#made with paper and pencil like in ye olden days

[iamamythologicalcreature]

I did a thing. A sketchy thing. A Simony-sketchy thing. I was then told by an expert in the field to post it. So I am doing a second thing and posting it.

(I like doing sketchy things, though I don't often post them because they're all sketchy and unfinished. But then I realized the world would probably be better if more artists posted more sketches and thus... TA-DA.)

[moinsbienquekaworu]

OKAY SO. I was asked for my aurebesh thoughts and I shall deliver! @zeawesomebirdie this is for YOU <3

Here's what the standard version of the aurebesh (I used it like you'd use the word alphabet because well, it's alphabet but in SW speak) looks like, rewritten by me but faithful to the most widely accepted version that I know of.

Now, this is all fine and good for computer fonts, since you're at best typing them with a keyboard. But to actually write, with a pen or stylus? Extremely inconvenient. Try to write that A cleanly but in one try. That's just not easy to write: the diagonals, the two different parts, it's just not made to be written.

I can hear you think "it doesn't need to be written though does it, who still writes on paper in the GFFA?" and fair, but. But. 1) some people just like Doing It Like They Used To in Ye Olden Days and there must be a thriving community of calligraphy enthusiasts making their own paper and writing in ink. 2) if WE can have apple pencils they can have styluses, if only to draw, and a natural extension of that is writing little notes. 3) and most important I think, but often disregarded, it's easier to learn a new writing system if you make your hand go through the motions. Obviously there are exceptions and obviously you can still learn by just seeing but actually going through the motion and gesture? That really helps a majority of people. Source: I took japanese and russian classes, and therefore had to learn both the japanese writing system and the russian cyrillic alphabet, and yes, putting in the effort to copy the symbols again and again with a pen in your hand works much better than trying to remember it from having seen it, and it was the same for a lot of other people in my classes.

(Obviously the aurebesh was developped hastily by people who wanted to make it a font before anything else AND who are most likely american, which is a country where they don't teach you cursive anymore apparently, so that influences things)

All of this to say, I think since the fun of being a fan is filling in the holes of canon and having fun with your stuff, I tried thinking of what a more realistic aurebesh would be like.

From my deep dive on wookieepedia a while back, I learnt that a few actual alphabets of our world exists in the GFFA, like Tionese is written using Greek and Sith markings are Hebrew letters, + our roman alphabet is called High Galactic, but is a very fancy thing most people don't use. So, the aurebesh is the standard writing system of galactic basic, which means it's probably very widespread. I imagine that people actually do learn to write with some kind of stylus, just to get you to remember quicker and because either you have access to the equivalent of an apple pencil, you can find a ballpoint pen somewhere, or you have an outside with dirt/sand and some kind of pointy stick thing. That means we need a more writing-friendly version of the aurebesh (not even a cursive version, just an easier block letter version, I'm still brainstorming that one because god this was NOT made to be cursive but my love of cursive is powering me through)

So here's how I write the aurebesh!

Purple are letters I've rewritten but without real changes, and blue are actual changes, ranging from "yeah I could tell what this was" (p, o, v) to "I think you need to know that it's this letter to be able to tell" (a, g, eo). I'm pretty proud of that A honestly! Generally, I rounded out things that could be rounded out, made simpler things that didn't need to be complicated to be understood, and reduced the number of strokes necessary, because needing to lift your pencil and come back for a second stroke is a huge time loss. You might also be able to tell that I took japanese for 4 years in my squares: the TH looks like a 日, the W like a ロ, the K like a コ, and the H is basically a 三 because I like to work smarter not harder and I love japanese. I made the V into a normal Y from our alphabet, and I still get I and L mixed up a lot of the time, but here it is. And YES I forgot the numbers but uuuh tbh I always forget them so yeah haha. Might do a few sentence samples just for fun + to show what it looks like when I write it VS my normal handwriting (because I'm a handwriting amateur)

Another note: I hate with all the fibers of my being the "reverse the letter and that marks it as a capital" because it is incredibly clunky and inconvenient. Nobody does it like that and it's stupid. I think making them bigger/smaller like the computer font version of cyrillic is the way to go honestly, like Д for capital and д for lowercase. I don't have the words to explain why but you should not mirror a letter and make it a capital that is bad and wrong and it clearly was thrown in there last minute when people asked. Either everything is capitals or the lowercase is smaller but please no mirroring T-T

If you have anything to contribute I am BEGGING please come tell me. If you have cursive aurebesh ideas I will ask for your hand in marriage right here and there. When I told my best friend about this they said "oh my god this is like Tolkien why are you thinking about how the people of the galaxy would use their alphabet what is wrong with you (affectionate)" and yeah.

(Also ALSO bonus aurebesh fonts I like, apart from the standard one: the Aurebesh Droid, Rodian, Cantina, and Typewriter. )

[oumaheroes]

Earthbound: Gabriel’s Story

Written for @needcake, whose wonderful and ongoing encouragement has spurred me to explore new directions.

Context: Hundreds of years after the fall of Earth, mankind is slowly starting to return. Some people have a stronger urge to return than others, confused by fragments of memories from a life already lived.

Word Count: 3570

Characters: Portugal

Arthur’s story can be found here.

Matthew’s story can be found here.

---

Gabriel is six.  He’s at the doctor’s, which he doesn’t think that he deserves, and to protest this offense he does not answer when he is spoken to.

‘Gabriel? Can you answer some questions for me?’

The lady doctor looks nice enough; she doesn’t look scary but that’s not the point and Gabriel presses his lips together and picks up a plastic shape. It’s solid and brightly coloured and he has some like this at home. He likes to build with them, usually, when he can get them from the other kids for long enough, and on the rare occasions he’s left alone with them undisturbed he builds high high towers and pretends they’re castles.

He turns this one, red and smooth, over in his hands and lays it on the small plastic table he is knelt in front of with finality. It will be a part of a dungeon.

‘He’s always like this,’ His foster mummy Anita speaks from behind him, over his head, ‘he has these funny moods where he won’t speak at all, and then when he’s not eating it just gets worse. Never had a kid like him.’

Gabriel feels his presence swallowed softly underneath her words as the conversation passes over and around him as if he were not there. He picks up another shape. This one is round at the edges and is blue. It can go at the top.

The Doctor gently taps the table by his elbow. He turns to find her crouched next to him; eyes slightly too wide behind large glasses. She smiles, ‘What are you building?’

He shrugs.

‘Ah,’ She ponders the beginnings of his construction with interest, ‘Well, the biggest I’ve seen someone build with these is about this big,’ she gestures with her hands to her chest and Gabriel is forced to look at her.

That is quite high.

‘I can go bigger.’

The doctor raises an eyebrow sceptically, ‘I don’t know,’ she says, ‘the girl who built it didn’t have to go home for dinner.’

‘I don’t have to go home for dinner,’ Gabriel retorts, immediately. Mummy Anita scoffs and Gabriel flushes, looking away.

‘Do you not like dinner?’ the doctor prompts, softly.

Gabriel shrugs again.

‘I don’t like Option 3,’ the doctor says. She reaches under the table and picks up another shape -yellow, a triangle- and puts it near him.  Might be a good turret ceiling, if they leave him alone to build high enough, ‘that’s what I hate. But my favourite is Option 17.’

‘I don’t like any of them.’

‘No? You must like one of them, there are so many!’

Gabriel shakes his head and continues to stack shapes, ‘they all taste funny.’

‘Funny?’ the doctor glances at Mummy Anita who shrugs.

‘None of the other kids say that. We’ve had the machine checked out- I eat from it. It’s fine. Even tried him on other machines but he says they all taste funny.’

The doctor looks back at him and he tries to look unbothered by their discussion, ‘Why do you think food from meal machines tastes funny? What’s strange about the food?’

It’s an easy enough question, but one that Gabriel can’t really answer- not even to himself.

The best way he can describe it is that food from machines just tastes wrong.

All meals come from food machines. They’re in every home and school and all taste the same; a catalogue copy of meals for everyone to have. But there’s a dryness to everything, something that sticks bland and metallic in his mouth and no matter which out of the many hundreds of options he tries, Gabriel hates them all. There’s something wrong about them, he thinks, something unnatural that he never wants to taste, no matter how used to it he knows he should be. Food from machines is all he’s ever eaten.

They don’t grow things on his colony; vegetables or fruits or grain. There’s no room in the towering stacks of buildings, stretching into the dusty orange sky. The colony is a jumble of things, a jungle bleached colourless and lifeless despite the scattering of people that scrabbled through its warrens.

There is no room for fields here. No farms for cattle to roam. The machines feed them: food materialised from the collective memory of humanity. Gabriel has heard in the playground at school that other human colonies, the ones further off into space where their communications cannot reach, make their own food from scratch, like the people of the olden times of Earth. This seems bizarre to him. What difference would it make, if you made a meal from things instead of a machine? All of their neighbouring colonies do the same as they do and this is all anyone of them have ever known.

Either way, the taste is lifeless and empty so Gabriel avoids eating as much as possible, giving in only when his tummy hurts with an ache that needs to be filled with something, anything, before it will think of going away.

He doesn’t know how to put this into words, so he turns away and adds another block to his tower, hoping that the adults will leave him alone. The doctor on his side sighs and taps something into her e-tab, looking back over at Mummy Anita.

The conversation begins again, over his head, and Gabriel slips away.

When Gabriel is thirteen when he realises that something about him isn’t quite right. It’s not his problem with food, although that has never improved, things taste as stilted now as they ever have done. No matter what meal option he tries, and no matter from which machine, there is the same blandness to everything, a cotton covering that prevents him from tasting what everyone else says he should.

But lack of taste is the least of his concerns.

The word most used to describe him by adults is ‘unfocused.’

This isn’t something he thinks is fair, but he understands how they think that, he supposes. He can often be found staring out of a window or escaping off into space, eyes glassy and face slack. He doesn’t agree with the term ‘unfocused’ because Gabriel is very focused on doing just that.

Escaping.

It is easy. So very, very easy. Like a quick breath in, he can switch off today effortlessly and take himself away somewhere, mind’s eye overlaying reality to wash his surrounds bright and true and better. He can take himself to a place so perfect it can only exist in his mind- soft sandy beaches in front of scrubby mountainsides that soar and roll up and down in sharp curves, all under a sky so blue it burns. Cyan rivers wend down corridors and curl around the legs of his classmates, a cliff face leans out of the drop of a window, a dark cupboard hides the maw of the unknown- damp caves that drip drip drip with depth and cool his older, sun-burnt skin.

If he closes his eyes and truly does focus, he can go even further- bite down and taste Brazilian gold, hard and cold as it hits his teeth to send shivers of warning up his spine. A dropped pencil or a creak of a floorboard snaps into the crackle of a fire, hot and close and his mouth waters with the promise of flame kissed meat and the smell of woodsmoke.

As much as he enjoys this, he realises it is a problem because it is not something that anyone else does. Not anymore, at least, and never as well. Children used to play pretend, of course, when they were younger- it was normal. Gabriel always seemed to be the best at it, somehow, better able to call to mind a place for their games with a vivacity no one else could hope to compare to and it was fun- something he excelled in. He made all of their games, a playmaker in setting the stage and lifting another world to blanket the dusty playground and wrap them all in colours.

But his friends have grown out of such things. Their thirst for the imaginary cooled and then tapered off entirely whilst Gabriel’s hunger for it only grew and grew until he could travel miles in the blink of an eye, drumming fingers playing a marching song to set the pace and propel him onwards.

Why be here when he can be elsewhere? Why would he ever choose otherwise, when elsewhere was a paradise unlike any other. Any colour, any texture, any smell or taste, and all blended and whirled together to spill a storm of yearning through his waking days.

Maybe he could write, he thinks. He is sixteen and thinks that, maybe this is why he does this. Maybe this is something that is normal after all, if he can put what he is feeling to paper and share it with others. If it is productive, it is good, after all. If it creates something tangible, if it is something that others can use and enjoy then it is something worthy; it has value. When it is just for him, it is strange; adults watching with dark and wary eyes, muttering condemnations that shackle him with labels.

It is the way of things.

But writing is harder than it looks. Words only describe so much and are too flat, too rigid to encompass the entirety of what he feels and sees. On paper, the world of his daydreams regresses to shapes like the coloured blocks he used to love as a child- useful for building something, yes, but ultimately something controlled and solid, changeable but unmoving and limited. Gabriel’s imagination isn’t like this, it is constantly new and fluid, forever showing him more and more and more with a detail words can never capture, never truly express.

He dreams of orchards, of fruit so orange and full and clear to him that he can see the speckles of dust in the dips of its skin, the dew that sits on the leaves in the morning. He feels himself, brown, large hand scarred with mistakes and history, close about it and pull; feels the tension as it resists on the branch before a gasp of a break. The leaves of the tree swing back and the fruit is full and firm and he can taste it, taste how full it will be when he peels back the skin and bites down to flood his mouth with sweetness.

He feels air that is cool and tastes of salt, wind that pushes and tugs at his clothes, of a floor of wood that moves and bucks in angry waters of grey and blue. Unknown jungles where the air is thick and hot, arid plains where the sun scorches the rocks, and damp misty hills that whistle ancient secrets across the miles and twist his heart until it breaks.

What is that.

Why is that.

He doesn’t know.

When Gabriel is eighteen, the foster home he is in releases him.

‘You can stay, if you want,’ Anita gives him a measured look, up and down, from beneath her eyelashes, ‘but you’ll need to start paying rent. Benefits stop for you now so I can’t keep you about for free.’

Gabriel blinks at her, ‘But, I don’t have a job.’

Anita’s face remains impassive, ‘Then you’ll have to find one.’

‘How?’ he is angry, all of a sudden. Older children had never stuck about after their eighteenth birthday but he always imagined that they had left of their own accord, that they couldn’t wait to leave. Now he wonders how many of them were forced out, where they went, ‘I’ve never had one before.’

‘Your school should do something about helping you find one. Or, here,’ she reaches into her desk drawer and pulls out her e-tab. The paint of the old thing is chipped but it still works; the screen flashes bright and the contrast with the dark office room washes her face flat and white in the glow. After a moment, she holds out the tab to him, ‘there are some programmes about. Take a look at them and sign up to some.’

Gabriel doesn’t take it and her arm hangs there, suspended and stiff between them. Eventually, she sets down the tab and pushes it towards him, ‘I’ll give you two months, if you want to stay. You should be able to find something in that time.’

‘What do I do if I can’t find anything?’ there is a tightness in his chest. He does not like it here, does not really even like her but the taste of betrayal is thick on his tongue and catches in the back of his throat to prick at his lungs, ‘what do I do? This isn’t fair.’

Anita looks at him, hard and cold, ‘Life isn’t fair. The quicker you learn that, the better off you’ll be.’ With that she motions with her head towards the door behind him and tabs on her computer, bringing it back to life.

The conversation is over.

Gabriel clenches his jaw, spins about and opens the door. The e-tab he leaves on her desk.

He moves his way through the house and out to the street. Night has fallen and the glow from their fat, orange sun hangs warm and faded behind the horizon. It looks like a painting; abstract- not real. The cut of the skyline is wrong, too sharp and small and alien all at once and he hurts with the urge to close his eyes and drift away on the tide of his dreams to somewhere better.

He can’t. He needs to do something, needs to go somewhere, needs to eat. Food machines are everywhere, but they cost money that he doesn’t have and the fear of hunger for the tasteless pushes him into the tangle of streets.

Gabriel is twenty-two. He found a job, eventually. It was the spur of the moment, out of desperation, but it’s not all that bad, in the end. He is a builder.

The monotony of manual work allows him to loosen his mind, lift himself out of his body as he lays dun-coloured bricks down in careful order, one by one by one. He builds a home under his hands but his mind is away, far far into grasses so tall they tickle his cheeks and he reconstructs himself into a reality he can control.  

This brick can be the dungeon. This brick can be a turret. Gabriel can be elsewhere.

This is enough. It is enough, he tells himself. It is more than enough; if he gets better, he can actually do that, actually build the castles of his dreams. Maybe he could be an artist, or an architect, maybe he can design a whole new colony that has fancy machines to replicate wind or bodies of water to recreate a sea deep and blue enough to have come straight from the Earth itself.

When he thinks about this too deeply, it hurts.

The ancient planet sings to him from the files of history, a stunning colourful thing that hangs suspended in time. Oh, what he would give to be there. To see the oceans and feel the grasses of fields that are somehow so very green. What he would give for the possibility see it, just once. Any part of it.

The pictures he’s seen, the videos and the stories that are collected into binary are the only things left of humanity’s original home- something so colourful and incredible that it is hauntingly impossible. Gabriel’s dreams must be modelled on it, he knows, they must have a grain of truth in them because only his imagination can compare to the flat, coded remains of Earth. Nothing man-made can be so beautiful, nothing built by mortal hands produce such unkempt beauty.

Gabriel feels like he was born in the wrong time, made and moulded to explore something older and wilder where he can go and go and go and always see something new, unending and natural. This lost opportunity, this missed moment and incorrect assignment whips a storm in his heart and brings tears to his eyes but passes, eventually. He is not a man for regret, not a man to dwell on what he cannot have and he consoles himself with the idea that maybe, one day, he can help to build a new world that rivals the one in his dreams.

When Gabriel is twenty-four, one of the human colonies fails. As the colony collapses, life systems screaming into the vacuum, the population spills into the sky, desperate to get away however they can. As one of their closest neighbours, despite the distance, Gabriel’s planet catches a lot of them.

They arrive in huge patchwork ships- cobbled together with speed, not precision. They’re falling apart and can barely cling on and the people they contain are scared, panicked things; exhausted by the constant and very near threat of death they press beseechingly into their new home. His planet is full, really, too full to take on so many but they have nowhere else to go, no place else to stop and so they flock into streets and public buildings, cawing for food and water and housing.

As a builder, Gabriel is in high demand and is immediately put to work. Hastily constructed houses spring up, growing the towns outwards and into the desert. There are no domes here- Gabriel’s planet can sustain itself and for the new arrivals this is bewildering.

Gabriel begins to talk to one of them. She is old, feather light skin wrinkled and soft, and she flutters like a bird about the building site, eager to offer help in any way she can. It’s sweet and Gabriel softens to her instantly, sensing she feels a displacement similar to what he does. A kinship of the unbelonging.

Every afternoon she arrives and as soon as his shift ends, he lowers himself to the ground and goes in search of her. They take tea together in the shade and talk existence to rights.

‘You remind me of my grandson,’ she says one day. Gabriel avoids talking about her planet or her family, or anything to do with what brought her here. He does not know what parts of it will cause her pain and he has no wish to do that to her. She must feel enough when she is alone, he knows, when she has time to mourn what she has lost and it is not his place to bring that sadness to other aspects of her day. She never offers anything and so the subject lies between them, an elephant in the void of space.

When she says this, then, he is surprised and curious, ‘Oh? How so?’

She smiles, ‘He’s a dreamer too. Always thinking of things when he should be focusing. He makes a similar face to the one you do.’

Gabriel blushes, ashamed to have been caught drifting off whilst in her company.

She sees his embarrassment and laughs, ‘Oh no, don’t worry- it’s fine. I used to love watching him float away somewhere. I used to say he was going off to Neverland.’

‘That’s a nice description for it,’ it’s an old Earthen story Gabriel was fond of growing up- a tale of a journey to somewhere else, ‘What was his name?’

‘Is,’ she corrects firmly and Gabriel nods apologetically, ‘Is. His name is Peter.’

‘Peter,’ the name fits a fellow daydreamer. The boy who never grew up. Gabriel decides to ask, tentatively, ‘Where is he?’

The old lady looks wistful, ‘Earth,’ she says with a sigh, ‘He and his parents managed to get passage to Earth but I wasn’t able to. We’re too far out to send any communication- I don’t want to think about what they believe became of me.’

Gabriel blinks once. Twice. Tries to speak, ‘Earth?’

She frowns at him, ‘Yes, don’t you know?’ Realisation hits and she shakes her head, ‘Oh, I forget that you don’t hear much this far out. Earth was declared habitable a few months ago. They’re starting a founding colony there to see if humans can survive there again.’

‘Wh- what?’

She looks at him, concerned, ‘Are you alright? You’ve gone awfully pale.’

Gabriel can’t really understand her, her voice feels like its coming from one end of an endless tunnel and his heart is hammering too loudly in his chest to focus on her. He stands, shaky, and she clutches at his shirt hem, ‘Gabriel? Gabriel, what’s wrong?’

‘I don’t know,’ his heart pounds canon fire, a boom boom boom that disorientates him. He smells smoke, smells fire, smells death, ‘I thought- I thought it was gone, Earth was gone.’

‘It was, but they travelled to investigate about a decade ago and they’ve been researching it- dear please sit down.’

She tugs at him but he shakes his head, a ghost of understanding in his mind that slips away like silk, ‘Can we go? Who can go- can I go?’

She looks scared, ‘Yes, but there’s a waiting list, you need to get your name down- Gabriel!’

---

He doesn’t wait for her to finish. He takes off into the centre of town to the public buildings, pushing his way through crowds to get there faster. He won’t waste one second more, will grab hold of what acutely feels like a delicate second chance with both hands and won't dare to let go.

AN:

This was my first time writing Portugal as a character with a voice and it was both challenging and very fun to do. There are so many amazing Portugal writers out there to inspire me and I hope I have done him justice for any of you who read this!

The full fic can be found here on A03. It doesn’t include Portugal, but explores this AU a whole lot more with a different cast of characters.

Thanks for reading!

[conversationswithhank]

On the train ride home my attempt to start a funny face contest was thwarted. Hank was far too tired to participate.

*************************************************************************************************

(Sitting in the bar at the Palacio das Cardosas in Porto waiting for our train, enjoying a coffee and a ginger ale)

Hank: This hotel is a luxury hotel isn’t it?

Me: It is.

Hank: I love this hotel.

Me: It sure is better than waiting an hour in cold, but beautiful, São Bento for our train.

Hank: Some day I want to stay here. I bet it is very expensive.

Me: If you cleared out your savings account you could stay here three nights and order room service once.

Hank: I can’t believe this day.

Me: Are you making memories?

Hank: My first day of work, my first time in a recording booth and my first mocktail in a luxury hotel. Five starts. There were five stars on the door. I didn’t think we could even come in to a hotel like this.

Me: In Portugal you are welcome anywhere for the price of a coffee.  Never let stars on doors stop you from enjoying a lovely place like this.  Behave yourself, conduct yourself with class and decorum and the world’s your oyster.

Hank: Yes, but the ginger ale here is much much more expensive than…

Me: Ba-ba-ba, don’t fret.  This is a special day therefore there are unconventional prices.  I’d say you’ve done rather well for yourself today. You’ve set the bar high.

Hank: (sipping his ginger ale, pinkie –I kid you not- extended) What do you mean?

Me: My first “real” paying job that wasn’t a newspaper route or babysitting or odd jobs for my grandma and her friends paid $4.75 an hour.

Hank: What?

Me: That was minimum wage back in the olden days before the Internet or ubiquitous cell phones.

Hank: Wow, so how much would you make in say…. 8 hours if you worked.

Me: Do the math.

Hank: So that would be $4.75 times 8. I need paper.

Me: (looking over the rim of my coffee cup at his backpack leaning against our plush, royal purple crushed velvet settee)

Hank: Oh right. (getting out a notebook, a pencil and doing the sums) $38.

Me: Before taxes.

Hank: Well yah, I’m a kid I don’t think about taxes.

Me: (foreboding voice of a life weary adult) Oh, but you wiiillllll! (shaking my fist in the air before returning to normal) And you, today, what was your paycheck?

Hank: I made €30.

Me: And now many hours did you work?

Hank: Two.

Me: So how much did you make per hour?

Hank: Um… €15.

Me: SEEE! Setting the bar way high for your first job. How much more money did you make in an hour compared to my 1994 minimum wage?

Hank: (doing the sums) $10.25 if we don’t think about the exchange rate and pretend I was paid in dollars and not euros.

Me: Nice. Well done, Hank.

Hank: (putting away his notebook and slipping deep into the settee) I could get used to this life.

Me: With your languages, and especially if you work hard when studying French, you could work in a hotel like this or someday own a hotel like this or design one or decorate the interior of one.

Hank: I don’t know what I want to do when I am an adult. Right now, I am liking being a kid having a special day with my mom in the city.

Me: No one ever called you dumb.

Hank: (stirring his ginger ale, taking in the room) Not one day.