having the “talent show au” thought. stop that.

WIGGLY FINGERS ON “WALKS IN THE NIGHT”

can’t believe i’m in love with an overcooked linguini noodle

he is So Floppy it genuinely hurts to even look at and honestly i love that for me. I’m living. i’m about to watch this scene a third time in a row see if i don’t

it really is a little low on the sheer manic vibe but at the same time it kinda has the energy of if you climbed into the washing machine or maybe dryer while the appliance is on? or if you got in the washing machine but you brought a toaster with you. and threw your phone in separate.

another perfect rewind let’s go I’M THE STUUUUUUUFF OF YOUR NIGHTMARES WAS I

his voice sounds like it’s coming from a vintage record player and it’s definitely in black and white with a smattering of static and just a slight flavor of tin and honestly i love that for me

Gwyn’s literally one of those old door stoppers you know like the little stick on the bottom of the door and sometimes you pull it all the way to one side and then let go and it’s like FWOBBLEFWOBBLEFWOBBLE and you’re like “OOOOOOH”

JEAN VALJEAN

ARMS UPPPPPPPP GO BACK AND BOIIIIIIIIIIING

LOVE that dude. Amazing.

did he just spit actually? he physically can’t? at least traditionally?

steppy leggies!

one more time and then i’ll move on. just one more.

rewound too far i’m now back at “Ursus If You Don’t Let Go Of That Boy’s Wrist”

come on through that curtain Gwynlit i am Ready for You.

I’M THE STUUUUUUFFFFF OF YOUR NIGHTM

i want this played at my funeral and i want mr. maskell to be there to dance to it

so i guess in this version his limbs just short-circuit at different times huh because i mean genuinely for real his elbows just seem to nope out every now and then

this right here is what mr. hugo meant when he said, if not in as many words, that you were a ten.

ARRRMMMS UP! ANNNND BAAAAAAACK AND

B O U N C E

he has the x factor

love how he just shuffles back through the curtain like that one gif of the yellow dude being absorbed into the bushes

JOJO I LOVE YOUR DRESS WHAT

Dirry-Moir’s voice is nice even if it’s Very Different

fr jojo that’s actually kinda cute

Osric my dear i Love You

and now they’re all dirilious

dilirius

dilirious

dileros

d e l i r i o u s ?

that

Dea and Gwyn just dropped out of the sky

awww mojo came to check on him

Mojo’s nudging at Gwyn’s arm and Gwyn’s Not Having It

Ursus you’re banned from touching him i am Mad At You

Gwyn’s having another attack in this version it is constantly happening. has this boy sipped any sauce yet?

he just stood up and now he’s like

HE’S DOING HAND FLAPS HE’S GOT FLAPPY HANDS HE’S ACTUALLY. WHAT. FLAP FLAP FLAP I LIKE IT I AGreE WITH THIS

ooh he reacts a little bit to “all the other fairground freaks”

FIDDLING WITH THE BANDAGES

Ursus sounds Angery

oh. gwynlit :( he’s cryin :( on “I don’t believe you” :(

😭💀😭💀

these two have PROBLEMS in this version and i am Hurt

he’s doing hand things again

VOCAL THINGS

this is canon now

DEA JUST HELPED HIM WITH THE CRIMSON LETHE

it looked like he was too jittery or something so she puts his hand over his and helps him bring the bottle of crimson lethe up to his mouth

im really just filling up a shopping cart over here

did quake just clock ursus over the head or did someone get shot boy golly that was loud

wait though with the little noise that Gwyn did a second ago, we hear it after the crowd starts doing it but in-universe did they hear him do that at some point and now they’re imitating it 👀

THAT CRISMSON LETHE JUST KNOCKED HIM OUT HE JUST FLOPPED FORWARD AND DEA HAD TO CATCH HIM 📝👀

oh. “The Grinning Man Is Not To Be Disturbed” is because he’s straight up out of it after having the medicine. oh no

Mojo just growled as Gwyn stood up and i heard it wrong and thought there was like a cartoon sound effect like “LOOK HOW FAST HE JUST STOOD UP. WOOSH.” but no it was a growly bark

he held onto Dea’s hand and kind of hopped over to the door that was neat

i’m gonna start holding everything i read Like That

shjshgsj he just held it Like that and Stared before switching to holding it normally and actually opening it

random Itch

her outfit really is cute though i like this costume

“who I aaaaaaaaaam” stop the voice is too good sir

okay but that maneuver really is illegal y’all ought not to have done that

wait wait lemme go back and

i don’t know how i feel about that

one more time lemme check lemme just ch

*phil collins voice* oh lord

there is no reason

gwyn sweetheart you are not strong enough. she will kill you.

i now know what song this reminds me of now and i’m so upset

why do they have the outside of the cart looking like a happy meal box

GWYN WHAT WAS THAT

he just did the squawkiest laugh oml

HOLD UP

“you must see or you’ll never know” “YOU’RE RIGHT! Something is changing! She wants to meet me!” WHAT IS THIS CONVERSATION

HE SOUNDS HAPPY

SHE KNOWS HE’S GOING TO MEET SOMEBODY AND SHE ACTUALLY KISSES HIM LIKE “You must go!” WHAT

boy i know you did not just finger-gun goodbye at the blind girl

he’s walking in place now and i’m crying

she told him he must go now and he took it so literally he left while she was still talking

THE WALKING IN PLACE THOUGH. IT’S IN SLOW MOTION. I AM DISTRAUGHT

did you just wave at someone Gwyn

he’s so doped up

i think he thinks he’s about to get beat

okay in this version he doesn’t Let Osric grab his hand Osric just kind of grabs him and then Gwyn snatches his hand away and Osric’s like “i’ve got a funny feeling in my hand” meanwhile Gwyn puts his hand up and looks at it for a second and shakes down his sleeve and then he’s all hands-on-hips and looking at Osric like >:?

i think he just did the sound with them

and he’s having another attack.

he just fell back and they caught him and one person grabbed his hand and yanked him forward and now they’re picking him up

idk think he knows he’s alive in this version

AJSHFAJGAH THEY’RE DOING HIM LIKE THE PUPPETS IN THE BEAUTY AND THE BEAST DANCE SEQUENCE THEY JUST TOSSED THAT BOY LIKE A FRESHLY-LAUNDERED BEDSHEET

he ain’t well sir

that’s all for now!

#bristol is still immeasurably better but i am having a great time negl #tgm #the grinning man

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vagrantblvrd · 5 years ago

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Sky Factory Android Shenanigans is giving me so many ideas?

That super cliché sci-fi AU where Michael’s an android on the run (because reasons???) and he ends up on one backwater planet/colony somewhere. Parts on the fritz thanks to a run in with some black ops/assassination squad and he needs repairs but doesn’t know who to trust?

Broadcasts reporting him as, idk, malfunctioning and the whatnot and a danger to the public – do not approach or engage – and call the authorities if you see this unit.

(Unit, like he’s not a person anymore, had his autonomy stripped away along with his humanity and goddamn him for being stupid enough to trust whatever organization he signed up for that got him killed, turned him into this and fucked him over again with all the secrets it was keeping he hadn’t even guessed at before stumbling on them, hence the android on the run part of things? But yes.)

And then he overhears someone talking about this lunatic living on the fringes of whatever settlement he’s come to. Like something out of the true crime stories he used to follow when he was a kid – or is that just another implanted memory?

Shady as hell and rife with con-men and thieves and worse, perfect place to hide out for a while until his stupid body shuts down and he dies for real out here.

Half-blind most days because that shot to the head and it acts up at the worst times. Almost gets him killed a few times when some of those thieves and worse ambush him in an alley and it’s sheer luck he manages to get out of it without suffering more damage.

Anyway, anyway, he hears about this lunatic who’s supposed to be some kind of mechanical genius, right? Doesn’t run a real shop, lives out by the main scrapyard like a weirdo. People bring their busted machines and gadgets and the whatnots to him and he fixes them up nice and pretty-ish. (Cheaper than the officially licensed technicians near the spaceport and a hell of a lot more discreet to boot.)

So.

Michael makes his way there, half-convinced he’s walking into a trap but it’s take that risk or end up being a pile of spare parts in the guy’s scrapyard anyway, right?

And at first the asshole doesn’t even respond when Michael knocks on his door, pretends he’s not home or whatever and Michael’s just.

At the end of his rope and angry and defeated and he starts yelling at the fucker until his vocalizer glitches out, and that’s when the door snaps open, sending Michael tumbling inside where he lands on his face because his everything is fucked up and he doesn’t react fast enough.

Looks up to see someone staring down at him, implants and augments like whoa because no human has an eye that glows red unless it’s in one of those old horror holovids.

“What do you want?

Surly bastard, which lines up with the things Michael overheard before.

Loner who doesn’t really gt left alone because people need things, don’t they, and there’s not a lot of money coming into a place like this. Old mining planet/colony where the companies pulled their operations out when the mines ran dry and only the worst kind of people come by anymore.

The few decent people left behind too poor to relocate, so it’s a shitshow and as someone with the skills to he has he gets visitors more often than he’d care for. (Customers or someone hoping to take what he has any way they have to, which explains the weapon in his hand and Michael’s almost to point he’d just let the fucker shoot him to be done with it, but.)

He stands up, servos and whatever else he’s made of these days creaking and groaning and this little flash of light that may be actual sparks coming off him and he sees the guy’s grimace at how bad off he is.

Like Jesus, if he wasn’t what he was Michael knows someone would have scrapped him a few planets back, but whatever.

The guy – Ryan, of course it’s Ryan – flips the lights on and they get a good look at one another.

Michael’s headed for a full-system shutdown and Ryan?

Looks like he’s been through some shit. Enough augments and implants that the legal system would be hard-put classifying him as human anymore, leaning past cyborg and dangerously close to being an android himself like some of those soldiers Michael’s seen who got caught up in the outer worlds skirmishes a few years back.

A lot of them look cobbled together from whatever parts he could find out here, which makes sense if the guy’s here of all places. (People don’t end up somewhere like here if they have resources to call on, you know? And no one ends up somewhere like here if they’re not in some kind of trouble, so. Yeah.)

They regard each for a long, long time.

Michael knows Ryan recognizes him, but he’s too tired to bother running – been doing too much of that as it is – and he wouldn’t get far in the shape he’s in if he tried

Last resort and the way that goes and Ryan sighs, gesturing for Michael to follow him and he does because what else is he going to do?

Ryan fixes him up, this long on-going process that takes a long damn time because Michael’s so busted up. Has this little helper bot he’s built out of old construction bots or something because its still sporting that distinct yellow paint job, little black and white stripe along its side.

Beeps and chirps and boops whenever Ryan asks it to bring him this tool or that, dig through the bins along one wall for parts or whatever. Hovers along just behind him when they’re not in the workshop/lab loyal little helper and kind of cute in a weird kind of way.

Ryan calls it E.D.G.A.R. and when Michael asks what the acronym stands for Ryan shrugs because hell if he knows, he just thought it was appropriate, which what does that even mean???

Ryan and E.D.G.A.R. dig through the bits and pieces he has stashed in his workshop/lab/lab, cannibalize worker androids – makes and models who didn’t start out as humans like Michael did – for some of it. Searches through the scrapyard to find parts he can modify for the rest.

Once he gets Michael functioning to a high enough level he can lend a hand Michael’s out there too, digging through piles of appliances and machinery and trying not to look too hard at the scattered android parts and chassis tossed in there too. (Some look too human, synthetic flesh torn and weathered from being unprotected from the elements for who know how long)

They don’t really get friendly, the two of them, but Ryan forgets to play the curmudgeon the longer he works at fixing Michael up.

Doesn’t ask who Michael is or how he ended up here, doesn’t seem like he’s waiting on the authorities to come claim him either.

Kind of a confusing time for them both because it’s clear Ryan’s got his own secrets, you know?

More than just some guy who picked up what he knows ‘along the way’, no.

There’s an order to his workshop/lab/lab Michael recognizes from the days right after those fuckers turned him into a machine, the way he works.

Meticulous as hell and so precise and just. More care than any of the hacks Michael’s gone to since he’s been on the run.

And then!

And then there’s – Michael doesn’t know when the shift happens but he bitches about something and Ryan laughs, quiet little huff of air and this tell-tale quirk to his mouth, and he gives Michael this. This look.

Something thoughtful to it he doesn’t really understand, can’t fucking compute, but who cares, right? Because Ryan’s less of a bastard after that, they get along better and Michael stops worrying Ryan’s just waiting for the right moment to turn him in, thinks his luck might be changing on him – so of course that’s when things go to shit.

Someone must have seen Michael before, recognized him and figured out he went to Ryan for help because the people chasing Michael?

They find him.

Assassination squad(s) and both of them unprepared for it and Ryan gets hit, gets hit bad.

More machine than man, but there’s still enough squishy human left to him that a bullet/energy weapon shot in the right place will kill him, you know? (Besides, all those augments and implants are hooked up to his squishy human parts in amazingly delicate ways and it’s real fucking easy to use that against someone if you know how.)

Michael doesn’t get away unscathed himself, but of the two of them he’s far more functional. And even though Ryan didn’t have the right parts and components to bring him up to factory specs again, so to speak, he did a damn good job with what he had on hand, you know?

There’s also the fact that the people who made Michael what he is now didn’t expect him to turn on them, thought they had a nice loyal dog in their hands and they made a mistake giving him the teeth and claws they did. All these built-in weapons because he’s a prototype, isn’t he.

New war machine to sell to the highest bidder and better than all those soulless robots people were using before because there’s a human mind in there capable of making the kind of decisions and choices and whatever else a simple computer program or AI could ever hope to. (Real fucking close to the complex sort of AI they’d need for that, but not close enough to satisfy the corporations or military forces who would commission them.)

So.

Michael gets them out of there, follows E.D.G.A.R. to this ship Ryan’s got hidden away – looks like shit but Ryan – stubbornly hanging on – insists it’ll get them to safety, just don’t fly them into the sun or a fucking planet, for Christ’s sake.

Michael gets Ryan into the medbay which – surprise, surprise – looks like a smaller version of Ryan’s workshop/lab/ than a medbay, but who cares at this point.

Hooks him up to machines to keep him alive until he can give him proper medical care and gets them away from any pursuers.

When he goes back down to check on Ryan it’s to find the asshole directing E.D.G.A.R. to open up this pod on the wall. (Looks more like a casket.)

Human shaped and something about it unsettles Michael who demands to know what’s going on, because Ryan shouldn’t be doing what’s he’s doing.

Seriously injured and lost a lot of blood and any normal human would be dead by this point, and Ryan.

He sighs, gives Michael this look because they both know he’s not going to get better from his injuries, you know? Squishy human parts all fucked up and augments and implants malfunctioning worse than Michael had been when he went to Ryan.

Only a matter of time and Ryan knew something like this would happen one day – all the things Michael was careful not to ask Ryan the same way Ryan didn’t ask Michael because secrets. (And Plot Reasons, but c’mon, you know how this works by now.)

E.D.G.A.R. cracks the pod/casket open and oh, wow, surprise, surprise there’s an android body inside it.

Looks a hell of a lot like Michael’s, but this one is a little bigger, bulkier. Looks like an older version, one that was modeled more after the construction androids, used for heavy labor and the whatnot. No synthetic flesh cover its frame, all powered down and waiting and -

“Don’t do this,” Michael says, because Ryan thinks he knows what he’s doing but he doesn’t.

He doesn’t.

(Michael doesn’t know what else they can do, but this - there has to be another way.)

Ryan gives Michael this sad little smile and it’s horrifying because internal bleeding and everything else, and he’s just.

“Michael,” he says, and he sounds so tired. “Why do you think I knew how to repair you?”

Because Ryan didn’t end up in some backwater planet/colony by accident, you know?

Doesn’t know the things he does because he read about it somewhere or had a job working in a goddamned repair shop on one of the inner worlds.

None of those easy little lies Michael kept telling himself, no.

Ryan used to work for this corporation, big on advancing science and all that bullshit that had major funding provided by the military and so on and so forth. People real interested in cutting down on human bloodshed and what better way than to create machines to do it for them?

Things went wrong along the way, and they got desperate as project after project failed to live up to expectation. (Some key component missing and it wasn’t until someone decided morals and ethics were oh so troublesome they made any real headway.)

People like Michael and accidents here and there, soldiers offer a second chance and there’s an experimental program that hasn’t been revealed to the public. Dangerous, of course, but -

Some people got a choice in the matter, sold their souls for that second chance. Others like Michael never had that luxury.

And Ryan, oh. He was part of that, wasn’t he.

Designed the androids because the science of it all, but he never expected things would lead where they did.

Got to watch as his creations were used in the worst possible ways, saw the early days where human brains couldn’t cope with the transfer progress. Breadth and depth of what makes a human mind (soul?) shoved into a computerized/cybernetic shell of its former self, most without warning and the fallout -

Most committed suicide, some went mad. The others had to be destroyed as they decayed.

And Ryan.

He tried to expose them, did what he could and it almost, almost worked.

But one man against a vast conglomeration fueled by greed and corruption and it almost killed him. (Should have, maybe that would have been better.)

He had a handful of augments and implants before everything went to hell to help him in his work, but afterward.

Well.

Squishy human bodies are just that, aren’t they. Get injured so badly they can’t be fixed and he ended up needing more and more until he might as well have been one of those androids he created once upon a time. (Poetic justice to it, or so he thought when he bothered to think about it at all.)

And anyway, anyway, that doesn’t matter at this point because it’s either transfer his squishy human brain-stuff into the waiting android frame or die.

Before all this, before Michael, Ryan might have chosen death. Figured it’s what he deserved for his part in things, no way he can expose the people responsible when he’s failed before, but.

Michael makes him want to try.

(Ryan knew, you see, while he was fixing Michael that the idiot would go right back out once he was done and try to do the impossible. May have drawn things out longer than he should have to prevent that from happening because he likes Michael, okay? Too much, maybe.)

This isn’t the way he saw things going, but he doesn’t want to die now. Doesn’t want to leave Michael alone to fix Ryan’s mistakes. (And maybe it’s not all on Ryan to fix, but who else is going to do it?)

So.

Michael hates it, hates it so much but he does what Ryan tells him to do. Gets him hooked up to the right machines, boots up the right programs and whatever else and watches Ryan die as he turns himself into an android.

He doesn’t know why Ryan’s doing what he’s doing, thinks it’s because he doesn’t want to just fade away into nothing, but Ryan tells him later.

Tells him everything as he’s figuring out how his new android body works, the two of them following gossip and rumors surrounding this broadcast someone’s sending out about the people responsible for making Michael what he is. Things said people are trying to shut down, shut down hard, but can never catch.

He tells him and Michael listens and it’s not easy, God is it ever not, but they come to an understanding or something like that.

Ryan didn’t know, not for the longest time and when he did he tried to do something about that, and that has to count for something.

(He saved Michael’s life or whatever the hell you’d call it when he turned up on his doorstep, and that counts for something too.)

And just.

Michael’s got his own mistakes too, okay.

So.

They figure things out, and Ryan fixes up his android body so its face looks like his human one and he maybe upgrades it, Michael laughing at him when Ryan goes on and on and on about laser hands or whatever the hell. (Ridiculous and impractical as hell, but goddamn does it sound cool.)

Also, also? Ryan doesn’t have the combat training/protocols Michael does so ~training. Partly to get him used to how his new body moves, partly because they don’t have access to adequate things at first and Michael runs him through the basics, right?

And he teaches Ryan how to compensate for it when his targeting whatevers are on the fritz and Ryan proves to be a better shot than Michael? (New ways to bring old cliches and tropes into play, is what I’m getting at here.)

Those moments where Ryan comes up against the limitations of his new body, realizes what he’s lost when he chose to become an android and Michael just being there because he’s the best person to understand what he’s going through?

The two of them becoming this amazing team over time that is an actual threat to the people after them? (And E.D.G.A.R., because Ryan is too damn fond of the bucket of bolts.)

They run into assassination squads and whatever else and finally, finally find the source of the broadcasts and of course it’s Matt and all these misfits and outcasts with grudges against the assholes after Michael and Ryan and it’s just.

Shenanigans in space as this group of supposed space pirates/smugglers/criminal types take on a corrupt corporation because reasons.

Also, yes, totally FAHC AU in space, but different ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

================

More of this AU with Jerevin this time???

#myan #ragehappy #android au #(but in space)#look #i don't even know #i just #yes #¯\_(ツ)_/¯#technically not a fic #vagrant fic #character death #(but they get better)

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a-very-fond-farewell · 4 years ago

Text

The forbidden crack! Untamed prompts: 24/?

CLAMP AU n.3 [chengyu? yucheng? (JC/MXY) edition. don’t...question my taste bruh]: “Somewhere, sometime.”

[tw eating disorders mentioned + tw suicide mention (body sacrifice)]

[ok fam. ok. I get it. I would basically ship JC with a rock if it meant I could play with my crack AUs. but I have solid evidence for this one. I promise you.]

[so, “Kobato” from CLAMP is possibly my favorite series from them. it’s 6 volumes long, roughly 40 chapters (and I only recently found out there was an epilogue...even though it was not there in my published version of the series. bc your local cryptid did in fact buy the entire thing in the flesh, that’s how much I love it)]

[in this AU I’ll change some things for the sake of consistency, but I suggest you read it bc the hurt/comfort and pining is enjoyable...so...if you read my silly AU I’m afraid I will spoil the plot for u :( and that’s the last thing I want to do...I understand if you decide to go read the manga and skip my prompt. it’s ok, I’m fine, go and have fun ;-;]

[if you kept reading, hi :D]

[now. am I uncomfortable with certain common tropes in CLAMP’s work in general? yes. especially the age gaps between some of the characters, some of which are not adults. hence the reason behind the changes in this AU. but! the aesthetics fam. the beautiful drawings. the cute outfits. (*ﾉ▽ﾉ)

do you see these?? how cute would Mo XuanYu look in these fam?? I honestly hc him enjoying skirts and feminine outfits a whole lot, but you can imagine him with pants and they would be just as cute. my favorite one is the second from the left btw.]

(imagine Mo XuanYu like this btw and check out the fancomic by the same op! an anon suggested it to me a while ago and now I’m hooked!)

[other mangacaps bc you need visuals:

yeah. angry boy meets bby with a mission to accomplish, bonding over their inferiority complex. yep. I only love the nicest things in life. that’s me.

also look at my baby girl ;-; so cuTe]

[the title is from the ost from the anime series, “Itsuka dokoka de” (check it out!). the anime feels more cohesive than the original manga, possibly bc the pacing is handled a little bit better (since the manga was cut short and the end felt a bit sloppy, but the emotional engagement was still good). and I remember being 17 and crying like a baby when this song came in. if you don’t have time for the manga binge the anime instead! there are plot holes in both of them and the stories are different but still both very enjoyable if you like soft things and angsty vibes.]

[enjoy!]

When YanLi saw him for the first time in front of her door, at the beginning of spring, she thought XuanYu was too pretty and too young for his own good. Sitting across her on the floor, a tea set between them as he politely answered her questions, the boy couldn’t have looked older than sixteen yet he assured her he was of age and well into adulthood. Which seemed pretty difficult to assess, not with the way he dressed: cute button down, beret slightly askew on top of his pretty head and an old-looking suitcases in hand. She didn’t mention the stuffed black rabbit poking out from the front pocket of his luggage, which seemed more of a comfort thing than a reliable source of company.

Moreover, Jin Ling seemed transfixed by him, toddling his way towards their guest asking for cuddles... something her son had never done in front of strangers.

XuanYu refused to give his last name, nor did he have an ID he could show her, nor did he seem worried about how strange that was. And YanLi knew ZiXuan would have been against it, but she couldn’t leave the kid looking all over Lanling for a place to stay... so she gave him the only available room in their rundown pension.

She only hoped Jiang Cheng would be a nice neighbor and leave the kid alone. Who knew what horrors XuanYu was running away from, after all.

When XiChen heard from YanLi of her new tenant, he would have never guessed the kid to look so naive. Not in a bad way, mind you. But his smiles, for how genuine they seemed to be, looked a little bit too big. A little bit too strained not to be a distraction tactic from his part. Or maybe XiChen had lived too long surrounded by fake smiles and closed off people to not worry.

That’s probably why he gave XuanYu a job when YanLi asked him to look over the kid. More to prove himself there were still trustworthy people in the world than to give the younger man a chance. He couldn’t even pay him a full salary, not with the debt collectors breathing on his neck as he tried to run his late mother’s kindergarten.

But maybe that would have been enough for now. A starting point for something better, something new.

A-Yuan had always known the kindergarten used to be an orphanage back in the days, but now he had reached an age where doubts stuck to his head instead of being forgotten with the passing of time. Wen Qing and A-Ning were always busy -be it in the hospital or in university- and A-Yuan didn’t know if they loved him enough to keep him. Ever since granny had passed away he had wondered, day after day, when his cousins would have left him behind for good.

He was thinking about such things when he first met XuanYu, on the man’s first day on the job as a teaching assistant. A-Yuan was mulling over his sadness when XuanYu had come to his rescue, asking him what was wrong... before enthusiastically praising his cousins for working so hard after hearing they were late to take A-Yuan home. XuanYu stayed with him and they played on the swings as they waited for A-Ning to come pick him up, apologizing profusely.

On the way home, his cousin held him close and kissed his forehead as he asked him if he had had fun with the new teacher. And A-Yuan felt less doubtful afterwards.

After hearing the story from her brother, Wen Qing had made it her job to look into XuanYu and his weird approach to life in general. She took every opportunity she could grasp to spy on the younger man, lunch breaks be damned. She needed to confirm if the kid was a trust worthy person or a runaway child pretending to be older than what he actually was. Well, maybe tailing an unsuspecting young man on the streets of Lanling in scrubs and sunglasses would be considered a bit much, she could admit as much. But it was the thought that counted, no?

Her friend MianMian told her to knock it off and talk to the kid like a normal human being, but the truth was that... well, XuanYu was really too weird to be considered normal. He seldom put himself in dangerous situations without much care, such as picking up a random (and still lit) cigarette from the ground just to give it back to the person who had “accidentally dropped it”. Other times he would cross a road without looking left and right first, risking to be run over by cars at every corner. He never, never, fumbled with a phone and he frequently talked to himself... sometimes even directing his words to that creepy stuffed rabbit of his.

No thank you, Wen Qing felt safer behind light poles and crumpled newspapers held upside down. Even if that made her look sketchy as fuck.

Wen Ning made sure to arrive on time to pick A-Yuan up after that time, often chatting with XuanYu as they waited for his baby cousin to retrieve his backpack and raincoat. It was refreshing to speak with the younger man, no matter how weird he acted sometimes. Like that time A-Yuan asked him to tie his shoe-laces for him and XuanYu didn’t know how to do it. Or that time they caught the man taking a nap on the floor in the middle of the school hall. Or that time XiChen had ordered a cake for one of the kids’ birthday and XuanYu didn’t seem to know how to sing the birthday song.

Wen Ning had no place to judge, after all. But XuanYu’s smiles felt like balm on his heart. And if his sweet voice followed Wen Ning home as he bounced A-Yuan in his arms, well. Nobody needed to know that.

The last thing Meng Yao would have expected to hear that summer day when he called the kindergarten was a voice so different from XiChen’s. Startled, he had confusedly asked if the kid worked there and how so, given that the school definitely couldn’t afford to hire anyone. He ought to know. He was the debt collector.

But the kid apologized, introduced himself, and then explained XiChen had offered him a part-time job out of kindness more than out of need. The idiot. XiChen should have remembered who his money belonged to instead of taking charity cases left and right.

But when Meng Yao said as much to naive XuanYu, the other vehemently protested, surprising the debt collector with strong opinions on how he shouldn’t underestimate other people’s intelligence and kindness in the first place.

Meng Yao laughed out at that, genuinely so.

There was more to that kid XuanYu than what one would have expected.

Nie HuaiSang caught a first glimpse of the mystery man only in late summer, when XuanYu stepped into his cake shop to look at the display. His coworker MianMian seemed to recognize the younger man immediately, greeting him by saying they had a friend in common, namely Wen Qing. The kid merely tilted his head and answered he had never formerly met “Miss. Wen” and that he only knew who she was from what the woman’s younger brother had told him about her.

MianMian shrugged and smiled at him.

To which HuaiSang asked him what they could do for him and XuanYu... just... stopped working. Saying that he had wondered if he could do something for them instead. Apparently, Wen Ning had let it slip they were currently understaffed and needed a hand to deliver their sweets.

Delighted, MianMian set him to work, no matter how many times HuaiSang assured her they didn’t need to force the kid to help them... also because they didn’t actually have the means to pay him in kind. But XuanYu refused money altogether, simply asking them to let him help.

To their amusement (and horror) XuanYu didn’t know how to ride a bicycle, so he insisted on covering the deliveries by foot in the neighborhood instead.

HuaiSang called XiChen on the phone that same evening, asking him to give the kid some slack the following day. And maybe buy him some balm for blisters as well.

Jin Ling was young but he wasn’t stupid. Turning three had made him wiser, he knew as much. So he knew XuanYu was magical. He just did.

His pretty-gege talked with stuffed animals, always wore nice things, and kept in his satchel bag a vial filling up with magical candies every time he did something nice for others. A-Ling had seen it with his own eyes, that time XuanYu had put a plaster on his scrapped knee and blew on it to make the pain go away: the golden candy had appeared in the bottle out of nowhere and XuanYu had asked him to keep the secret.

And A-Ling may have been young, but he wasn’t a snitch.

No sir.

ZiXuan eventually stumbled upon their new tenant even though YanLi had tried everything in her power to prevent it. He was very displeased with her: taking a scrawny kid in, cutting his rent in half merely because he couldn’t afford to pay the room in full. Utter nonsense.

No matter how much this kid XuanYu praised A-Ling’s personality or YanLi’s cooking, no matter how much he smiled and made himself look accommodating and unthreatening. ZiXuan didn’t work pro bono even at the firm, let alone for his wife’s business.

Yet, when he asked to be let inside the kid’s room to formally discuss the terms of his contract (and tell him to pack his things and leave at the end of summer), ZiXuan was left speechless. There was no bed, no table or chairs. The fridge wasn’t humming and the AC wasn’t working. The only things he could see were the younger man’s clothes neatly folded in his open suitcase or hanging by the window to dry. No books, no snacks, no nothing.

Usually tenants brought their things in right off the bat, their stuff mailed in within a week after moving in. YanLi was very particular about it, she would have not overlooked something like that. But maybe she had been too busy with A-Ling these past few months and hadn’t noticed the kid was actually too poor to even breathe.

And now that he looked at him, XuanYu looked suspiciously skinny.

Was he sleeping on the floor? Didn’t he have covers for the colder season? Was his fridge broken, empty, or -gods forbid- purposely left with no power because the kid couldn’t afford the electricity bill?

“Do you actually live like this?”

XuanYu didn’t answer to that, but smiled anyway. It looked sinister in a way ZiXuan couldn’t explain, afraid of the things such a young man may or may not have endured in the past. And was maybe still enduring now.

The following day ZiXuan gave the kid their spare futon they bought in Japan on their honeymoon. They never had guests anyway and they could afford to pay for a tenant’s electricity bill every now and then, they weren’t poor.

Certainly YanLi would have agreed with him on the matter.

JinGy saw it. He did! He wasn’t lying! Xuan-ge was there, surrounded by darkness and shadows, looking over the children during their nap time, only a sliver of light coming from the door left ajar... casting shadows on half of his pretty face.

And he saw him reviving that stuffed black rabbit he always had on him.

The rabbit just rose on his hind legs and turned his head up and started whispering things to Xuan-ge, who nodded every now and then in deep though.

JinGyi had read about how paper-man talismans had been stuff of legends in the past. His books spoke of ancient times in which even corpses could be brought back to life. How even animals could turn into godly beasts if enough resentful energy polluted them. But he would have never thought magic could actually be real and so easy to play with.

And Xuan-ge had looked nothing but beautiful as he was talking to the stuffed animal, humming softly under his breath.

When Jiang Cheng dropped out of university for the second time, YanLi didn’t say anything and instead welcomed him back in his old room. So much for enrolling in law school at twenty-three, uh? ZiXuan would have been disappointed in him like the first time that had happened in his bachelor anyway, no point in avoiding the man. It was autumn anyway: it was either going back to the apartment complex or look for a new flatmate. But the school housing had rightfully kicked him out after dropping out in the middle of the academic year, so there would have been little hope for him to find a new place anytime soon.

What he did not expect to find was a new tenant living next door.

Sleeping in front of the door, clutching a satchel bag and a fucking stuffed animal on his lap.

Jiang Cheng jolted him awake and took in the sight of his shoulder length hair, his long lashes and sleepy eyes and thought he looked ridiculous. Wearing a silly hat and moccasins, purple shadows under his eyes, a confused expression on his worn out face. When asked what the hell he was doing there, sleeping out of his room instead of inside of it, the younger man said he had forgotten his keys inside that morning.

He was clearly an idiot, so Jiang Cheng walked away and returned to his room after more than a year away. If someone asked him who had rung YanLi to bring the spare keys to help the idiot he would have shrugged at them and shut the door in their face.

He didn’t have time for that, he had to think how to ask XiChen to let him back to work at the school the following day.

A-Qing had seen many things in life, met many horrible people, dealt with the scum of the scum... but she had yet to meet XuanYu.

A menace. A hurricane. A fool. The amount of times she had had to scoop him up from the ground after he had clumsily slipped on invisible bananas and such should have earned her a honorary title for outstanding citizen. It’s been months since his arrival and the kids had already learned to make way whenever they saw him. He inspired fear even in their tiny heads, honestly. What a fellow teaching assistant, really.

She was just there to score brownie points for his electives and internship program to become a social service worker, that was true. But she cared about the kids enough to know she had to do something about that. The children loved XuanYu and they were this fucking close to either worship him like a small deity or criminal and something ought to be done.

The last thing she would have expected to see, however, was Jiang Cheng coming back so soon. Crawling back from university to ask to work there, wagging his tail like the lovesick dog he was. She could easily imagine what the older student would have said to XiChen, something on the line of “you know goddamn well I’m not doing it for the money. I grew up here, I don’t want to see this place crumbling down. I’m definitely not doing it because I’m in love with you and seeing you sad makes me want to gag.”

Well, maybe the last part could be considered artistic license from her part, but judging by what she could overhear behind XiChen’s office door... yep. She had definitely nailed the part about being fond of the ex-orphanage and for the rest... the sentiment was there. The pining bastard.

“Do you need anything, A-Qing?”, XuanYu asked her out of no-fucking-where, startling her as she pretended to dust off the floor very close to a door. Cheek-plastered-on-it kind of close.

“Nothing. Mind your business,” she answered, flustered as fuck.

XuanYu couldn’t be that naive, he knew what he was fucking doing. His creepy little smile so similar to the one the debt collect always had on his face. No wonder XiChen had fallen for such a tricky bitch.

“Then will you help me find JinGyi? He doesn’t want me to help him with his project for the festival and went into hiding again.”

There, that smile and knowing gaze. Judging poser. He looked much older than his alleged twenty years. He knew what he was fucking doi...

“You?!”

Jiang Cheng’s honest-to-gods screech pulled A-Qing out of her thoughts. She turned and had to witness XiChen amiably patting Jiang Cheng on the head as their boss explained him how XuanYu worked there.

“It’s been almost six months now, he’s a very valuable kid and helped out around here while you were studying.”

Jiang Cheng was both livid and red with longing, because his touch-starved ass was all over that hand patting him platonically on the head. He was also angry, which was default for him... but there was something else underneath. Something promising in the way he stared XuanYu down.

Maybe A-Qing could win some candy by betting with the kids about such unexpected turn of events.

ZiZhen believed A-Yi. If his friend had told him the new teacher assistant was a witch then he was right. So they had started researching witches at the school, but only found a couple of colored books on the matter, mostly useless. All but one, telling the story of a nanny called Mary Poppins... some western thing.

But everything checked for the most part. The hat was there, every day a different one, but ultimately never leaving XuanYu’s head. The umbrella was not, but both him and A-Yuan had seen their gege with a parasol once and that was enough. His satchel contained infinite amount of things, from sweets to possessed stuffed animals, like a qiankun bag from the legends! He talked with things as if he could control them.

Well, even the teacher sometimes tried to convince the printer to work with sweet words, gently coaxing it back to life... maybe that was just how adults functioned. Even his dad would ask the fridge where his favorite cake had disappeared sometimes. Adults were weird.

Fuck Lanling. Rain day and night, autumn planning everyone’s demise by flooding every bloody year. Xue Yang was over it.

He took a random umbrella from the rack by the door of the convenience store and left without a second thought, already wondering what he could say to convince XingChen to offer him dinner somewhere new. The man wasn’t married anymore after all, so Xue Yang could technically have his way with him now, right?

“Excuse me!”

Xue Yang was not in the mood for people calling him out on his bullshit that night, but he turned anyway and saw the weirdest thing. A young man roughly his age, maybe a year or so younger, drenched from head to toe after rushing to him. He was panting, clutching a plastic bag full of cleaning supplies from the convenience store Xue Yang had just left.

“I believe you mistakenly took my umbrella,” the other said, pretty face framed by wet hair sticking to his forehead and cheeks.

Amused, Xue Yang shut the clear plastic umbrella he had “mistakenly taken” and held it at arm’s length by the handle, directing the pointy edge to the other like a sword. Hell if he was going to get wet himself, he needed to prove something to the idiot. He could handle a bit of rain for the sake of being dramatic.

“You want it back?” Xue Yang asked, rising his chin and arching an eyebrow at the other. The man nodded, holding his now wet beret in place on top of his head as if he was more worried about it falling on the ground than keeping his crown dry.

“I knew it was someone else’s when I took it.”

“But...?”

“And what’ll you give me back for it? What are you gonna do about it?”

This should have taught him not to mess with him: he didn’t even have to use his business tone to make the other take a step back. Meng Yao, the bastard, had taught him smiles went a long way in dealing with stupid people after all.

“Right, if I take it from you... you won’t have one to go back home with.”

Uh?

“Wait here. I’ll go buy you one at the convenience store. I’ll be back.”

Uh??

The idiot actually run back to the store and purchased him a fucking umbrella. And Xue Yang was twice as stupid because he waited for him to come back, startled as he was. The idiot was smiling megawatt bright when he came back as well, what the fuck?

The sick bastard extended the clear plastic umbrella to him like Xue Yang had done earlier, but he held it by the middle, as if surrendering his weapon. It was fairly similar to the one Xue Yang had stolen anyway, why bother asking for his umbrella back?

“Did your dead mother give this particular one to you or something?”

The bite in his words only mildly deterred the other man, who pressed his lips together before forcing an even bigger smile on his face.

“No. It’s pretty cheap. But it’s mine. It’s the first thing I bought with my money.”

Xue Yang left after that. With the stolen umbrella. Because he was still a scumbag and not a sentimental asshole. But he was very quiet that evening when XingChen treated him to some fancy takeout on his couch while lovingly drying Xue Yang’s hair with a towel.

Nothing made sense anymore.

Qin Su worried over Jiang Cheng. He was her best worker, but she knew for a fact that he had a million part-time jobs in town and she didn’t want to overwork him. She also knew he would give all of his hard-earned money to XiChen anyway. All to pay a stupid debt. The huge lovesick idiot.

Was he the fastest delivery driver? Yes. Was he the most well behaved of his staff? Not even close. But he was respectful enough to work over his issues and she trusted him with doing his job at the end of the day.

So when she found a young man in a frilly outfit waiting for her on the lobby of her shop asking for Jiang Cheng... well, she was pleasantly surprised.

He introduced himself as XuanYu and held a lunch box in his hands, saying Jiang Cheng had forgotten it at home. Which left A-Su properly impressed. How could a man as angry as Jiang Cheng secure himself such a lovely person was beyond her comprehension, honestly.

He was adorable and she wanted to be his sister like, yesterday.

But when Jiang Cheng came back from a delivery, entering the dumpling shop with his helmet still on, he stared XuanYu down and told him off right off the bat.

“Not you again,” he said, to A-Su’s utter confusion, “Can’t you take a fucking hint? I’m already avoiding you at work. I don’t want to be your friend.”

Something akin to hurt painted XuanYu’s feature for a fraction of a second before he could retrieve his smile and point at the lunch box.

“Your sister asked me to give this to you on my way out. A-Ling helped making rice cakes this time and wanted to hear from you if you liked them or not.”

Qin Su could have easily missed the change in XuanYu’s voice at that, that’s how much of a good actor he was. But Jiang Cheng had no face even to feel ashamed for lashing out at the kid like that. How much older could he be from XuanYu, three years? Two? Had nobody taught him some respect?

“XuanYu, if he bullies you again you come here. Am I understood?”

Like hell she was gonna let this gem of a child slip away from Jiang Cheng’s hands.

Not in a million years.

Song Lan breathed in and out. In and out. The clear morning air surrounded him like an old friend, hugging him closely as he clutched the papers for his divorce.

XingChen had signed them in the end. Five years together were now in the past for him.

Maybe they had been too young back then, when they had taken the chance to get married the moment the government announced the change in the law for people like them. How old have they been, twenty-three? Twenty-four? Another lifetime. An existence away.

He wished he could cry. It would have been easier.

But, as he turned a corner, someone stumbled into him and sent the papers scattering on the sidewalk. Song Lan tried to save them from being dirtied on a puddle but was unsuccessful. He didn’t know why he bothered anymore. It felt like the last piece of his lover had left and Song Lan couldn’t even prevent something as simple as that. XingChen’s signature dirtied in a pool, but not enough to be washed away. What a joke.

The young man in front him bowed down, apologizing profusely, trying to save the documents at the best of his abilities. He even suggested finding a public toilet to dry the sheets under the hot air blowing machine, the silly man.

Song Lan smiled instead, reassuring him it was fine.

He was fine.

But the kid accidentally read the first few lines of the agreement before looking up at Song Lan. And where he would have expected pity, Song Lan only saw consternation instead on his pale face. It was so startling to see it, that he had to crouch back down on the ground next to the kid and reassure him everything was fine. It was just paper, it wasn’t important, he didn’t have to feel so guilty about...

“It is important. Your life is important.”

Such a dramatic sentence, uttered so vehemently, should have sounded weird to Song Lan. Especially because he disapproved of such antics in the first place. But it sounded so sincere, so earnest that he felt touched for a moment.

So he helped the kid up on his feet and asked him to walk a bit with him, to keep him company. Reserved as he was, he would have never thought possible opening up to a stranger the way he did that day. But there was something calming about the kid, almost as if he had been put on earth to soothe other people’s existence.

So he told him how his husband had fallen in love with someone else, someone much younger than them. How this had strained their marriage even if Song Lan had known all along his husband had the ability to fall in love with more than one person at a time. But Song Lan was monogamous and would have never justified forcing his lover to suppress his feelings just to please him. So it had been Song Lan himself to call it quits and wish him all the luck in the world.

The kid had started crying at some point, without Song Lan even noticing at first.

“Why are you crying? Please no, I didn’t wan to upset you.”

“So much love. In different ways but... it’s too much. There’s so much of it, of course I’m crying for you and your loved one.”

Song Lan was many things. Too stern, too rigid, too peculiar about who could touch him or not, too cold in expressing his emotions. But he felt warm then, in front of a kid crying for him in the middle of the street, one day of late autumn.

“Thank you.”

***

XuanYu let it slip once with Mrs. Jin how little he remembered of his past.

It wasn’t a lie, he really didn’t remember what it had been of him before he had met her, asking for a room. But the kind woman just assumed he was talking about his past or youth, so he didn’t correct her on the matter.

Knowing the truth would have scared her, after all.

But he still let himself trust her that day as they sat in front of a pot of tea and he pretended to drink and eat the pastries on the low table. He didn’t need to eat or drink. He wasn’t even sure he had a digestive system.

“I only remember... a song.”

“A song?”

“Yes. Someone singing every night before falling asleep. I don’t think it was meant for me to hear... but my body remembers the shivers. The feeling of being loved.”

“The body remembers the weirdest things, XuanYu. You should trust it more.”

He smiled at that, wriggling his hands on the handkerchief where he had hidden the pastries from sight.

“I’m pretty sure that song wasn’t for me. My body was merely there to listen.”

YanLi looked uncomfortable at that, something scary painting her features.

“Maybe I was eavesdropping,” he reassured her with a self-deprecating joke, not sure if that would have made her feel more at ease or not, “Maybe I was listening in, hoping such lovely words could be directed at me for once.”

Mrs. Jin sipped her tea for a long while afterwards, before finding the resolution to look up and stare him down with a serious expression.

“Unrequited feelings hurt, don’t they?”

XuanYu didn’t know what she meant by that, but he nodded anyway.

He heard something rustling in his bag and hid the sweets inside of it the moment YanLi turned to clear the table. If A-Ling heard someone munching their protests away from inside of the bag, he didn’t snitch on XuanYu and retrieved playing with Fairy on the carpeted floor next to him instead.

Lan Zhan was disappointed in him, XuanYu knew that much. They were admiring the sunset from the small balcony in their room, folding laundry.

XuanYu always wondered why Lan Zhan assumed the form of a black stuffed rabbit, of all things, but he didn’t want to pry. He didn’t even know his real name. The other had told him he used to be a human in his past life and that he hadn’t technically reincarnated in this lifetime. That his current form was just a mean to a goal, that he could use it to guide XuanYu and help him better that way without expending much spiritual energy.

He told him someone dear to him taught him how to manipulate paper-man talismans in his previous life. How similar the process had been to move around in a stuffed animal’s body. How convenient.

XuanYu believed he secretly loved it, even if Lan Zhan would have never said as much. He already talked very little to begin with.

“You told her you don’t remember your past.”

“That I did.”

“Don’t do it again”

XuanYu folded the last towel on his lap and then let Lan Zhan take a nap on it. He felt silly having to take showers and pretend to be a normal human being. He hated inconveniencing the Jins with him, accepting their bedding and paid kitchen appliances and so on. But if he wanted to accomplish his mission he had to make an effort to look normal... instead of spirited away from another world or maybe simply another era.

“I won’t do it again, don’t worry Lan Zhan.”

Lan Zhan was disappointed, but he was also patient to a fault.

Sure, it would have been much appreciated if Mo XuanYu didn’t lose him around every other day. This time the younger man had forgotten to pick him up from the floor where he had been reading stories to the children at the kindergarten.

But Lan Zhan was also a stuffed animal now, so it wasn’t like he could move around and risk being seeing by normal humans. His body was a vessel and any damage would have had repercussions on his soul as well.

What to do.

He tried not to panic when he felt someone picking him up from the floor after an hour or so. He silently prayed for them not to be A-Qing: even in this life she was too smart for her own good and he couldn’t risk being found out so soon. Mo XuanYu wasn’t even halfway to complete his mission and Lan Zhan couldn’t...

“I’m sure A-Yu is looking for you, little guy. What are doing all the way back here?”

It was always difficult to hear his older brother’s voice in this life. To see his face, to notice how sad he was even in this new reincarnation of his.

Lan Zhan didn’t move a single muscle as XiChen dusted him off and put him in his apron front pocket as he looked for “A-Yu”.

In order to give a second chance to Mo XuanYu, Lan Zhan had sacrificed any possibility to ever reincarnate until his mission was accomplished. So XiChen didn’t have a younger brother in this lifetime and he would have not had one for a while. Lan Zhan missed him, but they had to wait for a bit more.

They still had three months to fill the bottle the King of Hell had entrusted Mo XuanYu with. Then he would have entered the list for reincarnation once more and everything will have been fine in the end.

Lan Zhan owed the kid his life, so he trusted him.

No matter what.

XuanYu remembered the boy who had stolen his umbrella. He remembered him well enough to recognize him when he found him crawling on the floor, a stab wound in his belly, one winter night.

Panicked, he asked Lan Zhan what they could do as he instinctively pressed the wound with his bare hands. Lan Zhan didn’t dare move not to attract attention on himself. The other man snarled out at XuanYu, asking him why did he even bother, seemingly recognizing him.

“I took your fucking umbrella. Hate me and leave me alone.”

“Ridiculous.”

Lan Zhan would have been proud of him for that remark, but XuanYu was too scared to think about it. He didn’t have a phone and he didn’t even know the number for emergencies. He wasn’t even qualified to be a teacher. How had he survived until then. He was useless and stupid and...

“What the fuck?” Jiang Cheng’s voice came in a whisper behind him.

What a sorry view the older man had to take in that night: a pool of blood staining otherwise clean clothes, a moaning boy on the ground in restless pain, a crying mess of a sad excuse of a human pressing on a throbbing wound next to him.

Jiang Cheng muttered something about the boy being one of Meng Yao’s men, that they should leave him there to die for all he cared.

The man under XuanYu barked back, telling him he had tried to “convince the idiot of the same”. But XuanYu was horrified by what he had just heard.

“People die for nothing. People die for fucking nothing. You don’t leave someone behind just because you fucking hate them.”

XuanYu has never cursed in this brief, borrowed life of his. Maybe spending so much time with Jiang Cheng had rubbed some of his habits off on him in the end.

Startled, Jiang Cheng seemed to agree with him because he fished out his phone and called an ambulance right away.

The stabbed man laughed at that.

Lan Zhan was clutched in XuanYu’s hands as they waited in the corridor of a badly lit hospital. The kid was crying, hard. He must have remembered how his family in Mo Manor had mistreated him in the past, how easily his own relatives had starved him off just out of spite. How already impossibly emaciated he had been when he had sacrificed his body for Wei Ying, to bring him back in a weakened vessel just to seek revenge. Just to let his hatred run free.

Such cruelty had earned him nothing but distrust from the hell judges, who sentenced him to never be reincarnated again. Only when Lan Zhan had ascended to heaven -many centuries after reaching immortality- he had been able to make them relent.

If Mo XuanYu could prove to be a good human being during a trial time of one year on planet earth, filling a vial with good actions in the form of golden gems, then they would have considered Lan Zhan’s proposal. Mo XuanYu would have atoned his sin and be granted a new life, a clean record, and a second chance at happiness.

Seeing someone almost die in front of him must have awaken something ugly in him. His stained hands, the iron stench in the air. All that blood... like the last thing he had most probably seen in his previous life before his body sacrifice. A scarlet array under his feet, another soul replacing his in his own body.

Lan Zhan let himself be held tightly in Mo XuanYu’s hands that night at the hospital.

And hugged back without anyone else noticing.

Xiao XingChen. That was the name of the man showing up at the kindergarten one week later. XuanYu had never seen him before, but the man hugged him in front of the kids, alerting both XiChen and Jiang Cheng.

“Thank you,” the tall man said in between tears, holding him tight.

“I don’t understand. I...”

“You saved A-Yang. Thank you.”

XuanYu pressed his lips together tightly at that, so overwhelmed he didn’t know what to say. His fingertips hurting with sometimes akin to electricity the more he let himself be held so fiercely by the other man.

He started crying in earnest only after the man had left, surrounded by the children who worried and fussed over him. He fell asleep with them during nap time and when he woke up he found Jiang Cheng placing a quilt over him.

Caught red handed, the older man feigned disinterest in the beginning... but then he sat down next to him. Just like he had done in the hospital one week ago.

“Did you see someone die before?” Jiang Cheng asked then, awkwardly scratching the back of his head, “You had such a strong... reaction to my words. It was insensitive of me. I apologize for angering you. I’ll better myself.”

XuanYu didn’t answer at that.

Jiang Cheng would have never understood what it meant to sacrifice yourself to hatred and revenge. How much it had scarred him to be brought back to life, but only as a worn out set of robes on top of someone else’s soul. How distant he had felt when the Yiling Patriarch had inhabited his body and had let himself be touched by someone else.

Jiang Cheng would have never understood what it meant to be touched in the flesh but be utterly unreachable as a soul. Or how much it hurt to become an empty body filled by someone foreign and new. Someone who could wear his skin better than him.

Jiang Cheng would have never understood. And thank all the gods for that.

So XuanYu... Mo XuanYu kept quiet and smiled instead.

Lan Zhan didn’t trust Jiang Cheng. He hadn’t in the past and he wasn’t gonna start now. Wei Ying would have been so disappointed in him for thinking badly of his baby brother, but there was little Lan Zhan could do about that.

Wei Ying wasn’t there to judge him for it.

Mo XuanYu would wake up every morning and wash himself, get dressed and tidy up the room before leaving. He would fix his appearance in a mirror Young Lady Jiang had gifted him in autumn, making sure his hat was still in place.

“What would happen if I were to...?”

“You must keep your hat on... even when you sleep. You know this much.”

“I wear a headband to bed.”

“And what of it?”

“It’s... silly.”

“Nobody can see you in your sleep. Why the sudden worry?”

Mo XuanYu said nothing in response to that, but Lan Zhan knew. The kid had never worried too much about his appearance aside from looking proper and well dressed. He had never fussed over his features, but recently he had taken the habit to walk dangerously close to makeup stores and check various displays at the convenience store close by. Lan Zhan knew Mo XuanYu had remembered his past... how he had quickly realized he was already an adult. With needs and desires.

But now a brand new reincarnation of Jiang WanYin would wait for him every morning to walk to work together. Now Jiang Cheng acted pleasantly enough to be considered kind and doting to someone starved of affection like Mo XuanYu had always been. Which wasn’t planned, it had never been.

Lan Zhan didn’t like where this was going.

He didn’t like it at all.

Nie HuaiSang came to bring a cake for XuanYu one day or so before the end of the year, snow sticking to his hair and flushed cheeks.

“I don’t know when your birthday is... so I’m pretty sure I’m late to the game. But I wanted to thank you for helping me and MianMian that one time. So I made a cake for you. I hope you like strawberries.”

Mo XuanYu had no idea if he liked them or not. He couldn’t even eat.

He started crying in the middle of his room, where HuaiSang had placed the boxed cake on top of his low table.

Panicked, HuaiSang jumped up and out of the room to alert Jiang Cheng next door. But upon seeing the other man’s worried expression XuanYu cried even harder.

“What did you do to him, you bastard?”

“I’m not the one who used to prank people all the time. Grow up!”

“You clearly did something horrible to him for...”

“A-Cheng we’re not twelve anymore. Who do you take me for?”

XuanYu took his chance to stuff his face with cake, gulping it down bit by bit even if he knew he didn’t have the necessary organs to process it without vomiting it all out in an hour or so. He had tried many times to hold food down to no avail. His body rejecting it as if it was poisonous and dangerous.

He had tried so many times... to practice. To be able to appreciate YanLi’s generous cooking, to help A-Ling and the children at school prep their lunches and maybe... maybe to eat with Jiang Cheng every now and then.

Nie HuaiSang hugged him and patted his head, confused but too scared to ask for an explanation. Mo XuanYu smiled at him and lied, saying his cake was the best he had ever eaten. It wasn’t the best. It was simply the first.

He had no way to compare it with anything else, really.

Wen Ning had heard about his “stomachache” from XiChen, who had known all about it from YanLi and Jiang Cheng. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise for XuanYu when he saw the older boy in front of his apartment complex the last day of the year.

But it was a surprise.

“Can we talk for a bit?” Wen Ning asked, holding his umbrella up for XuanYu to walk beside him, protecting him from the icy snow.

They walked to the nearest park, sitting under the gazebo to watch the snow falling down. Their heavy coats keeping them warm, despite the cold.

They used to take long walks back from the kindergarten with A-Yuan after school, since the Wens lived close to XuanYu. Before Jiang Cheng came back anyway.

Wen Ning looked uncomfortable, fidgeting with his fingers as he tried to find the right words. He surprised XuanYu by telling him how, in the past, he had suffered from an eating disorder and had been hospitalized for a while in his teens. How worried his sister and their grandma had been for him, how much they helped him in his recovery. How alone he had felt for years still, no matter how loved he was.

“A-Yuan told me he never saw you eat. So I was wondering if you needed help.”

It wasn’t the case, but XuanYu knew he meant well. Telling him everything was fine would have only worried him more, so he tried to explain an half-truth that could satisfy him. Saying it was difficult for him to process food, that in the past he had suffered from malnutrition and now he had digestive issues.

He was talking about his past life, but he figured that could work as well.

When they parted ways in front of the apartment complex, Wen Ning asked to hold XuanYu’s hands for a bit. He cradled them carefully, as if they were precious. His slender fingers cupping XuanYu’s smaller palms almost reverently.

“I know you don’t feel the same about me. But I’ll ask you to look after yourself anyway. Not out of obligation for me... but out of respect for yourself, if nothing else.”

The moment Wen Ning let go of his hands, Jiang Cheng stepped out of the front door of the building and saw them.

He said nothing and walked away after stepping out of the gate.

Lan Zhan would have very much liked to flip a finger at Jiang WanYin’s forehead. Hard. Wei Ying would have done the same, he was sure.

Wei Ying would have also smacked some sense in his baby brother, forcing him to face his feelings and take responsibility for what he was doing to poor Mo XuanYu.

Who was currently waiting for the other man’s return like a dog by his room balcony, surveying the front courtyard like a bird of prey from above.

Lan Zhan tried to coax the kid inside, reminding him snow was still falling down and that his beanie was slipping away. He tried to be gentle about it, knowing how much XuanYu had grown resentful of the hats he had to constantly wear.

But the younger man simply shrugged, saying he wanted to wait for another five minutes. Just one more. Just to make sure.

Jiang Cheng didn’t come back that night.

And Mo XuanYu cried in his sleep clutching the half-empty vial to his chest.

Lan Zhan spent the night watching over him, singing to him the song he had written for Wei Ying. He snuggled close to XuanYu and made sure his wide headband was covering the crown of his head, before pressing himself to the other’s forehead.

He never stopped singing.

Wishing he could take all the pain away.

YanLi, A-Yuan and even ZiXuan knocked on his door to greet him into the new year, despite how XuanYu should have been the one to pay his respects to his landlords.

But they asked him to visit the funeral home with them instead, to say their thanks to YanLi’s parents with offers and flowers.

He dressed in his best clothes, having never been in what seemed to be a modern version of the ancestral halls of his childhood in a past life. The establishment was fairly sterile, with shelves filled with plaques and pictures instead of wooden inscriptions on an altar. The lot of them bowed and said their thanks, chatting with the late Jiangs almost as if they had never left. YanLi apologized to her mother for Jiang Cheng’s absence that year like any other year, while ZiXuan told his father-in-law how they would have visited the Jin ancestors during Chūnjié to make it fair.

XuanYu looked at them and barely kept himself from crying.

On their way back, YanLi explained her parents had died when she was still twelve and Jiang Cheng was merely six. How they had lived in the orphanage run by XiChen’s mother and made friends with the boy, who was YanLi’s classmate. How the siblings stayed there until YanLi came of age and got custody of her baby brother. ZiXuan’s family of lawyers had helped her pro bono and that was how she had met the man and fallen in love with him. Even if it had taken a while for ZiXuan to notice her at first, preoccupied with university and law school as he had been at the time. But the Jins helped her with the inheritance left by the late Madame Yu: the apartment complex where they currently lived.

Watching them explaining their past in such detail moved XuanYu deeply. Feeling as if they wanted to make him part of their family by filling in the gaps for him.

That was still his older brother after all and those were still his sister-in-law and his beloved nephew and he... he loved them. He had missed them so, so much.

And he was about to leave them again soon.

Wen Qing finally showed herself up one day at the park, when Mo XuanYu was taking Fairy out for an evening walk. She approached him by telling the younger man she had assisted in the surgery Xue Yang had undergone some time back.

Lan Zhan (hiding in the kid’s coat pocket) could see how startled the kid was at the mention of the criminal, but he decided to trust this version of Lady Wen as he would have done in the past.

Wei Ying cared deeply for her, after all.

Whatever truths she was about to entrust Mo XuanYu with, Lan Zhan knew the kid could take it.

He hoped as much, at least.

Jiang Cheng came back only for Chinese New Year. Saying he had stayed at XiChen’s since the winter break allowed them to take it easy and figure some stuff out for the following school year.

It hurt to know where he had been all along, but XuanYu braved a smile anyway. He knew how much Jiang Cheng cared for the older man, how much he wanted to save the school from the debt collector. How much he didn’t love XuanYu back.

So he let himself cry one last time before waking up one morning and deciding he had had enough.

He talked with Lan Zhan, asking him to tell him all about Wei WuXian and their love. If XuanYu’s sacrifice had allowed them to be happy as they deserved in the end. If Lan Zhan hated him now, for forcing him away from his loved one, who was currently waiting for him to come back to heaven.

Mo XuanYu knew the couple had sacrificed their chance at reincarnation to allow him to seek a second lifetime for himself. He knew Wei Ying watched over them from up above, waiting for Lan Zhan to secure a new life for the kid.

They talked all day and then well into the night.

By dawn Mo XuanYu had decided what to do.

XuanYu properly met Meng Yao one day of early spring, when flowers weren’t yet brave enough to poke their way out and greet the sun. The man was dressed in black, his hair cut short, a sigarette between his lips as he waited patiently for the kindergarten to open.

It was XuanYu’s duty to open that morning, so he was the one to greet the man.

Upon hearing his voice, Meng Yao immediately recognized him.

“There you are. I was waiting for you.”

“Me?”

“You’re the kid who answered the phone. And the one who helped my subordinate back in winter, right?”

His dimples were so deep, his face so pleasant.

Mo XuanYu remembered him from another lifetime. He remembered how much he had cared for his older brother Jin GuangYao. How hurt he had felt when the other had lied and accused him of harassment just to get rid of him.

But this was a new life and Meng Yao was just a man.

Who happened to have been married with XiChen for a while before turning to a life filled with crime and gang violence.

Wen Qing had told him Meng Yao had initially tried to live far away from his adoptive father Wen RuoHan. All for the sake of marrying XiChen and keep him safe. But XiChen’s mother still had had a debt to pay for the construction of the orphanage, a price too high for her to pay with her poor health and delicate disposition. A debt that XiChen had inherited from her when she had died.

That was why Meng Yao had left him: to go back to his father and ask him to handle the debt himself, supplicating him to overlook such small issue and let him dry XiChen out of every penny and cent instead.

Wen Qing may have learned this only from the gossiping running in her family, with the Wen Clan being as big as it was, but she was pretty sure of what she had told XuanYu. That Meng Yao had simply faked having fallen out of love with XiChen to protect him from his adoptive father and his cruelty. That XiChen still loved him and was waiting for him to fight alongside him instead.

Mo XuanYu knew all of this.

So now he could act and fulfill his mission.

“I want to pay the debt XiChen owes you.”

“You are full of surprises, XuanYu. And how do you plan to do that?”

“I can do many things.”

“You’re very pretty, you can make good money out of it.”

XuanYu considered his words before shaking his head.

“It’s not something I can do.”

“Then what can you do?”

“I’ll solve everything.”

“I’m all ears.”

“But you’ll have to stop making XiChen worry so much.”

“That’s not how business work...”

“Lie to me. Give your word and I’ll... I will solve everything.”

Meng Yao humored him and nodded.

Then and only then, Mo XuanYu took his hat off.

Lan Zhan had watched the entire scene unfold before his eyes without intervening, trusting Mo XuanYu with such an important choice. He took in the sight of the beautiful spiritual light shining brightly on top of XuanYu’s head like a crown.

His soul in full display, its energy so raw it had slowed down time all around them.

Lan Zhan turned around and looked at XiChen, who had just turned a corner and had been walking towards XuanYu to greet him good morning. Frozen in time, his older brother’s face still looked peaceful... simply because he had had no time to notice Meng Yao’s presence quite yet.

Lan Zhan turned once more and saw Jiang WanYin making his way in a rush towards them, surely to protect XuanYu from Meng Yao. When did he arrive? His features trapped in a perpetual frown, scared for the one he truly loved in this lifetime.

Then, Lan Zhan looked up at Mo XuanYu and saw him taking the bottle only half filled with gold... which symbolized his goodwill and generous spirit.

“Will this be enough to grant a wish, Lan Zhan?”

When XuanYu said his name like that he sounded so much like his Wei Ying, full of hope and love.

“It depends on the wish, A-Yu.”

“I reckon it’s not enough for a new reincarnation, eh?”

“It’s enough to save a life... but not yours.”

XuanYu looked crestfallen, but he persevered still.

The bottle transformed into a bag filled with money and XuanYu made his way to XiChen and left it at his feet before smiling up at his mentor and employer.

“I cannot rewrite the past, but maybe I can plan a better future for you.”

Still smiling, XuanYu slowly walked over to Jiang Cheng and said his farewells.

Then he crouched down and took Lan Zhan in his hands, kissing him goodbye on the head affectionately.

“Erase me well, Lan Zhan,” he whispered then.

Before disappearing into thin air.

***

Wei Ying had agreed with him, suggesting the idea himself.

In the end the King of Hell had granted Lan Zhan’s request and offered Mo XuanYu a second chance anyway. Since this new self-sacrifice had been fueled by positive emotions instead of anger and despair, the hell judges had considered the atonement fulfilled and put the kid’s name back on the reincarnation list.

Twenty years had past and many things had changed.

For starters, the kid’s last name wasn’t Mo anymore, but Nie. The boy had, in fact, born into Nie MingJue’s family and had lived overseas in Japan for a while before moving back to Lanling when XuanYu turned twenty. Nie HuaiSang had met him many times during summer vacations and other festivities, visiting his brother and his wife every chance he had gotten to dote on his cute nephew XuanYu.

Nie MingJue had done a remarkable job in protecting him from harm. So, by the time their little family had decided to move close to HuaiSang, XuanYu had become a well adjusted adult with a brilliant future ahead of him.

Nobody remembered him.

Or so Lan Zhan had thought.

Apparently, he had forgotten to wipe Jin Ling’s memories thoroughly. So, when The Nie family had come to greet HuaiSang’s friends YanLi and ZiXuan, A-Ling almost had a stroke out of incredulity and happiness for being reunited with his “A-Yu”. Even if Jin Ling was now older than the pretty-gege from his memories. Even if he had spent years trying to figure out why nobody seemed to remember the weird uncle living next door to his Jiujiu years back.

XiChen and Meng Yao had solved their problems and had started running the school together right after Wen RuoHan sudden and mysterious disappearance. The man had many enemies after all.

A-Yuan had grown up into a fine young man, someone Wei Ying would have certainly been proud of, working with his cousin Wen Ning at the local botanical garden while his friends still studied in university.

Nie HuaiSang had married Qin Su and opened a restaurant with her.

MianMian and Wen Qing had decided to live together and adopt a bunch of dogs just because.

Xiao XingChen and Xue Yang still lived together while Song Lan had found his way back to them after talking it out with the couple.

A-Qing was probably running some sketchy business in social services to protect kids from horrible families.

Lan Zhan was still, unfortunately, a stuffed rabbit. Following XuanYu in his new life in the most unexpected of ways. In the form of the first present the boy’s uncle had gifted him in childhood. If Wei Ying had pulled a string or two from heaven to make that happen, well, Lan Zhan himself was none the wiser. The only thing he knew was that XuanYu had always taken him with him in all his travels even if he didn’t know he could speak. Lan Zhan had preferred not to reveal his nature and let the kid have a normal childhood. Especially since he had no memories of his past as a tenant in Jiang YanLi’s house. Nor of his life as a cultivator.

Wei Ying had agreed they could wait to be reunited again. The both of them wanting to look over XuanYu for a little longer before getting their own chance at reincarnation. They had all eternity to be together again... they could definitely wait a bit more for the kid.

All was well.

Aside from the other person whose mind Lan Zhan had conveniently forgot to wipe clean of any memory of XuanYu.

In his defense, Lan Zhan had tried to make Jiang Cheng forget. But something about XuanYu must have touched him so deeply... that Lan Zhan had not been able to do much about it. The kid’s smiles and clumsy antics would always linger in the back of the other’s mind no matter how much he tried to ignore them.

Coming back from his job at ZiXuan’s firm, exhausted and vulnerable, Jiang Cheng decided to visit his sister the same day Nie MingJue had brought his family there. So he was particularly weak to the sight of a bright, soft XuanYu when YanLi introduced her younger brother to their guests.

To Lan Zhan’s absolute delight, Jiang Cheng immediately bowed down to a scary looking Nie MingJue and asked his son’s hand in marriage.

Yes, grovel to this precious boy and learn your place.

XuanYu only tilted his head at that weird man bowing to his parents and smiled.

His laughter ringing up to the sky, where Wei Ying was still listening.

From where he would have kept watching.

[I worked so hard on this please reblog]

[kobato means “little dove” I thought it was cute since XuanYu is a magpie! + I wanted MXY a chance at life and for once this is a reversal-sacrifice from WWX’s part and I think it’s neat.]

[JC would be 43 or so... which yikes. but this is all I could do. I don’t like huge age gaps but at least everyone is a consenting adult, okay?]

[the thing that started this was like “what if LXC was an only child and LWJ did not reincarnate bc he’s still in the afterlife or something? then the entire thing escalated so...yeah.]

now I will cry for ages. I worked so hard on this good god D:

#mdzs #cql #the untamed #mo dao zu shi #mdzs/au: clamp #mdzs/au: kindergarten #mdzs/au: kobato #mdzs/au: modern #mo xuanyu #jiang cheng #the forbidden crack! untamed prompts #RAREPAIR ALERT #I AM TRASH I WILL SHIP JC WITH A ROCK FOR ALL I CARE #xiyao #tw eating disorders mentioned #wangxian #yucheng #chengyu

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greensconnor · 5 years ago

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i’m asking about your dragon age characters

molly i would KILL for u im ur personal hitman now

anyway i said my city now because the entire bioware writing team sucks shit xoxo and i’m so much smarter than all of them but also fully incapable of having a normal amount of ocs for anything (see: the time i made 20 rwby ocs in less than two weeks) so i have. five worldstates here r some assorted thoughts

uhhh so the worldstates r as follows

eira mahariel (two-handed berserk/champ spec), rhett hawke (two-handed berserk spec), alas lavellan (mage knight enchanter spec), romanced alistair/fenris/dorian respectively

shiv tabris (dual wield duelist/assassin spec), radella “rads” hawke (mage spirit healer spec), kat adaar (two-handed reaver spec), romanced morrigan/isabela/cassandra respectively because im a pc gamer and i think i should be able to date whatever video game woman i like because im infinitely better than cishet men

this world state said yeah i respect mens rights. mens rights to shut the fuck up

twins bronson (sword/shield reaver spec) & bryant cousland (archer ranger spec), carmine hawke (archer assassin spec), syracuse trevelyan (dual wield tempest spec), romanced zevran/anora/josephine/bull. if ur wondering how that works my city now and the warden, hawke and the inquisitor should all meet and so they do because i Said So

riva amell (mage arcane warrior/battlemage spec), graham “gray” hawke (mage force spec), hellathen “hela” lavellan (archer assassin spec); romanced cullen/anders and later blackwall because hawke only likes men who will break his heart. hela doesn’t have a romance because she’s literally 20. who let her lead the inquisition (me it was me). also it should be noted the version of cullen i have in my head only vaguely resembles actual cullen because i write better than dragon age writers ever could and i gave him an Actual Cohesive Narrative and he gets bullied relentlessly for being scrawnier than his mage boyfriend

malien “mal” surana (mage spirit healer/keeper spec), jules hawke (sword/shield reaver spec), ash adaar (mage rift spec), romanced leliana/merrill/krem because i should have been able to kiss krem and its a Crime that i am not allowed to

knight enchanter is a Very op specialization and by Very op i mean it makes a mage with their built-in low constitution stats able to solo the biggest baddest dragon in the game on nightmare mode in under five minutes so like. alas lavellan fist fights dragons for fun send tweet

i think lavellans should be able to hit ppl with bricks for all the shit they endure. thus solas gets pranked by mahariel and alas by which i mean they just tip buckets of water onto him from the rookery

kat might be my only competent inquisitor but she did also try to knock out the right hand of the divine and attempt to gap even tho there’s fucky magic burning up her hand so does she have a brain cell? you decide

also its fantasy land and i do what i want so kat has blue/gold sectoral heterochromia

gray “mage rights” hawke is best friends with fenris which surprises literally everyone. their friendship started because they got into a fist fight and then they were like okay i respect u now. hawke is like hey fenris give me ur sword i have a fun trick to show u [uses his sword as a foci to zap carver in the ass with lightning]

i am Always thinking abt like how cullen could have been one man anti-chantry propaganda machine if he hadn’t so blatantly been shoehorned into every game past origins so anyway bioware forgot about a wholeass moon i can write what i like. [holds up cullen by the scruff of his stupid armor] not only are you bisexual you are also a bottom

i also Hate the whole uwu mage haters get fixed by romancing a mage

unlocked secret dialogue option where my inquisitors verbally cuss out dorian’s dad instead of whatever sympathetic narrative the writers were going for cuz its bullshit.

riva is a showoff and a Menace about being as good as he is because he unabashedly loves being a mage and hes like oooh look at me im sexy i dont need to use my hands to cast magic because i’m just that good ;)) and you know what. hes right.

gray, on the other hand, does Not want to be mage. he wants to be a druffalo farmer and retire in the hinterlands and be left the fuck alone. unfortunately he is gay and has one brain cell and terrible, terrible taste in men. ribbed relentlessly for this by riva (altho does he have room to talk hes been hung up on cullen since he was like 13)

shiv is trans n kieran is the result of doing the dark ritual with her wife and he looks a Lot like shiv (dark skin pointed ears, shock-white hair) and morrigan always just Assumed she dyed it or did something magic with it so seeing their kid come out like that was a WEIRD time for her

leliana almost Murdered by cassandra in worldstate 5 because the warden is Actually There The Whole Time, but its been 10 years, mal’s cut off all her hair and gotten full facial tattoos and she’s like “no one will know its me its fine” and she’s right. she gets away with it. only cullen like, Knows, because he knew her before the blight but he doesnt have a death wish n he like. will Not piss her off

shes dalish by birth n she was stolen from her clan by templars and thus is vehemently anti-circle and anti-chantry in general

uhhh the vallaslin (elf face tattoos) of my 4 dalish characters are:

eira = ghilan’nain (chose em cuz shes rlly interested in the navigation aspect of the goddess)

alas = falon’din (god of the dead n he picked them because he’s Also the god of fortune and alas is like tee hee fun but also he can and will kill u if u fuck with him so yk its fitting)

hela = june (god of the craft bc she likes to Make things but june is also the god who taught the elves 2 hunt and hela is. a hunter.)

mal = elgar’nan (allfather/god of vengeance bc. she is Vengeful. she is Angry. but yk fucking with shem politics and fucking their divine is like. mal may have little a retribution. as a treat.) yes she has the full half-face solid colour tattoo she does NOT fuck around.

bronson and bryant r not genetically identical but they Look similar enough 2 anyone who doesn’t know them well enough 2 play spot the distance. anora and bronson think this is a super fun game to play, especially when nobles realize they’ve swapped out the king but they’re too nervous to say anything

eira mahariel has two hands. one is for holding hands with alistair and the other is for throttling elven gods, apparently. she’s killed one before so solas she’s coming for your bitch ass next. watch urself.

speaking of eira and alistair are married thru dalish tradition and humans don’t recognize it n alistair loves 2 re-propose to her with random things. he’ll just pick up like. a bit of cheese and be like “marry me ;)” and she’s like GASP but whatever will the chantry say!!!! all of their friends r sick of them

“vhenan if you love me bring me a sword” “you think i could do better than a sword made out of space rock?” “:)”

eira is my youngest hero at 18 at the start of her game and kat is my oldest at 32 at the start of her game.

none of my hawkes are under six foot. rhett is the tallest (6′8″) and rads is the shortest (6′2″).

syracuse trevelyan would have been the Perfect inquisitor if he were not a pretty boy himbo and a gay bastard who does Most Things just to spite his parents.

[corypheus pointing at syracuse’s visage in his crystal orb thingo] i want that twink obliterated

i love the companions from older games return thing i truly do so i make it a point for Every companion to return in inquisition so the gang rlly is all here because i am a Slutte for found family

i lie in my keep worldstates because i dont want to choose between hawke and alistair during here lies the abyss but i never make him king and every time i play inquisition and cole has the wicked grace line it makes me Scream. alistair baby im so sorry i did this to you but i didnt actually do this to you

yes this is my everyone lives au but like. all the time. i have never left hawke in the fade and i do not intend to.

fuck whatever nonsense about wardens not being able 2 have kids. by sheer divine power (me) anora and bryant have three daughters; eleanor, sabina & cecelia n both bronson and zevran make Excellent uncles because i think anora deserves good things because i’m tired of bioware being like women bad, actually,

so like most of the time i have the warden & hawke turning up after the move to skyhold n then staying on, with the exception of bryant, carmine & mal. mal is as mentioned previously just There the whole time with her girlfriend. bryant steps in as king of ferelden w/ interests in closing the big hole in the sky spewing demons in2 his kingdom yk. carmine shows up because she wants to help & she wants protection for bethany but she outright says she’d rather die than be inquisitor so cassandra is shit out of luck.

“CHANGE HER MIND VARRIC” “she once doubled down on insisting amaranth was a shade of blue because she didn’t want to admit to being wrong. no one’s changing her mind seeker”

alas is the middle child of eight and is thus very good with children and also bossing around people older than him. 2 of his older siblings come to the inquisition when stuff in wycome has been settled

i left ash with the basic canon background with Some variation (he grew up under the qun and left of his own free will when his magic was discovered n he realized he couldn’t take living as a saarebas

kat on the other hand was raised tal-vashoth and has bounced around basically all over thedas and leads her own merc company when the conclave blows up. she also speaks multiple languages. is there a language she doesn’t speak? probably not

just realized how long this got so im gonna like. stop my general rambling now but lmao yeah theres some basics. waves hands.

#sol.txt #sol.orig #long post #late night followers im SO sorry for this #but also like.#i love them so yall just have 2 cope w/ it #no thoughts head dragon age #peonydarling

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neechees · 5 years ago

Note

Do you have any comfort music youd reccomend? Im kinda down right now and i know youre cool

Aw hun! I’ll give you a few, I’m sorry I kinda answered late! I’m putting the first one batch top of the read more because I’m putting a lot of songs!

Happy sounding songs: Song I like that are just generally very jovial and peppy, and put me in a good mood

Stutter by Marianas Trench

Shut up and Kiss me by Marianas Trench

kito kito by Masakatsu Takagi (instrumental)

September by Earth, Wind, and Fire

The Cave by Mumford and Sons

Shut up and Dance by WALK THE MOON

South Australia by the Kilkennys

The Devil is in the Details by The Chemical Brothers

From now on by Kim min Seung

London Thumakda by Labh Janjua (from “Queen”)

Tukuna Au by Jaedyn Randell (”How far I’ll go” Maori version)

Hopeful Songs: songs for when I a reminder there’s still hope and love in the world

Better Days by Hedley

Fight Song by Rachel Platten

I wanna get better by Bleachers

Dog Days are Over by Florence and the Machine

I’ll be Good by James Young

Stay Alive by Jose Gonzales

Fight by Tanya Tagaq

You got to Run by Buffie St. Marie feat. Tanya Tagaq

This is Me by Kesha

We are Stars by Virginia to Vegas

Hello by Hedley

I’m still standing cover by Taron Egerton

Calming Songs: for when I need to feel calm, they’re soothing songs

Animal Skins (acoustic) by Dry the River

Piano Sonata No.3 in C Major, Op. 2 by Beethoven

Journey to the West by Joe Hisaishi

The Woods by Hollow Coves

Mona Ki Ngi Xica by Bonga

Grandmother Tree & the Feathered Serpent by Deya Dova

Earth Angel by Northern Cree

Arrietty’s song by Meine Meinung

Tulou Tagaloa by Olivia Foia’i

Venting songs: for when I wanna feel what I’m feeling until it doesn’t hurt as much

Down the Line by Jose Gonzales

Somewhere only we know by Keane

Praying by Kesha

Heron blue by Sun Kil Moon

Wild Fire by Marianas Trench

Real Life by The Weekend

Saint Bernard by Lincoln

How I feel by Frank Waln

Back around by Dessert

Silly Songs: because they’re dumb and silly

Not a Moon by Bad Lip Reading

Bushes of Love by Bad Lip Reading

Backin Up song by The Gregory Brothers

Amish Paradise by Weird Al Yankovic

This Globglogabgalab remix

We are Number one remix by The Living Tombston

I hope you feel better soon darling, and that some of these help!

#Anonymous

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e0nian · 6 years ago

Text

What is a Source?

---- As there's actually no word in the human tongue for this species, Source is the term used for lack of an official title. A Source, essentially, is a sentient physical manifestation, a tutelary of a specific concept, these concepts ranging from the more literal (i.e. Source of Nature, Source of Light, Source of Death) to the more obscure (i.e. Source of Time, Source of Prophecy), the latter of which are often referred to as simply Concepts for the purpose of distinction. Generally, a Source is fully unique in appearance, barring the small few that were made to resemble other creatures (as Sariel, the Source of Light, was designed to resemble humans). Often, the more obscure the concept, the more obscure the appearance of the Source.

---- These beings are not physically affected by each others’ abilities-- this, as well as the process of their birth and death, is the only similarity shared between Sources. This is important to note because it means that no Source is bound by time or space; though their sentience is usually only limited to their physical bodies, each Source is capable of existing in whatever time and place their purest forms have existed or will exist. For example, Sariel could alternate between sipping tea in a Viennese café in the 70′s to picking mirrored flowers from a faraway alien planet, trillions of years into Earth’s future, in nearly the same instant-- so long as light exists in those places at the time she visits (don’t be mistaken to think she would need to travel by light to reach those places; if light exists there, she is technically already there).

---- Because only one physical manifestation is necessary for one concept, no alternate versions of a Source exist; one could travel the endless seas of universes and timelines and find only one version of each Source (barring each Source’s successors and predecessors, who share the same body but exist in different mindsets. More on that in the Birth/Death section). It’s worthy of note, though, that there is likely no single being alive that knows just how many Sources exist.

---- Sources are capable of sharing small bits of their power, and by extension their responsibility, with other beings to serve as acolytes. This phenomenon is uncommon, though there are two Sources notorious for having done so: the Source of Time (whose acolytes are given the title of ‘Aeon’) and the more well known Source of Death (whose acolytes are given the title of ‘Reaper’).

How are they born? How do they die?

---- Every few eons, a successor will be created upon the Source’s request, so that one day they might relinquish the responsibilities and burdens that come with their existence. The Source in question will design the outline of their successor’s first several years to their tastes and, with the guidance of the Source of Life-- giver of sentience to all other Sources-- the two will construct a temporary world for the successor to live until the day they ascend into their abilities (whatever chosen number of years into their future that may be). On the day the new world is complete, the former Source’s soul will move on to the next, and a new life will develop in the newly youthful body of the predecessor-- who, in truth, is simply a memory-less version of the former.

---- Once a Source ascends into their abilities at the chosen age, the world they were 'born' into is destroyed, like the shell of an egg that breaks to release an infant bird. All of the relationships they would have known would now be gone as their lives are made anew, their slates wiped clean, save for what they've learned in those first several years. A Source will not age from this point on.

[ Adriel, Sariel, and Darius, the successors of Nature, Light, and Void (respectively), were purposely born into the same world, a world in the reflection of Earth, in the hopes that they would understand humanity and humility before ascending. They were the first of all Sources to share a world with another, at the behest of their predecessors. These are also the only Sources that are human-like in appearance. ]

It should be noted that a Source’s death does not fall to the responsibility of the Source of Death, nor to the Source in question. In fact, it’s only when the Source of Life gives consent to perform this ritual that one is given the option of their pseudo-death. This is because it’s common for a newly-ascended concept to reject their responsibilities and, when exposed to such naked loneliness as a Source’s life and unending exposure to life’s harsh realities, inescapable through different universes and timelines, it’s not uncommon for one to wish for death as an appeal for peace. The conditions given by Source of Life for consent to death are: 1.) you must live a given number of fulfilling millennia, long enough to fully appreciate the most splendid of goods and the most wretched of evils, and 2.) you must feel satisfied with, and have no desire to take your own life.

FAQ / TL;DR:

Can my muse kill Sariel or Darius? Technically, yes. Their bodies die easily enough, and neither is especially skilled in combat, but so long as their natural forms exist (photons in Sariel’s case, void in Darius’s) in some universe whether past or present, they will always come back. Only by stripping their sentience, (a power wielded by the Source of Death, incidentally) to the degree needed to do this, can they be killed in the truest sense.

Do I need to create an AU for my character to interact with Sariel or Darius? Nope. As one Source isn’t bound by another’s powers, they aren’t bound by Time or Space, either; it’s not out of the question for one of the two to be able to visit your character’s world, so long as Light and Void exist there (they can’t, however, travel to worlds that aren’t tangible, such as ones built on memories. They also can’t sleep, and therefore can’t dream, so they’re unable to visit dream worlds without some kind of loophole).

How old are they in the main verse? Sariel had spent more time travelling space than Darius, and as such has racked up more years than the other muses (apart from Gabriel). She’s around 8 centuries old in the main verse, give or take a few decades. Darius, having spent most of his life in one space and timeline, has only been around about 250-300 years since his ascension.

Can they heal quickly? Yes; when damage is done to them, their bodies naturally revert back to the form they’d taken at the time of their ascension (it’s because of this Sariel is unable to grow her hair, and Darius is unable to cut his own). Their regeneration rate generally isn’t so great that it would do much good in a fast-paced battle. However, the more they’re hurt, the more rapid their rate of healing will become over time. For example, a war-savvy Source who’d spent many centuries in battle would probably have a healing rate high enough that one could hardly have time to see the damage dealt when inflicted, whereas a more mundane or antisocial Source would have a healing rate only moderately more impressive than a human’s.

Can they fight? Neither Sariel nor Darius is especially adept at fighting in the main verse. Darius knows self-defense, and Sariel had once spent many centuries at war-- though she was primarily used as a strategist. So their greatest weapons would be their natural abilities, which both are reluctant to use against others. Just try not to fight them, please. They really don’t want to be dealing with that.

Can my muse get pregnant by/impregnate a Source? Sources can not procreate, so no. It’s against the Source of Life’s wishes for the power of a Source to be shared in any way barring the small amount given when deigning an acolyte, so producing offspring is out of the question.

Sariel and Adriel don’t look exactly human. Do they travel to human worlds looking like that? For Sariel, not always. Being the tutelary of Light, she can manipulate the color of her eyes and hair with ease, and often does in worlds where her natural colors would call too much attention to her. She most often goes for blonde hair and green eyes.

As for Adriel, he is marginally taller than the average human, the aquamarine of his eyes just a little too deep-- too bright-- his skin almost shimmery in the sun, with pointed ears and a face that looks maybe a little too sharp, but... well, honestly, there isn’t much he can do about that. He’s come to accept that he'll always look a little different. So yes, he’ll straight up travel Earth in all his mud-elf glory.

FINAL NOTE. Why should I feel comfortable presenting my muse to such an OP character?

This is something I want us to be very upfront with each other about. Sariel and Darius are both reluctant to use their abilities in front of others, so in general interactions, they won’t feel much different from your average human (if a bit weird and aged in the eyes). However, if their abilities make you uncomfortable, please let me know and I’ll make sure they don’t use them around your muse!

Please keep in mind that Sariel and Darius can’t actually do much besides what’s related to their concept, and even then, your muse isn’t likely to see much of that (unless they ask or the situation demands it, but even then, they’ll be frugal). It sounds like a lot, but rather than seeing their concept as a power or ability, I often think of it as the truer form of the Source. It gives a sense that yes, these characters are powerful, but at the same time, they’re also simple. They’re not Gods who rule over things or people-- they’re not ancient sorcerers with accumulating abilities-- they’re just beings with a simple and true connection to existence, a larger... mass, I suppose... and longer lifespan than most.

#story;#long post;#i'll try to add more to the faq in time #but in the meantime it would help me a whole bunch if y'all could send in some questions you might have !#things that aren't clear #or things you don't understand #or something that seems important that i didn't mention!#story

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idiopath-fic-smile · 7 years ago

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have you ever put any thought into what's going on with the ABC gang in WAR a decade on? like, a lot of high school aus that use homophobia as a plot point are deliberately set in the 70s or the 80s, so it gets a little depressing because they'll have to wait decades for things to really get better - but you set WAR in 2006, which is *so cool* because in less than 10 years it goes from, well, 2006, to obergefell v. hodges.

this question is a bit complicated by the fact that i’m still working on adapting WAR into a novel, and the characters are a little different (i combined a lot of people, and also made most of them female) so this is specifically for the Les Mis fanfic version.

also, this is more just my overall headcanon for the epilogue of WAR. take it with a grain of salt, none of this is True Canon, death of the author, etc

-it is my cherished secret headcanon that the members of the ABC gradually realize (in some cases, YEARS later) that actually none of them were straight, cis, and allo, with the possible exception of combeferre.

ex) high school jehan ID’s as gay, but once they’re in the place to have more vocabulary for it, they come out as trans, nonbinary but femme-leaning (while continuing to be mostly into dudes). i think that eponine is bi (and also realizes pretty late that she’s nonbinary.) joly and bossuet are both bi. cosette is a lesbian. marius is ace. (their relationship worked in part because neither ever pressured the other, for anything. it was kind of more like playing house.) bahorel ID’s as straight for the longest time, but there’s a couple of male celebrities he jokes about as his “exceptions” until he realizes one day, hmm not really a joke. courfeyrac in high school considers himself gay, but after jehan comes out, realizes in retrospect he doesn’t fall perfectly on one end of the kinsey scale, either.

-molly keeps the ABC alive once the others graduate. gavroche joins when he becomes a freshman, and by his senior year, the club is double its original size. (he jokes it’s because he made LGBTQ rights cool, but really, a tide is turning.)

-enjolras stays politically active and does a lot of nonprofit and organizing work all throughout college. in ‘08, he joins one of those groups that goes door to door registering voters (so does jehan, who attends the same university). enjolras’s experiences with other people, people NOT from affluent suburbs, open his eyes in a good way and make him a little less intense about his own point of view.

-most of the ABC kids are swept up in the excitement of the first obama campaign. combeferre actually gets emotional, talking about it; he writes some very eloquent op-eds in the school paper about what obama means to him, and how fucked-up all the racist scrutiny really is. joly, musichetta, and bossuet phone bank. eponine starts taking photos at rallies, one of which becomes kind of well-known and helps launch her interest in pursuing photography for real. courfeyrac organizes theatrical productions to raise money for the campaign, which are a weird and wild success. bahorel is a minor social media star, and he leverages his dubious fame to try to help get out the young people vote.

-(eponine is gavroche’s legal guardian, and she balances work with community college. she was honestly more of a hillary girl, but obama wins her over eventually.)

-grantaire and enjolras stayed together post-high school, and after a year of attending a nearby community college, grantaire has the grades to transfer to the same university as enjolras.

grantire spends most of his early college years bouncing from one major to another; he likes art but more as a release than as an area of academic focus. like, getting a bad grade on an art project is fucking devastating. they start fighting a lot that first september in the same school because enjolras is so sure of his path and grantaire feels guilty and defensive for not knowing where to go with his life. it makes grantaire feel like a worthless burnout again (which is frustrating because he thought he’d WORKED THROUGH IT, dammit), but he also resents enjolras’s attempts to help him, which eventually makes enjolras pull away in hurt, which terrifies grantaire so much that he pulls away too, and they break up very early sophomore year of college.

-the night obama wins the election in ‘08, even despite the blow of prop 8 passing, all the old ABC members are calling each other, yelling into their phones with delight. combeferre is literally crying.enjolras is jubilant, but grantaire, who had never seriously thought that obama had a chance, honestly feels like he’s high again.

enjolras and grantaire wind up at the same celebratory party and, under the influence of all that victory, they hook up. holy shit have they missed each other. they briefly get back together, but it’s not like it was in high school, before they knew quite how badly they could hurt each other. when enjolras does study abroad for a semester, they break up again, amicably, rather than do the long distance thing. they drift apart even when he gets back. it’s nobody’s fault.

-jehan switches to they/them pronouns and puts out a chapbook of poetry about feeling connected to the words of dead authors. bahorel becomes a college radio DJ, and is so good, his show gets picked up by local stations and he eventually starts working as the “bad boy of NPR”. courfeyrac realizes that more than acting, his real joy is stage managing. musichetta goes into business, advocating for greater diversity.

-grantaire winds up at the last minute, majoring in psychology. studying this stuff in an actual class makes him realize just how dysfunctional his family dynamics have really been, and how little of it had to do with him. it’s both freeing and terrifying. he makes friends in his advanced psych courses (mostly idealistic young feminist women), and dates one for a while. ironically, she’s also bi. he has more of a chance to unpack all the stigma he’s been carrying around for years, how frustrating it was to be seen as “the gay kid” in high school when that wasn’t really true.

-combeferre decides to get dreadlocks after graduating undergrad and becomes “that hot World Lit TA with the dreadlocks”

-grantaire starts kind of considering going into counseling. the members of the ABC he’s still in touch with keep urging him to write Mr. Myriel a letter, and grantaire keeps dragging his feet, but one night he’s in town to visit Eponine, and runs into Mr. Myriel at the grocery store, and basically word-vomits all this gratitude, and the two become penpals. Mr. Myriel eventually writes one of the recommendation letters that gets grantaire into a sociology master’s program.

-combeferre gets fed up with the ivory tower of academia and joins a startup that teaches coding to kids, particularly girls in low-income areas. (He’d long been interested in coding, but more as a fun side hobby.)

-grantaire moves to the city (uh, let’s say chicago) to get his master’s, where he also reconnects with bossuet, who by then is a hippie engineer and just a solid, low-stress friend to have. they become super close in a platonic bros way, and grantaire may actually be the one to say, “oh btw, did you have a crush on joly, or did you guys both just like musichetta?” (answer: YES and YES). grantaire rents a bedroom in bossuet’s apartment (bossuet has more space than anticipated because he just had a rough breakup) and in his starving student days, grantaire pays some of his rent to bossuet by cooking him dinner and stuff. in this time, grantaire actually learns how to cook, beyond just fucking up the occasional frozen pizza.

-kind of to his surprise, grantaire winds up really enjoying counseling (or at least, finding it rewarding; talking to people with such intense problems be rough) and particularly working with youths. they never expect his sense of humor, which turns out to be a pretty useful tool in connecting with them.

-bossuet sometimes, long-distance, donates his time to combeferre’s coding project. grantaire hears through bossuet, through combeferre, that enjolras is moving to chicago for law school.

-at first, grantaire and enjolras are awkward around each other, but the weird thing is, their positions are kind of reversed because grantaire by now feels pretty confident in his role as a counselor, and is doing good work, while enjolras is under a ton of stress in law school and still not always 100% sure it’s the right move. grantaire is living alone by now, and he misses hanging with bossuet (who is in a complex poly triad now, and has a lot less free time) (part of me feels it’d be way too big of a coincidence if it’s joly and musichetta, part of me yearns for it, so you decide for yourself i suppose). so grantaire starts coming over to cook dinner at enjolras’s apartment as enjolras studies. this is partly because grantaire’s own kitchen in his studio is really insufficient, but mostly an excuse for them to hang out in a low-cost, low-pressure way. they eat and watch Parks and Rec.

-in theory this is a great system, and in practice it’s the same kind of agonizing romantic tension from high school. enjolras is really into this more confident, happier, more balanced grantaire. grantaire appreciates that enjolras has gotten a little less overbearing, a little lighter even as he’s also so clearly fraying at the seams. grantaire just wants to, like, give him a massage, but whoa boundaries. they sit on the same couch and SOMETIMES THEIR ARMS BRUSH.

-enjolras decides first that he wants to get back together, that they’ve grown enough in the time they were apart that they could build something healthy and balanced now. he’s not totally sure how to make his case to grantaire, and he feels a little weird being the less stable one of the pair.

-enjolras decides that he’s gonna make grantaire dinner. grantaire doesn’t really get why; enjolras generally does the dishes so it’s not like anything’s really owed here??? enjolras slips into way overachiever mode and prepares like a whole three-course spread of painstakingly researched recipes. grantaire is VERY confused. “I thought I was hot shit, dude, where did you learn to cook like this?” enjolras has to shamefacedly confess he taught it to himself for this night. “Damn, are you proposing or something?” grantaire blurts in an ill-considered joke, and enjolras’s ears turn red. they get together again. it’s really good this time.

-in 2013, when the supreme court rules that gay marriage is legal in all 50 states, enjolras actually finds out because grantaire texts him the minute the news breaks with simply, “Holy fuck, you were right all along!!!!!” and then some hearts.

-they’re married a year later. one of their wedding photos is them kissing, both raising a middle finger to the imagined haters, like “bring it on, assholes” you’d think this would’ve been grantaire’s idea, but nope, enjolras. it’s framed over their mantle.

-by november 2016, enjolras is a lawyer for the ACLU, and grantaire is a counselor at an organization that primarily works with LGBTQA youth. after the election, enjolras doesn’t get out of bed all day. then he’s a whirlwind of activity. trump-era enjolras is a hybrid of the wisdom and confidence of obama-era enjolras, and the “fuck these motherfuckers” pinpoint focused ferocity of bush jr-era enjolras. grantaire’s work is frequently draining as hell, but he’s drawing again (making a webcomic with joly, actually), and they’re getting by.

-sometimes, at low moments, they remember how it felt at their wedding reception, when bahorel cued up Ted Leo’s “Shake the Sheets” and all those friends and loved ones danced their brains out (enjolras’s parents have some MOVES as it turns out), and grantaire got super choked up, and then enjolras leaned over while they were dancing and whispered in his ear, “Probably better that he didn’t go with our prom song,” (which, as you’ll remember, is Fifty Cent’s “Candy Shop”) and they both burst out laughing in the middle of the dance floor. If they survived high school, they can survive anything.

-bossuet, grantaire, joly, eponine, musichetta and sometimes enjolras have a long-distance D&D game wherein a ragtag crew of outcasts battles the odds as they attempt to take down an evil totalitarian kingdom. (joly’s already got notes for the graphic novel version.)

#again: this is all DEEPLY UNOFFICIAL #off the cuff thoughts #Anonymous

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wordcubed · 7 years ago

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Unpublished WIP List Game

Tagged by @fineillsignup!

1. An Even More Different World — My current main fic, A Different World, is so sprawling and ambitious, and has been revised so much while writing, that I have a bunch of little scenes that’re fine, but just don’t work with the direction I ended up going. I’d like to clean them up and post them. Maybe.

Sample:

Nagato who commanded Yahiko's body as the Deva Path. Itachi with Shisui's eyes. And himself, with the eye he had once given to Kakashi.

Obito was starting to feel uncomfortable, which meant one thing: it was time to say something stupid.

"Is there anyone here who hasn't harvested their best friend's corpse?" he asked.

(Another example: In earlier revisions, Kakashi ended up working in admin—specifically, as a strategic advisor to the Hokage—after giving his sharingan back to Obito. This idea developed into Kakashi’s mother working in admin in the published fic, but I still have an entire scene written for this storyline.)

2. The Philosophes — What if Naruto isn’t weird, and all ninjas fought with Talking no Jutsu? All “battles” would be depicted entirely via dialogue and metaphor. Laying out their motivations and justifications for what they do and believe becomes the entire point of fighting. (Despite the fancy title, it’s less like formal debate and more like a particularly intense and loud personal argument.)

The concept alone is the most pretentious Naruto fic ever.

Featuring: Messiah!Naruto preaching universal love in world of hatred and suffering; Objectivist!Orochimaru; failed messiah Obito who’s tried the power of love, and knows it can’t change the world.

Sample:

“We must love one another or die,” Naruto said.

“True,” said Obito. “But we don’t love one another. And we’re dying.”

3. As We Lay Dying — A series of depressing one-shots exploring various characters’ reasoning behind all the shit they did. I have one-and-a-half chapters written for this one so far.

Sample:

Itachi knows the value of every life. War was the arbitrage of the priceless, and he would attenuate the cost.

4. Samsara Wheel — The world is set. Rin always dies, Kakashi always lives, Obito always breaks. Until Rin lives, just once. It's all she needs. Rin will tear down the wheel of fate itself to save her team.

Like A Different World, this is way too ambitious. Featuring: massively OP tailed-beast-sage-mode Rin in pursuit of whoever keeps destroying every AU she discovers; multiple versions of Kakashi (the traumatized canon!Kakashi, a traumatized TeenagedHokage!Kakashi who still somehow fails to ever save anyone he loves); and multiple versions of Obito (Hokage!Obito, and of course, Evil!Obito who’s destroying universes in his search for the “perfect” version of his team).

I have only a couple hundred words of this written. (The original inspiration for this fic was “Time Braid, minus all the gross parts, and for Team Minato”.)

5. Dark Naruto — A deconstruction of all the ~Dark Naruto~ fics floating around. Unfortunately, I can’t decide if it’ll be completely straightforward (letting Naruto’s cruel, counterproductive, foolish actions speak for themselves) or if it’ll mostly be a comedy. I’ve written some for both!

Featuring: AU Sasuke, seeing how awful Naruto is, decides he doesn’t want to be anything like that—even if it means not avenging his clan. I hope you like the idea of awkward good-guy Sasuke!

Sample:

“Congratulations Naruto!” announced Kakashi. “You’ve failed.”

“What?!” yelled Naruto indignantly. (He was always indignant because other people were always idiots.) “You said 'be ready to kill'! And I totally was! You’re a stupid teacher, just like all the others! I’m better than either of those two losers,” he said, jabbing a finger at Sakura and Sasuke.

Sasuke was hunched over bleeding while Sakura frantically applied the first aid she’d learned in academy.

“Double failed,” said Kakashi.

Naruto screamed and charged at him. Naruto wasn’t sure what happened, but he somehow ended up hanging by his leg, paralyzed by a slight current running from Kakashi’s fingers.

“Triple failed,” said Kakashi.

Naruto blinked and he was still standing, as if he’d never charged at Kakashi. Illusion. “Take me seriously!” Naruto demanded, throwing a kunai at his shitty-ass teacher.

The kunai was caught and thrown back at his feet. Kakashi was so fast that Naruto didn’t even realize this until he tripped over the kunai now in front of his foot.

“No,” said Kakashi. “You’re an asshole.”

“I’m a realist!” yelled Naruto. “I make the hard choices others don’t!”

“Quadruple failed,” said Kakashi. “Violence is a tool—one of many in a ninja’s arsenal. And it’s certainly not a tool you turn on your own comrades.”

Feel free to let me know if any of these strike your fancy. I still don’t know which one I’ll focus on once I’m done with A Different World.

I’m going to tag @endoplasmicpanda (I know you’ve got a ton of them, but I wanna see how long the list is), @athanatosora, and @justenzhe

#my writing #ask memes #writing #fanfiction #A Different World #fineillsignup #endoplasmicpanda #athanatosora #justenzhe #actual blog post #OPs #effortpost #Obito Uchiha #Rin Nohara

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sorcieresque · 7 years ago

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12, 13, 14, 18, 19

What have you found to be most difficult about creating art for your OC (any form of art: writing, drawing, edits, etc.)?

oh god i commiserate with casper on this one cause daisy is supposed to be super witty and super sharp, which i never feel like i live up to. smart and witty characters are really only as smart as witty as the person writing them and i know this is the wrong question to say this but like her i push myself really hard and rarely give myself enough credit so no matter how i write daisy’s dialogue i always feel like it could have been better, funnier, more concise, more poetic, and just more of it, cause she, like nick, never fucking shuts up.

most of the time though, when i go back and read old stuff i realize that it actually was pretty good (if i do say so myself) so i know a lot of the time my impression of her dialogue being lackluster has more to do with her/my impossible expectations for my own abilities… daisy’s only as hard on herself as i am hard on myself writing her. its an oroburos of perfectionism

re: drawing her, the fact that i choose a real life face-claim so i can never quite get her face right without references. her eyes are so far apart you guys

s o f a r a p a r t

How far past the canon events that take place in their world have you extended their story, if at all?

in ye olde h*rry p*tter au, she became somewhat of a (non racist lol) second coming of voldemort in the pursuit of power, glory and recognition, because i’ve come to terms with her being a bit of a mary sue and also because it was the logical conclusion of her character in that au, a relentless pursuit of something that was never quite enough for her own personal standards which made her aimless and wrathful. there was a lot less genocide lol for obvious reasons, but she did murder a bunch of people who challenged her and lighted the match that eventually led to the human world knowing about the wizarding world. what a way to go down in history. through this all she let go of nick because she saw her emotional attachment to him as a weakness, but when it came between proving herself and killing him she ended up saving his life instead at the cost of all of her power and took out her following in the processes. i know technically you can’t bring people back to life in the HP universe but again 1) mary sue, and 2) it really showed the size and scope of her power and the magnitude of her sacrifice, and i really loved the idea of adding onto the h*rry p*tter themes of love and that love is the most powerful force, but also that love washes away sins, that even when you’ve done horrible things you’re still worthy of love and love can save you.

after she saves nick though she goes to azkaban for 15 years and then she’s in house arrest i think for another 10, because the magic jury goes soft on her given that she no longer has any power, the magical media was an absolute sucker for that kind of love story, and also because the magical word is stupid and i didnt want her to spend the rest of her life in jail. she spends most of those 25 years trying to make amends with nick, who eventually forgives her. she also never quite adapts properly to living without magic

after that she just travels the world with nick and writes and writes and writes, including thousands of stories but most importantly an incredibly popular autobiography

SORRY THAT GOT SO LONG

i have a vague idea of what i want her to do in WSC but like, daisy is greater than life, she’s a historical figure, a religious icon, a myth and a messiah, the pursuit of worldwide recognition and power is SUCH a huge part of her that it’s going to feel so weird and… incomplete, if she doesn’t at least attempt some kind of massive, universal-stakes type of feat in this universe

i actually don’t want to give too many details because of spoilers, but my number one priority right now is giving her a purpose so she’s not so aimless, and that purpose is figuring out where she’s from and who she really is. disney pixar much? more likely than you think. and also hopefully pushing her towards chaotic neutral, or even, gasp, good? (unlikely).

If you had to narrow it down to 2 things that you MUST keep in mind while working with your OC, what would those things be?

i’m having a hard time with this one for some reason but i’m going to forego speech patterns and say that

1) up until WSC daisy’s life had been an exercise in how much it would actually suck to be OP in a world where no one quite lives up to your level (she sees nick as an equal in terms of wits and depth and humanity, but it had always been an understanding between them that she had power and he didn’t. not in a threatening way, of course, just as something that is), so she is always bored and that boredom makes her difficult and petty and annoying and cruel and dissatisfied and self-destructive. therefore, coming to WSC has done wonders for her personality (lmao) because she’s finally among people who could rise up to her level, because everyone’s as weird as she’s always been and she isn’t alone, and most importantly because now she’s rarely bored. it’s actually quite hard to make her hate your kid because her fascination is always gonna triumph over her momentary dislike or annoyance, and she’s always a tiny bit in a manic state when she interacts with your kids (see: aud, reagan, moire, gabe) because they’re just so fucking interesting

2) layers. like an onion. there’s so many layers. she’s so fucking convoluted. i’ve talked about this before here and this is already so long so i don’t wanna get into it, but the crux of the idea is that there’s always more daisy the deeper you dig, and most of the time she’s trying to make herself as mythical and tortuously complex as she can make herself be because she’s both trying to protect the soft parts of her where people can hurt her, and because she’s begging people to see through her bullshit and reach those parts, anyway.

What is the most recent thing you’ve discovered about your OC?

i actually haven’t been writing her a lot lately cause my spoons are low, but the most recent thing that comes to mind is how much more into clea (shout out!) she is than i originally thought/intended lmao. it’s a weird combo of being desperate for friendship and connections, and also never having been around girl-aligned people she isn’t related to and therefore having this idealized version of hanging out with her ~girlfriends~ which involves a lot of lesbianism like scantily clad sleepovers and kissing each other to practice for “””boys.””

and of course there’s a more sincere layer of just being constantly fascinated and confused by how different clea is from her and trying to parse that out. clea and daisy balance each other our so well and i think they allow each other to be more like the way they want to be but are too embarrassed to say out loud. clea definitely lets daisy be more of the teenager that daisy is too proud to let herself be, so even when she acts prim and prissy and greater-than-life around clea, they still do a wonderful job of keeping her grounded. also daisy is hopelessly attracted to the whole 4d thing because she’s always been the only person around who’s not quite right, and there’s a lot of intimacy in that recognition, a weird convoluted self-love in seeing and celebrating in someone else what you’ve always struggled with yourself

What is your favorite fact about your OC?

just like w/ misha, don’t quote me on this because i love her! so much! so it’s impossible to pick just one but i just love… all her imperfections, not to be a massive sap (girl ur amazing… just the way you are…) but i love the things that make her weird and random and vulnerable and human, i like that she craves connections but has no fucking clue how to make friends, i love her weird obsession with unicorns, i love how convoluted her vent is because she thinks too fast to write things down coherently, i love writing her when her magic fucks up or when she’s so upset she cries or being awkward because there’s cute people around her or being comfortable enough to make silly jokes and just in general i love when she’s uncool and clumsy and a teenager. i’m gay!

#a-thousand-dreadful-things

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todokori-kun · 7 years ago

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(remember how I kept mentioning that my computer has been weird?

It finally just broke down and I feel like I’ll have to wait a couple of days for it to be ok again…currently using dad’s computer that he never uses, but since the keyboard on this one is a bit wonky there may be more typos than I usually make. Sorry OTL)

It’s quite the heartwarming moment. Look at how happy Draco looks

She was PUNCHING her stomach??? Idk how I missed that when I was reading the chapter, gotta go reread it now…but why, Touka. Why would you do that.

I’d much prefer an Uta/Touka child tho. Kaneki's kid might not be able to escape being involved in a tragedy, but any child of Uta’s is destined to be the one writing that tragedy. At least they’d be safe(ish).

Ugh I’m imagining Eto passing on the title of OEK to the Touken kid as she’s dying like

“If I say goodbye, this world will learn to move on. Our legacy outlives me when I’m gone…”

Ok, but wait. What if. Uncle Hide meets Eto and the child at the airport and drives them to their new home, where a tall man with a serious face, white hair and a pink flower-patterned shirt is waiting for them…

“Who’s that, Auntie Eto?”

“That’s your grandfather, sweetheart.”

(No idea whether I should smile or sob over those Hide gifs)

My sister is the girl who claims that she’s the queen of Korea.

��Sweetheart, Korea already has a president.”

“Then I’m the queen of England.”

“You’re not from England though…”

“I can speak English!”

(five year old logic. This is an actual conversation we had once. She’s also read a bit of Black Butler’s more kid-friendly arcs with me (I’ve altered canon to make her believe that Sebastian is like Ciel’s fairy godfather or something lol)…and is convinced that whenever those pictures of Sebastian pulling off his glove with his teeth pop up he’s actually eating his glove.)

Well, as you can probably tell I’m still a masochist/sadist when it comes to characters and stories XD

And since I sent Naomi and Louisa, I hope you liked them! :) Louisa’s still in development so there might have been too little info, sorry about that ^^;;

Yeah, you’re right, it’s pretty op. However, I was actually trying to make her a bit op, if that makes sense? I thought it might be good to make her naturally a super powerful ghoul so that it would really show how much she’s holding herself back.

(You might have noticed that I ended up scrapping the kakuja anyway though ^^;; Naomi and Tatsuo are both old OCs I decided to remake and I couldn’t remember the backstory behind how she got her it. I didn’t really want to make a new explanation so yeah, no kakuja XD)

Honestly, my personal opinion on OCs is that being super powerful is fine as long as you can have it make sense (example: if you have an AoT OC making them a really strong soldier is fine, especially if they’re a new member of the MP or a Survey Corps veteran. However, you cannot make them as strong as/stronger than Levi and Mikasa unless they are a dead member of the Ackerman clan, and having them on the same level as the Titan trio is also pushing it unless they were also trained to be warriors/potential titan shifters). Angst is fine too as long as it fits (dead parents and a violent childhood spent alone on the streets is the average backstory for a ghoul in the TG universe, but not for a skater from YoI) and you know how to pull it off. I mean, Kaneki’s story is basically 99.9% tragedy but Ishida nailed it. I think it depends on the writer’s skill level and understanding of the character.

And I definitely did not have the required skill level/understanding when I created that Catwoman OC lol

It seems we’ve both improved a lot since those dark times though, so that’s great! :D (still, sometimes I’m not quite sure if I’m doing it right haha…but from what you’ve shown me you’re being a queen again. How do you do it. Please teach me your ways).

I can relate to that…I make OCs just because I like developing them. The only ones who ever actually get used are the characters for my original stories (like Louisa) ^^;;

Well, I did imagine some of his role in TG canon and I planned for him to die in Re…probably because of Naomi, because he has a very strong sense of self-preservation until his baby sister gets involved.

It is a perfect gif. And yes, that’s usually what happens when I try to explain my fandoms to my parents/acquaintances. (Aot is especially awkward because in the Korean version titans are just called ‘giants’, and whenever I talk about it with other people not in the fandom I can just FEEL that they’re imagining fully-dressed fairytale giants like the one in Jack and the Beanstalk lol)

You’ll probably have to use it again soon because I’m working on that Kaneki/reader Heathers AU ;)

Btw, Shuu/Kaneki song list that I just thought of (you probably know a lot of the songs on here too, but I just felt this weird need to show it to you. It’s mostly from Shuu’s POV):

Part 1

Blank Space- Taylor Swift

Irresistible- Fall Out Boy

Kiss with a Fist- Florence + The Machine

Fire meet Gasoline- Sia

Love the way you lie- Skylar Grey

I don’t wanna live forever- ZAYN & Taylor Swift

Part 2:

Dark Paradise- Lana Del Rey

Ultraviolence- Lana Del Rey

Jet pack blues- Fall Out Boy

Breath of Life- Florence + The Machine

Colors- Halsey

Before I say anything. THE NEW BLACK BUTLER CHAPTER IS OUT I AM DECEASED. IT HAPPENED HOLY SHIT IT HAPPENED I WANNA SCREAM AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Okay enough yelling. But damn, I am McFricking emotional right now, because damn, it was expected but unexpected and holy shit I can not calm myself down because w h a t t h e h e l l Idk if you’ve read it (sorry if you didn’t, this probably doesn’t make any sense ^^;;) I just. Wow. woow. I wanna put the panels here, but if I do, it’s a spoiler and I don’t wanna spoil it for you. When you do read it, please come scream with me.

Aw, that’s a shame :/ Hopefully it gets fixed soon!

The joy on his face is unmistakeable. Just look at it

No, no, I’m not sure if she was punching it, I just said that it’d be bad if she did punch it, since she had punched her stomach in the anime when her friend delivered that food. Also, in the school’s bathroom stall.

Uta/Touka child would be the ultimate troll. Damn, now I’m wishing it’s their child as well :P

That would be sad, but completely honestly, Eto’s death wouldn’t phase me all that much.

And now you’ve melted my heart to the end. Congrats on not breaking it for once :)))

I like your sis hahah Give her the newest chapter of BB and we’ll see how she reacts *sadistic grinning* Bassy eating his gloves certainly is an interesting thought, though.

I like both of them ^^ I definitely want to hear more about Louisa, though

It seems we have different views on OCs here ^^;; Honestly, op characters haven’t been my favourite after I finished my phase of making them hahaha How I see it, having an all powerful characters erases a lot of great opportunities for character development and sometimes even makes the plot pointless, since they could solve it at any time, by themselves. Not to mention it can make them very unoriginal. This is especially present in my views of AoT OCs. Most of them are either Titan Shifters (which is also canonically impossible considering the recent chapters, unless you add a new titan type (also pushing it)) or as strong as/stronger than Levi, which makes them all bland and hard to distinguish between. Why not make a character strong in their own way? Instead of being an expert with blades (just like Levi), why not have them be someone extremely skilled with 3DMG, so they can serve as distraction for titans until others finish it off? Sure, that doesn’t mean the character will have a ton of solo kills (which is something OC creators seem to value a lot), but it still makes them important to the team. Also, one of my biggest problems with those OCs: they all join the Survey Corps (despite being in top 10 (also pretty much a requirement for OCs)) and are extremely brave and yadayadayada Let’s be honest, if we were in that world and managed to get top 10, chances are we’d join the MP. Or at least the Garrison.

As for angst, I’m fine with an angsty backstory, as long as it doesn’t go too far. Sure, kill the parents and have them wander on the streets, but for fucks sake, if you do that, there’s no reason for the character to be molested, experimented on by a cult, have a best friend who dies purely for the plot and then make the see the undead or something, so they are more Edgy™

Whoops, that turned out quite long ^^;;; This is just my personal opinion, though.

Well, when making my newer OCs, I try to focus on character flaws. What makes them human? What would break them? Why do they have powers, yet aren’t able to defeat everything with a single kick (ONE PUUUUNCH)? I guess making 'flawless’ characters in the past made me take the opposite approach today :p

Well, Titans do look ridiculous. I mean,

Not fairy tale material, but enough for the whole fandom to make fun of them.

Oh my, am I going to get my feelings destroyed again?

Actually, I don’t know a few of the songs ^^;;; I’ll go listen to them now ^^

#evans #submission

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courage-a-word-of-justice · 8 years ago

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Classicaloid 13 | Blue Exorcist: Kyoto Saga 1 | Masamune-kun’s Revenge 1 | Erased 2 - 5

My streaming site says this show is a reverse harem, and I laugh at it every time I see it.

Trout…? *LOLs, but…*

Well, that’s a piece of transformative fiction I wouldn’t like to write. (In case you don’t know it by my love of magical girls, I love transformations.)

“That bum. Is he planning to eat me?” – Never has a line about a man transformed into a fish made me laugh so hard…probably because I’ve seen a work where a woman gets transformed into an eel, but I’ve never seen man to fish fiction before…

How did fish!Schu get into the washing machine? They’ll probably answer that question anyway, but I wanted to ask it before I found out the answer. Update: They didn’t, but it’s pretty safe to assume he got there the same way fish!Schu got around to other bodies of water.

Of course they’d have a sign saying “Watch out for fire”, knowing Beethes.

Off model fish. Never though I’d complain about a fish’s eyes in animation. Also, isn’t it goldfish with limited mental capacity?

Salmo trutta is at least correct.

Never have I laughed so hard at an animated fish…

Eh? I never questioned what Schu would call Sousuke, but there you go. Also, Sousuke doesn’t know English.

Aw no. I see the clincher coming. Poor Schu.

Pencil frame? In the fish episode? Okay, who had enough budget for that? (incredulous)

I didn’t know that fish gyoza existed until now. I guess I should’ve known.

Hey wait a second. Black bass. Bass are a type of guitar. I see what you did there, Classicaloid staff and Fujita-kantoku. *nods approvingly*

*looks into the “predatory” part of bass* Oops. “Know that you can feed trout to selected sizes of bass.”

Meuniere is the only one I had to check up.

Why is Liszt only scolding the Piece of Junk (Sousuke)? I know she’s done it every other episode but she really has it out for him, doesn’t she?

What the-Okay, you know you’re on to some crazy antics when you have anthropomorphic fish. *still laughs crazily*

Wait, so Liszt is a lionfish. Guess I should’ve known.

Motz is a flying fish. Less predictable, but eh.

Cho-chan is an eel, specifically one found in volcanic vents at the bottom of the sea.

Holy fish, Batman! We found Nemo…er, Kanae.

Okay, I take some of my enjoyment of this ep back, thanks to you Beethes.

Sousuke is a sea snail. LOL.

I like limpets too, but pond snail…? Never heard of it. Sorry for my inaccuracy.

Japanese mystery snail? Now that’s mysterious. Aside from that, I’d never heard of an eel that lived in ponds…LOL, so my knowledge is adapted to sea life but not ponds. Okay then, I learnt something about myself today.

Thank you for your censor head, Beethes. Thank you so very much.

That’s kinda cute. Not only are there bubbles, but there’s the anthropomorphic fish versions of the group popping up (I presume in time to the music), with Sousuke and Kanae covering for Bach/Bada/Tchaiko.

(Masamune-kun’s Revenge 1)

There’s a passing resemblance to One Wish They Never Wanted to this show, so since this anime must’ve come before it, I’m here to compare.

I’m with the girl at 0:31 (Masamune’s sister).

His mum?!

I think the pun is that “Moleo” is also read “Shigeo”, but the middle character is “hair”…so there you have it. *makes Not Bad face but is otherwise not quite convinced by this show*

Wa-wa-wait! Standard practice is that you don’t use your OP in the first ep, isn’t it? You use the ED, but not the OP, and debut the OP and ED in their proper spots in ep 2. This is blasphemy!

OP title: Wagamama means “selfish”, so I think the OP title suits the show well.

Nope, not even hot guys can get away with drooling...not to me, no.

Shuri is best girl in this show.

What is with servant girl’s eyebrows? I swear, if they had another girl in that posse of Aki’s, we’d have a Mean Girls AU on our hands!

Adagaki Aki is the only name I’ll remember once I get out of here, I bet. Only a few times reading synopses of this show, and I already remembered it. I bet I won’t even remember the “Makabe” part of Masamune’s name.

Masamune needs a sign saying “Caution: Do Not Pass By. Dramatic Stare in Progress” or something.

Okay, I need that Mean Girls AU now.

Cat donut. I want one.

Well, if a girl looks around like that so many times, y’think she wouldn’t be hiding something?!

Basically, you turned your protagonist into a male version of a mean girl to upstage a mean girl?...Nice try, but no dice. It’s kinda cliched.

Hypoglycemia? Hmm. It’s not always associated with diabetes, but I tend to associate the two. Speaking of stomachs rumbling, I once sat a test with my stomach basically playing a symphony for the last half…yeah, not gonna think about it.

Then how did Masamune get a photo with Aki?

Oh. It’s nice that he’s keeping Tanabe-kun’s secret. (still not wholly convinced)

Okay: verdict time – it looks pretty, but that Kirito face ain’t doing it for me and neither are Yoshino’s eyebrows. The jokes tend to miss and I’ve got a potential plot hole on my hands. Overall…I could probably handle one more episode of it, and that’s what I’ll take for the sake of its potential.

…*sees “Elemetal World”* Okay, add “a lot of cliches” to the list too.

(Blue Exorcist: Kyoto Saga 1)

Hey, Blue Exorcist. Haven’t seen this since I marathoned the ending 5 episodes or so a few years back. I was wondering how they’d handle the anime-only ending, but they’ve just cut it off like nothing ever happened. It seems a situation much like Noragami, only Noragami’s anime-only ending is much better (IMHO, but YMMV).

…and yes, I’ve read enough of the manga to know this is called the “Impure King Part”, but I’m using the AnimeLab name for convenience. Also, what is up with the complicated kanji? It says “episode 1”, sure, but I didn’t know such complicated kanji existed for “Small Beginnings”. Update: Kyoto Impure King Arc. That’s a better way to explain it.

“Satoru”…haha. (At the time of typing, I was rewatching Erased. LOL)

Considering the name “Saburota” suggests he’s one of at least 3 children, that makes sense.

Celesta (from one of my stories “Next to Me”) is a Shura-type character. I should really take some cues from this Shura for Celesta going forward.

It feels weird seeing the Kyoto trio shrug off Rin’s friendliness now. Must be because I’ve been through this part of the woods once before. Plus did you see they’re on the Nozomi shinkansen? (It’s kinda like this MTR (city express MTR, Hong Kong) or a plane or something…) Someone bothered to translate the ticker to English, even.

Unwilling, LOL.

(Erased ep 2)

It was from this ep that I learnt the Japanese word for “palm (of the hand)”.

Apparently Re:Re got resurrected for Erased? Or am I wrong about this? Update: Yeah, I was wrong.

Mask Man I assme is Kamen Rider or Ultraman, but I dunno what Black is.

The type of backpack Satoru’s got is a randoseru and he had a recorder with it. There’s a manga out there called “Recorder and Randoseru”, IIRC.

Hanba-gu aren’t actually hamburgers. They’re hamburger patties, or to get technical, Hamburg patties.

Since I still haven’t been too badly damaged by a person’s death so far (but eventually I know I will), there’s an undercurrent of melancholy running through this show for me…

How does Erased get away with all these trademarks? Were they in the source material? Plus, I’ve never hear the term “chew the fat” until now. Huh.

The word “hope” is on the back wall lots and lots of times (presumably kids’ calligraphy work), if you didn’t know.

So. The kanji for “palm (of the hand)” that is there during the titlecard is read tenohira. Kinda long, but it’s an advanced kanji. I probably shouldn’t know it as it’s quite the advanced kanji, but hey, I get curious about these sorts of things…

I never understand why there’s occasionally urinal scenes in media. Is it to promote a sense of camaraderie in guys? *shrugs*

McGregor gloves are apparently the ones with all the fingers…? Not sure. Google-sensei wasn’t very definite on it.

I think Satoru goes “youkai” because he suspected his mum of being one there for a second.

The pink on the ground and the yellow of the house…it’s like a colour palette. Only, Kayo will go to danger and Satoru will go home to his house, that isn’t truly his house anymore.

By the way, I’ve liked both Sayuri songs that have been used for anime so far, even if they’re both EDS. When I heard Sayuri was doing the ED for Erased, I liked it even more. (Even still, I only use the name Erased out of convenience. I much prefer the name Boku Dake ga Inai Machi otherwise.)

(ep 3)

This Hamada…I only just finished watching Yuri!!! on Ice a few days back (as of time of typing), and now Hamada reminds me of Yurio.

Yuuki – he reminds me of my dad. My dad has a stuttering problem which makes him sound nervous on occasion. Come to think of it, I was thinking of unique ways to study at one point (I can get bored pretty easily though not to ADHD standards), and as a result made a “biology helper” (visual novel). I made the visual novel around a character who I called Satoru, based on what I learnt about the name for Erased. (Note: Satoru can mean “to perceive” or “to understand”.)

Speaking of visual novels, I think there should be a visual novel for this. An official one that stays faithful to the manga.

Not sure I’ve noticed it until now, but Yuuki has freckles…he looks like Renzou Shima (Blue Exorcist) to me for some reason…

The word for “birthmark” can also mean “bruise”.

Satou is different to Satoru, even if the names are one letter difference.

The bins said “5 – 4” in one shot and “5 の 4” in another. They mean the same thing though.

Is Satoru x Kayo technically a ship? Or not? I’d go “ick!” if Satoru still counted as being his normal age in this timeline, for ships’ sake.

(ep 4)

How can you tease a child about girlfriends when he’s barely old enough to fall in love? (Physically, that is.)

Liveman? Falcon? Okay, who decided on this background chatter?!

Okay…revelation time, before we go forward. Showa Genroku is criminally underrated by the masses, but good enough for an s2. Erased seems to have been more of a public praise while SGRS got it on the critics’ side, and while I consider myself to be more casual than critic, I side with the critics on this. (By the way, I tend to root for the underdog series and also have a critic’s sensibility for series, if you haven’t caught on to that yet. I’m a bit of a paradox in that sense.)

What happened to Satoru’s dad?

At least the “You’re pretty” went down like you’d expect kids to handle it…haha.

Welp, at least the sentence with “pole” (as in “North Pole”) did actually have the kanji for “pole” in it. If this were an English lesson though, the kid would’ve gotten an X. (Remember, O is the way to say “correct” on schoolwork in Japan.)

Uh…using my standard conversion, 5000 yen = $50. That’s a lot of sandwiches…

(ep 5)

Back to griping about CGI cars for me…

The Last Supper? Surely, the only meaning for that being there must be a symbolic one.

The manager is basically playing the role of Satoru here…awkwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaard.

Cafeteria? The kanji means that, but wouldn’t it be better to call it a “restaurant”?

ONE PUNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNCH! Hahaha.

“Majin” can mean “demon god” with the right kanji.

The pencil frames make for a good contrast.

#simulcast commentary #classicaloid #masamune-kun no revenge #blue exorcist: kyoto impure king arc #blue exorcist: kyoto saga #erased #Boku Dake ga Inai Machi #Chesarka watches Classicaloid #Chesarka watches Erased

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