#me taking notes on all the shit canon neglected to mention looking like charlie iasip with the pepe silvia board

[cryptocism]

So if Eight and Nine were raised as normal kids and had real names and all that...they dressed in normal clothes right? Like "civvies," t-shirts, jeans, long sleeves, shorts, sneakers and boots, all that jazz

How did they respond to the transition from multiple outfits/articles of clothing to just ONE JUMPSUIT AND THAT IS ALL, maybe two if it catches on fire and burns up, but other than that ONLY ONE

I just have Eight and Nine brain rot and love them so much (Nine has obviously become a fan favorite)

that... is an excellent question actually. so much of trying to flesh out this au is realizing just how much was never confirmed or elaborated on in canon smh (for instance where/when exactly Thad's lab exists space and time-wise - i've been assuming it's underground somewhere, many eons post-30th century, but it's literally never confirmed - where Thad gets food from, where he sleeps, etc.)

so really, who even made the Inertia costume to begin with? the design roots are obvious bc it's just Impulse but palette-swapped, but did Thad make it himself or was it provided for him by CRAYDL and/or President Thawne? does Thad wear it because of his dogmatic loyalty to the cause or because he has no other option?

and keep in mind that Eight and Nine had a "normal childhood" in the sense that they experienced a regular age progression (along with parental love and affection,) but they were still. raised by a computer in a secret wing of a massive laboratory. which isn't really uhh the typical childhood experience

because technoplasm exists (and im bringing it back bc a substance that is essentially physical code and can be made into any form it's programmed to be is a phenomenal concept) we can assume that CRAYDL could semi-accurately replicate whatever physical object they wanted, including clothes

given all of that and taking many creative liberties with the gaps in canon i'm gonna say... i don't think it would occur to CRAYDL to provide them clothes that fell outside the general Inertia range. CRAYDL loves them and wants them to be happy but personal self expression via physical appearance probably wouldn't even be on the radar for an AI who doesn't have much of a physical form to speak of (beyond technoplasm and. idk servers?)

that being said Eight and Nine have plenty of access to Styroband videos (actually another thing that's never explained: what the fuck Styroband files actually are. can they access the entire past throughout all of earth's history or is it Just Bart Allen?? how does it account for timeline changes? obviously Inertia didn't know just how much he'd get his shit rocked every time he went back to the past, otherwise he wouldn't have gotten his shit rocked the way he did! meaning he was changing the timeline with every trip and i've put far too much thought into this) SO Eight and Nine had some kind of visual for - at the very least - the kinds of clothing Bart & Co were wearing throughout his life.

this is a very long way of saying Eight and Nine spent their baby/toddler years in Inertia-style jumpsuits, and when they got old enough to develop their own methods of self-expression asked CRAYDL to make them some sweet sweet threads like the cool guy in the videos likes to wear.

being discovered by Three and subsequently folded into the Clone Team along with the semi-personalized semi-uniform outfits probably wasn't completely unfamiliar, but definitely restrictive in terms of like, personal identity and preferred ways of dressing