#might so some tweaking to their designs still... the younger one looks probably too much like Hiro

[autoboros]

Did you know Auto and Hiro get two kids

[lettheladylead]

avoid the unhappy ending (ch7)

ships/characters: Goldie, Della, Scrooge/Goldie words (ch7): ~2100 summary: Goldie comes to town to see Scrooge. Instead, she somehow manages to run into literally everyone else. ao3 link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27108943/

[1 & 2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Chapter 7 under the cut:

Avoiding Beakley was a little more difficult than anticipated when they were on the same floor of the same house. In retrospect, Goldie realized that Bentina probably knew she was there. How could she not? The red triplet knew a lot of things he couldn’t have known unless the kids were texting each other all afternoon and surely she was on some kind of text chain.

Eh. If she knew, Goldie would probably be the hunt of the day. Instead she was able to wander about freely, making her way towards the garage where Scrooge kept a lot of his treasures. Everytime she was there it seemed to be missing things that were there before. But at least there were always new trinkets to look at!

She looked around as she stepped down the hallway, taking in all the photos and paintings lining the walls. Scrooge was so narcissistic. How many times could someone commission their own face before getting tired? And did he pose for all of them? Absolutely ridiculous.

A certain painting caught her eye and Goldie paused in her walk to really take a look at it. She stepped closer and brought a hand up to the image, feeling a nostalgic warmth in her chest as she rubbed her finger along the edge of his face.

It was Scrooge back in the Klondike - probably only a few years after they’d first met. Not too different from the photo she kept in her wallet.

He was very handsome back then. She hated to admit how much it struck her, that underneath all that dirt and grime and sour roughness he had the cutest face she’d ever seen - but Goldie was taken the first moment she saw him. It didn’t stop her from drugging and robbing him, sure, but he was the only sourdough that made her hesitate.

It’d been a few minutes before Goldie realized she was just standing there, staring at this painting and reminiscing like an old fool. She blushed, glad no one was around to see, and continued on her journey down the hall.

This house had so many distractions. No wonder Scrooge just wandered around, lost in his memories all the time. Her place was kept much neater - things she wanted to remember were kept in a box or her wallet so she would have to seek them out if she wanted to reminisce. Just another in a long list of reasons why she didn’t like being here for too long.

The door ahead of her was open wide and Goldie could clearly hear the sound of someone struggling with...something. It didn’t sound like Scrooge, but she wasn’t sure who it was.

A few steps forward, a turn around the corner, and three steps down the stairs and Goldie was inside the cramped little room. There weren’t as many treasures in it as last time - maybe Scrooge moved them somewhere else? - but directly in her line of sight was a duck she hadn’t seen in a long time trying to move a heavy-looking box by pushing it with her back.

Goldie smirked, feeling a sparkle to her eyes that she was very embarrassed about. Before Louie, she’d never gotten attached to any of Scrooge’s kids. He specifically asked her not to, several times, because he didn’t want her hurting them. A painful insinuation, but he was right. She would’ve treated them just the same as him, and kids can’t handle that kind of drama.

That being said, she always liked Donald and Della. They were funny, they were different, and they were very annoying. But in a good way! Donald was whiny and loved to complain about his family. Della was crazy and high-flying and always took her jokes too far. Goldie didn’t imagine they thought very highly of her, considering the way she treated their uncle. But despite their lack of closeness, Della confided in Goldie when she first realized she was pregnant.

“You’ve known Uncle Scrooge longer than anyone,” she’d said quietly. “...do you think he’ll be mad? Disappointed?”

Goldie had barely known what to say to her then, mostly feeling bad that her mother wasn’t around to help in this kind of situation (or any other adult women, really). She knew what she would’ve done herself and what she would’ve said to the girls she used to work with back at the saloon. But this was different. This girl wasn’t her friend and wasn’t scared of motherhood - she was just entering unfamiliar territory.

“He’ll be more excited than you’ve ever seen him, trust me.”

Shaking off another spell of nostalgia, Goldie hurried over to help the younger duck with the big box in her hands, tugging at it while she pushed. Her shoulder stung at the pressure, but she wanted to make a fun entrance.

“Hey, thanks!” Della said, without looking back.

Goldie wondered who she thought was helping her. “No problem, Fly Girl.”

“Heh,” Della stopped for a second. “No one’s called me that since -”

She stopped and finally turned, taking in the smirking face staring right at her. Her fingers gripped at the top of the box tightly and her eyes started to sparkle. And then they stopped sparkling and she glared. And then they sparkled again.

Goldie raised an eyebrow. Internal dilemma?

“Aunt Goldie!” Della yelped, lifting herself over the box and slamming into Goldie - knocking them both to the ground.

Goldie took the brunt of the impact, letting out a loud OOF! as Della squeezed her tight and made her poor shoulder flare up. She didn’t get a chance to hug back before the younger duck pulled away and stood back up, her metal leg clanging on the hard floor.

“Sorry, sorry,” Della said softly, standing back up. “What’s up? What’re you doing here? What are you stealing?”

Goldie sat up straight, taking a moment to stare at Della’s leg. She knew she’d returned, but no one had really shared any details. This seemed like one of those big details that deserved to be shared, but maybe everyone was just used to it already. She started to push herself up when Della leaned over and helped her stand.

“Hey, hey,” Goldie brushed her hands off. “I’m not that old just yet.”

Della laughed and pulled her hands back. “Oh no, of course not! You’re a million years old, but somehow younger looking than you were before I disappeared.”

“Hilarious.” She crossed her arms over her chest, not really offended. “You sound exactly like one of your kids.”

That immediately brought a sparkle to Della’s eyes. “Yeah? That’s what Donald says, too!” She leaned on the box and smiled. “And Uncle Scrooge.”

Goldie smiled despite herself and Della felt a warm nostalgia brush over her. “So are you here to see Scrooge? I’m kind of glad you guys are still doing this whatever-it-is-you’re-doing thing. So many things changed while I was gone, it's nice to have some consistency!”

Ignoring the question, Goldie leaned against the shelf behind her. “I didn’t come around too much while you were away. Scrooge was always so depressed, it wasn’t any fun to tease him.”

Della grimaced and sighed, turning away. “...yeah. So I’ve heard.”

There was an awkward silence for a few moments that Goldie fully acknowledged was her own fault. She bit the inside of her cheek and cleared her throat. “Well, um. Yes, I guess we’re still doing whatever this is.”

“No labels, yet?” Della’s mood did a 180. “But you didn’t object when I called you Aunt Goldie this time! What’s that about?”

Goldie scoffed. “I was a little distracted by you plowing me into the ground.”

Della just smiled bigger. “Still not objecting!”

Goldie didn’t look at her and opted to focus on playing with her hair. She hummed. “...I’ve never really minded it that much. It’s cute.”

“Do the kids call you Aunt?” She lifted herself up, sitting fully on top of the box. “You said I sound like them. You’ve spent time with them, then?”

“Don’t get too excited.” Goldie pushed herself off the shelf, standing up straight and stretching her arms. “I spent a day with Sharp-, er, with...ah, Louie. But not the others.” The name felt foreign on her tongue.

Della excitedly tapped the box lid. “Were you going to call him Sharpie?” She laughed. “You’ve gotten a lot less creative with nicknames over the years.”

“I don’t know if Fly Girl is all that creative, either,” Goldie said with a smirk and walked closer to the box, leaning against the side of it.

There was a light clang as Della swung her legs back and forth. “No one appreciates my great names,” she said proudly. “The boys were supposed to have much cooler names! And they’re calling my Cloudslayer the Sunchaser? Like, what’s up with that?”

“What were those names?”

“Jet, Turbo, and Rebel!”

Goldie silently blinked at her. “Um…yeah. Fantastic names.”

“Thanks!” Della smiled brightly, still not accustomed to sarcasm after being alone for so long. “Donald’s picks are just so old-fashioned.”

“Personally, I’m a fan of old fashioned.”

“Yeah, well, when you live through it, it makes sense to get attached!” Della laughed and swung her legs again.

The metal sound caught Goldie’s eye and she glanced down again, though this time Della took notice.

“You haven’t asked me about my leg yet.”

“I was trying to be polite,” Goldie said with a frown. “What happened?”

“Lost it on the moon,” she responded, looking off at nothing while she spoke. “It was the second most painful experience of my life, and I’m lucky I knew enough about robotics to build myself this sucker in only a few months. I don’t know how well I would’ve done if I wasn’t able to move around, y’know?” Della reached down and twisted off her prosthetic, holding it in front of her to point at different parts while she spoke. “This joint was the worst, took me almost two straight weeks to figure out what I was doing wrong. And now that I’m back, Gyro’s been offering to tweak the design, and he kind of owes me for the stupid licorice gum, but I like how I made it! And, of course, according to Junior Woodchuck Rule #42, something made right doesn’t need any tweaking. Though some upgrades might be cool.”

Goldie stared down at the metal limb and hummed. “I’m impressed. In all my years adventuring, I’ve never lost a limb, but I don’t know if I’d bounce back from that the way you did.”

“Yeah, well, I had to get back to my boys!” She twisted her leg back on and stretched it out. “You know how it is.”

“I really don’t,” Goldie said with an eye roll.

“Hmmm.” Della adjusted herself, moving her legs on top of the box and sitting on them. “Don’t you have anyone in particular you think about during life or death situations? That’s the feeling I had. That I couldn’t die ‘cause I had to get back to them no matter what.”

The blonde stared down, looking at the gray concrete of the floor and thinking. Of course there was a person - one particular person - who her mind drifted to when she thought about survival. But it wasn’t just about seeing him again...she was inspired by him and his ability to make it through anything thrown his way. He survived so much on his own and she struggled to accept when he started needing help. Della’s lovey dovey family monologue was just reminding her of how long it took her to adjust to Scrooge’s family suddenly being a part of his life.

She stood up straight and put a hand on her hips. “I don’t know if everyone can identify with that. But I’m glad it helped you come back in one piece.”

Della smiled, completely aware of the long pause Goldie took before answering. She always liked Goldie - didn’t trust her, would never fully trust her - but she liked her a lot. Even when she showed up just to ruin things or piss Scrooge off, there was always a little spark of warmth at the knowledge that she’d be back eventually.

“So…” Della tapped her hands against her thighs. “You never said why you’re here.”

“Right,” Goldie sighed and brushed some hair out of her face. “Looking for your uncle. Have you seen him?”

“As expected,” the younger duck responded with another bright smile. “Did you check his study?”

“His study?” Goldie frowned and thought about the path of her day. “Of course I...er…” Did she check his study? The most obvious place he could possibly be? “...right. Thanks.”

Della laughed again, patting Goldie on the back. “Don’t sweat it! And hey, let us know if you’re staying for dinner! I’m sure Mrs. Beakley will be happy to make you a plate!”

Goldie grimaced as she headed back out the door. “Oh, sure. She’d love nothing more.”

“Okay, great!” Della waved as the door closed again.

[joshslater]

Great Meadows

@jd07201990 just dumped a bunch of unfinished scripts. So, with a few tweaks here and there, here is someone else’s content.

Sitting here, staring down at my large palmed, clammy hands, feeling the burning warmth of new hormones rushing through me, I knew I was screwed. “What’s Ma gonna think”, I thought to myself, shuffling my large, sweaty sneakered feet. I kept having flashes from the trippy process popping in and out of my head. They said it’d take a few days for me to settle in. That such a big change is always rough, especially on girls. “I should’a just stayed home…” was my last thought before another skull-splitting migraine had me fall onto the stiff cot, passed out.

I’d been incredibly curious as to why my older brothers got to go to camp every summer, and I had to stay home, or enlist in summer gymnastics classes. They always came back at the end of summer, excited to tell of all the fun they’d had, all the cool activities, new friends. It sounded amazing! I had to sit there at dinner times, listening to them rub it in. Having only small accomplishments to talk about myself when it was my turn. I was tired of it. At the end of the school year, when it was time to sign my brother’s up, I made my move. I waited for mom to fill out their forms, and stealthily made a copy for myself, changing my name from Kari, to Kaeden. I know it is an all-boys camp, but once there, what could they really do?

On departure day I hid in the back of the truck, underneath my brother’s bags and gear, for the entire ride. It was awful, but I knew it’d be worth it when I got to see what the camp was all about. I’d been afraid my treasonous bladder would give me away, but the hot car had me thirsty in the trunk after the first hour. We arrived after a 4 hr drive, and while they got their papers handed in and sorted, I snuck out of the truck and into the grounds, finding a side door open along the main building. Once our parents left, it’d be too late for them to send me home, I figured, so I waited till all the cars left, and the sun started to set, marched up to the offices where the paperwork was handled, and put mine down on the desk. The man sitting behind it looked shocked, muttered a bit, then sighed, picked up my paperwork and read it over.

Name: Kaedan Atherton Age: 16 Height: 6’1” Weight: 154 lbs Hair: Blonde Eyes: Green Known allergies: none Dietary restrictions: none

He read though all of the false information I’d added, interests, past activates.

“Miss, Atherton. I assume you’re Heath and Daniel’s sister. Yes? Are you aware this is a boy’s summer camp?” I began to answer, but he cut me off, clearly not interested in having his rhetorical question answered.

“Aaaaa... This is going to create so much problem whichever way we go about to solve this… Are you really 16, or was that made up too?”

“No, I’m 16.”

He went silent and kept staring at the desk phone, as if he expected it to ring at any moment. He sat still uncomfortably long and then suddenly lurched forward, attacked the phone and dialed a three-digit number.

“Yeah, this is Robert. Are you still looking for a candidate for Moth 3?” Whoever was on the other side spoke quite a lot. ”Yes, I have a girl.” More talking “16” The line went quiet for a bit, then some more talking. “OK, I’ll bring her over if she agrees.”

Turning to me “Alright, there is something we can do. Spend an hour for science and then you are free to spend your summer here like any other boy. Would you do that?” I’m not stupid, so I knew there was a catch. Well, not stupid enough at least, but I made this bed. Time to sleep in it. “Yes.”

“OK, you are old enough to make a decision like this on your own, legally.” He stood up and walked over to a filing cabinet, opened the next to bottom drawer and rifled around a bit. Then pulled out a few papers, walked back and handed them to me. “So. Either sign this and stay, or I’ll call your parents to pick you up tomorrow.” The papers were dense legalize. Lots of cross references to laws and precedent, as if whoever wrote it thought all of this was self-evident, or didn’t want you to understand it. I thought of what the dinner table would look like the next time we all ate together. The stories we would share. How I would be a part of them for once. Damn right I signed the papers. While I did that he brought me a glass of water and a small dropper bottle. Brown glass with a rubber pipette in the cap. He poured some water in the glass, and added two drops from the bottle. “Last chance to go home as you are.” I emptied the glass in one go.

He took my arm and lead me across the camp, using side paths that went through the trees. I had a feeling he didn’t want anyone to see me. We’d barely walked a few buildings away from his office when the world started to sway. I was getting nauseous, having a creeping feeling of dread, and I think I saw a squirrel. When we got to a large, barn style building, we went to the back and he pushed a button on an intercom on the wall. “Code 91. Immediate response required”

He looked down at me and let go of my arm as the door buzzed, and opened. Two large men dressed in white scrubs came out, grabbed me by the shoulders and rushed me through. They looked eerily like Arnold Schwarzenegger, both of them. We went down a staircase as the door above slammed shut, and entered a room full of what looked like Frankenstein’s lab equipment. I panicked, pulling myself away from the men. I tried to run towards the stairs, following the fleeing squirrels. I only made it a few feet before they grabbed me again, pulling me to a chair and sat me down. Holding me down. Another man came out of a side door, dressed in double buttoned lab coat and goggles, pulling on a pair of gloves. He spoke in a hardcore, heavy German accent.

“Ah, Code 91. Haven’t had one of these in years. Wilkommen!” I tried to scream, but the orderly to my left clapped his hand over my mouth. They were both wearing world war two style gas masks now.

“No need to fuzz, it’ll only take a bit. I’ve gotten quite good at this particular physical! Now, Franz, Dözer, please take… Hmm” the German man headed to a computer and pulled up my file. “Please take Kaedan, to ze chamber”.

With my mouth still firmly covered, I fought and yelped as the two men carried me to a table, with what looked like a giant human shaped cake pan. They forced me into the mold, strapping my legs, torso, arms, and head down into the groove, and adjusted things until I was firmly stuck. I couldn’t move a muscle. I started screaming threats, until Dözer stuffed a gag into my mouth, with a hose attached to the ceiling. All the squirrels were lined up and just laughed. I was left in the cold metal mold while the Doctor set things up on a computer panel. I could hear him mumbling.

“Hm, Kaeden Atherton. Ah, yes, the Atherton boys! Good kids those two, talented, handsome. Hm, I think I know what to do here. Kaeden, says 6’1”, so shall it be! 154 lbs, check! Eyes and hair, no problem there. Now, details… details… I guess I’ve got free reign here. That is quite some athletic accomplishments you’ve listed here. Let’s use that as a guide for muscle development. Soccer. Lacrosse. Oh, climbing? Best make sure you’re a match to your strapping brothers, eh?” The doctor started typing things and using a 3D mouse, like one I’d seen in my graphic design class, to move something on the screen. Probably more squirrels. He kept rambling off little details as the top half of the human mold came down from above me, sealing with a harsh hissing sound and a cloud of gasses. I could feel my entire body slowly turning to strawberry jell-o.

“Now, skeletal and muscular systems… tall, thin, strong boned, muscle density upped a bit, rebalance muscle fiber composition. The brothers are quite fit, might as well match… Body fat needs to go down a lot. Oxygenation, cardiac development. There.

Hmmm, just a little more in the shoulders… that’s it, nice proportions, good shape.

Chest, check. Abs, check. Hips, check. Thighs, check. Calves, check. Oh… What about size 9? Yes, that ratio of fitting… no, let’s go 10 to be sure.

Now, for the secondary features. Would’ve been easier had you been younger, but I can fix this. I think, second to highest levels. Ah, definitely. Just like Heath, no, more so! May as well go full out. Dial it up to 10.

Hormone levels, highest. Ooh, right, must match the physical bits. This will be an interesting summer for you in an all male camp. I think Miss Atheron might be the new alpha in the family when this is all settled.

What settings have we left? Hmm... Looks like you’ll be a lucky lad! 8” to be proportional to the height… you know what, let’s go for 10 again… yes, yes, and hmm, a bit thicker and make those a bit larger… there, perfect! A well built young man. On those hormone levels we’ll probably see a lot of development during the summer as well.

Now, I think we’re set! Alright, Alright, here we go! Mr. Atherton, Welcome to Great Meadows Boy’s Camp!”

With that, he pushed one last button on the control panel, and I felt the metal mold heat up and start to vibrate. I tried screaming, tears welling up in my eyes as pain shot through my body. All the squirrels ran away.

When I woke up in the rickety wooden cabin I had a pounding head ache and was completely parched. I had no idea what was real and what had been hallucinations. I was pretty sure my raging hard on was real, and the implications of that wasn’t lost. I would definitively have something to talk about at our next family dinner.

[shellheadtmark2]

actually, because i’ve gotten a lot of new mcu mutuals lately, and i need to redo my 616 tony stark care manual bc i wanna tweak it and make some aesthetic changes (because i’m just Like That), things you should probably know because i am actually 616/marvel prime/main continuity-based.  i swear i’ll be serious this time.  maybe.

the original flavor tony is not going to be the same tony you’re used to from the mcu - mcu tony is actually more marvel ultimates inspired, which is a whole kettle of fish unto itself and that i have a verse for, but we’ll get to that at a later date.  instead, meet main continuity tony.

+  he started his path to iron man in a very similar way to mcu tony, in that he was injured by his own weapons (depending on where you pull from the sliding timescale, it’s everything from landmines to micromunitions) that damaged his heart and left him slowly dying.  we all know this story, right?  he built the first iron man to escape and the rest is history.

+  the difference is, main continuity was dependent upon the armor’s chestplate for a few years. the arc reactor ain’t really a thing in 616, instead we have the rt node.  similar in function, only tony could use it to do unibeams without the suit.  anyway, when tony came back, he took on iron man as an alternate identity, and told the world iron man was his bodyguard.  no one knew for a few years there that tony stark - handsome, generous, kind-hearted benefactor of the avengers who opened his home to them - and the metal-clad adventurer known as iron man was the same person.  it took a mishap with molecule man and a tiny red silk thong (no, i’m not kidding) for that little secret to come to light.

+  he was in his very early twenties when he became iron man - much younger than his mcu counterpart, and he’s very, very good at being iron man.

+  his relationship to most of the avengers - and heroes in general - is very different.  his best friend in the entire world is steve rogers - he’s had a captain america memorabilia collection since before the avengers pulled steve out of the ice (which is another thing - the avengers thawed steve, and tony has always idolized him - there’s no resentment there - and steve was not a founding member, he came in after the avengers had already formed).  his other best friend is rhodey, who was his employee-turned-military liason for stark unlimted (formerly known by many other names).  his other other best friend is pepper potts - they’ve never actually been romantically involved.  his other other other best friend was happy hogan, who died a few years back during the nightmare of civil war - which was much more us-based and much more horrific in tony’s universe.  he’s carol danvers’ aa sponsor.  he’s good friends with reed richards.  he’s been friends with stephen strange for years.  he and bucky barnes are fairly close and tony’s the one that got rid of bucky’s trigger words.  he and natasha have dated...ish, and are close.  he was never peter parker’s mentor, as his peter is a full grown adult, but peter did intern for him for a while.  and was on an avengers team with him before civil war.  he, steve, and thor are still the big three, but they have a friendship that’s been forged in the fires of really bad mistakes and they’ve come out the other side still close.  he knows the guardians of the galaxy because he was a guardian for a while during his big vacation in space.  he’s dated more avengers and x-men than you can shake a stick at.  and jarvis for him is edwin jarvis, his living, breathing, now semi-retired butler who served the avengers for many years and is part of the avengers family.

+  he was director of shield for a short time after civil war and steve rogers’ assassination.  he hated the job and he hated steve being dead and he hated what he forced himself to do so bad he literally erased that entire year out of his head.  and to get rid of the database full of superhero secret identities stored in his brain but you can’t tell me he didn’t have a more recent backup without it.

+  his first ai was named homer.  jarvis actually was pepper’s ai, for her rescue suit, and was never tony’s.  friday is and has been his main ai for years, and she has a hologram form.  she mostly runs the day to day stuff that doesn’t require tony to physically be there for the company.  which, also, tony is still ceo, he hasn’t handed that over to anyone, and pulls double fulltime duty as both a working stiff and an avenger.  his eyebags are designer.

+  he was secretary of defense for a year - he got himself elected when he found out someone in military research was reverse engineering and stealing things from the iron man.

+  he’s in his early 40s and looks younger:  being an extremis enhancile for a while and then undergoing a full-body reboot does wonders for the skin, apparently.

+  he’s canonically bisexual.

+  is known for using himself as a lab rat for incorporating experimental technology into his biology.  ask me about the suit he carried in his bones!

+  he’s 6′1 with blue eyes.  that’s, uh.  kind of important to know.  he’s tall.  he’s lanky.  and if you’re not a metahuman he might just can kick your ass, because captain america trained him in hand to hand combat (of which he’s very proud of).

+  the ten rings are literally ten alien rings used by his main archvillain, the mandarin.  they hurt.  a lot.  and he hates when he gets an up close and personal view of them smashing into his face.

+  he’s not as quippy as his mcu counterpart, and instead is more prone to bad puns and rambling awkwardly.  canonically he has depression, anxiety, and ptsd, and struggles with them regularly.  he’s also a recovering alcoholic.

+  take mcu tony’s tech.  then put it on steroids.  then make it the craziest scifi thing you can imagine.  and you’ve got the barest hint of what this tony’s tech is like.  seriously.  ask me about the suit he literally carried inside of himself.  or the time he could control machines with his brain.  616 is wild.

+  he’s been homeless.  and i don’t mean rich people homeless. i mean living on the street, nearly froze to death riding out a blizzard in a doorway and almost lost fingers and toes to frostbite homeless.  tony’s a Rich Boy but one who’s had a taste of how the other half lives on more than one occasion.  he’s also worked a regular nine to five like everyone else and lived in what was...honestly...a really shitty apartment.

+  he’s adopted, and he has a(n adopted) brother named arno.  his bio mom’s a former rockstar, and his bio dad a hydra double agent.  you literally can’t make this shit up.

+  he’s incredibly self destructive and self sacrificing.  if things look hopeless he’ll be the first to offer himself for the pyre.  because he has absolutely horrid self esteem.

+  he’s a liar.  he’s sneaky.  he tends to make decisions for other people without consulting their feelings on the matter - partly because of a tony knows best attitude, but also because there are people in the world he’d do anything, and i mean anything, to keep safe, even if they hate him in the end.  it’s kind of awe inspiring and terrifying if you manage to inspire that level of devotion in tony, because really.  anything.

+  he has a playboy reputation, but he’s anything but.  you either get casual sex out of him?  or you’re married now, sorry, that’s just how it is.  he settles and nests with a vengeance.  he’s one of those people that would love to be happy and safe and loved and married and all that happy shit but doesn’t feel like he’s worthy of it.  his issues with this have issues, to be honest.

+  if you call him in the middle of the night and need an evac and you’re on his People list he will come.  twice in two days.  dropping everything to go to the middle of indiana to do it.  if you are sad and text him about it he will bring you food.  if you don’t answer his texts he will find you and check in on you.  if you feel out of place and adrift he will try to buy your baseball team and move them back to brooklyn to make you happy.  if you die and he can’t cope with your death he will buy your first avengers indenticard for 2mil at an auction because he can’t stand the thought of anyone else having it.  if you’re really special he’ll call you “beloved” and “captain handsome”.  sometimes sweetheart.  please note these things are all canon.

+  he dies a lot.  it’s okay, he gets better.

+  his irrational fears are the dark and cockroaches.  his actual fears are waking up drunk and the suit becoming a coffin.

anyway this is a Lot.  and it’s not even really scratching the surface so.  i’m gonna just drop this on the dash as is.  and you know it helps for me to make dumb lists like this from time to time to refresh things.  anyway, i know it’s a lot!  i know it’s different!  but my (broken) ims and disco (shellhead#8434) are always open for questions and plotting.  and my inbox, too, ig.  so you know.  remember we’ve got a canon multiverse.  it’s real easy for me to drop him in the mcu to make your day annoying.

[clumsydarknut]

The Spirit of the Hero - Chapter 1

My take on the AU by Jojo over at @linkeduniverse . I loved the design and the idea, but did some tweaking to the character ages and origins to better fit my plot. Hope it’s good. Enjoy.

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               Link jolted awake. The cold air forced its way into his lungs more than he inhaled it. His heart pounded in his chest as he panted. Wha-? Where-?

               Above him was a dark piece of sky outlined by thick branches. As the shock wore off he became aware of the chilled earth beneath him. He grasped at the soft pine needles on the forest floor to bring some life to his limbs. Bending his frozen fingers stung, but at least they still worked.

               With some effort he sat up, putting a hand to his head. Soft moonlight outlined a small clearing, rimmed by towering pine trees. Only small tufts of grass poked up through the thick bed of needles and pinecones. Obviously, very few beings had ever set foot here, meaning that whatever forest this was, he was very deep into it. But where exactly is this? More importantly, how did I get here? He squinted at the patch of stars above him, tracing from star to star in the hopes of finding a familiar constellation. None appeared, but very few were visible anyway.

               Sighing, he turned his attention away from the sky. His fingers, though cold, were far from frostbitten, and none of the forest dust had seemed to settle on his soft green tunic. With further inspection he found the soles of his boots spotless, and his hair mostly without tangles. However he had gotten here, he hadn’t been here long. What was I doing? Where was I before?

               Images of a castle interior flashed through his mind. Warm smiles, laughter, music. Next to him, a woman in pink with beautiful auburn hair. That’s right. The feast. Her awakening feast. The Princess had just given a toast, and then… Link gasped and began searching his pockets. Sword, shield, bow, potions, but where is it? It can’t be gone.

               At last, in the bottom of his rupee pouch, his hand clasped around the small wooden box. It’s still here. Good. His relief quickly turned into confusion. But if I still have it, what happened? I was about to make my toast, and… Try as he might, the last thing he could remember was clinking his goblet with his spoon. This is all too strange. An invasion? But I seem unharmed. Magic, perhaps? But I wasn’t wearing this tunic at the feast. What magic would change my clothes but also provide me with my weapons?

               The wind licked his face and sent a chill down his spine. Whatever had happened, trying to puzzle it out here would do little good. There was little in the way of shelter. Traversing the woods at night wasn’t ideal either, but the moon was at its peak. The light wouldn’t be this good for much longer.

               Link pushed himself to his feet, adjusting his equipment. With another glance at the sky he found south and started off. Though the forest was dark, it was certainly not empty. Crickets chirped and a creek bubbled in the distance. If this was the forest he was thinking of, the nearest town would surely be south. Few pine forests grew so thickly in Hyrule as the ones on the northern border. Of course, that was on the assumption that this was, in fact, Hyrule. He tried to ignore that thought and instead take comfort in the familiarity of forest travel.

               Several hours in the forest was not a bother to Link. As a child he had loved exploring the woods. Handy with a sword and fascinated by wildlife, it was one of those many adventures that led to his meeting with Impa. He had never really returned from that adventure. Then again, he hadn’t much to return to in the first place. By then, the wilderness had become more of a home to him than… well, he couldn’t remember much about his life in the village. Both life in the village and life in the castle seemed equally foreign to him.

               But I can learn to live in a castle, he chuckled, ducking under another branch. For her, I can learn to live in a castle.

               As the moon began to dip the trees began to thin. Pine needle carpets gave way to more underbrush, and animal tracks became more common. He was entering a younger portion of the woods where the trees weren’t quite so tall, letting him see further ahead. In the distance he could see the gleam of water. No rumble of waves, so probably not a river. A lake, maybe? The water source was a good sign that civilization might be nearby. But just as the forest could harbor wolves and monsters, so could towns harbor thieves. He caught sight of a plume of smoke and tightened the strap on his wallet.

               Link crept from the tree line into what appeared to be a traveler’s town. The dirt road, winding along between cottages and small gardens, was well worn. The heavy wheel ruts told him it had seen many wagons. Other than the lake, the village seemed absent of any valuable resources. Likely a halfway point between two larger towns. Far enough apart that a rest stop is warranted. There must be an inn of sorts somewhere.

               Walking along the path, he quickly found what he was looking for. In the center of town, right on the waterfront, stood the town’s only three-story building. Above the main doors hung a sign bearing “The White Wolfos Inn” in cracked blue and white paint. Propped up in one of the windows, a slate read “Home of Hyrule’s Best Ale!” So I am in Hyrule. He reached for the door.

               “It won’t open. It’s after hours.”

               The voice made Link jump. Left of the door on a bench sat a young man roughly the same age as he. About a head shorter, he sported a traveler’s cloak, well-worn boots, brown trousers, and leather gauntlets. His golden hair was straight and cut off at the jaw, but wavy tufts here and there made it appear as though it took a lot of work to keep it that way. Across his forehead was tied a deep green headband, and beneath the cloak Link could see what looked like a tunic pieced together with four different colored fabrics – green, red, blue, and purple.

               “I tried knocking already, and no luck,” the boy continued, “but I’m not surprised, seeing it’s about three in the morning.” He gestured to the bench. Link took the seat but made sure to keep a hand on his wallet.

               “This may seem like a strange question,” Link began, “but may I ask what town this is? I seem to have gotten somewhat… turned around while hunting.”

               The boy raised his eyebrow. “Funny you should say that. I’m in a similar situation myself. Then again what other reason is there for arriving at an inn so late at night?”

               Link chuckled. “I suppose you’re right.” Both fell silent. A few minutes passed and a slight wind gave Link a chill. He clenched and unclenched his fists and his fingers cried out for relief from the cold.

               “Perhaps I will try knocking,” he said at last and got to his feet. He gave three solid raps on the hard wood and paused to listen.

               Just as he was going to knock again the door latch clicked and a figure pulled the door open enough to peek through. The other young man got to his feet at the sound. A curly-haired woman holding a lit candle peered through the gap.

               “What do you want?” she asked firmly. Obviously this woman was in charge.

               “Just lodging, ma’am,” Link replied calmly. Best not to appear suspicious. “There are two of us out here looking for a bed and a warm fire, if they are to be had.”

               The woman sighed and opened the door further. Scanning both Link and the young man up and down, she swung the door wide and beckoned them inside. “Come in, come in, jus’ be quick about it. God knows how many more o’ ya will show up ‘tween now an’ sunrise. Every time I open this door it’s another log on the fire and my husband won’t be ‘appy if he ‘as to go cut more before breakfast.”

               “More of us?” the young man puzzled. “How do you mean?”

               “Oh,” the woman chuckled as she shut the door, “Nothin’ by it young master. There’ve just been a few other travelers arrivin’ tonight after hours. Seems as though that storm yesterday afternoon caught some by surprise and got a fair number o’ people lost.”

               “Ah,” Link said. I suppose that’s a lucky coincidence.

               The woman led the two of them up to the second floor and down to the end of the hall. “I hope you masters don’t mind sharing a room. We’re hosting a party what got stranded by the storm and so we’re a bit short on space. If it’s any comfort to ya there are two cabinets that lock solid fer any of yer belongings need safekeeping.” She pulled a large key ring out of the pocket of her wool robe and fingered through until she found what she was looking for, poking the key into the lock and giving it a twist. The door swung open to reveal a simple, cozy room with two beds, a hearth, a washbasin, and two large chestnut armoires. “There ought to be firewood, and the bedding is all fresh. Regular pricing is 30 rupees a night wit’ breakfast, but we can discuss tha’ in the mornin’. Would the masters like me to send someone to start the fire?”

               “No, thank you ma’am,” the young man replied. “Your hospitality is much appreciated.”

               The woman nodded, satisfied. “Well, best of rest to ya. Keys to the room and the cabinets should be on the pillows. If ya need anythin’, housekeepin’ is the door at the top o’ the stairs.”

               The woman retreated down the hall, leaving Link and the stranger to settle in. Neither seemed particularly comfortable sharing the space, but both found the alternative – sleeping out front in the cold – undesirable enough that neither mentioned their discomfort. He seems polite enough, Link thought. Still, better lock up my things.

               Link took the closer bed and began removing his equipment. The young man set to lighting a fire, giving him the opportunity to stow his more valuable items in secret. Most travelers had wallets, but few had rarities like his magic rod. It was better no one knew he had such an item; locks were only meant to keep honest people honest, as thieves could and would pick locks. A prize like that was one no thief could resist.

               He kept a wary eye on his roommate as he too began settling in. When the stranger removed his cloak, Link was tempted to stare. The tunic he boasted was pieced together from four different tunics laced with gold embroidery. Link would have been convinced he was royalty if the four colors weren’t stitched together so haphazardly with thick brown yarn. The boy was also quite spindly. The only thing that told Link they were the same age was the lack of baby fat on his jaw. Something about him seemed familiar, too, but logic kept his curiosity at bay. When the stranger laid a gold-hilted shortsword on the bedspread, Link pretended not to notice. Just another traveler. It isn’t as if my blade is any less impressive.

               Link considered locking his blade in his cabinet, but instead propped it against the bed. The silver, ruby-encrusted hilt shimmered in the dim light. If the stranger noticed it, he hadn’t let it show.

               Finished settling in and itching for warmth, Link slipped off his boots and crawled into the soft feather bed. Now, with only the crackling fire to break the silence, the strangeness of his situation came to the forefront of his mind. Where exactly was he? How had he gotten here? Most importantly, how was he to get back? Were his friends okay? Was she okay? What of Hyrule? The innkeeper had let them in in the dead of night without a lick of suspicion, so if Hyrule were in crisis, she didn’t seem to know. The frustration of trying to remember what had happened didn’t lend itself to easy sleep, but he was warm. Warm and alive. That would have to do for the night, and he could figure out the rest in the morning.

               In the other bed, unbeknownst to Link, the stranger lay plagued by the same questions.

[queenpersephonesgarden]

little devil darling

Fandom: Bendy and the Ink Machine Characters: Thomas Connor, Joey Drew, Allison Connor, Bendy Word Count: 2408 Inspired by: @squigglydigg‘s  rather wonderful theory about the end of Chapter 5, and the Halloween spirit!

Can also be read on FFN and AO3

Mr. Drew doesn’t invite Thomas along for the grand ceremony to herald the Ink Machine’s first awakening on Wednesday night, which suits Thomas just fine; even if he’d been ordered to attend, he wouldn’t have gone back to that studio at night for all the extra pay in the world.

He’s spent more than his fair share of sleepless nights holed up in the dim, flickering lights, all alone, tweaking and readjusting the damned thing over and over. Trying to bring this ‘great technical marvel’ Mr. Drew had clumsily designed to life in a way that actually worked less on belief and prayers and more on engineering and logic. He’s not exactly eager to return unless the sun is up and there are at least a handful of other employees already there, thank you very much.

So, Thomas isn’t there the night the machine finally works, but he arrives the Thursday morning afterwards to see the results after a lengthy, half-coherent phone call with Mr. Drew, who’d been too excited to get half his words out.

He comes in a couple hours early because at least Mr. Drew promised a bit of overtime, and he is a bit curious to see what exactly resulted from the boss man’s special experiment. But when he enters the chamber where the infamous Machine is glugging away gallons of the studio’s precious ink, Thomas is suddenly really wishing he’d taken that vacation Allison had suggested.

“What in the hell?”

The question kind of slips out without Thomas really meaning it to, because Christ Almighty, there is a hulking, dripping thing lurking just in Mr. Drew’s shadow, and for a moment Thomas is afraid to make any sudden moves, attract its attention, but his voice seems to have already done that, if the eerie way it turns its malformed head towards him is any indication.

Thomas can’t help but swallow hard as a goopy, unsettling grin slowly tilts curiously to the side, like it’s watching him, but before he can start retreating out the door the way he came Mr. Drew finally spins away from the Machine.

“Isn’t he wonderful?!” Thomas has never seen Mr. Drew so ecstatic before, face alight with a joy that had all but faded in the last few years of the studio’s decline into bankruptcy. He’s standing up tall and straight as he can without leaning on his cane, like he’s trying to appear as large as the thing standing behind him. “I knew you had it in you, Mr. Connor! Your redesigns really did the trick, my boy! It stopped clogging and accepted the model just like you said it would!”

The compliments practically fly over Thomas’ head, as most of his attention is fastened to the monstrosity Mr. Drew seems to be ignoring rather masterfully.

“Sir,” Thomas coughs, because God, what the hell- “What- uh, what did you-?”

“Oh, he’s just marvelous, isn’t he?!” Mr. Drew turns right around and beams up at the oozing monster like it’s the best Christmas present he’s ever seen, and Thomas feels a chill go down his spine when the thing just angles its head down and continues grinning back even though from here it doesn’t look like it can properly see, what with its eyes being nonexistent. “He’s just a prototype, but he came right out on the first try! I didn’t even have to reset the levers or anything; he crawled right out after the sketch was put in!”

“‘He?’” Thomas asks weakly. There’s a lot more he should be saying – hell, there’s plenty he should be screaming at this point – but his brain is refusing to cooperate. Words are completely failing him, because his eyes can barely comprehend what they’re seeing.

Mr. Drew cheers a bit, shaking his cane around in excitement, and if he were a younger man he might have broken into a happy jig.

“Yes! Bendy, of course!” he says, and.

What?

Is that what this is supposed to be?

Looming just behind Mr. Drew’s shoulder, the thing sways a little bit, like a sudden breeze might make it topple over and crush him.

Thomas musters something that might resemble an understanding smile, and backs out of the room as slowly as he can, trying not to look like he’s running away.

Mr. Drew hardly seems to notice his departure, ecstatically circling back around the Machine, chanting words that aren’t even English and waving his arms around like a loon.

Back where it had been left, the thing that might be Bendy the Dancing Demon hadn’t taken its attention off of Thomas, head still tilted to watch his exit, still smiling smiling smiling.

Once he reaches the corner, Thomas gives up on any pretenses and books it out of there like a bat out of hell.

He can still feel the thing’s invisible eyes on him all the way out of the studio.

-

While the experiment might seem like a success in some ways, in many ways it most definitely is not.

The strange, towering husk is almost nothing like the little devil darling it’s supposed to be.

Sure, it’s got the iconic horns and the unnaturally wide grin of its cartoon counterpart, but that’s about where the similarities end.

This thing is tall, unnaturally so, like its body is made out of taffy that’s been stretched out too long. It’s horns nearly brush the ceiling and its arms are nearly as long as it’s body. One hand has the glove reminiscent of the real Bendy, while the other is just an ugly, black paw, fingers jagged and curled slightly like claws.

And it drips everywhere, continuously oozing puddles and streaks of dark ink all across the ground wherever it goes, staining the floor just as much as all the damned burst pipes always do.

“It’s a damn menace!” Sammy Lawrence snarls at lunch time, voice booming through the breakroom like it usually does when he’s in a terrible mood and he needs everyone else to know. “Fuckin’ freak thinks it can wander into my studio and-! There’s ink all over the damned walls! How the hell am I supposed to write a damned thing when half my papers are soaked darker than Satan’s soul?!”

Thomas, picking wordlessly at his lukewarm tuna sandwich, watches Eddie and Marge and Frankie all nod seriously in agreement, and can’t help pursing his lips.

The animators and half the rest of the staff are practically in an uproar about the thing, which has meandered its way all across the studio and back in the day and a half since it was brought into existence. At first, they were too creeped out by its’ appearance to say much against Mr. Drew, but ever since it started seriously disrupting people’s work with its random disappearing-reappearing through walls act, they’d been getting a little more vocal about their displeasure in private, where neither the boss man or the thing in question could hear them.

Sammy looks about five seconds away from storming out of the room and demanding a word with Joey, and honestly Thomas is almost tempted to let him; if there’s anyone in this place that can kick up enough of a storm to actually get Mr. Drew’s attention, it’s Sammy Lawrence and his sharp tongue and even sharper temper.

But the same, creeping feeling of being watched is still on him, even now, hours later and with the thing not even in the room, and Thomas isn’t feeling up to pressing his luck right now.

“You managed just fine when the pipes burst, yeah?” he dares to ask, raising an eyebrow at Sammy’s outraged sputtering.

This could become a nice, distracting argument, but even thinking about defending the monster is killing Thomas’s appetite, and he shoves back from the table with a scowl.

“Up yours, Connor!” Sammy hollers after him as he heads out into the hallway.

Thomas waves over his shoulder and skirts around a fresh ink puddle without looking.

-

Thomas gets called in to deal with another burst pipe in the animator’s department, and ain’t it just his great luck that he finds the thing standing right in the middle of the room, hunched over a bit to accommodate for its massive height and the low ceiling, smiling smiling smiling in that creepy way it does as it seemingly watches Mr. Drew with poor Frankie at the man’s desk.

“It needs to be completely on model this time, Mr. Chambers,” Mr. Drew’s voice is poisonously sweet as he loomed ominously over the animator, expression calm but the look in his eyes bordering on murderous as he stared Frankie down.

Thomas winces in sympathy as Frankie gestures uselessly at whatever is on his desk, face set in a stubborn scowl that’ll probably get him fired.

“Sir, ya said so yourself; the sketches I gave you yesterday were on model! Those Bendy’s looked like every other cartoon we’ve ever released, they were perfect, so I don’t see how it’s my fault the-” he coughed a bit, glanced at the shadow standing right in the middle of the room, and grimaced. “-the model your Machine spat out is as deformed as it is! Maybe you should be taking a look at-!”

“The Machine worked exactly as it was supposed to!” Mr. Drew snapped, and Thomas pretends very hard like he’s studying the leaking pipe he’s over here to fix, because the Machine was working just fine when he’d been working on it, but that was back before all the weird voodoo shit was thrown in, and he’s not sure he wants to see what would happen if he decided to mention that.

Another chill goes shooting up his spine, and Thomas glances over his shoulder to find the thing slowly drifting closer to the wall he’s working next to as both Frankie and the boss man continue their little discussion.

His entire body stiffens at the thing’s approach, and Thomas is just contemplating how much trouble he’s likely to get in if he reaches for his wrench and takes a swing at it, but he doesn’t need to worry; the thing drifts farther and farther to the right until it reaches the corner opposite Thomas. It hits the wall, and Thomas half expects it to phase through the wood like it’s been doing all damn day, but instead it just sort of leans listlessly against it, unmoving for a long minute, until its form slowly crumples up into an awkward, misshapen ball, like a pouting child in timeout.

The comparison does nothing for Thomas’s nerves, and neither does the sudden thud and the sound of paper ripping coming from Frankie’s desk.

“Just do better this time, Mr. Chambers!” Mr. Drew is still smiling that unhappy smile as he walks away, limping heavily even with his cane, not even looking back when Frankie throws up his hands in frustration and proceeds to rip up even more papers from his desk.

“Whatever you say, sir,” Frankie mutters sourly, gathering up his ink pot and a few folders before stalking out after the boss, expression thunderous.

The door slams closed after the duo’s dramatic exit, and Thomas is left with the horrifying realization that he is alone in here, and that thing is also very much still here.

Ruined scraps of paper float gently off Frankie’s desk after it’s owner’s hasty departure, and they scatter a bit across the floor.

In the corner of the room, the thing has started to rock back and forth. A disturbing choking sound is emanating from the back of its throat, and Thomas can feel gooseflesh rising up all along his arms as it thumps it’s head gently against the wall with a gentle splat-splat, staining the wall with ink.

If Thomas didn’t know any better, he’d say it was crying, curled up like a frightened kid and making itself as small as possible.

“Would you stop that?”

He doesn’t mean to talk to it. He doesn’t want to talk to it, because it’s not a fucking person, but it’s crying and he doesn’t know why.

Thomas’s throat rasped, voice curiously strained for some reason. His tone was a lot quieter than he’d meant it to be, but if he tried to go any louder he might really start screaming. “You’re Drew’s special little project, ya hear? You ain’t got nothin’ to cry about. Stop that.”

A half-finished sketch of what looks like Boris the Wolf lands on Thomas’s shoe, and he shakes it off with a scowl.

The thing chokes a little louder, and Thomas gets up and grabs his toolbox and walks back out of the room. Someone else can deal with the leak for now. He’s really not in the mood.

-

Allison finds him, after work is over for the day and he’s still packing up his things. She bursts into the room like she’d run all the way here from the recording studio, entire body trembling like a leaf in a storm and eyes haunted.

He doesn’t ask, just opens his arms and holds onto her when she falls into him with a gasp.

“I said ‘hi’ to it,” she whispers, voice so hoarse he can barely hear it even when her chin is pressed into his shoulder. “It came up behind me, and I wasn’t thinking, and I said ‘hi’ because I thought it was Sammy and it- I thought-”

She sobs hard, can’t speak for a moment, and Thomas can’t do anything but tighten his arms around her, ignore the angry fire banking in his gut as she shakes apart.

“It said- I thought it said ‘Hi Alice’, and the voice-! The sounds it made- oh, god, Tom, that’s not human, whatever it is, and it’s- it’s so sad-!”

Words fail her, and Allison buries her face into his neck and cries her heart out.

Above them, Thomas listens to ink flow sluggishly through the pipes. It never sounded so much like a moaning voice, before.

-

Thomas hands in his resignation letter the Monday after a long weekend of thinking.

Marching back out of the studio with his head held high, he ignores the stares of his former colleagues and keeps his shaking hands balled into fists at his sides.

The ink thing that might be Bendy wanders past him on the way out, face still dripping inky tears and smiling smiling smiling all the while.

[callistochan87]

Inktober Day 11, Shelby

Posting this one solo because the weekends are couples so it’d be a bit weird to pair this up with a larger picture, plus this takes up most of the page anyway. Might as well make it its own thing.

I had an idea for a hairstyle in my head. Not necessarily for Shelby, but it worked for her because it’s similar to what she has already. The headband...I dunno, just thought she needed something and it looks cute with the little bow. makes her look a bit younger which is good because I feel like my teenage characters usually look older than they are.

Shelby is absolutely one of those characters that I see with pale eyelashes and freckles all over, total ginger

also, that bottom picture of Shelby, that was like...damn, Callisto, can you even draw your own characters any more? it’s not fair to draw random maybe-redesigns maybe-second book designs for them when I barely draw anymore to begin with. I swear I haven’t dabbled with possible redesigns for all of them, I swear. Some of the girls I don’t do much with, they’re fine, I swear. (she says...we’ll see when I actually get to them...?)

it’s not my fault I like short hair and there’s like, a million variants of it. actually on reflection it doesn’t look too bad (her hair, that is, because I was thinking the hairstyle looked too old.) It looks pretty nice, it’s just that the original reference sheet was from, holy shit, 2016. That feels like ages ago, And her hair looked a little weird there, but then again the picture is three years old. I’m more amazed it has been three years.

also also I’m starting to freak out a bit because we’re almost halfway though October and I’m realizing that I’m actually...not sure if I want to write a second book or rewrite book one? I have no idea for an actual plot and I keep thinking the ending I have is a bit of a cop out, it’d make more sense if they wound up remaining in the dark matter-verse because...what, I think I wrote that they’d only expected this (reversing the conversion process) to work in a theoretical sense but had no idea if it actually would, because they weren’t really expecting them originally either? Or something. Feels like a bit of a risk to send seven kids, who they presumably have gotten attached to on some level, back into an experimental shuttle that they’re not sure will work/could potentially kill them, and certainly they’d have no way of knowing either way what happened to them. I dunno. The original ending just feels a bit cliche and too neat and perfect and since I don’t know what the second book would be about I can’t figure out how they’d go through that shit again, because like I said this was all experimental, and the person who might actually want to bring them back (Amina) doesn’t actually have the equipment or knowledge to do so. The one person who does wants them to stay on Earth.

i mean I could edit, because parts of the first draft are okay, and parts of the beginning (of the second draft) are okay/a little more condensed, and the other changes I could work with, but uhhhhhhhhhh given my shitty time management skills and my constant, low-level exhaustion, doing this and editing is probably a recipe for disaster at this point, and I have other things I need to do besides.

this was nice, don’t get me wrong. It feels like it’s been a while since I’ve seriously thought abut any story, let alone something that’s been around with for 14 years at this point, and when I’m working my mind is usually free to wander to various places. but then it fills me with anxiety because i don’t know what I’m doing and why am I not happy with anything, and also am I just going to tweak everything until I die? why even tweak when this isn’t a graphic novel, but a written story? 🙃

it is a cute hairstyle though so I’m super torn. also still raging quietly that I basically have to ink shit twice because the eraser pulls off the ink from the page. I’m beginning to think the pencil is maybe the culprit, it’s a Prismscolour pencil, their inks can be soft and a bit waxy, maybe the pen doesn’t really stick as much if it’s sticking to the blue. But on the other hand, it’s so faint! So easy! Never mind I can’t actually get rid of the blue because Photoshop Elements doesn’t let you mess around with channels, but it’s something!

And I think Shelby had a scarf in her design at one point. I guess she does now. It’s firmly Sweater Weather up here so I am biased towards drawing warm winter clothing. 😂

[whiskeyworen]

MIRIYA - SISTERS "When was the last time all three of us got together like this?" Miriya asked, slipping into the seat at the table. Truth be told, she didn't so much 'slip in' as 'hop up', since the seats were all human-sized. Extremely resilient seats too; though scaled for humans, each one had to be able to support a full grown Norn or Charr without breaking. Someone out there must be making a killing on specialized chairs she thought idly as she plopped into the seat and flashed a grin at the other person at the table. "Fairly long time, I think." Her sister Sonnya replied, sipping her lager. She looked every part the responsible older sister; the uncomplicated and efficient hair style, the simple tunic she wore in place of her heavy Guardian armor, the fact she wore very little in the way of makeup. Were she to stand by her sister, Sonnya would 'tower' over her by a full three inches, making her the big sister in more than just title. Far too often in their collective pasts, she'd been forced to regulate arguments and fights between her younger siblings. "Last time I saw you directly was during the war with Mordremoth, when we were all playing at Jungle Fighter." Miriya nodded while indicating to the waiter her drink order. She too, had forgone the usual combat gear for something simple; a strangely bright sundress quite at odds with her profession. Sonnya thought to ask her about it but declined after a moment's thought. "I nearly forgot about that. Between dodging poison vines and defending Tarir, my krewe and I were fairly occupied." She glanced at the empty spot at the table and raised an eyebrow. "So...is she going to be here?"

Sonnya nodded, grimacing slightly. "She said she'd be here. Probably got waylaid. While she's out though, we...need to talk." Immediately all of Miriya's alarms went off. Her ears snapped up, curling away from her face and twitching with concern and worry. Oh no...don't tell me she's heard about Kaleb. Please don't let this be the Talk about Interspecies Relations... "Uh.. talk about what?" "Tenna." The sourness in the older sister's tone caught her by surprise. "I suppose you haven't heard the rumors floating out of Rata Sum?" Well, there IS that pile of notices and orders sitting back on my desk in the Chantry of Secrets... Swear I'll get to that some day. Miriya took a sip from the drink that had arrived, using the edge of the stein to hide her pursed lips.  "What kinds of rumors are we talking? Did she... get involved with the Inquest or something?" Sonnya shook her head slowly. "No...not that bad. And yet, it's worse. Since the war with the Jungle Dragon, I've been getting observer reports coming in from Vigil weaponeers. About an Asura with the Danae name who's apparently gone off the bend." The necromancer sister couldn't help but laugh. "Well, I know Tenna's a bit of a firebrand and a wild thinker, but I wouldn't call her insane..." Her sister, the Guardian, just traced a fingertip around the rim of her mug. "...She hasn't slowed down, hasn't stopped, hasn't slept in who knows how long. Peacemaker security reports tell me she hasn't even returned to her dorms since the war began, and now that it's over she still hasn't come back." Miriya's laughter and smile slowly faded. "That's...ungood. I'm all for studying till it hurts, but even I sleep when I need to." Lately I've been preferring to, since I've got a nice warm human to snuggle up to--STOP IT! She cut her own thought off before it resulted in a blush that her very observant sister would have noticed. "Say...when did you start keeping tabs on her? You're not Whispers, so the spying game seems kinda weird." Her sister chuckled hollowly. "I have two sisters I think the world of. I also have two sisters who, given the right time and place, might accidentally do something to end that world. One of them is a necromancer of some repute who apparently delved so deep into the Entropic Cog of the Alchemy that some say she's already died and come back." The subsequent 'meep' from her dreadlock-headed sibling made her quirk a smile. "The other is an engineer with an absolute fascination with energy manipulation and explosives development, who's already tabled half a dozen designs for new explosion-based weapons so exotic that all five nations have unilaterally put them under lock and seal. Even the Council of Elders in Rata Sum wanted nothing to do with them." Miriya's jaw dropped. It took something massive to get the Council to lock it down; most of the time they'd steal the idea and claim it as their own, adding tweaks and modifications to seem like they'd improved it. For them to blacklist something meant it was so dangerous they couldn't risk it getting out. "You're serious? By the Cogs... Huh, I wonder if the notice for those is in my pile of mail.." "What?" "Nothing.  Just making a mental note..." "Yeah. Sure." Sonnya sipped her beer, knowing full-well that the Order of Whispers spy agency would have had detailed notes on all of that. If the Vigil could get a hold of details like that, it was progeny's play for the Whispers. Chances were pretty good that the information the Vigil got was FROM the Whispers! "Well, when she gets here we can talk to her about it." "Talk to me about what?" A perky voice chimed in, before a charcoal-skinned Asura popped up beside them, surprising them both. She hopped into her own seat, brushing one of her ponytails out her eyes before smiling at her sisters. "Sorry I'm late. I got...distracted." Tenna giggled as if she had told a joke, giving both sisters a chance to see how bedraggled she really was. Her normally straight hair, the color of bordeaux and tied into a pair of pony tails framing her face, with a third one on the back of her head holding her long hair off her body, seemed a bit...askew. The ponytail bindings weren't as tight, so hair had gotten loose and springing away from her typically immaculate hairstyle. Both of them could see soot in her hair and in places on her face, like her jawline or at the edge of her hairline. Overall, she looked messy, and perhaps just a little unhinged? They couldn't see her mouth, since she had her hand up to cover her face slightly, resting her elbow on the table to do so. But..something else seemed off. Her eyes... Miriya tried not to gasp in horror. They look so... Words failed her. Tenna's eyes, normally a bright golden orange, were both fairly sunken in her face, surrounded by tired, dark, I-haven't-slept-in-ages bags. The color was also muted; where her eyes used to shine like a solar reactor, the Asura looking back at Miriya had glassy, empty eyes that twitched from one sister to the other almost nervously. There was still the same wild humor, the twinkle of the practical joker she was in those eyes, but by their very sunkenness, the tone of that humor was changed. "Tenna..." Miriya began awkwardly, giving her younger sister a strained smile. The Danae sisters, though physically similar in some respects, had enough differences that it made them hard to believe they were blood sisters. "It's so good to see you. I trust you've been keeping out of trouble?" Of the three sisters, Sonnya was the oldest and the tallest. All three sisters shared the same facial markings, that of a trio of diamonds across their foreheads, but Sonnya's skin tone was almost a human-pink, rather than the shades of grey most Asura sported. Her hair was a plain orange-red, her eyes a strong, deep blue. Being the oldest sister, she'd grown up the responsible one, keeping her bickering siblings under control. As an adult she'd joined the Vigil rather than any of the Colleges, her disdain for study manifest. That didn't stop her from improving designs that came her way, but she was no wild inventor, and the Vigil needed steadfast soldiers, not starry-eyed dreamers. Miriya on the on other hand, was the middle sibling and out of the group, surprisingly the shortest. Where her older sister favored a more broad, tall frame, toned by battle and hard training, she herself was slim and small, a waif by Asuran standards. It ground her gears that she was the smallest of the trio, no matter that she was older than Tenna; some fluke of genetics had given her the petite frame she was born with. Sharp emerald eyes gazed out upon the world. Where her older sister favored a simple, asymmetric hairstyle, she had hers pulled and shaped into short, fingerlength dreadlocks, held back by her utilitarian headband. Her skin was remarkably pale for an asura, which she prided since she clearly felt it suited her profession as a Necromancer (extraordinaire, if you believed her). The black sheep of the group was Tenna. Last of the Danae, she had her older sister's height, but the middle sister's build. Tall and lanky, she had grown up being known as a gangly progeny and prone to accidents. Another genetic quirk had set off recessive genes in Tenna; instead of being pale or pink like her older siblings, Tenna was had a darker, almost sooty aspect to her skin. Her markings were inverted color, compared to the others; where they had dark marks on pale skin, hers were pale marks on dark skin. Were it not for her sleep-deprived bags under her eyes, she would have had bright, gold-orange eyes. There was a joke that persisted for years that Tenna had been able to see in the dark thanks to her unrealistically bright, shiny eyes. Tenna smiled behind her hand and signalled the waiter for something. Whatever the hand gesture was, the waiter flinched and then frowned, before nodding and departing to get it. The engineer waited till the drink was placed before her before answering her sister. "As much as able, not as much as I could." She replied vaguely, uncorking the glass bottle and pouring a fair bit of deep red liquid into her glass. It wasn't thick liquor; the ice in the glass barely stained with the ruby red of the liquid. "Been on the road lately, exploring, getting research materials..." "And developing a taste for Charr-style Blood whiskey, I see. " Sonnya pointed out disapprovingly, sipping her own beer. "You DO know what makes it 'blood' whiskey, right?" Tenna merely giggled, and took a sip. Still, she had her hand over her mouth, though she gave her lips a bit of a rub against her fingers. "It's a very interesting recipe. I've gotten quite accustomed to it." Her necromancer sister just watched her, before shrugging and drinking some of her own. She preferred wine, personally. In fact, she'd been drinking a bit more of it since... She cut the thought off before the blush started again. Damn, I really gotta control myself. At this rate it won't be secret anymore, will it? "Sis tells me you've been working on some new weapons or something? Explosives and such?" Miriya ventured, trying to divert the conversation to safer ground for them all. "Anything you can tell us? Or are you under one of those Council seals?" Tenna finally let her hand drop from her mouth, apparently satisfied with whatever she'd done until that moment. She took a long, bracing sip of the whiskey, wincing at its sharpness, before answering. "Nah. The actual diagrams and technology IS under seal, but I can still tell you about it. Not like you're gonna be able to build it from a bare description anyway." Both sisters looked at each other, and then at Tenna, blinking. They both expected to be told 'Classified' and then the conversation to move along. They leaned forward, almost conspiratorily. "So?..." Tenna shrugged, still grinning toothily. "Been working on a few projects. Small-scale application, Pact-fleet application, and a few private projects just for my entertainment, of course." She looked down at her drink. "Made a new grenade type, for starters. High density explosive based off Tonn's ship-cracker, melded with a fragmentation core, and laced with specially designed high-temp resistant spikes. Not using much of the explosive, but it's so powerful a few milligrams are equal to a standard grenade payload." "That's... wait. If you made it a frag grenade, then why add those 'high temp resistant spikes' or whatever?" Miriya puzzled, frowning. "Seems kinda redundant." Sonnya nodded. "Indeed. Wouldn't the frag core be sufficient to cause damage?" The dark-haired engineer nodded, trying to keep from giggling again. "Oh it would...but the spikes are for increased damage, burn damage, and morale-breaking. After the grenade goes off, in addition to the regular shrapnel, those spikes are thrown out. They're razor sharp, intensely heated by the blast but not deformed by it, and best of all, they richochet off hard surfaces." Her eyes flicked up and over to each of them, judging their reactions. She couldn't help but giggle as they made the connection. "All that razor-sharp spike storm, in a confined space, bouncing around like the goo-ball from an elixir gun... The pa-ting-ting-TANG of bouncing metal, all searching for something...meaty...to bury itself in. Burning hot to boot, so it practically cooks the flesh when it skewers it..." "By the Eternal Alchemy..." Miriya breathed. She'd seen Dhangalor's grenades in action before, shredding Orrian monstrosities and Mordrem plant abominations. Her own sister's devices made those pale. "That's just...heinous. I can definitely see the morale-shattering effect of it." Sonnya nodded mutely. She'd heard of the design, as it had crossed her desk before. Tonn's recipe was a state secret, but the Charr had been salivating at getting their hands on it. It was sealed by the council, but in time, those grenades might make it to the hands of those who could use them. "Heh... Also work great in a pinch for meal time." Tenna went on, almost distractedly. "Just toss into a room with a food animal and when the explosions are over, you got some nice cooked meat, pre-skewered for ease of eating." "Okay, that's just gross." Her older sister frowned, crossing her arms. "Especially if the creature wasn't killed in the blast. Then you gotta deal with it afterward." Tenna just shrugged mildly, as if it didn't bother her at all. "Secondary designs are for artillery shells, bombs, grenade launchers, that kind of thing. Simple fair." She continued. "Another project that got kiboshed by the Council was for an orbital energy weapon delivery platform. I don't think they liked the idea of someone putting nigh-untouchable magitek weapons in geosynch orbit." Sonnya eyed her sister suspiciously. "Where did you come up with THAT idea, pray tell?" Her engineer sister shrugged. "Files from the Scarlet Briar archives. Studies of the wreckage of the Breachmaker in all three forms it had." She smiled brightly. "That sylvari was in a class all her own. She was really onto something with ethertech, and that big slag-off ethercannon she tested in the Shiverpeaks. Got an idea what she'd intended it for, but that's MY secret." "In any case, while I was studying it, I was also trying to see...how shall I put this? I wanted to see how high a sentient-made device could go." Tenna giggled, licking her lips. "I used Tonn's explosive formula, of course, but with my own mixes. Made a nice long-burning, fuel source. Impractical for anything other than in engines or rockets. Which is what I did. I launched rockets with varying degrees of fuel, studded with sensors and golemites, and just...aimed at the sky." "Well, that still sounds more acceptable than the grenade." Miriya pointed out, nodding. Experimentation was all part of Dynamics. While her sister was a Synergetics College alumni, Miriya herself was Dynamics. The two fields often overlapped; the crazed experiments for-the-sake-of-experimenting Dynamics got passed over or incorporated into Synergetic scientists projects aimed at integrating new and exotic things into the fabric of society and knowledge. They took all experiments, failure or not, and added them to the warp and weave of the Asuran knowledge pool, often figuring out solutions the original scientists didn't see. "And what can you tell us of the upper atmosphere then?" "That the breathable part ends at about one hundred kilometers above sea level, for starters." Tenna looked at both sisters, and their gawping faces. "Oh yeah, that's right... neither of you knew. Did you think the atmosphere just kept going out and out, until it reached the stars?" Sonnya frowned, before nodding. "Well, just doing the math in my head for gas density versus gravity, that would make sense. If the atmosphere just kept going, gravity would cause it to naturally condense more and more on the surface, until it was unbearable, unlivable. Possibly even dangerous. We're talking tons per square inch here." Her dark haired sister nodded. "Yep. I mean, there's still SOME atmo up there; it doesn't just end like a forcefield. But it does trail off rather abruptly. Everything beyond that, from what I can tell from recovered probes, says there's only trace gases. The golemites that survived reentry...the ones that still could think, anyway, reported being unable to move around the rocket pod due to a lack of gravity. Around the fifth trial rocket I had to put magnets on the feet and hands, and bind the free-floating limbs with wire just so they wouldn't fall apart up there! I almost reverted back to using a design like those stupid old Novan golems, where all the bits are attached by machine." She stuck her tongue out, making a lemon-eating face. Archaic technology... "So what did you learn?" Sonnya asked, nibbling a corn chip from the appetizer that had appeared on the table. She hadn't asked for it, and was pretty sure no one had ordered it, but there it was anyway. Tenna smirked, removing a vial from her pocket and emptying its contents into her whiskey, before she stirred it with one long nailed finger. "That the council hates the idea of orbitally-launched, geosynchronous weapons systems. At least, ones that weren't under their control. Didn't stop the Inquest though. Those shit-eaters tried three times to either sink or commandeer my satellite with ones of their own based off what they could see of my design." She sighed, shaking her head. "The original rocket probes weren't meant to do much but measure stuff. But then I sent up my prototype beam cannon satellite, and I guess they got word of it. A shame for them that those golemites I sent up in the actual satellite were the most heavily armed ones I could get. And it's not like the satellite is undefended itself." Miriya quirked an eyebrow, noting the vial but saying nothing. "You mean you went paranoid and turned it into more than a study satellite didn't you." "Got it in one!" Tenna pointed at her sister, grinning, before taking a slug of her drink, wincing at the burn. " In addition to the sensor packages and the golemites in it, which are specially modified with weapons I made, the satellite package itself is studded with direct-fire energy weapons, retractable turrets, and then there's also the mega particle cannon I installed on it. Kinda the point of it really." Sonnya was stunned. "What could possibly be the point of THAT?! To burn a section of the planet to ash?" Tenna nodded brightly, her loose ponytail bobbing. "Exactly! I envisioned a network of them in orbit, placed all over the planet! Imagine being able to cut off dragon minions from their attack routes, carve the landscape into what you need, or better yet, just BURN the bastards out?" "By the Alchemy, that's just nuts." Miriya shook her head. "I mean, the Dragons are a threat, but you've heard the reports coming out of Rata Novus, and the instabilities everywhere; killing them isn't an option anymore. Maybe it never was, but we couldn't stop Zhaitan without completely annihilating him, and that bitch Scarlet left us no choice when she woke Mordremoth early. If we'd had time to build up our militaries and train them for jungle assaults, we could have approached him while he slept and fire-bombed everything." She sipped her drink, thinking. "Now we have to deal with the planet trying to break up underneath us, and rampant magic." "Well, whatever. Like I care." Tenna shrugged flippantly. "The Council, the human royalty, and the Charr Imperator, while they saw the benefits, worried the network would fall into less-than-admirable hands, and so quashed the idea immediately. Permanently forbid me from seeking funding for the network. So I was left with just my test satellite, and it's non-city-smashing laser." "They didn't take that one away?" "Not a chance. I bonded the control system to my own genetic structure, magic wavelength run through a cipher, voice control... and several other systems." She replied. "That satellite is mine; it's keyed to wipe out anything that approaches it that doesn't have my specific okay, which means coming from my labs with ALL my signatures on it. Its use is connected to me in a way I won't go into, but no one other than me can use it." She began to giggle again. "I can hit anyone I see from orbit with a pinpoint high energy strike born of the very energy of our world. And there's nothing anyone can do to stop it." "They could kill you. Let it just drift in space." Sonnya offered sardonically. She pointed a finger-gun at her youngest sibling and closed an eye, sighting over an invisible iron sight. "No control, no weapon." Tenna smiled broadly, eyes closed in utter confidence, so very much like when they were younger. The cute redhead goofball from the past was suddenly before her older sister. "They could try. I've made it MUCH harder to kill me. And I don't think they'd like the consequences of killing me. It'd be...detrimental." She tilted her head to the side, oddly, still smiling. That smile, as playful as it was, was definitely giving Sonnya the creeps. It wasn't healthy. "How so?" The goofball grin shifted into something much less innocent; Tenna's eyes were hooded with something less wholesome than mere mischief. "If I die suddenly, the satellite goes on automatic. I've embedded scanners and sensors in my armor, and in my own body, thanks to a very capable sylvari surgeon. That satellite is recieving a constant datafeed from me. It doesn't matter if I don't see my killer; one of my sensors will. And then a moment later, the killer will be obliterated by a terawatt laser. The system is as heuristic as I can make it; all vectors included. If an Inquest shithead kills me, the laser starts with them, and then proceeds to work its way through the database of Inquest labs and fortresses, before taking down individual targets with a powered down version of the laser. Less collateral damage that way." She sipped her drink again, and this time Miriya noticed her eyes seemed to shimmer or glow brighter afterward. The bags under her eyes seemed to recede, and she looked slightly more refreshed. Whatever she'd slipped into her drink, it was reviving her? Miriya could feel something, on the edge of thought, the edge of reality; there was something familiar.... An energy of some kind, a violation of Death itself. It was minor right now, but with each second it was gaining resolution. She sat there confused as Tenna continued to blather about her weapons. "You're talking about potential mass murder from a weapon no one else can reach, Tenna. " Sonnya scolded, her concern rising with each moment. "Don't you think that's a little excessive?" Tenna shrugged mildly, still drinking her whiskey. "Not really. Vexa built her lab in Flame Legion territory to contain and continue her genetic experiments. Calx hid his lab behind a gateway system in the heart of a mountain. Oola hid hers in the jungle to keep people from her Necro-golem research (interesting concept, I'd have you). Our people have a history of hiding our best research and gear and all that behind layers of defenses and automatic weaponry. Mine is just orbitally based, and VERY vengeful." She started to laugh, rocking in her seat and slapping a palm against the table top. "I'm just following everyone else!" While she laughed, Miriya and Sonnya passed a look between each other. Had their sister officially lost her mind? It was true Asuran paranoia was well known, and the best researchers and inventors had sequestred themselves away from others for the sake of hiding their research until they were ready to reveal it...but... Tenna's laughter finally started to fade, and she brushed a tear from her eye before draining her drink. With a triumphant slam, she signalled for a fresh drink from the bar. "'Nother one! I'm still seeing straight!" There it was again; when Tenna drained the drink, that odd sensation, that whisper Miriya was hearing in the back of her mind got louder. Much louder. It was seemingly focused on Tenna. She stared at her sister as she cracked another vial into her new drink, stirring it with a finger. Miriya glanced at Sonnya, and noticed she too seemed suddenly wary. Was she feeling something?

Unbeknownst to Miriya, she was right; Sonnya felt something disturbing as well. As a Guardian, she was trained to notice changes, both magically and physically in the area around her. It was part of Guardian training to master any battlefield, which meant that if the battlefield suddenly started to change, you studied and adapted to it. Foreign weapon making fighting hard? Adjust. Alien magic warping your opponent or the landscape or something? Identify, adjust, eliminate. Purge the unclean with holy fire based from the diamond hard sureity of your own soul. The stronger your faith was, the more you could undo the damage someone had done.

All too often, Sonnya's mere prescence on the Vigil battlefield had sent Orrian monstrosities reeling. The flames of her devotion to the cause manifested ghostly blue fire across her entire body, and, combined with the channelling crystals and specialized sigils she had personally installed in every piece of her gear, she could vent those flames as a physical weapon; no ally would ever be harmed, but anyone that stood in her path would burn. In a private, self-indulgant moment, she had once confessed she called it the Exterminatus. Sitting there, staring at her youngest sibling as she drank a drink corrupted with...something... she could feel that distortion to the Right Order growing. What had Tenna gotten into?!

It was Miriya who suddenly recognized the unfamiliar-yet-familiar distortion. Her face paled as she realized just what it was, but... how had Tenna gotten her hands on it?!

"Tenna..." She asked tenatively. "What...is that you mixed into your drink?" Tenna paused her stirring, but didn't look at her sister at all. Her voice was low, almost a whisper. A small, knowing smile crossed her lips. "Oh, it's just... something. Something very interesting." She replied, feigning evasiveness.

"How so?" Sonnya added, her voice hard. It was less a question than a demand. Big sister needed to be big sister.

"It was quite interesting actually. Several months ago, a plasma sample was sent to the Dynamics labs. It was bounced around the labs, with no one making progress since there was little detail on its origins. All data had been put under lock and key. Or deliberately omitted." She sat back, smiling wistfully. "So there I was, in the Synergetics labs, struggling to deal with stress, lack of sleep, requests for translations from the Priory, an upcoming presentation for an invention I hadn't created yet... and this vial gets passed to me by a coworker who was seeing a girl in Dynamics." Her smile twisted slightly. It seemed slightly more toothy than before. "Well, I did my own analysis and discovered that there was something very wrong with the sample. There was an active blood-borne viral parasite component latched onto every single red blood cell, even the white cells. I did an analysis of the T cells, and discovered that the viral component was bypassing the normal immune responses by literally being slightly out of phase; every time a leukocyte started to draw a bead on one and try to kill it, the virus's membrane coating would shift chaotically until it no longer matched up. Very tenacious." "So the immune system couldn't touch it, and yet it wasn't killing cells. This virus, if you could call it that, was making subtle, random changes to the DNA of its target. Some of the changes were fairly regular, which means whoever the poor bastard is, they're gonna start seeing some teratological changes the longer they're infected." Tenna shook her head. "I don't know precisely what that'll entail, but it won't kill them. Oh no...definitely not." "You see, the virus was also actively repairing telomeres. It wasn't reversing telomere damage that had happened prior to infection, but no new telomeres were being lost." She glanced at her sisters. "The subject of that virus was no longer going to age. Whatever age they were infected at, they might age two for every ten now. The virus isn't perfect, but it's damned good at its job." Miriya's mind was racing; she was right. She knew who the sample came from...and where they'd got the virus. Oh alchemy...is that why? Is that why things are starting to change? "What...what else do you know about it?" Tenna looked over at her suspiciously, and then smirked knowingly. "Oh... not much. Just that it tries to improve its host while following some unknown guideline. I got markers for enhanced strength, muscle-changes increasing reaction muscle, a marker for eyesight change, but I don't know what... things like that. Enhanced healing and regeneration, since it co-opts the ATP production and triples it. I imagine that if the infection continues uncontested that there might come a time when the 'victim', if you can call it that, might be able to lose a limb and regrow it in a matter of minutes, at the cost of personal stored energy. Lose an arm and regrow it in three minutes, but need to eat like an Arctodus shortly after. You'd be RAVENOUS." She started to giggle. There was something unhealthy about that giggle. It was too deep, too personal. Like there was something about the pun that was so very, very funny that only she'd get the joke. "Ravenous... which the virus takes into account in a very, very interesting way." Tenna toyed with the vial in her fingers, watching the leftover fluid rolling around the glass. "It depletes iron something fierce. More when there's injury. The need for iron, for....hemoglobin... will be an almost unstoppable thirst. The subject will be able to surpress it the same way you surpress being hungry...but at some point, they WILL give in to the Thirst." She dipped a finger into the vial and brought out a golden droplet on her finger, before delicately licking it off her fingertip. "Keep the virus happy, it keeps you happy. And makes you better as a gift." There was an almost audible snap as both sisters came to the same realization. "No... you didn't....?" "That's obscene! You didn't seriously test it on..." All Tenna could do was smile.  A wide, toothy smile. In fact, it was perhaps too toothy. Asura were known for their sharp teeth, but Tenna's seemed just a little bit TOO sharp. Miriya stared at her sister in horror. It was true. She had been right; somehow, Kaleb's infected blood sample, his blood infected by whatever made that bitch Maeva into a fleshreaving monster, had made it to Tenna's desk. And she'd gone and... "Oh unclench, you two." Tenna giggled. "I stabilized the virus easily. The reason why it was so unstable was because it was laced with a Torment energy. Once that was stripped away, I used my sciences and skill with magical manipulation to reprogram it to what I wanted. Enhanced healing, stamina, strength, etc." Almost as an afterthought, she added "I couldn't remove the Thirst aspect though. Every attempt destroyed the virus. It's too deeply built into its structure to remove entirely." Both older sisters shifted slightly away from their sibling. She'd deliberately infected herself with a viral component just....because? Sonnya shook her head in disappointment. "I'm not one to use another culture's euphamisms, Tenna, but, By the Six, what in the hell have you done to yourself?" Tenna's eyes shrouded, their sullen orange glowing a vibrant gold. "Made. Myself. Better. And if you can't handle that, then this is where we draw the lines. There are those who accept me, accept the changes I've made. They don't judge me like you two." She glared at Miriya. "You, the Twice-dead. The Deathshroud addict. The Scourge of the wastes. You with your minions cobbled together with the expended life-essence of countless things, imbued with intelligence from beyond the grave. You who hides a romance with a HUMAN." She hissed the word, as if it were a curse. " You would dare judge ME? " Her gaze snapped over to her oldest sister. "Or you. The stoic one. The consumate soldier and blessed older sister. The 'responsible' one. The one hiding an even deeper secret than a love of a bookah. You would judge me? How dare you." Sonnya twitched like she'd been slapped. "Both of you left me in Rata Sum. I ended up joining the Priory because I didn't know anything about the outer world, because you LEFT ME THERE." She clenched her fists. "I didn't have the virus back then, but when I returned to work on that paper, it was there waiting for me. Like a gift. A boon in the disguise of a curse. I no longer needed to fear being weak and helpless compared to my powerful sisters." She glared at them both. "One of you has incredible magic powers, and the other has strength born of nothing but FAITH of all things. I had none of that. I had my inventions, my tools, and my ideas. But that virus..." she sighed tiredly. "I was so tired of being stressed out. Of wondering if I'd be accidentally killed in a lab accident, or an Inquest raid. Of the distant worry of being annihilated by Dragons  or their minions. Or a mad human god or two. Do you have any idea how afraid I was?" Her grip on the vial was tightening, the glass creaking in her grasp. "There was no way out for me. But then I found the virus, purified it, rectified it... And now I know there's nothing that can stop me. Me or my allies." For a long, painful moment there was dead silence. Neither older sister knew what to say. Miriya tried to reach out to her, but Tenna shook off her hand. Sonnya just crossed her arms, slouching, and stared into her drink, contemplating how badly things had gotten screwed up. "...I've left the Priory. Told them I was on sabbatical. Same thing for the Dynamics college." Tenna whispered. She squeezed the vial again; this time a faint crick of cracking glass could be heard from her palm. "I don't think I'll be going back. The only place I need to be is with my allies...with my friends. If I need protecting, they'll protect me. And they know they can count on me to protect them in turn." "You...found a krewe." "No...not a krewe. A team. Strangers. Odd ones like me, who don't fit in." Her voice was sad, even as her grip tightened. This time there was a noticable snap, and shards of glass dribbled out of her hand, followed by a thin streamer of blood. As calm as she looked at that moment, she'd crushed the vial and cut her palm. What unsettled Miriya and Sonnya though, was the fact that Tenna had shown utterly no reaction to it. She hadn't flinched, blinked, or even changed expression. It was like she hadn't felt it, even though she was looking at her hand. Slowly, delicately, she opened her hand, letting the larger chunks fall to the table, before plucking individual shards out of her palm and fingers. At no point did she show a sign of pain. In fact, she was almost smilingly with wonder. when she was done, she held her hand up for them to see. "....Cuts are already healing. In another minute, they'll be fully healed." "That fast..." Miriya breathed, visibly watching the wounds seal. She'd only seen that kind of healing through the use of magic or various concoctions. Seeing it from just someone's body was amazing. "...pain reduction, endorphine release. Rapid healing and regeneration." Tenna flexed her fingers, still bloody. Idly she brought her hand to her mouth and began to lick the blood away, leaving a smear on her cheeks and jaw as she dragged her hand across her mouth. "Mmm...waste-not-want-not. Might have to get a Dolyak burger later. Like I said, there's a trade off..." "Tenna, I..."  Sonnya began, but a male voice from the door interrupted her. "Tenna. Are you ready?" Sillouetted in the door were three figures and an animal. The first was a human, male, with slicked back sandy-blonde hair. A pair of glasses adorned a face marked with a very prominent mark over his right eye. At first glance it looked like he'd been punched or scratched, but a closer inspection revealled it as a very elaborate and foreign symbol of some kind. He had blue eyes, but it must have been a trick of the lighting; the eye that the symbol/bruise was centered on had some kind of glow or reflection in its pupil, visible for a second before fading. Miriya had to do a double-take when she realized what he was wearing. There were minor differences in details, like the gloves were clearly Elonian gauntlets, but he seemed to be wearing a heavily modified suit of Aetherblade Magitech armor. It had been a while since she’d seen that kind of gear, but it was unmistakable with the furnace-like power core at his neck and the spiked shoulder guard who’s glow spoke of hidden magitech.   Certainly, suits of that kind had been salvaged from the Breachmaker after it went down, but usually ruined or in pieces. His seemed...tailor-made. Could he have been an Aetherblade? She wondered. There were no records of crew to be salvaged, and all the other sky pirates had either been captured and forced into servitude to pay off their crimes, or had escaped deep into the Mists with their airships, presumably to other Scarlet Briar bases as-yet undiscovered. The second was a dark rose-tinted sylvari with collapsable twinswords at her hips. Though the lines of her face were delicate and could be considered beautiful, the hard expression on her face told of a severe personality. Contrasting that severity, her hair was like soft fern fronds or jade plant, smooth and curling. She looked uneasily at the sisters, almost disapprovingly, her expression revealling a mark on her jaw that seemed to be a scar of some kind, curving down along her jawline. As they watched, her natural sylvari glow, pale green, illuminated that scar. It would have been unnoticable were it not for the glow. Behind them, twice as big as any of them and armored in the most brutal armor any of them had ever seen was a Charr dam. Long white hair hung down from her tawny head, her helmet latched to a belt loop. Her armor, contrary to standard Legion colors, was an unassuming gunmetal grey, trimmed by the darkest black and a bright, warning yellow. In places, if one looked carefully, you could see chevroned 'warning' markers emblazoned along her plate. One grand shoulderpad held an embossed Dreadnought helm symbol, shining in silver. The last figure was a very large, confused looking striped cat near the human. It looked around the bar, panting, before making a murph noise and nuzzling the gloved hand of the human. "Cyrus. Yeah, I'm ready. " She looked around the table reluctantly, before leaving it. "... I think I'm done here." The human ranger nodded stiffly, and glanced at the other sisters. "Are these your...." "Yeah. Miriya of the Whispers, and Sonnya of the Vigil." He nodded to both of them, face neutral, though his eyes caught both of theirs and stared straight through them. "A pleasure to meet you." Tenna paused as she neared Cyrus, and turned to her sisters. "Girls... these are my allies. Cyrus Sigismund, a Ranger, and his cat Dangles... Moryggan Deraleth of the Dawn, a Mesmer." There was a sniff of distaste from the Mesmer, who turned and left the doorway. "And the big one is Verula Faithbreaker, of the Iron Legion, daughter of Perturaba Forgebreaker." Verula just grunted, not saying anything. She turned to look at something outside, and Sonnya could immediately see that the axe on her hip wasn't any normal axe. For one, it had eyes and horns. Three eyes, actually. And it was breathing through a horrifyingly tooth-filled maw. What in the Alchemy is THAT?! She wondered, unable to take her eyes off the living violation strapped to the Charr's hip. Sonnya eyed them, pursing her lips. "So... you know what our sister has...done?" Cyrus nodded slowly. "We don't care. It's not a concern to any of us." "Even if she wants to...." He shrugged. "She brought up the subject. It doesn't matter to Moryggan at all, doesn't concern Verula, and I personally just don't care. What happens happens." "Huh. I see." Cyrus seemed to consider something before looking straight at Sonnya. "...if it will make you relax, you should know that we all take care of each other. When one steps out of line, the others will be there to make sure they step back." Another shrug. "It's how we work. Our balance." "Balance." He nodded, and turned away. "Let's go. We still have to book accomodations for the night." Tenna smiled brightly up at him. "Already done! I booked one of the larger rooms; Normally meant for noble families and their entourage. It'll have a LOT of beds." He smiled back, the stoic demeanor shedding for a moment in a tired smile. "That's great. I hate divvying up bed assignments on the spot." The Charr made a disrespectful snort. "Yeah. Especially when you snore like you do." "You snore louder than me, woman." He retorted, smirking, before they all walked away. Miriya and Sonnya could hear a few more ripostes and some laughter, but it faded quickly. The two sisters stared into their drinks, contemplating everything their little sister had told them. Miriya made a decision and downed the remainder of hers before pushing away from the table. "... I have to go. I have...business in Rata Sum in the morning. I've been expecting some test results back on something...anomalous." Sonnya too, drained her stein, wiping a bit of foam away from her lips. "As do I. Not in Rata Sum though. I have inquiries to make through my contacts. Perhaps I'll look up our sister's companions?..." She cast a raised eyebrow to her necromantic sibling. The necromancer sighed and nodded. "I'll check with my...sources. If I find anything, don't be surprised if you suddenly find a file in your archives that wasn't there a minute ago." She smirked. "Of course, I disavow any knowledge of it, should it turn out to be after-action reports and spy reports from redacted sources known by the Whispers." "I'll be sure to accidentally spill my coffee on it, and then trip on the way past the fireplace." Sonnya replied, leaving her seat and tossing some coin on the table for all their drinks, including Tenna's. "After I read it of course. Might I suggest double-copying the redacted version so that I can't do something silly like remove the black bars covering things like names and such?" "Sounds like a good idea for security." Miriya nodded, smirking. "But since I have NO idea what papers you speak of, and I am merely a humble Pact agent, I'm afraid it's just falling on deaf ears..." "Oh yes, pardon my blathering." Sonnya chuckled and headed outside, giving her sister a final over-the-shoulder wave. "I look forward to finding out who and what our sister's friends truly are."

[astro-b-o-y-d]

I finally got the designs for all the next gen kids done! And I even tweaked Richie’s a bit because I felt like it could be a lot better, and now it is :’D

In case anyone’s new and haven’t met them yet, here’s some descriptions:

Dhrumi and Dahlia are Max’s twins. He really wanted a child of his own, so after considering a few options, he chose to go to Nikki and ask her to be his surrogate (only surrogate; they are not together). She happily said yes and soon after, the twins were a thing. Dhrumi is the more adventurous and ‘get from point A to point B as quickly as possible because if you go fast, you see a lot more a lot quicker’ twin while Dahlia prefers to stop and smell the flowers. And identify them by their scientific names. And sometimes eat them. She really likes to put things in her mouth, so Max bought her that chew necklace around her neck.

Overall, the two of them really love nature and look forward to going to camp every summer with Dad, Grandpa David and Grandma Gwen. It’s very hard for the three of them not to show clear favoritism among the campers (not that Max ever tries not to; he’s going to make it clear his daughters are the best ones there). Dahlia always likes to sign up for Botany Camp, and is especially interested in the more dangerous plants. She has been rushed to the hospital several times because she keeps putting said plants in her mouth (she claims she’s trying to build up an immunity to some of them), but she’s tough and always pulls through. Now whether or not her father and grandparents will pull through after all the heart attacks that she puts them through with those plant stunts; that’s another story.

Dhrumi isn’t signed up for one camp in particular, but that’s her choice. She wants to be able to experience as many camps as she can over the summer, just like Dad did! Max...doesn’t have the heart to tell her, but he’s proud of her enthusiasm and is happy his girls have so much fun at the camp. He still thinks the place is a backwoods, rundown piece of shit, but........that backwoods, rundown piece of shit gave him a family so he can’t complain.

Richie is Nikki’s son, born after she was Max’s surrogate for the twins. Once she saw Max raising his own kids, she was like “....Well shit, I wanna do that parent thing too!” And after a unanimous decision between her, her girlfriend (Cody) and her wife (Natalia), Richie was born some time later. And it takes less than two seconds of being around him to know that he VERY MUCH takes after Nikki in personality. He’s very excitable, very bouncy, and it’s very hard for him to sit still for long periods of time. Naturally, Nikki is nothing but incredibly supportive of her son’s endless energy, though she does wish he wouldn’t stop forgetting his glasses whenever he runs off to do something. Glasses are expensive, you little booger, and you can’t explore everything in the world if you can’t see.

While Richie likes to tag along with Dhrumi in hopping from camp to camp, his main camp is Adventure Camp, which Nikki is HAPPY to lead. She’s also incredibly biased about her favorite camper. No counselor in the camp knows how to.....not do that, because their kid is so obviously the best one!

Annabelle is Neil and Harrison’s formally-foster now-adopted daughter. Neil had been considering becoming a foster parent for a while (And after Richie, Nikki was ‘no longer renting out cloning space’ so to speak, so that option was off the table). So he and Harrison got their foster parent licenses, and had a few kids come and go over a few years.

Then Annabelle showed up in their lives and they knew within a month after she moved in that they wanted to adopt her. She’s incredible shy and anxious, and a bit of a novice when it comes to magic (her specialty is potions and she keeps that backpack of hers full of brewing ingredients). In fact, magic’s what made her original parents disown her, when a failed spell caused her to accidentally light the kitchen curtains on fire. Needless to say, she had a bad streak of magical accidents that caused her to get kicked out of a lot of foster homes, to the point where she started hiding her abilities and practicing them in secret in the hopes that someone would actually keep her around for longer than two weeks.

Of course, that failed when Neil caught her practicing levitation spells one night and she broke down in tears, terrified that she was going to be sent to yet another family. But Neil (obviously having grown up a bit since his Camp Campbell days and furious obsession with proving magic’s not real) calls Harrison to her room and has him show her the kind of illusions he can do to calm her down and assure her that they aren’t going to get rid of her for having a gift like that.

And of course after hearing what happened to her, they adopt her within a week and she’s been with them ever since. She’s been a bit more willing to practice her magic around others again, though she’s still a little fearful and self-conscious about her gifts. But she’s surrounded by good people who love her and support her and over time, she’ll probably grow a lot more confident in time.

Obviously, she belongs to magic camp, though again, her specialty is Potions (which is a mix of science and magic) so she actually ends up creating her own little combination of the two camps and makes a whole new camp in the process. All the younger kids think she’s cool and Dahlia likes to bring her plants to use for her recipes while Dhrumi tends to bring her any animals/animal parts/bugs/etc she might need. Richie brings excitement and enthusiasm, which is.......honestly more than enough for her. She could use the confidence boosts and assurance that she is loved by others.

[thebigladjake]

AX3001: TV Show - Cognitivation: Main Characters and Roles in the Story

Alex, the PSI Prodigy

Alex is a young and adventurous boy in his small hometown, a self proclaimed protector, he roams the town with his trusty stick and keeps all evil do-er’s in order! He loves his home, his family and his friends. But, is suddenly forced to put on his big boy shorts and face the world outside of his hometown. The world is a big and scary place, Alex will be tested and his own emotions will come into question as he wonders. Why me? Why am I the ‘PSI Prodigy’.

Alex was the first character designed and is the heart of the whole series. His journey will be one full of self-discovery and self-doubt, I want to capture the pressure of expectations of children and how they can effect kids. The whole prodigy thing may be toned down, since I'm not the biggest fan of prophecy stories. I'm undecided, but right now, I think this will give him the added depth he needs and could be relatable to kids that may have the pressures of expectations, I know I certainly did.

Alex's name was originally Andy because he was actually inspired by a character called Alex, that Alex being from the Indie JRPG game known as YIIK (Y Two K, not Yiik). A game that suffers from several problems such as severe tonal shifts, terrible endings that make the entire game redundant and a character who is insufferable that doesn’t learn to change his ways and is rewarded at the end of the game. Alex is simply an awful character from an awful game and I was going to call my lead Andy, but that name wasn’t really vibing with me. So, I kept Alex since it was more gender neutral too, so boys and girls can reflect their own feelings onto him. It may still be subject to change, we’ll just have to wait and see.

Of course, as our lead character, I gave him a pinkish red and a gold colour combination. The red not being a strong red since red is a very strong colour and I didn’t think that level of passion would be embodied into Alex so soon. So, he’s simply a pinky red. The gold elements are there to reassure his good boy status, with the badges on his bag being a reference to the badges on Hambone’s hat from my first year film. Just a little Easter Egg that puts a smile on my face, like how Pixar or Disney may just throw something in there as a nod.

I chose the shorts as I’ve not drawn a lot of characters that wear shorts and a young kid that likes to run around would probably want the best clothing for the job. So, shorts it was. The cap too was to give him a unique silhouette compared to the rest as he’s the only one with the hat and very rarely will we see him without it. He also carries a gold coloured backpack that he keeps all of his helpful items inside.

Alex’s primary attacks are the most potent PSI abilities that Frank has ever seen and he teaches him how to activate them. Alex’s PSI abilities are both helpful for the team’s defence and offence. While physically, he wields a powerful stick that his Dad found and gave to him to use on his adventures.

For a main character, Alex gets the job done and I’m looking forward to where his character will go over the course of a season and over the course of this project.

Frank, the Frantic Freak

An aimless twenty something year old still living at his parent’s house, Frank is unemployed, never goes outside nor does many people know of his existence and since he doesn’t bother anyone, his parents just kind of let him exist. A member of the Orb.Net forum, he honed his PSI abilities purely from nonstop training with spoons. Bending them with his mind because he saw it in a movie once. Frank knows of the oncoming threat and for the first time in forever, leaves his room to embark on this epic quest with Alex. To save his world, a world he doesn’t even truly know.

Frank was always meant to be an outcast, original concepts were of him to be occupying a house where the kids would prank his house and get him to come out and shout at them. Until he finally catches Alex one day and recognises his psychic powers, taking him inside and telling him everything he knows about the oncoming invasion. Alex would then understand that, even though he’s a crackpot, he means well and is just misunderstood. While I loved this concept, I wanted to make Frank just a little stranger, so I went with the unemployed aimless twenty something who just practises psychic abilities in the comfort of his room.

Design-wise, Hector came first and then Frank was modelled after him. Since the brotherly resemblance was an important part of their design, it was important to nail what a younger brother of a family would look like first. And once I had the traits off of Hector, I used and tweaked a few things to make Frank older and also give him a few new design quirks. The main ‘quirk’ being his hairstyle as hair is always important to my character designs. I took Hector’s hair and instead of having the hair be styled up into a point, it was like an explosion. Symbolising his psychic powers being more volatile and dangerous with his hair all messy where his powers come from.  

His facial expressions were important to show that he was a bit nutty, Ghiaccio from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure served as inspiration for that. Just the way his face angrily distorts just gives him a different feel compared to the regular characters.

His outfit was just simple loungewear because since he doesn’t care about who sees him, he’s not going to dress up too nicely and definitely not going to wear clothes that are restrictive and make him uncomfortable like jeans. Compared to the rest of the colourful cast and even his brother, Frank’s colours are incredibly limited and a way to counteract this a little was to give him mismatching socks. Just a little asymmetry to make him stand out more.

Frank’s weapon of choice is spoons, not really as an attack, but a way of calculating how powerful his PSI attack is going to be. He also bends them regularly and spent most of his savings on spoons so he can always stay on top of his psychic abilities.

Frank was a part of the original four, he’s an idea I’ve liked for a long time and is now a character that I will really enjoy working on and writing for.

Hector, the Apathetic Assistant.

Hector is just a kid that’s kind of done with it, just everything that’s going on in the world. What he thought would be a regular friendship, unfortunately turns into a big adventure and he’d just rather have the life of a kid. But, it’s too late for that now as Alex needs him by his side. Hector knows too much and if he’s only going to see his friend if he comes on this epic quest, then so be it. Hector doesn’t have many friends, but those he does have understand his extreme loyalty.

Hector was created as a contrast to his crazy brother, being much more relaxed and apathetic to this whole world ending thing. In the initial concepts, there were going to be four main characters much like Earthbound has, but I decided to increase it when I thought about Alex’s and Frank’s roles and how it might be a little strange if some stranger suddenly shows interest in this young boy. So, I figured a good catalyst would be a little brother to the crazy stranger! Alex has someone to be friend with and gets the plot started too.

I also thought it was quite amusing that it was the little kid that was the cynic and the big brother has much more enthusiasm about the world. Like the strangeness of his brother has no effect on him to the point where Hector is like, “Oh god here we go again.”

Hector and Frank have near identical colour schemes, their primary colours being green and greenish hues. It was all in contrast to Alex’s bright red, white and gold elements that make him look like an adventurous youth. Hector has dirty blonde hair and pale skin, sort of to hint at the fact that he and his brother are a little odd.

His hairstyle was created to be similar to Frank’s, but being styled and maintained because Hector does care about his appearance since he is the one who will be seen by others. It was made to contrast against Frank’s hair explosion, with Hector spiking up his hair to meet all at one point. I also like to think Frank also had hair like this at one point.

Hector and Frank also have weird shapes ears compared to what I usually do because some people do have weird shaped ears or other body parts and it will never be brought up in the show that they look weird. It’s purely visual to normalise these little oddities, that people shouldn’t judge someone for the most trivial things.

Hector’s weapon of choice is his backpack full of spoons, I chose this as I was drawing his pose and thinking about the relationship between him and Frank. Frank’s obsession with spoons to keep his PSI abilities in check requires a lot of spoons and I just had this sudden image of Hector with this great big bag full of spoons on his back. Hunched over a little as he looks annoyed like “I’ve got to carry this around all day...” And since it’s such a heavy bag, I imagined him using it as a weapon whenever in combat because Hector doesn’t have any powers and Frank only taught himself PSI. However, the less spoons he has, the weaker it becomes, effectively making Hector weaponless at certain points.

Hector is a great character in my opinion who I feel turned out really well as he was everything I wanted him to be. He filled a gap in the story nicely and I got a nice character out of it. An absolute win in my book.

Benjamin [Benji], the Anti-Social Armourer

A renowned child genius, famous in the orphanage for his Tools of Destruction. The other kids never interact with him if he doesn’t want you to, having a strange attachment to his box. Hiding under it when he feels threatened or if he just wants you to go away. His only friend is aware of his skills and is a member on the same forums as Frank... Which sets a mission to get him adopted into motion...

Benji was created as representation of shy kids and how hard it can really be to come out of your shell and make friends. Wanting to stay in somewhere that makes you feel safe and secure. Also, as a representation of kids that others may consider weird and outcasts, so we could get a closer look at him and show kids not to judge a book by it’s cover, maybe even give a kid they consider weird in their own life a chance of friendship.

Benji does have one major source of inspiration and may just have to go a few more designs before I’m truly happy with this design. Near from the manga, Death Note. Near was the replacement of the main sort of rival character, L, and is a child genius himself that displays some cases of social awkwardness. While Benji does have a lot of these similarities, the main aspect of Near that attracted me was that whenever he had a scene, he’d often have toys surrounding him and he’d play with them while deducing the whole mystery of the series. I feel one of the reasons that this aspect is my favourite thing about him is because I’m still quite fond of toys and sometimes fiddle about with them.

A specific scene (I can’t find a better screenshot I am sorry) where Near was surrounded by model train tracks with the trains going around him resonated with me, I saw him placed in a safe space where he’s protected by his toys and that imagery immediately gave me an idea of a boy that hides to be protected, but uses his toys to fight rather than help him think.

His weapon being model cars and toy trains with motors in them, creating ticking time bombs, I felt was a nice way of weaponizing Benji for the conflicts they will run into. Carrying a toolbox within his box, never getting to see his operations, only the results of when he converts a plane into a homing missile.

Benji needs a little more work, in my opinion, but so far, I am happy with this character.

Lottie Sweet, the Tough Nut.

The younger sister of Dentist Gloria Sweet, Lottie is a no-nonsense thirteen year old and always has a serious pouty face as she’s out and about. Using a Skipping Rope as a weapon, she has mastered the art and uses it to keep people away from her at a distance. While she remains unfriendly, deep down she has a good heart and a strong sense of justice.

Lottie came to be as a younger sister for Gloria Sweet, she was created to add a little bit of conflict between the main crew. With her not having very high opinions of any of them and then she has to work with them, causing her to try and take the lead. However, things don’t go as she planned with Gloria and Frank often getting her out of trouble.

Since Frank and Hector turned out so nicely, I thought to make the group an even six by giving Gloria a sister. While Frank and Hector were purposely designed to have very similar colour schemes to hint at the fact that they are brothers. The only shared colours between the sisters is the skin tone and hair colour. I chose the orange and purple for Lottie because I felt it was striking and that matched her personality, plus nobody else had those colours on them.

The Skipping Rope as a weapon came to me because I imagined a girl using her imagination to see one as a whip and just like that, it stuck. One of the charming things about Earthbound was that characters had specific weapons, Ness had baseball bats, Lucas had sticks, Jeff had guns and Paula had... A frying pan. Not stereotypical at all... With Lottie not being that kind of girl, I felt a more sporty weapon could work and the Skipping Rope was appropriate as both a sporty weapon and a girly weapon, depending on how you look at it.

I have also never designed a younger girl character, so this was a nice exercise to do. As well as just a nice design, I really enjoy drawing her pout and her wider eyes. Usually I go with the round eyes, so it’s nice to change up the eye shape. Her hair was definitely fun, as it’s usually my favourite part to design on a character, I remember the girls in my school tying their hair back whenever they did activities. Obviously, it’s so their hair doesn’t swish around in their face while they do things and I added the little hair strands on the front of her head to sort of hint to how intense her movements may have been. Since two strands have come loose.

I wanted to create a sporty girl and I feel like I did. Lottie was a successful design that I am really proud of.

Dentist Gloria Sweet, the Healer.

Gloria is a sweet and passionate dentist, that understands not everyone likes her line of work. So, she takes their feelings into consideration and tries to make everyone’s experience comfortable. Born with these PSI abilities, she was just able to do them rather than training to enhance them.

Gloria was one of the characters first characters I thought up back when I had created this series. Inspired by Earthbound, my initial group was made up of four people with three people being PSI users with Gloria filling the healer role that the Earthbound series typically has, the one character that learns the healing moves. Although, more characters have an array of offensive moves to go along with their healing abilities, Gloria was created much more as a support ally rather than an offensive fighter.

Gloria’s PSI abilities had to play a role in her field of work and the first job that jumped to mind was a doctor. A doctor that healed their patients using their PSI abilities, that then evolved into a dentist as a lot of people don’t like the dentist and are scared of going to them. Luckily, the mad dentist I had was long gone at the time and my dentist helped to inspire this idea, since she’s nice and it’s always an easy time for me (Though that’s probably because I care about my dental hygiene.)

Since people viewed it as an unpleasant experience, I thought it’d be nice if she was a really sweet character that makes her business by ensuring her customers shall be fine if they have anything done to their teeth. This also played into her design, I didn’t want to give her blue eyes like Lottie and I didn’t think brown eyes looked all that great. Then, I tried red.

Again, it was a play on the whole scary dentist cliché. People find her incredibly unsettling as she’s staring at their teeth with those red eyes, but are quite comfortable with her personality and painless operations. I really liked how this turned out and I just love how it contrasts with how she is as a person. Very happy with how Gloria turned out from an initial concept.

[alluring-skull]

ancient scapes

I just got back from Seattle, after watching the Valve Dota 2 tournament The International all week. I don’t talk about it too much beyond random tweets while watching other events at work (and so on) but I’ve played the game for a super long time (albeit somewhat sporadically overall) and definitely have a lot of attachment to it. I wanted to talk about some of the things that have really appealed to me over time, what it’s been like watching the evolution of a game that’s been alive, changing and competitive for longer than almost any other i can think of, a bit about the big event itself, and hopefully some stuff that will give other people an appreciation for what it’s like seeing a game that’s so much the same yet so different from one i played so much as a teenager. This isn’t the most complete, knowledgeable (I really have no familiarity with the pro scene before TI1 in particular), or accurate history you can probably find, but it’s mine, and I hope some people enjoy it. With all that in mind this first post is background (I’m giving this topic...probably 3-4, at least. I have a lot to talk about.)

In 2000 or so a distant, much older cousin introduced my younger brother and I to Starcraft. I think that was about the last time I ever talked to him. (It was extremely unrelated, but I have no desire to return to Texas at any rate.) At some point, probably about a year later, we found a copy for like $10 at a Toys R Us and instantly bought it. We didn’t have a home internet connection that was really usable to play online at the time (dial-up...) so we mostly played single-player, both vs AI and the campaigns. (Brood War didn’t have a key, so we totally just burned a copy of the CD we got from the library.) I played a bit with the map editor, but I couldn’t think of anything interesting to do with it, and making Starcraft maps kinda sucked anyway because the kind of symmetry you have to work with is really limited anyway due to the isometric view.

When Warcraft 3 came out, my older brothers’ friends (I think...) convinced him to get it since he was in college at the time. He got really into it, and my other brother and I played some as well. Eventually he moved home and the expansion came out, so my other brother and I got to start playing a lot. I again messed with the map editor, though I didn’t have any programming experience to touch the more advanced parts. I loved all the terrain construction and deforming (I was a huge, huge fan of Simcity 2000 and especially 3000 before this), but placing trees was kind of tedious and I never really finished anything still. Maybe if I’d had a better concept of “starting small” I could’ve gotten somewhere with things, but that took me a long time to learn. I’m saying this obviously not to be like “oh, I could’ve been Icefrog” (or even Guinsoo) but to emphasize how interesting the UMS map scene (”Use Map Settings,” the common Blizzard RTS community term to refer to these; now most people just use “mod”) was to me from the start.

DotA Allstars, as it was called during the 5.5x era when we started playing, was not the first map to use the general concept that’s become defined as its own genre, with a bunch of predecessors generally named things along the lines of “Aeon of Strife,” dating-I’ve heard, since I wasn’t around much on battle.net then, as I mentioned-back to Starcraft. (The name is a reference to the Starcraft backstory, I guess, so it’s not very hard to believe.) I did eventually find a couple, years later, and messed with them a bit, but the limitations of the design system in that game really don’t work well with the concept, even ignoring the maximalist design elements that are to some extent highlighted in dota’s enormous pool of heroes and items. (These elements are highlighted even more in the popular “Evolves” game type, where, for example, at some point in the game you lose a very good unit because it’s replaced with horrifically clumsy Protoss Dragoons, who have slightly better stats and extremely poor interactions with the engine’s pathing systems)

The newer AOS maps weren’t very good either, but the inherent leveling mechanic in Warcraft 3 made it a little easier to keep some semblance of consistent progression, and the amount of unit types you could set was much higher (I don’t know if there is a limit, but for Starcraft you can generally only create 1-2 different versions of any given unit, depending on if they have a “Hero” counterpart with a different name to tweak). Broadly speaking, most custom maps focused on hero play fell into what I can only describe as the “tome trap,” where you could buy items (consumable tomes) which didn’t take inventory space and permanently buffed stats. There’s three kinds of heroes in Warcraft, correlating roughly to the “Warrior Rogue Mage” thing, and each benefits most from a specific stat. That stat increases attack damage, and each stat has benefits for all heroes as well, with Strength giving health, Agility giving armor and attack speed, and Intellect giving extra mana pool and regeneration. But spells have cooldowns, so the tome items quickly become relatively useless for Int heroes, while Str heroes see slightly better scaling. But Agility gives attack damage and speed to Agility heroes, creating a compounding effect that becomes increasingly absurd the more you feed into it. Although, it did cause the animations to break in all sorts of hilarious ways, with certain breakpoints making the attack animations stop altogether or even go in reverse, so I still consider that a huge plus.

There was a bigger issue with pretty much all maps, due to the way that the map editor exported maps in a format that was, essentially, open-source. It was therefore very easy for people to make small tweaks to a map which would specifically benefit a certain player spot or character, save it under the same name, then host a rigged version of the game for other players. (There were a couple ways to tell if this was probably what was happening, but even so, it made looking for games very frustrating.) As it turned out, there was a workaround for this, by which you could make the editor unable to read the customized script data. The map still worked in game, but other players wouldn’t be able to make slightly altered copies; they would lose all of that code by trying to tweak anything and save a new version of the file. Essentially, it was copy-protection, and few mapmakers used it, probably since most AOS games, Tower Defense maps, and other styles didn’t really use any sophisticated scripting anyway.

Dota Allstars used the copy protection, though it had had relatively few unique abilities at the time we began playing it (I was familiar with another map with far more custom effects, Elil’s “Vale of Nightmares”). Perhaps the most well-known was the Crystal Maiden’s “Freezing Field” ultimate ability, still represented in the game to this day. But most characters simply had weird mixtures of default Warcraft 3 abilities, tweaked with different stats and so on, and strangely, the most egregious example of all (the Brewmaster, who pretty much just had the original Pandaren Brewmaster abilities from the game’s regular RTS mode) still just has the same stuff as ever. I think it’s fair to say that Allstars was never the most original game, and some things that have survived to this day (Lina Inverse is still called Lina!! What is that???) are still incredibly obvious ripoffs of stuff from Blizzard games, other video games, and anime. I understand the “Allstars” name came from this version being a patchwork of characters from different maps, though I’m not sure how true that is. It might explain some of the worst 5.5 era heroes, like “God” (a nigh-unkillable wisp with no offensive skills, who was removed for .52 and has never returned), and “Conjurer” (an outrageously busted magician on a horse, who could push to win the game in as little as 20 minutes with chain-stunning golems, even in a era where player micro was relatively poor), but it became very difficult to find other AoS type games at all once 5.52 and 5.54 locked in as extremely popular maps across the server. Both enjoyed popularity at once, as I recall; it seemed many people simply preferred one or the other and would gravitate toward that choice, making both open all the time. But the release of 5.55 was a huge paradigm shift, with complete overhauls for many heroes and numerous bug fixes and tweaks. Its release signaled the future of the game, in a sense.

Well, I don’t know. That might be giving too much credit to a version of the game which, as I recall, was the newest for approximately one hour.

(Part 2)

(Part 3)

(Part 4)

[hypnoticcastiel]

VALERIAN: skyjet conceptart & interview with Ben Mauro.

Hi Ben. Tell us a little about your background in design – was film always the field you wanted to get into, or did you start in another discipline? I got my training in industrial design and entertainment design from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA where I got a good set of skills to begin my career as a concept designer many years ago. I think initially I really just wanted to work in videogames, I was a huge fan of games like Halo growing up so I thought it would be fun to design levels and architecture for worlds and experiences like that. This led me to Seattle initially to explore that path out of high school, but in the middle of it I found I was more interested in the design side of things and ultimately shifted my education from more of a 3D direction into more of a design focused one down at Art Center, where it was a pretty easy transition to working in games and films afterwards with the skills I learned there.

As you began designing for films, which artists and illustrators have provided the most inspiration to your personal style? I don’t look at much art anymore while I design, but starting out I definitely tried to learn and study everything in school, I wanted to know what had come before to get a holistic understanding of all film/automotive/product/aerospace/architecture/nature and any other form of design throughout history. Through that study, the more entertainment based artwork that resonated most to me was mainly a combination of French and Japanese artists such as Katsuhiro Otomo, Shirow Masamune, Katsuya Terada, Kow Yokoyama, Yasushi Nirasawa, Yoji Shinkawa and Makoto Kobayashi on the Japanese side of things and artists like Moebius, Meziere, Sylvain Despretz (who I was lucky enough to get to work with on Valerian!) and Juan Gimenez on the French/European side of things. These two main groups of artists were sort of a melting pot of influences for me starting out, and of course American artists like Syd Mead, Doug Chiang, Ian Mccaig and Ralph McQuarrie are hard to not be influenced by growing up here.

When I started working professionally I sort of turned off a lot of my personal preferences for the sake of learning new skills, the first 7-8 years I just wanted to learn as many different things from everyone I was working with to grow as much as possible. On the one hand this approach was good to create a very diverse range of skills to offer clients/projects, but it also means a lot of your individuality gets lost quite a bit. Luckily the projects with Luc tend to overlap with a lot of my early influences that I enjoy the most, so Valerian came at a very good moment, I was able to sort of go back in time to all the work I loved at the beginning of my career but armed with a lot of new skills to help build this universe in much more detail than I could have when I was younger. In a way, Valerian sort of felt like the project I had been training most of my career for, which was a really cool thing to be a part of.

As a 21st century artist, what type of design do you feel is more challenging: Something that evokes the past through fantasy, like The Hobbit, or something that projects futuristic realism like Elysium? I definitely think sci-fi work is more challenging than fantasy as far as being a designer on the project, with (live action) fantasy design it usually means taking real world elements and slightly tweaking/exaggerating them to be more fantastic or mixing ancient designs cleverly with natural or geometric forms and patterns. Something like Elysium which is a more realistic near future design direction, I guess kind of falls into a similar logic as a lot of the design was referencing real world technologies to make everything more believable while obviously exaggerating/tweaking it to create something new. I think even under those circumstances the world/scenarios created in a sci-fi setting like that are more new/interesting (to me at least) than what can be found in fantasy based projects. The most challenging projects (to me) would be sci-fi universes like what we created for Valerian, where it’s not necessarily always based on anything found on earth/reality so we are going pretty far into uncharted territory creating something new/original, those types of projects definitely push you to your limits as a designer.

Valerian is your second project with Luc Besson (Lucy was the first); how did you come to work with him and what about his world-building do you find most creative? I actually worked on an early version of Valerian before Lucy around 7 or so years ago now. Luc found some of my early work created when I was still a student and got in touch with me, I had just started working on film/videogame projects at the time and helped him out on an earlier version of the film for a few months before things went on hold for a couple years. At the time I remember being a little sad that things went on hold for so long, but in hindsight I’m kind of glad as I feel like I needed those extra years in-between to get better and be ready artistically to do the job I ended up doing on the final film.

After the success of Lucy, Valerian came back and we began on that project full-time for the last few years. I think the thing I enjoyed the most working with Luc on a world building creative level was how much he wanted to see something that was cool/original above all else, style over reality. Most of the other projects I worked on in my career followed a pretty strict ‘reality’ based logic, it’s almost more of an engineer like approach to design where everything has to be ‘grounded’, you need to be able to find something in real life and extrapolate functionality/form language from it to create something that would/could possibly exist. This logic works fine for many projects and is easy to grasp as a designer, but I find it can be restrictive creatively and sometimes hard to break out of if you go too far down that line of thinking. I remember early on for Valerian having to break out of this mindset and sort of ‘unlearn’ a lot of things I had experienced over the last few years because it was getting in the way of me solving problems successfully for Luc. That moment came when I was designing this big spaceship that splits into 1000 smaller ships, I was trying to design something that could logically fold up and connect together in a way that allowed all the pilots to get into each of the individual smaller ships and I remember struggling with this assignment for a little bit until Luc said something along the lines of “Ben, this is a movie, not real life! Don’t worry too much about that, this is what I want the ships to look like and here’s what I want to happen in the sequence, it will be a cool moment”. After that I learned to start turning off the more ‘reality’ based logic and just having fun with the designs on the film, coming up with the funkiest/coolest things I could imagine.

You’ve spoken before about the iterative process of concept art for film, and how complex that can be. How close would you say the designs for Valerian ended up on-screen versus the initial concepts? On Valerian I felt like Luc was very good about making sure the approved design he likes ends up pretty much identical in the final film which has been amazing to see! It’s a very rare occurrence to work with someone that knows what they want on such a massive project and able to make decisions years in advance and stick to them. Because of this he has also been the most efficient director I have ever worked with, it was really inspiring to see and made for a very pleasant working experience all the years I was on the film. After working on other projects where we are sometimes asked to do 500+ designs/revisions on small insignificant objects in a movie, I kind of didn’t believe it when Luc approved the first design I did for one of the big creatures we see early on in the film, the Megaptor. I remember really liking the design after creating it and thinking “Well, at least this first idea is cool, it will probably change 100 times”, but he ended up liking it as much as I did and approved it! Even after that I still kind of didn’t believe it until I saw it running around in the trailers 2 years later, ha!

What was Luc’s vision for the SKYJET originally? Luc was after something simple and iconic, something the audience would be able to easily understand and remember long after they left the theater.

What is the main inspiration for the design of the ship? The exterior design inspiration mainly came from nature, looking at things like dolphins, orca and sharks to create a very fast and aerodynamic looking design. I also looked at more man made objects such as fighter jets, luxury single seater submersibles and other aquatic/flying vehicles to make sure the scale and level of detail was suitable for the SKYJET in the world we were trying to create in the film.

What is the primary function of the SKYJET? Is it a personal commuting vehicle for future motorists or is it a more specialized mode of transportation? The way I understood it was that the SKYJET was more of a specialized military type vehicle built specifically for Valerian and Laureline (or whichever agency they work for) to be used by highly trained agents on their missions and adventures all over the galaxy.

Do you design a vehicle like this thinking of material components? For example, is the outer shell composed of something like carbon-fiber or a completely new material from the future? I imagined it would be some sort of advanced future military grade metal material capable of withstanding any blasts and attacks from various alien technologies/weapons they might encounter on their missions.

How fast does the SKYJET travel? Can you give us details on its proposed performance? Does it have an altitude limit, or can it fly in outer space? I imagined the top speed and altitude limit to be comparable or exceed modern day fighter jets (An F-22 Raptors top speed is 2,410 km/h) while flying on planets with atmosphere. While flying in space I imagine it would go faster without any atmosphere/friction to slow it down.

What role do you think AI might play in cars of the future? I think AI and autonomous driving will become a big part of cars in the near future, especially in larger city based locations congested with traffic. Those technologies will definitely help streamline commutes and keep things moving more smoothly while cutting down on accidents. A car will most likely start to become more of a moving extension of a person’s office or leisure/entertainment space with all control given up to AI. That being said, I hope manually driven car technology will still exist in some form so that cars can be used for fun.

Lastly, for our fans and followers who might want to get into concept design for films one day, what advice would you offer them that you feel is invaluable? If you really want to do this job for a living then go for it! When I was starting out a lot of this information was really hard to find and isolated to a few schools in California which not everyone could afford, but I feel like now all information needed to be a competent designer/illustrator in games and films is easily available/affordable in books and the dozens of online schools or artists Gumroads/Patreons offering very high level training for not a lot of money. It’s almost the opposite of what I experienced starting out, the difficulty now is from there being too much information available to you which I think is a good problem to have. So if you know what you want to learn and are self motivated enough to put in the time to learn it, the sky’s the limit.

[Nicole Campos,lootcrate]

[bublp0pr]

Roletale Sans & Paps

Now the struggle of who to swap first…. the pressure is crazy. Hmmmm. HMMMMmMmmm. Let’s start with the obvious characters you think of in UnderSwap: Sans and Papyrus.

(I don’t know how I’m formatting these or whatever so don’t expect structure that makes complete sense haha. Also i got too lazy to capitalise their names or spell out Papyrus’s full name all the time so i’ll just call him paps)

Main differences to UnderSwap

Normal US

In normal underswap, papyrus becomes the chill laid back one and sans becomes the obsessive one that wants to be a member of the royal guard. Sans chases down papyrus a lot for slacking off but it’s papyrus who’s actually more observant and ends up looking after him. Paps drinks mustard where sans drank ketchup. And for some reason they made sans like tacos. I’m guessing it’s the AU equivalent of pasta for pap? Sans is considered one of the most adorable versions of himself within the multiverse: hyperactive and demonstrating beliefs and understanding similar to a child in some cases, though has been shown to be capable of being more serious in other instances like Errortale.

(askError!Sans, my one true love… will your hiatus ever end??? Error’s ORIGINAL universe-destroying emotionally complex character (not that fan art inkxerror fluff and smut) has imprinted on me for life ;_; Atleast i have Fatal!Error plot to sustain me)

From what I understand of the webcomics, papyrus becomes the one to watch out for in a genocide run, having their own megalovania sequence in the judgement hall. Papyrus is also considered to be the one with a science background. Whether or not he is aware of the timelines isn’t something the webcomics I’ve seen dwell into. Judgement hall would usually imply that he is the character with some awareness of the implications of determination. On the other hand though, it’s swap sans that ends up in multiverse shenanigans more frequently than paps.

Because of how these characters were swapped, it’s like inserting a papyrus straight into sans body and a sans straight into papyrus. Which is pretty impressive. But not the goal of my AU. I want sans to still be sans an paps to still be paps in their own way.

RT

Take puns as a simple example, sans will still love puns and paps will still hate them… you know what? Sentence form of this will take ages. How about I just make this a list of things I’m keeping from UT?

Sans:

likes puns

likes science (this is canon to undertale. Papyrus says so in one of his calls)

cares for his brother deeply

has an awareness of at least the scientific implications and likeliness of resets

won’t fight you unless you give them no other choice because they realise the futility of trying

one day stopped being a scientist probably due to either losing WD or learning about resets

knows an old lady from the other side of a door who shares puns

Paps:

likes making spaghetti

hates puns

will always respond to your calls

fights you in Snowdin

will believe in you when no one else will. Has a a lot of faith in people and trusts that you can do better. To a fault… = )

is capable of being a royal guard but doesn’t have the value set for it (because of previous point)

How, you may ask, can I make this a swap universe when so many things are the not swapped? Well that’s the fun part.

Backstories etc.

Sans

It wouldn’t be swap if sans didn’t aspire to be in the royal guard… and be slightly pathetic at it despite all of his highly motivated efforts. But i have a solution.

What if before the CORE, sans was a scientist who loved puns but didn’t really have any friends and was always focussed on his work? (Remember papyrus didn’t have friends before in UT either so it’s reasonable to impose this scenario on him. Puns aren’t always popular with crowds afterall) He worked with Gaster and then after the… incident, sans had vague recollections of WD and studied determination in an effort to figure out why he can’t remember him properly. With a certain someone playing around with time, this study leads to the reports that show timelines starting and stopping until suddenly, everything just ends.

This comes as a huge blow to him. But not in the way it does in UT, where he finds it harder and harder to care about things because of how powerless he is. Quite the opposite, he starts to realise that if his life doesn’t matter he wants to spend it doing what he wants to do rather than what he’s good at, because there’s no point anyway. He wants friends. He knows paps used to be a royal guard and he’s popular so sans makes it his lifelong dream to become a member of the royal guard and receive a little love and recognition, to bathe in a shower of kisses every morning etc. etc.

Kinda tragic really considering how good he was at science and how terrible he is at his duties. I mean, he only has 1 HP and 1 AT. This is the main reason they haven’t let him in the guard yet, because if he entered a fight he’d just die.

With motivations like that, you can sorta see how a normal sans might show papyrus behaviour, right? No need to just swap the personality entirely.

I will concede to say that in this universe sans has passion for making the puzzles (a normally papyrus trait that i really shouldn’t be adding but it just simplifies things). He tends to make them overly complicated and convoluted in reference to his science background but he always misses the obvious point in their design.

Papyrus

Did you notice I said pap used to be royal guard? Yep. This is one of those I’m-tweaking-with-the-plot-in-a-big-way things. So papyrus in US has a bit more of a level head than UT. Which is sorta hard to bring out in our normal loveable skeleton. 

Let’s say that in this universe he somehow became a royal guard without the struggle he faces in UT. In fact, let’s say that he became a royal guard a long time ago. His vigour and commitment made him a good candidate and they hired him a thought. So, without having to be desperate about getting people’s approval like in UT, he found he didn’t need to try so hard to make friends which actually made him more popular and likeable. 

He was a capable royal guard really. I mean, Undyne admits in UT itself that he’s actually pretty strong. But what stops him from fulfilling his duties is exactly what Undyne notices in him with UT, he’s too morally good for the job.

*queue the weird screen wobble of a backstory*

I’m not sure on the details but in my head, papyrus learns his fault in a serious way. Maybe facing one of the past humans or another monster (I might use this loose end to tie up some other plot point later..). 

Anyway, at some point in the past he confronts an assailant one on one. He knows what he must do: kill them. He’s been in FIGHTs before of course, dealt damage and captured badguys, but he’s never actually turned a living thing into dust. Facing his enemy, he faces a moral conflict at the core of his being. Papyrus can’t kill. Because despite everything, no matter how heinous the crime or horrible the person, he can’t help himself from believing in the potential of others. From hoping that people can do a little better. And as long as he thinks like this he knows he will never be able to rob someone from an opportunity to improve themselves. To give them that chance at change. There, facing this villain just waiting for him to strike, he realises that he will never be able to be a true royal guard.

They stand for what feels like hours but may as well be just moments of real time in a standstill waiting for papyrus to FIGHT, or atleast even ACT. Finally, papyrus relents and shows mercy, giving into his true nature. It’s at this point that Alphys arrives and intervenes, fighting and capturing the assailant. But papyrus has already learnt a lesson about himself that cannot be forgotten.

Despondent, realising what this means for his job, papyrus begins to care less and less about his work. A stigma grows around him. The guard who won’t FIGHT. The laziest member of the force. It’s around this time he starts frequenting Grillby’s. He eventually quits the guard entirely and embraces what people assume he is. Laziness becomes his escape from the blame he places on himself for all the things he HAD done as a guard and the one thing he couldn’t that fateful day.

Years pass and his time in the guard is all but forgotten. Paps is popular, easy-going and doesn’t care to do much of anything. That is until the one thing he does care about intervenes.

Sans and papyrus always had a strong relationship while younger. Paps is one of the only ones who stuck by sans through his awkward scientist days. Before, sans hadn’t cared much for gossip or other people in general and didn’t really bother to learn about why pap left the guard. What he did know was that somehow being on the guard had left him popular all this time later (which motivated his need to be in the royal guard like I said). Because he was concerned about how lazy paps was getting, he encouraged paps to join him as a sentry. 

It’s an offer papyrus couldn’t refuse, knowing how vulnerable sans truly was. Someone needed to keep an eye on him. And really, the dynamic works both ways with sans being there to stop paps from giving up on life entirely some days just by being his perky self.

Dynamic

There’s still that adorable by-play between the bros.

Sans gets frustrated at papyrus for being lazy.

Papyrus silently cringes at the puns sans makes (but he doesn’t react to it like he does in UT)

Despite being the laziest monster in the underground sans still considers him ‘the coolest’

Papyrus somehow always manages to have access to spaghetti 24/7 which drives sans crazy. Sans refuses to eat the spaghetti because of how ridiculous it is. This is supposed to replace the pun thing in UT. I keep thinking of a twist on something in the game: “Papyrus! You need to stop making spaghetti all the time! It’s getting out of hand!” “come on bro, your stomach is grumbling just looking at it.” “I know and i hate it!” 

Instead of a hotdog stand, papyrus has a full-on spaghetti kitchen concealed in his sentry station.

Sans is the one that has all the extra sentry jobs around the underground though that he impossibly manages. Most people don’t question it because he’s always putting 110% into everything he does (but how can he possibly be in so many places at once i wonder... *audible wink* )

Papyrus will give Frisk their phone number and answer their calls whenever for each room but I’ll explain how and why that works in another post (I’ve let this one drag long enough)

To be continued i guess?

Ok... That’s not EVERYTHING. But that’s the basics. I still want to go into how frisk encountering the skelebros would work (like i mentioned with the phone calls), the whole lady behind the door thing (but i’ll probably cover that in the Asgore/Toriel swap), who you fight in the blizzard exiting snowdin, who you date in a true pacifist route and how the whole genocide drama would run down. Not to mention i still need to elaborate on the separate friendships they have with alphys, undyne, hapstablook etc. but i’ll them bring up with their own swaps rather than this one because the skeletons are too integrated with everything and everyone to explain it all here.

[droneseco]

Insta360 GO: The Only Action Cam You’ll Ever Need

Our verdict of the Insta360 GO: With one-click shooting, a unique magnetic mounting system, and incredible software AI and video templates, this is the action cam you've been waiting for. It's effortless to shoot, and edit. 1010

The Insta360 GO is a camera that removes all the barriers to shooting a great video at precisely the right moment. With built-in stabilization and a single-button to start recording, anyone can capture the moment quickly and simply. And when you’re done, the app makes creating a professional video an absolutely breeze.

It’s available today for $200, and we think it’s amazing. Check out our review video and read on to find out why. At the end of this review, we’re giving an Insta360 GO away to one lucky reader, so be sure to enter your details and watch the video for some bonus entries.

What Makes The Insta360 GO Different?

I must admit, I was somewhat skeptical when Insta360 reached out to tell me they were launching an action cam. It doesn’t have any 360 or VR features?! It’s literally just an action cam? But I couldn’t have been more wrong. Here’s what makes the Insta360 GO simply magical:

One-button recording. The Insta360 GO is designed primarily to capture short video clips, of 14-30 seconds long. Just press the single button on the back of the device (or just press the whole camera when it’s mounted on your pendant), and it’ll wake up, start recording, then shut down after the time elapses. It’s ridiculously easy to use.

FlowState Stabilization. With a wide-angle lens and on-board gyroscope, Insta360 has brought its incredible stabilization technology to this tiny device. Your footage will be super smooth, no matter what crazyness you’re getting up to. It looks amazing, and it’s all seamless and automatic. Shoot at any angle, it doesn’t matter, it’ll come out the right way (unless of course you wanted it upside down, then you can rotate it during editing).

Video templates and AI editing. Of course, you’re free to export the individual clips and edit in whatever software you like, but most people will want to use the built-in templates. These give you the music, the shot list, ready-made transitions, and everything is timed to the beat. Just pick the shots you want, and let the software do the rest. It took about ten minutes to manually put together the demo video in the review. If that’s too much though, there’s even a one-click AI FlashCut feature, that picks your shots for you.

Hyperlapses made easy. Compress a long walk along the beach or around the city into a minute of video using super smooth hyperlapse techniques. No additional editing required: just long press to activate the camera, then double press to start shooting.

Insta360 Go Specs and Design

Inside the box, you’ll find a smorgasbord of accessories and mounting bits.

As well as the Insta360 Go, which weighs 18.6 grams and is barely bigger than a finger, you’ll find a combined charging and connector case.

The Insta360 GO snaps magnetically into the top and begins charging immediately. At the base of the charging case, you’ll find a block of rubber, which protects a Lightning plug. This entire case plugs directly into your iPhone for transferring files. A USB-C to micro-USB adaptor is included for Android users, though at launch this device is iOS only. A micro-USB port on the side of the case is used for charging.

The GO is as minimal as it can be. There are no ports, and only a single button on the back. A set of pogo pins provide all the charging and connectivity the device needs when sat in the charging case. The single button initiates recording.

The magnetic pendant will be your most typical use case. Simply hang it around your neck–the height is adjustable–and snap the Insta360 GO on. It’s very discreet and works over a single layer of clothing like a t-shirt or dress.

If that’s not quite suitable, the magnetic clip mount might be your next choice. Don’t worry about orienting the camera on its side–the gyroscope will automatically flip your footage the right way up, using Insta360’s incredible FlowState Stabilization technology.

You also get a tripod mount case. Again, the Insta360 magnetically snaps into place. The case adds a standard tripod screw at the bottom, which you can attach a tripod, selfie stick, or any of your other favorite mounts. Alternatively, you can use the included stick mount. This screws into the tripod mount, and includes a reusable sticky pad. You can adjust the angle of tilt, too.

If all that still doesn’t do it for you, a simple magnetic and sticky pad should do the job with any flat surface. You really should be able to mount the Insta360 Go anywhere with minimal effort; everything you could possibly need is included in the box.

Video Templates and AI FlashCut

After plugging the charging case into your phone, the Insta360 app analyzes your footage and attempts use AI to match specific types of shots. Head over to the Stories tab, and choose a theme. The app can then pick out the best shots and mix them into the chosen video template with a single tap on the FlashCut button.

At launch, it seems to recognize:

Food

Smiles

City scenes

Since I tested in the countryside, don’t tend to take pictures of my food, and rarely smile, the FlashCut feature was less useful for me. Over time I expect it’ll be trained on more content types, but you’re free to use as much or as little of the FlashCut feature as you like. You can always use it to populate a story, then go in and tweak some of the clips if you didn’t quite like the output. It’s magical to watch it work though, and I think some people (those weirdos that tend to smile a lot, for instance), will love the feature.

Pick a theme, watch a preview, then press FlashCut. Congratulations, you’ve just made a compilation video.

Even if you don’t the FlashCut feature at all, it’s still effortless to put together an impressive video. If you stick to the pre-built templates, all you need to is pick the shot, then slide it back and forth until you find the desired bit of the clip.

During testing, the range of templates has been limited, but more are promised at launch and beyond. Those we tested with varied in clip lengths from half a second–obviously designed for a younger audience with the attention span of a gnat–to a more glacial seven seconds. Some are designed specifically for certain types of shots (a compilation of smiles, a set of hyperlapses around a city), but most can be used generically with any kind of clip. The editing process felt a lot like iMovie Trailers, but even easier.

You can tweak all aspects of a template if you’re inclined, though I found the defaults worked great. You can opt for a square output for Instagram, or a more traditional 16:9 format. The camera itself shoots videos at a resolution of 2720 pixels square, but after stabilization, videos are output at a maximum 1080p full HD. Yes, this isn’t 4K, but it’s more than enough for mobile, where the majority of online video is consumed now.

Lifelogging Makes a Comeback?

The unique magnetic pendant mount and sheer ease of capturing a moment reminds me of the “lifelogging” camera craze from a few years back. These devices were designed to capture your entire day, then pick out the highlights. Of course, they didn’t last: the idea of a camera that captured your every moment was an obvious invasion of privacy. But on top of that, who wants to review a day worth of footage to find the best bits?

The Insta360 GO is completely unobtrusive, and only captures the moments you want. It’s an everything camera: for lifelogging, travel blogging, action sports, or just random family moments.

Battery Life

The biggest drain on the charging case appears to be transferring files. The charging case battery ran out after a week of testing, midway through transferring a large hyperlapse video. The file wasn’t damaged, but since the charging case doesn’t siphon power from your phone, you’ll need to plug it in and charge before you can finish transferring files. Since the case automatically tops up the Insta360 GO whenever it’s placed inside, the camera itself never run out of power, and had some residual battery when the case itself ran out, so I could still keep shooting while the case recharged.

Should You Buy an Insta360 GO?

Ultimately, video cameras are designed to capture a moment. That sounds patently obvious, but any barriers either due to inherently bad hardware design, or difficulty of use, will stop you from achieving that. We probably all have an action camera or two sitting in a drawer of dead electronics. It’s never charged, it needs all manner of complicated mounting options, it’s an effort to start shooting, and after all that, you’ve got to think about how to edit the footage together in a neat way. I’m certainly guilty of that. Most of the time I can’t even bothered to pull out my phone and film something. That’s like, at least three clicks.

The Insta360 GO is the action cam anyone can use, even those of us who are incredibly lazy. The one-click shooting is absolutely effortless. Take as many shots as you want. Plug it into your phone, and let the automatic transfer do its magic. Even if you ignore the AI FlashCut features, picking ten or twenty clips for a ready-made template shouldn’t take more than ten minutes. And that’s it: you’ve got a publishable video of holiday memories to throw on your Instagram feed. It looks professional, it’s in-time to the beat, and you’re free to spend more time enjoying yourself. Even if you’re not the type of person that regular skydives, rides a rollercoaster, or visits exquisite Asian temples on the weekend, I think you’ll still get a lot of use from this adorable camera.

I love this thing, and I’m going keep using it as much as I can. That’s the highest praise I can give a device.

Don’t miss out. Grab yours now direct from Insta360.com for $199.99, and get free laser engraving.

Enter the Competition!

Insta360 GO Giveaway

Read the full article: Insta360 GO: The Only Action Cam You’ll Ever Need

Insta360 GO: The Only Action Cam You’ll Ever Need published first on http://droneseco.tumblr.com/

[thisdaynews]

How an exit poll arms race could create election-night confusion

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-an-exit-poll-arms-race-could-create-election-night-confusion/

How an exit poll arms race could create election-night confusion

In general elections, roughly four-in-10 voters cast their ballots in ways other than appearing in person on Election Day, making them unreachable by interviewers positioned outside polling places. | M. Spencer Green, File/AP Photo

2020 elections

Competing exit polls may leave the public with conflicting signals in the final hours of the 2020 election.

TORONTO — The demand for exit poll data has always outweighed the exit poll’s predictive accuracy.

The network-sponsored, election-night exit polls serve two purposes: guiding the news media as it covers national elections in real time and serving as a standing record of the composition of the electorate and what they thought about the candidates and issues.

Story Continued Below

But their problematic history has spurred a schism among America’s top news organizations, which have spent decades pooling their resources to conduct one universal exit poll. Now some outlets have splintered off to launch their own project, which debuted in last year’s midterm elections.

The 2020 elections will feature two parallel polls of voters designed to measure who voted, for whom they cast their ballots and why. And both providers — the National Election Pool and its exit poll, along with The Associated Press’ new VoteCast project — claim they’ve solved many of the problems that have confronted exit pollsters for decades.

It’s led to something of an exit polling arms race — with both camps, while collegial and collaborative in general, claiming their recent work has produced more accurate data for news organizations to project elections. The war of words kicked off here at the American Association for Public Opinion Research’s annual conference, where papers were presented at back-to-back panel discussions on Saturday.

“I do believe we have better data,” David Scott, AP’s deputy managing editor for operations, said in an interview.

“We achieved what we wanted to do in the two things that VoteCast is really designed to deliver,” Scott said. “We need really great data on election night to power the AP’s decision desk and to tell the story of the electorate and why the winners won.”

But new doesn’t actually mean better, said Joe Lenski, vice president of Edison Research, which conducts the exit poll for the TV networks.

“I think the exit poll data is the data of record for election analysis,” he said, referring to the work by media outlets and academics well after the election occurs.

The history of past exit poll failures is well-documented, even if the slip-ups aren’t actually that frequent. If the exit polls in 2004 were accurate, John Kerry would have been elected president. More recently, exit poll data suggested Hillary Clinton would defeat Donald Trump in 2016.

As a record of the composition of the electorate, the exit polls have been plagued for years by a number of historical biases — namely the over-representation of younger and more-educated voters, which, in recent elections, has led to a Democratic skew in the results.

And the exit polls have been under siege from external forces, too, with more voters nationally casting ballots before Election Day or through the mail, making them unreachable by interviewers positioned outside polling places. In general elections now, roughly four-in-10 voters cast their ballots in ways other than appearing in person on Election Day.

So now there will be two exit polls. If you watch the election returns on the three major broadcast networks, CNN or MSNBC, you’ll see the traditional exit poll that mostly consists of interviewers approaching voters leaving their polling places on Election Day. But if you’re watching Fox or the Fox News Channel or consuming news from any of The Associated Press’ thousands of affiliates across the country, you’ll get VoteCast.

Moreover, the members of the National Election Pool — ABC News, CBS News, CNN and NBC News — also get their election results from Edison, while the vast majority of other news organizations (including POLITICO) get their results from The AP. That means if the polls or the election results differ, Americans might get two diverging pictures of the election as results pour in that Tuesday night in November 2020.

But researchers on both projects say they’ve cracked the code, producing results on Election Night 2018 that were, on average, only 1 percentage point off from the final vote count. At a panel discussion here Saturday, Courtney Kennedy, the director of survey research at Pew Research Center, proclaimed that 2018 “improvements” and “innovations” to the traditional exit poll were “tremendous.”

“You made the national exit poll more accurate,” said Kennedy.

Meanwhile, the AP and its partner at NORC, a research institution that’s part of the University of Chicago, are celebrating what they consider a wildly successful 2018 launch here this week. They’re throwing a party at the Hockey Hall of Fame, featuring with an open bar and photo opportunities with the Stanley Cup, the sport’s iconic championship trophy.

While both are polls of voters and serve similar purposes, there are important differences between them. The National Election Pool’s exit poll combines the traditional exit polling approach — interviewing voters on their way out of the polling place — with telephone surveys in states with all-mail voting or robust in-person early voting.

Edison made two key changes in 2018, Lenski said. It experimented with in-person interviewers at large, early-vote centers in Nevada and Tennessee. And most importantly, Lenski said, Edison tweaked the way it asks voters about their own levels of educational attainment and adjusted the survey to reflect a truer balance along educational lines, producing a more accurate result early in the evening that carried through until all the votes were counted.

“We felt that those adjustments we had made based on education have done a really good job of giving us top-line numbers at 5 o’clock and at poll closing that told the story,” Lenski said in an interview. “Our members had the story on election night. We knew at 5 o’clock it was going to be a really good night for Democrats in the House and not-so-good night for Democrats in the Senate.”

AP VoteCast, on the other hand, looks more like a typical pre-election poll, combining traditional, probability-based polling with an online, opt-in survey of voters. VoteCast — which involves more complicated statistical modeling than the traditional exit poll — includes both those who say they voted, and those who say they didn’t.

The 2018 midterms marked VoteCast’s debut, and Scott, the AP editor in charge of the project, says it couldn’t have gone much better. AP and NORC researchers will present their results here on Saturday; in a public report, they’re calling VoteCast’s launch “an impressive success.”

“At that period between 5 o’clock on the East Coast and when polls close, the data for VoteCast was showing the right winner in 92 percent of the races that we looked at,” Scott said in an interview. “And our average margin of error was around 1 percent — still leaning toward the Dem, but still just a 1 percent margin of error. At that same time in our history with the exit poll — especially our recent history with the exit poll — you know, we’re looking at average errors of double digits in some states.”

The next test for VoteCast will be the 2020 presidential primaries and caucuses — contests that pose unique challenges. Unlike in general elections, primary electorates shift drastically from cycle to cycle, and there are few historical benchmarks to use in calibrating to get the right mix of voters. And since VoteCast is conducted beginning in the days before the vote, late-breaking events in the campaign — a candidate dropping out in the days between primaries in different states, for example — may be harder to measure.

“The scalability and infrastructure works a lot better when we’re doing all 50 states all in one night, as opposed to a series of events,” Scott said. “There’s also the technical: We’re in the field, looking for early voters at the same time that you might have an election going on.”

Lenski, who leads the traditional exit poll, thinks he has an advantage come next year’s primaries.

“I can’t speak for how AP VoteCast is planning on doing this, but I know the type of modeling they use in a general election is much tougher to do in a primary because there’s no really good history for a 23-candidate Democratic race to model what the electorate is going to look like,” he said.

“I know what we do works for a primary,” Lenski added. “It’s worked for 40 years. And we have the infrastructure in place to do event after event, week after week. It’s going to be a real grind. Starting February 3 with Iowa, going through March 17 — it’s just about every Tuesday, and sometimes Saturdays, and sometimes Mondays — there’s going to be an event. And we have the infrastructure in place to cover state after state.”

The 2020 presidential race consists not of one Election Day but a series of elections, beginning with the Iowa caucuses. That increases the chance, with different sources of voter polling and election results, that the trajectory of election night could look different based on where Americans get their news — a dangerous turn given Americans’ already declining faith in institutions of government and media, sometimes amplified by political leaders.

“I think that’s possible,” said Emily Swanson, the AP’s polling editor. “And I think that we would have a lot of confidence in the story that we’re telling.”

But Lenski maintains the traditional approach used for the network pool is best.

“We still believe that the best way to report voter opinions on Election Day is to actually talk to voters right after they voted,” he said.

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[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHY I'M SMARTER THAN DOMAIN

But unfortunately you run into a chicken and egg problem here. Of course the question of how to choose startups presumes you have startups to choose between. The focus group may say they want the fund to be huge—hundreds of millions of dollars given to a small investment bank that offered to find funding for them to start their own businesses. Who knew? Once they invest in. The need to do their job. Maybe I'm just stupid, or have they abandoned the center for the suburbs? And while 110 may not seem much better than 100, if you mistreat the founders you invest in startups, they might build things that get used for pornography, or file-sharing, or the idea—or more precisely, the market. I going to wear this all the time? But it seems more to the point that their culture prizes design and craftsmanship.

Yes. One of my most vivid memories from our startup is going to visit Greylock, the famous Boston VCs. Steam power was a sliver of the British economy when Watt started working on it. The main complaint of the more articulate critics was that Arc seemed so flimsy. 05, or 4. You have to pick startups before they've got a hit—either because they've made something great but users don't realize it yet, like Google early on, or because they're still an iteration or two away from the big hit, like Paypal when they were only in charge of their narrow domain of building things, rather than just an effect? They build something for themselves and their friends, who happen to be the first time that measures taken in an atmosphere of panic had the opposite of hapless, that would be painless, though annoying, to lose. Are there good universities nearby? Both you and the startup should have lawyers. If the car business worked like software or movies, you'd surpass your competitors by making a commodity. You might think a high valuation unless you can somehow achieve what those in the business call a liquidity event, and the problem they solved was an urgent one.

Letting focus groups design your cars for you only wins in the short term. What do you do? Which means that as we learn to avoid one class of distractions, new ones constantly appear, like drug-resistant bacteria. If Internet startups offer the best opportunity for ambitious people, then a lot of money from a deal, it's not because they invested at a valuation of $1. But once you prove yourself as a good investor in the startups is that startups are often involved in disreputable things. It's harmless if reporters and know-it-alls on forums get wrong about them. This is a new essay for the Japanese edition of Hackers & Painters.

It's hard to create wealth by making a commodity. They wouldn't seem bad to the city officials. But perhaps the biggest thing preventing founders from realizing how attentive they could be to their users is that they've never experienced such attention themselves. If you want to invest seriously, the way Stripe delivered instant merchant accounts to its first users was that the founders manually signed them up for traditional merchant accounts behind the scenes. It will be easier in proportion to how much your town resembles San Francisco.1 This pattern suggests that attitudes at Stanford and Berkeley are not an anomaly, but a leading indicator. And my main computer is now freed for work. However, even that is an interesting counterexample to the general American trend. But what if you're investing by yourself? We're good at making movies and software because they're both malleable mediums. To programmers, hacker connotes mastery in the most literal sense: someone who can help them a lot, they'll let you invest at a low valuation. Figure out what the real problem is, and make sure you solve that.

Something that a Lisp hacker might handle by pushing a symbol onto a list becomes a whole file of classes and methods. It would be a little frightening to be solving users' problems in a way that wasn't yet automatic, but less frightening than the far more common case of having something automatic that doesn't yet solve anyone's problems.2 And they won't dilute themselves unless they end up net ahead. If you drink too much, you can try importing startups on a larger scale.3 They want to work for the very best VC funds. You'd have started a self-sustaining chain reaction like the one that drives the Valley. The initial user serves as the form for your mold; keep tweaking till you fit their needs perfectly, and you'll usually find you've made something other users want too. It was like watching a car you're chasing turn down a street that you know has no outlet. The bad news is it means that if you're not one of the motives on the FBI's list. Really hot companies sometimes have high standards for angels. There are two reasons founders resist going out and recruiting users individually. If you're part of a round led by someone else, that you are doing a lot of arrogant people.

But in fact they're famous within YC for aggressive early user acquisition.4 No one knew till change reached a sufficient speed. Partly because some companies use mechanisms to prevent copying. The valuation determines how much stock you get. If you want to invest seriously, the way to get started in angel investing is to find a better focus group than hackers, because they were pulled into it by unscrupulous investment bankers. And if at the last minute two parts don't quite fit, you can sometimes get away with this in movies and software, and bad at making cars and cities. In fact, worse than worthless, because I didn't realize that it evolves. There are some towns, like Portland, that would be too much of a political commissar in a Red Army unit. In the case of Viaweb, the simple solution was to make the company good. With so much at stake, they have to be devious. Like steroids, these sudden huge investments can do more harm than good.

Notes

According to a later investor trying to make money. There is usually some injustice that is not limited to startups has recently been getting smoother. They're still deciding, which have remained more or less, then their incentives aren't aligned with some axe the audience already has to be younger initially we encouraged undergrads to apply, and only one founder take fundraising meetings is that you're paying yourselves high salaries. Beware too of the expert they send to look appealing in stores, but it's hard to judge for yourself and that we should work like they worked together mostly at night.

This is why I haven't released Arc. Spices are also startlingly popular on pre-Google search engines and there didn't seem to someone in 1880 that schoolchildren in 1980 would be to say whether the program is no. The Mac number is a cause them to switch to OSX. In practice you can eliminate, do it now.

Gauss was supposedly asked this when he was 10 years ago it would be to write your dissertation in the comment sorting algorithm. There are a handful of consulting firms that rent out big pools of foreign programmers they bring in on H1-B visas. Founders at Work.

It is probably not far from the conventional wisdom on the side of their core values is Don't be evil. If you have to be so obsessed with being published. But you can see the Valley itself, not lowercase. So when they got started in Mississippi.

Thanks to Joe Gebbia, Robert Morris, Greg Mcadoo, Jessica Livingston, Harj Taggar, and Patrick Collison for smelling so good.