#nothing much changed from this to the game itself except for how it is built out of its own blueprints

[katrinavalentina]

Collection of concept art for the Polyhedron in Pathologic 1

Official art from www.ice-pick.com

[jackdraw-spwrite]

Fine, Chapter 1

Danny's fine. He's fine. Really, he is.

Never mind that he hasn't seen Clockwork in weeks, shouldn't see him ever again.

Never mind that he can't stop wondering how much of him is metal, and how much of him is left.

He's fine.

~~~

An unofficial continuation (with permission) to @five-rivers phight fic Pearls, set some time later.

Words: 2014

Characters: Danny, Frostbite

For: @five-rivers, for their prompt: Horror, but soft and cozy with lots of sensation.

Read on AO3, or below the readmore:

It was fine.

Well, no. It wasn't fine. It wasn't fine at all and even thinking about it sent Danny's heart into his stomach and his stomach into his chest not that he even had those in his ghost form anymore–

So he didn't think about it.

As long as he didn't think about it, it was fine.

He was fine.

Nothing in him hurt. Except when he was thrown through a wall or into the street. Except for his heart when he thought about it and he didn't so it was fine.

It was subtle, anyway. And Frostbite said it would go away if he just ignored it. So long as he just stayed away, it would wear off. Like paint.

Just so long as he went about his days like normal it would be fine. He would be fine.

So he did.

He got up. He ate.

He didn’t wonder where food went when he was a ghost since didn’t have a stomach anymore.

He went to school, fought ghosts, fought frustration and schoolwork and didn't fight Dash, but maybe goaded him a little. He went home.

Not through the portal.

Home.

Home, with his parents and his sister and all the inventions Danny could never quite feel settled around, not like–

Fentonworks was home.

He hung out with Sam and Tucker and fought more ghosts and played video games and did homework, not always in that order. Maybe mostly in that order.

And he was fine. He'd figure it out.

He had figured it out. Or Frostbite had told him.

All he had to do was stay away.

It was fine.

 

He couldn't sleep.

There was something unsettled in his gut, churning. He could imagine it. Every time he closed his eyes against the light of the neon glow from outside the image floated in his head.

What was in his head?

No.

It was a slow thing, with many teeth. They were square, with perfectly machined points to every one. He couldn't quite count them; they kept slipping sideways out of his mind. But it was slow, and round, and it was hungry.

He imagined the teeth of it pressing against his other organs. Hard, harder until they began to bite. Until they caught on tender flesh and dug and dug until it had sawed furrows in him and the gear had made itself a new home in his gut.

Churning.

Danny fought the idea down. He was human. The scans hadn't shown anything like that in this form.

But that could change, couldn't it? Diseases progressed. This could, too. Probably. Even if Frostbite was right, what if it–the lair, the buildup, whatever it was–what if it kept changing him until it wore off?

He pressed a hand to his stomach, hard. Harder.

Nothing.

He was fine.

It was fine.

But the churning of his gut remained.

He needed–soft words, a wash of sound, a sense of place–to sleep. An ache built in his chest at the thought he couldn’t quite finish.

…

It wouldn't be bad, would it? Just to listen? What if the sound of ticking was the warning that it was spreading to his human half? What if he was ticking now, and he didn't know because he hadn’t listened?

Danny placed fingers on his neck, and heard his heart.

Thump…thump…thump

It was a soft and even sound. Regular.

It reminded him, just a little, of the symphony of Long Now’s clocks. But that was in the regularity of it, not the sound. He still had a heartbeat. He was still something close to human.

And like this…Danny breathed in.

Thump…thump…thump

He breathed out, and found a glimmer of the peace he’d known in Clockwork’s garden.

It was fine.

He was fine.

Breaths in time with the beat of his heart, Danny slept.

~~~

Danny held his arm where the latest ghostly menace had grabbed him and used it to toss him into, then through several walls. Some of them had been brick.

But he was fine.

Sure, he hurt. His whole body twinged with every movement and there was a deep ache in his arm. But that was just his life. It would get better. It probably wouldn't even take a day.

Danny flexed his fingers and felt something in them click.

All he had to do was stay away.

~~~

In the morning, the ache in his arm was the same.

~~~

Danny opened his hand, palm facing up and fingers spread wide. The thick rubber of his glove stretched tight across his palm like this, folding on itself with the strain.

He held the position for a moment, then relaxed.

Or tried to. His pinky finger stayed motionless. In his hand, he could hear a rapid clicking, just on the edge of his ghostly hearing. The ache in his forearm built.

Danny grimaced and tapped his pinky with his other hand. With a pop, it fell into place by his other fingers.

Tucker's voice crackled to life in his ear. "Danny, you see anything?"

From his hand, he looked up and down to the rooftops of Amity, focusing back on the task at hand. He squinted down to scan the streets, hand momentarily forgotten.

~~~

"You okay, dude? I know you said you were fine but you've been holding your arm a lot lately."

"Yeah," Danny let go of his arm. "See? Good as new," he gave it a wave and schooled his expression to hide the pain that exploded along his joints.

~~~

His parents were out, Danny surmised from the post-it stuck to the microwave. That was useful. They could poke around in the lab today.

First, breakfast.

Danny pulled the milk jug from the fridge and a sparkle of pain danced along his forearm.

He set the jug down on the counter and looked his forearm over.

Nothing on his skin.

"That's not good," he muttered.

Maybe he should talk to Frostbite.

~~~

"It's what?" Danny pulled his arm to his chest.

Frostbite peered down at him and sighed. "I'm sorry, Great One. I know this is an unpleasant and unwanted experience for you, and I wish we could treat you."

Danny bit his lip. "You really can't?"

Frostbite shook his head. "Our mechanics work primarily with hydraulics and ectoplasmic energy fields. We use gears, but nothing of the delicacy and intricacy you have."

"The delicacy," Danny echoed.

He swallowed, reminded of the recurring thought of the gear replacing his stomach. In his ghost form, it was less far-fetched. He pulled the arm at his chest tighter to his stomach.

"I'm sorry, Great One," Frostbite said. "Do you know anyone else?"

"Other than the guy who did this to me?"

Frostbite nodded.

"No," Danny said at last. His voice cracked. "There's no one else."

He was looking down at his feet, now. He felt so small, so alone. Like his life was tumbling, like he was.

Everything had been upside down since he learned, since he learned–

He flexed his hand. Tried to.

"Are you worried he might not let you go?" asked Frostbite.

"I–no."

Clockwork wasn't that direct. Danny suspected Clockwork didn't know how to be that direct.

Danny wasn't worried that Clockwork wouldn't let him leave. The thought of the chorus of the clocks still filled him with a desperate longing, and there was part of him, a loud part, that asked if being stuck in Long Now forever would be such a terrible fate. That tied threads around his heart and pulled them tight at the thought of never going back.

No, Danny wasn't worried that Clockwork would trap him. Danny was worried Clockwork wouldn't need to.

Danny looked up at the feeling of Frostbite resting a paw on his shoulder. "If you're worried, Great One, we can search for someone with expertise. But we may not find anyone soon."

And Danny's hand was immobile in ghost form. And Amity’s ghost problem was as severe as ever.

"I don't–I." Danny swallowed again, and veered from the thought of what his gut looked like right now. "How much time?"

"We don't know. If we knew where to find a ghost with expertise, then–"

"No, I mean. I mean, how much time do I have left? Before I–"

He stopped, struck by how much it sounded like he was dying. Danny wanted to laugh. He was already dead.

He wasn't.

But wouldn't this be like dying, all over again?

Danny pulled his arm tighter to his stomach again, hunching himself against the thought.

"Oh," Frostbite said, comprehending.

And then he was kneeling in front of Danny, still dwarfing him.

“It depends greatly on the pressure the lair exerts on you, but I would say you could spend days, even weeks more there and still eventually shed its influence.

"But young one, the influence of a lair is a softer change by far than death can be. When they joined me here my friends found it a gradual process, painful only in the way that growth can be painful. I cannot speak for the lair you have spent so much time in, but have the changes so far been painful?"

Danny looked down at his arm.

"Other than that," said Frostbite.

It seemed like a pretty big 'that' to Danny, but "No. I guess."

"Then your transformation is unlikely to be painful."

Frustration bubbled up from Danny's chest. "I don't care that it won't be painful,” he said. “I care about being me."

"My friends are still themselves," said Frostbite.

"Are they?"

There was silence for a moment, and Danny felt a yawning fear that he'd made Frostbite angry.

"I think," said Frostbite with measured slowness, "that you should discuss your worries with the ghost whose lair you've been visiting. You trust him, don't you?"

~~~

Long Now's doors were huge enough to feel like they had a gravity of their own. Danny hesitated before them, stomach turning on itself with anxiety.

It was like they were calling him. Danny closed his eyes against the memory of garden naps, of a wash of sound and peace and place.

He was here to have his arm fixed. His arm, which wouldn't have anything wrong with it if Clockwork hadn't messed up his insides without telling him. Danny clutched it tighter.

There was something in his throat.

He swallowed.

He couldn't feel at peace here. He shouldn't.

If he weren't careful, he would.

Danny took a shaky breath. Did he really need them now? Had he ever, as a ghost?

Maybe…maybe if he just focused on what he would lose, if he stayed. Frostbite had said that Danny still had time. That he had days or weeks, before Danny's–

Before he was trapped.

Before he belonged.

He could get out before then, surely?

Unless Clockwork decided otherwise.

Alone and confronted by a vast threshold that stretched beyond his ability to predict, that possibility seemed suddenly more real than it had in the Far Frozen hours before.

Danny rolled his lip between his teeth. Maybe he should have accepted Frostbite's offer of finding someone else. The uncertainty was gnawing at him already and he hadn't even set foot through the doors he'd been avoiding for weeks.

…But no.

Danny straightened.

None of his problems since the portal had gotten better by ignoring them. They'd only gotten worse, and it was time to accept that his arm was the same. That Clockwork was the same.

Maybe he could avoid Long Now long enough to shed the layers of lair gunk that had changed him. Maybe he could come back in a few years to yell at Clockwork more once there wasn't any risk to it.

But that wasn't really true, was it?

Whether he stepped through these doors a few seconds from now or a few years, even a few decades, it wouldn’t matter.

Clockwork controlled his lair, and he controlled time.

There would always be a risk.

As with so many other things he'd faced, the only way was through.

Arm still curled at his waist, Danny pushed through the doors.

[deusvervemakesgames]

Project RBH Devlog 0020

You know, this game has a lot of bullets in it. Like, a lot. And explosions. And those rings of bullets. What I’m saying is, there’s a lot of things that can hurt you moving across the entire screen at once and that’s only going to get worse as development continues. The player has zero defensive options besides physically moving, and no way to recover health except for a single powerup based on random chance.

So I added in a way to dodge.

(For some reason, this GIF is bigger than any of my other ones so I had to tweak it a bit for Tumblr to handle. As such it looks better on my Patreon. Apologies for the inconvenience)

Dodging itself is actually pretty simple: it takes the direction you’re currently moving and moves you that direction at four times your base movement speed. The trick is making sure that you’re invincible while doing this action. Luckily, the easiest way to implement the dodge input solved this issue for me. I turned the player code into a state machine.

A state machine is very straightforward, really. Instead of having all of the player movement and damage handling and attacking code in the player object itself, I turned that all into a function that the player object calls. The dodge input switches over to a different function instead, the one that makes you go fast. Doing this also means that the player movement controls and attack code stop working during the dodge. More importantly, so does the code that makes the player take damage. End result is a functional dodge action.

The particle effect is a little trickier. It’s not technically a particle system that GameMaker has built into the engine, much like the damage numbers that I discussed in the previous DevLog. It’s an object that I repeatedly create during the dodge action. The object itself decreases in opacity, fading away quickly and deleting itself once it’s entirely invisible. The color also shifts over time, rapidly changing from that reddish-purple to a sky blue as it fades. While the code itself was simple enough, the specific numbers that I needed in order to achieve the effect that I wanted took some trial and error.

Oh and then I found another game breaking bug that I wasn’t aware of, because my work is never finished. You might recall the status effects that I added a while back? It turns out that if an enemy has multiple status effects applied to them, when one of those statuses runs out, the game crashes. It turns out the fix for this was as easy as a single line of code once I realized what the problem was. The For loop that runs to make the effects of each status work sets its size by how many status effects currently apply to the enemy. This number, the ‘length’ of the array, is never changed, even if the actual length of the array does. As a result, when a status runs out, the For loop attempts to run code that no longer exists and freaks out. So all I had to do was reset the ‘length’ variable within the For loop and the problem was resolved.

I’ve still got so much ahead of me, and I’m not totally sure what I want to tackle next. I need way more powerups, but to get more powerups I need to expand the current placeholder powerup section system so that it can display the description of each upgrade. I also need a few more status effects. I’m pretty sure there’s a bug in the code that limits how many times any given upgrade appears, and I need to make sure that’s resetting correctly when the player dies. The enemies spawn in pretty much every room with no regards for the player. There’s nothing to find in the dungeon except the exit. And the enemy AI is about as simplistic as it’s possible to be.

Ah well. My work is never finished.

Until next Devlog!

-DeusVerve

Special thanks to my Tier 3 Patrons, Haelerin and Christos Kempf!

Support me on Patreon to get Early Access to builds!

[arsenicflame]

hi i'm really interested in space lesbians! where are they, who are they? how can i see them? (shows, games, books?) also what are you most excited about in s2 of ofmd?

OH BOY OH BOY OH BOY

soooooo my space lesbian enthusiasm refers to 3 separate medias!! (it used to say gay space vikings bc that was an even more specific niche buuuut im way more into tihylttw these days s o) one day i am going to make a fuckin venn diagram of my girls because they all have so many similarities. (loki/sigyn and angela/sera are basically the same characters change my mind.)

this is about to get real long bc im unhinged about them <3 10/10 would talk about them all day if the communities were there

our first space lesbians are loki + sigyn from the bifrost incident! TBI is an album by the band the mechanisms which you can find wherever you listen to music (youtube here) its a norse mythology inspired rock/steampunk-esque album and it is SO GOOD- it takes place on a train in SPACE in the format of an incident investigation. its a story so you have to listen to the tracks in order :)

--

next up! this is how you lose the time war- our lesbians in this are called red + blue because we have deconstructed this trope to its most basic format at this point :') its a short book, and you may be familiar with it as it went viral from a trigun fan tweet a few months back. (my url (and sewing blog url) are actually references to a quote from this book!) you can get it wherever you get books and id recc the audiobook if youre into that i am also in possession of the pdf if you wantto try before you buy.

tihylttw is a story told through the exchange of letters between two agents on opposite sides of a war- it usually gets described as enemies to lovers but id personally use rivals as i think it describes them better. the book is known for being incredibly poetic and sometimes pretentious in its writing and i just think its the most beautiful thing ever. lesbians do it better

honestly theres nothing i could say for tihylttw better than it could say for itself, i just adore the universe theyve built and i want to KNOW MORE. i love you and i love you and i want to find out what that means together

--

saving the best for last is my girls angela + sera. the most of all time. nobody compares to them for me. they consume me

angela + sera are from marvel comics and you can find my complete reading list here, but if im talking about them positively, im usually talking about one of the titular Angela comics, and more often than not queen of hel.

honestly i love the angela comics so much that im making myself speechless trying to figure out where to start. Angela falls into the asgard side of marvel comics, though she is a lot more fluid in her affiliations, her whole thing being that she deals in deals- nothing for nothing everything has its price. she is at times described as emotionless and is generally quite a stoic character, especially around strangers. the major exception to this is her wife, sera. seras one of marvels few canon trans characters and i think she is just so wonderfully written. shes witty and cheeky and doesnt take shit from anyone, even when it gets her into trouble- and oh boy does sera find herself in some predicaments! the angela comics are often just as poetic as tihylttw for me, theyll drop an 'as long as you are with me, i am not afraid' and ill need to go smother myself in a pillow for a sec. in QOH they adopt a daughter who is Also a lesbian, shes an alternate version of leah of hel and i ALSO adore her.

im desperately trying to avoid plot points but god. the main arc is 21 issues of smooching Shakespearean space angels what more could you want?

(through sera & angela we get a lot of heven lore and honestly that could be its whole own thing for me im SO fascinated.)

my girls are currently in comic hell, i am praying they will get something good soon 🙏🙏

--

and what am i most excited about for season 2? can i just say izzy? can i just say anne + mary? dude im so ready for some lesbians you have no idea actually you probably have a very good idea if you made it this far down. im incredibly excited to be seeing izzy get a favourable arc this season, im really hoping to see him develop relationships with everyone else, see him grapple with feelings around ed (actually im really hoping he chooses not to forgive ed. for growth) im excited to see whats gonna go down with his leg, im excited to see wtf is going on w ed + stede because i have no idea what the continuity is at the moment, im just excited!!!!!! i honestly dont think theres anything im not excited about everything looks so good so far

[michaelbobrowski]

How Mefion is Tackling One of the Biggest Problems in Freelancing: Payment Security

 Alright, I’ve spent some time discussing the bigger picture of Mefion and how it can reshape freelancing and business collaboration, but let’s get real for a second. If you’re a freelancer, the #1 thing on your mind is getting paid. And let’s be honest, it’s not always as straightforward as it should be.

For years, freelancers (and I’ve hired my fair share of them) have struggled with delayed payments, clients backing out at the last second, and the good old-fashioned ghosting. What Mefion has done, and what I think deserves a whole article by itself, is tackle this payment security issue head-on with their use of smart contracts.

The Problem: Getting Paid (or Not) as a Freelancer

I’ve been running businesses in consulting, capital investment, and aviation for over a decade, and I’ve seen some messy payment situations. Freelancers sign up for a job, do the work, and then… crickets. The client disappears, or suddenly there’s an excuse about why the payment can’t be processed. As a business owner, I’ve seen the frustration this causes, and let’s be honest, I’ve even been on the side where I’m chasing down freelancers for deliverables. The whole process is just a mess.

That’s why trust in freelancing is such a huge issue, and it’s been tough for platforms to solve this. Most platforms just act as middlemen, holding the payment and taking their cut (sometimes a pretty big one) but don’t do much more. Mefion, on the other hand, doesn’t just take a cut and call it a day. They’ve built in a system where smart contracts do the heavy lifting.

How Smart Contracts Solve the Issue

So, what exactly are smart contracts, and why should you care? Think of them as a digital handshake between the freelancer and the client, except this handshake is recorded on the blockchain and can’t be broken. Once both parties agree to the terms, the contract takes care of the rest. The client’s payment is secured upfront and only gets released once the work is completed and approved.

Now, here’s why this is a game-changer. First off, freelancers don’t have to worry about whether or not the client will actually pay up. The money is already in the system, waiting for the job to be done. No chasing invoices, no awkward follow-up emails asking “uh, where’s my money?” It’s all automated, transparent, and locked in.

For businesses, this means more accountability. If you agree to a contract, you can’t just disappear or change the terms halfway through. It forces both parties to commit to the project, which builds a lot more trust in the long term.

Why It’s Different From Other Platforms

You might be thinking, “Wait, don’t most freelance platforms do this?” Well, not really. A lot of the time, platforms act as escrow services, meaning they hold the funds but can still get involved in disputes, often leading to delays. Plus, they usually take a pretty hefty fee for this service.

Mefion’s system, by comparison, is fully decentralized. The smart contract handles the payment without the need for human intervention or platform interference. It’s just you, the client, and the contract. That also means the platform doesn’t take a massive cut out of your earnings just for the privilege of getting paid.

No More Payment Uncertainty

One thing that stands out to me about Mefion’s approach is the sense of certainty it brings to the freelancing space. Let’s face it, for most freelancers, the stress isn’t just about finding jobs – it’s about making sure they actually get paid for the jobs they do. There’s nothing worse than pouring hours into a project and then being left in the dark about whether you’ll ever see the money.

With Mefion, freelancers can jump into projects with confidence. They know the funds are secured from the start. And for businesses, it means they get what they paid for. If the work isn’t delivered, the money doesn’t leave the account. It’s as simple as that.

Impact Beyond Freelancing

But this isn’t just a solution for freelancers – businesses also benefit in a huge way. As someone who’s been on both sides of the fence, I can see how Mefion’s payment system can reduce friction in partnerships. Contracts are honored, and work is delivered. There’s less back-and-forth, fewer disputes, and ultimately, better relationships between freelancers and clients.

Final Thoughts: Why This Payment Model Stands Out

At the end of the day, if you’re a freelancer or a business owner, you know that payment issues are one of the biggest hurdles to making work relationships smooth and successful. Mefion has found a way to eliminate that hurdle by using smart contracts to guarantee payment security.

That’s not just a feature – that’s a solution to one of the oldest problems in freelancing. It’s one of the reasons why Mefion stands out for me, and I genuinely think this will change the way we think about freelancing. If they continue to develop this system, it’s going to set a new standard for how business gets done.

Whether you’re a freelancer tired of chasing down payments, or a business wanting a little more reliability from your hires, Mefion’s smart contract model is definitely worth checking out.

[woodswolf]

really really long thoughts on aini and how it could've been made WAY better if they just changed a few little things with regards to its "background canon" i.e. from ai 1. full spoilers for ai 1 and aini, minor (ending) spoilers for the zero escape series.

the worst part of aini is really just that uchikoshi really wrote the most compelling emotional found family drama plotline EVER that's as close to perfectly executed as it's possible for anything to be and SO much better than everything else around it and then said "actually that was an offshoot timeline and didn't technically happen! this much more underwhelming series of events (but where the characters figure out Exactly What Went Down) is what Really happened."

its like... yes in Any Other Case with Any Other Series this would be pretty obviously the only option. zero escape for instance couldn't continue from anything but the true ending for each game because that series presents itself as brute-forcing meta progress in order to unlock the full truth. like, if you take any "ending" in zero escape, you're still not getting the full story? e.g. dio end in vlr still isn't THE END in bold font with a period at the end bc they still have to actually figure out how to get everyone out with their lives, which can't happen without forcing all of the progress in the morphogenetic field by getting all the endings. even if they WANTED to it wouldn't make sense to make a sequel to dio end - most of the cast would be dead or dying and they're Still trapped so its just. yeah. it just wouldn't really work. the only exceptions of endings they could make sequels to are like, the safe ending in 999 (bc SOME of the cast survives to theoretically escape - there's a really cool fic series that explores this (part 1 / part 2) by spacedaydreamer on ao3), ztd's true end, and ztd's pre-vlr end (which they kinda literally did make a "sequel" to lmao). nothing else would really work due to the setup constraints.

but aitsf as a series is fundamentally Built Different and in that sense it's very very smart. the fact that it's built up like a serial with each game focused around a single case unrelated to any others means that it's very modular - you could reasonably make a sequel to ai 1 that's set after ANY of the endings (minus like, annihilation, where basically the entire cast is dead, and iris ending bc thats the only other end where a (likeable) character from the first game explicitly dies) because there aren't any pressing constraints on chronology that couldn't be overlooked or brushed aside for the sake of keeping it modular. like, saito is DEFINITELY still alive and running around killing people after ota's ending, which would naturally lead to it becoming annihilation... 2!!! if we got to see that actually play out - but that happens off-screen, so we could just Ignore It Tm and have the gang move on to the next case after the new cyclops killer "mysteriously disappeared" or whatever. same thing for iris - she could just eventually wake up as her normal self because we're never explicitly told that so sejima is in iris's body after ota's ending. just ignore it in favor of preserving a good character! aitsf isn't like zero escape where a potential plot hole like this could ruin the whole series - capitalize on that to carefully pick and choose the best elements of each game to make permanent "background canon". it doesn't HAVE to make COMPLETE sense or fit together EXACTLY - just cherrypick the best and most memorable moments that you want to keep as core canon.

which is the biggest problem with aini being set after ai 1's resolution route - nothing of what happens in it is really built on. and yeah, it makes sense - everyone who got the most development in ai 1's resolution route (i.e. date, iris, hitomi) is reduced to more side character status here - but i don't care about things making sense as much as them being good. and ai 1's resolution route is... fine. it's fine! but the writing quality on the right half of ai 1's flowchart is Not As Good compared to the left half and it really shows on repeat playthroughs. (the feels-like-it's-two-hours-long recap of falco's entire backstory is really shit to have to sit through when you already know all of it - and that's only ONE of the problems with the resolution ending, there are WAY MORE.) there are only like three things that are explicitly carried over from the resolution ending:

iris being Definitely Alive and Still Herself (which like, yeah, this is the only ending where that happens, but ota's and mizuki's endings still have her body being alive, and with the "just make it a plot hole" scheme that i outlined earlier they could literally just Ignore That and have her still be alive. AND they could give her a cool AIball that she could be soooooo normal about on her twitch streams like this is literally perfect ok)

so sejima being Definitely Alive and Still Himself (for all of the TWO scenes he's relevant for like wow good job. DEFINITELY couldn't have filled his role with a new sleazy politician character instead no sir )

datomi real (which like, Yes resolution is the only ending where this is Really set up, but it honestly could've happened after any ending (except annihilation bc hitomi's obviously dead RIP). those two took one (1) look at each other, shot the Autism Beams into each other's eyes, and then fell in love (as you do). it was just kinda Bound To Happen Anyway, the only difference would be how much they know about how date was falco yadda yadda and honestly imo i liked the idea of datomi better before i knew date was falco but this post isn't about that)

that's... really not a lot? and considering that all of this has to do with characters that are reduced to like, background status at best if even that (iirc hitomi LITERALLY only shows up for three scenes, one of which is over in like 30 seconds; iris's appearance count is in the very low double digits at best; and date is still important but only when NEITHER of those characters are in the room) it just. aini being set after ai 1's resolution ending doesn't really Add anything, and i would further argue that it's actually actively bad compared to the other and most obvious option!

let's stop kidding ourselves; you all knew when you clicked in here that i was going to talk about this, the only reason i started writing this is because i wanted to talk about this, and everyone is tired of ignoring the elephant in the room. so let's stop beating around the bush: aini is made actively worse by not being set after ai 1's mizuki ending, and almost everything about the game comes off like the whole development team knew this and still chose not to go through with it.

where to START with how fucked this is, honestly - though i guess the best place is probably the beginning for multiple reasons. if you didn't know about this already (because you're an epic gamer who managed to avoid all of the evil Ryukis during the parts of the first psync where they're chasing you - i only got hit by the last set on my first playthrough), now's a good time for you to go replay the first psync in aini and see what happens when you hit all of the ryukis instead of avoiding them.

through ryuki's repeated reverse psyncs, we get to see that, on some level, mizuki still remembers the events of her ending from ai 1. the "do you know the culprit" room is straight-up the setup from PSYNCIN' IN THE CAPTaiN, down to the bowl of soup and adorabbit cursing mizuki forever, with various memorable imagery from PSYNCIN' IN THE PaiN scattered about the room. and from there, getting caught by the Ryuki chases gives us four "scenes":

the merry go round column's door

the left birdcage from PSYNCIN' IN THE PaiN with the picture taped back together

adorabbit dangling from balloons

the setup from the end of PSYNCIN' IN THE CAPTaiN with date vs shoko and renju, with the models replaced by the neon "anonymous person" figures

this is obviously the events that happened during mizuki's ending in chronological order - mizuki hides in the column, date and aiba help her in the psync, mizuki thinks about all that date's done for her (shown abstractly through adorabbit), and finally the ending of PSYNCIN' IN THE CAPTaiN.

this is like, really good. it's exactly the kind of throwback reference that works with or without knowledge of the first game and still has an effect. for players that haven't played ai 1 it's "damn, what does all of THIS mean and why is one of the main characters thinking about it? i wonder if there's a bit of background material where i could learn more!", and for players that have played ai 1 it's like "aww, mizuki remembers all that happened in her ending on some level, that's sweet <3".

but it's like. do you see the problem with this. i SHOULD just be able to say something like, "oh, that's a convenient throwback/recap!" or "it must've affected her real bad for it to be the first thing that her somnium calls up even after literal years :(" but i don't get to say any of that. instead, we as the audience are left to wonder how she even remembers any of this FOR it to be in her somnium because none of it even happened in this timeline!

and like, yeah, aini's whole point is all the meta shit, or at least it is significantly more so than it was in ai 1. theoretically it could make sense that mizuki remembers everything she was present for in ai 1 whether it technically happened in this timeline or not because we're the "frayer" and she's one of the "frayer characters" (though ryuki fulfills his role as a "frayer character" slightly better than mizuki does because he's so fucked up with the meta levels) and therefore knows a bit more than she realistically should, the same way date did a few times in ai 1. but something being "theoretically possible due to meta shit" is nowhere near as compelling as "this actually happened to you over half a decade ago, and you're still not really normal about it because you CAN'T be normal about it because it kinda-sorta-maybe messed with your mental state just a little bit because it was a really important part of your development as a person that ultimately ended in tragedy (i.e. date's "death" in the cathedral) despite your own best efforts (i.e. PSYNCIN' IN THE CAPTaiN)". one of these explanations is not like the other in that it positions mizuki's character on much stronger footing that could be further built up on her side.

now we go from the part where this changes from passively bad to actively bad, which is basically right at the end of the game. mizuki day 5: they all find the corpse in the freezer, and then mizuki sees date and gets to talk to him for the first time in 6 years... and this is what happens:

i hate this SO MUCH because it was SO CLOSE to being good. and literally ALL it needs to be good is to be set after the mizuki ending (with minor rewrites to match).

now maybe this doesn't FEEL that bad. but think about This version instead (changes in green):

Date: What? Do you have more insults to hurl at me after missing six years of your life? Mizuki: No, it's not that... Bibi: Maybe she just wanted to hear you say... Bibi: "Mizuki, you've grown so much," or something emotional like that... Mizuki: No, not that either... Date: Ah, right. For you, it's been six years. Date: For me, it's different. Date: I've been back for four days, dressed like this. I've been watching you guys the whole time. Date: So I don't really have anything sappy to say... Mizuki: I told you, it's not that! Mizuki: You already know what I want. Date: ... Date: All right, okay. Date: Let me try this again. Date: Mizuki... Date: ... Date: I'm home... Mizuki: ... Mizuki: Welcome back, Date... Mizuki: But I had something else I wanted to say, too. Date: ...? Mizuki: I threw away all your porno mags. Date: Nooooooo!!!

just LOOK at how this already reads so much stronger. it gives mizuki so much more emotional strength - exactly the kind of emotional strength that she had in the mizuki ending, because she's already had all of this development before. the last change is rather subtle and hard to convey through text alone, as it'd be much more through the facial expression and voice direction, but that line would be much better if it was read as "shit-eating-grin-but-also-trying-not-to-cry" emotion instead of kinda timid and almost tense like how it actually is in the game.

this conversation just plainly and succinctly reveals everything fundamentally wrong with setting aini after ai 1's resolution route instead of mizuki's ending. the way that mizuki just doesn't have the words for what she wants from date, the way that aiba has to call her out on what she wants and then mizuki is just... shocked?

which really just brings everything around to the core reason that aini is made so much worse by not being set after the mizuki ending: mizuki doesn't have the character development that she got during her ending and it makes her character a lot weaker overall. and, because of the way things have been set up, she can never get that development again unless it's off-screen.

which is really sad! like, SO much of what everyone liked about her in ai 1 was specifically the development she and date got during her ending, and she's the protagonist of this game so you'd think that they'd let her keep that good development! but mizuki gets shafted for the entirety of ai 1's resolution route, and as a result she and date never really had those moments where they CHOOSE to be family. which just... really flattens her character. and it affects WAY more than just this scene.

now's about the time where i say how i would rewrite aini to fix all of this, and honestly, very little would have to actually change in a meta sense - it's just the smallest tweaks and rewrites of single lines in a few places. the way id have it play out would be like this:

on mizuki's side, on the days where we're playing as mizuki instead of bibi, mizuki would be more openly Not Happy that date "died" six years ago in the cathedral and coping pretty poorly. like she's not weeping over him in every conversation, just every so often when he gets brought up she just kinda Stops Talking or gets teary. the general impression should be that this was a really deep wound (which like, after everything that happened in the mizuki ending and then date ACTUALLY DIES? YEAH NO FUCKING KIDDING) and that she'd only just started to heal only for it to be violently ripped open again with the return of the HB case. aiba should be acting as mizuki's crutch and parent figure - and it should clearly help, because mizuki and aiba actually know each other and are family in the mizuki end instead of never even being introduced in the resolution route.

meanwhile, on the days we're playing as bibi: bibi obviously isn't torn up about date's "death", both because it hasn't happened yet and also because bibi and date barely even know each other - so of course bibi doesn't want nor need aiba's comfort about this. aiba and bibi will seem slightly more distant as a result, because they barely know each other, either. until the reveal of the chronology twist, the player will think that this is just one of the days where mizuki is coping better with what happened and trying to focus on the investigation - and it can simultaneously be another hint toward that chronology twist, and make the "mandela effect in real time" that happens on mizuki day 4 stand out even more as "wait, there's obviously something wrong here".

barely anything else would have to actually change. and what do we get out of this? well - a lot.

for one, the "spoiler toggle" is no longer necessary at all, or is barely necessary. the characters barely know anything of the truth in the mizuki ending. date is still in saito's body and he doesn't even know saito's name, he doesn't remember anything about falco, he didn't discover the body-swapping secret. and considering that absolutely zero of that matters in aini anyway and it more often causes problems (like with date's "mask" - like, yes, the implicit confirmation that date experienced MEGA dysmorphia after ai 1's resolution route was good because i'd called that back in 2019, but it's not ever brought up nor touched on again and could be written out without anything changing), setting aini after the mizuki ending just removes a lot of the clumsiness around this and makes everything... smoother.

the only thing that's slightly off about this would be that, obviously, iris is technically already dead in the mizuki ending in ai 1. but, as i said earlier, this is such an obvious and acceptable handwave that i would be mad if that was the reason they chose to set aini after the resolution route. aini already does other handwaves like this, such as everything around mizuki being adopted by shoko and renju, and this would be a handwave for a worthy cause! iris is such a good character, and because they never figure out the body swapping twist in the mizuki end, it's very easy to handwave that she's Still Definitely Herself Tm and keep a really good character. worst case scenario you can stick something in the appendix like "technically iris would already be dead in the mizuki ending but SHUT UP!!! this is an offshoot timeline where the mizuki ending happened but she's still alive just enjoy the story <3".

(and like. iris having an AIball after she loses her eye in the mizuki ending would be SO funny. she wouldn't even be a psyncer she'd just beg pewter for one and pewter would be like "Fine. Ok Fine." it'd be pink with a rainbow segment and its eyeball form would look like a TBH and it'd play multiplayer shovelforge and/or kusemon and/or towerday (fortnite) doubles with her. LITERAL comedy gold potential here.)

i could write a lot more about how this would specifically improve things, but i think this just about sums up most of my thoughts in general. tl;dr aini's main plot could be so much better if they set it after ai 1's mizuki ending, though it still wouldn't be a perfect game bc the side routes minus shoma and komeji's have Other problems that this wouldn't fix. aini is also still overall better than ai 1 imo because it just builds and earns its climax better than ai 1 does. in ai 1 you can get the best ending in the first 8 hours and have everything else be all downhill from there, but aini just always gets bigger and better and its resolution route actually earns everything it does. both games still have problems though, and i think 999 is still overall a better game than either of them even if i like ai's characters a lot more. so yea!

(also someone PLEASE draw iris being soooooooooooooo normal with her AIball this needs to exist so bad)

[thefirstknife]

wait, where was it said the Vex were the final shape in the Flower Game? that sounds familiar and i've definitely theorized it, but i've read Unveiling about a thousand times by now and i know they weren't explicitly mentioned there (aside from the "universal computer" that simulates other computers, but even that "includes nested copies of the flower game itself," but the Vex aren't the game itself - was it mentioned somewhere else at some point and i missed it?

It's definitely implied in Unveiling, though as everything in Unveiling, it can be open to interpretation. But the lore tab The Final Shape in Unveiling is more or less explicitly about them:

They're majestic, I said. They have no purpose except to subsume all other purposes. There is nothing at the center of them except the will to go on existing, to alter the game to suit their existence. They spare not one sliver of their totality for any other work. They are the end.

This is about how the Vex have one goal: Convergence.

The gardener got up and brushed their knees. "Every game we play, this one pattern consumes all the others. Wipes out every interesting development. A stupid, boring exploit that cuts off entire possibility spaces from ever arising. There's so much that we'll never get to see because of this… pest."

Also the lore tab before this one, mentions a really specific word:

They learned those rules, because they were those rules.

And in time the gardener became vexed.

The gardener became "vexed" about one pattern always winning and that pattern is the one explored in The Final Shape. In T=0:

And the patterns in the flowers, terrified by our contention, were no longer the inevitable victors of a game whose rules had suddenly changed, and they passed into the newborn cosmos to escape us.

When the battle in the garden ended and the universe was created, the Vex were no longer the inevitable final shape and now actually they have to fight everybody to become one. This is further explored in Patternfall:

But they are not incontrovertibly destined to rule this cosmos. They were made before Light and Darkness, but the rules are different now, and even this pattern must adapt.

And:

They propagated in the saline meltwater of comets orbiting the first stars. That broth of chemicals became their substrate, and they learned to catalyze impossible chemistry with quantum tricks. Then, they rained from the sky into the steaming seas of fallow worlds, and there they built their first housings from geometry and silica.

"Orbiting first stars" is interesting due to Volantis, the Vex' Forge Star, which is one of the first stars that the Vex learned to refuel for billions of years. They also "built their first housings from geometry and silica." Both of those are signifiers of the Vex.

They are not all mine, not in the way that admirers such as my man Oryx are mine: utterly devoted to the practice of my principle. But some of them have, nonetheless, found their way home.

This is a reference to the Sol Divisive worshipping the Darkness, as they're a small part of the Vex that "have found their way home."

Obviously, this could all turn out to be something entirely different. Unveiling is not exactly a reliable source of information, but there are plenty of hints that are very consistent with each other so for now, this seems to be referencing the Vex.

[starlessea]

𝙎𝙩𝙚𝙥 𝙤𝙣 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙂𝙖𝙨 - Prologue 0. Closing Time

Series Masterlist: Step on the Gas

Summary: A dishonourable discharge from the military results in you being hauled off to live with your grandparents in the boonies, otherwise known as the middle of nowhere Georgia. After running over a nail on the road, and pushing your grandpa's vintage Camaro to the nearest auto-shop, you meet Daryl Dixon - the local mechanic. At some point, the world ends, but that stubborn man never gives you a chance to slow down. His smile gives you whiplash, but he still insists that you to step on the gas.

Words: 6286

Chapter Warnings: Language, Injury

The sky was empty — save for one bird.

Daryl watched it fly above him, so close to the ground that he could make out the beating of its wings and swore he saw individual feathers flutter in the breeze.

His fingers itched over his crossbow, as he contemplated shooting it down from the sky and plucking it clean. He'd have something to eat then, at least. Though, for some reason, Daryl Dixon couldn't bring himself to let loose his arrow, watching as the bird soared overhead — and disappeared beyond the trees.

The man sighed as he kicked up some loose stones with the toe of his boot. What a waste, he thought, before trudging through the field once again.

The sky remained cloudless for the rest of the day, existing as a pale, washed-out grey that made Daryl feel uncomfortable as he hunted. The game must have felt the same, since the deer he'd been tracking made itself scarce, and the string of squirrels hanging from his belt seemed no heavier than it had done when the sun rose that morning.

Still, he trekked onwards over the thick, winding grass and through damp forest overgrowth. He was nearly back at the quarry already, but he hardly had anything to show for it. A few measly rodents and a sprained ankle were barely worth his trip in the first place; they sure as hell wouldn't be enough for all of the mouths he now had to feed.

Daryl cursed at himself for hesitating to shoot that bird straight out of the sky, and clip its wings. It wasn't much, but maybe it would have lasted a day if he was lucky. Still, there was no use wondering now, since it had swooped so close to him that he almost felt the downward draft on his cheek — and then he let it fly away.

He thought that it had been a jaeger; it definitely looked like a seabird that had veered too far from the shore. It was a gull with a white breast and dark, blackish feathers — and a wingspan that made sure you couldn't miss it.

He remembered you pointing one out to him, at 3am, parked up on that deserted beach as the two of you stared out into the rocking ocean.

"Ya thinkin' 'bout 'er again, baby brother?"

Daryl could hear Merle's voice taunt, in the deepest, darkest corners of his thoughts.

"Tha' lil' birdie of yours?"

He quickly shook his head — even though it was the truth.

It had been Daryl's own mind that conjured up those words, after all. Merle wasn't actually here. He was probably back at the campsite, lazing about and leering after women far too good for a beaten-up redneck like him.

Though, funnily enough, Merle had said the exact same thing to Daryl when he noticed his gaze settling over the new bar server, who swiped away the froth spilling over from their draught beers. Merle had given him even more of an earful when he realised that his younger brother was waiting for her shift to end.

Daryl took a deep breath, before rolling his neck to try and relieve the tension that had built up there. Once his mind drifted into thoughts of you — even if only for a split second — it often sank to the point of no return.

You were all consuming; you had been from the first time he laid eyes on you in that old, country auto-repair shop.

He remembered the way your voice chirped like a bird's, despite the curses that often fell from your lips.

You even made those sound sweet.

And he could also recall the way you yelled over the rumble of his bike engine, and competed with the screeching that came from his tyres losing their grip on the worn-out tarmac.

You'd told him that it felt like you were flying — and that was probably the reason why Daryl Dixon couldn't shoot that jaeger.

Then, the man heard something louder than he had done since the world ended — and suddenly, the sky was no longer empty.

There was an explosion, and that dull greyness was set alight with brilliant hues of red and orange. It made fire start to rain down upon Daryl, who could only stand and watch below. Debris fell out of the sky like a meteor shower, landing beyond the trees in the distance — to a place that Daryl couldn't quite make out, no matter how much he squinted.

The air became full with the sounds of scraping metal and flickering flames that caught the leaves and made them burn up like the end of a cigarette. Daryl felt his heart race as the adrenaline pumped its way through his veins, and made him flinch each time something crashed heavily to the ground.

There was often a moment in a person's life where their brain got kick-started into gear — and they awoke from whatever auto-pilot they'd been functioning on until that point.

For most, it was probably a mundane milestone like marriage or parenthood.

For others, it might have been a life or death situation that made them re-evaluate their perspective.

For some, it had only happened when the world actually ended, and the apocalypse began.

And perhaps, if Daryl had been a smarter man, it would have been this instant — as he gazed up at the sky and watched it burn above him. Maybe this was his second life-changing realisation; maybe he was lucky enough to get two.

But, for Daryl, the first had just been a regular Tuesday.

The garage was sticky hot that day. It was the kind of heat that made you sweat no matter how many fans you had blowing — since Old man Dean was too cheap to install air conditioning. His boss was a bit of a stickler for paying his bills, and nit picky with his nickles, but he'd always been kind to Daryl.

That being said, working as a mechanic wasn't exactly where Daryl had pictured himself at his age; but then again, he couldn't really picture himself anywhere at all. He felt like that last piece of the jigsaw puzzle, which didn't quite fit in with the others — the one that you had to bend into shape just to make it work.

Sure, he enjoyed seeing the different bikes roll in and out of the shop — those models he would never be able to afford — and Daryl appreciated having a few extra dollars in his pocket for when Merle raided his savings to score some pot.

Besides, there wasn't much else to do in the boonies. Daryl's old man once told him that the only interesting thing to rear its ugly head out of Georgia's backyard in the last fifty years was Dean's Auto Shop. That's probably why Daryl started working there in the first place, as a summer job when he was teenager — and had never really left since.

As much as he didn't want to admit it, his old man had been right about one thing — despite the bastard never catching on to the role of father. He'd been right about the shop being the only interesting thing around.

Because it was the place where he met her.

And then she became the only thing in that small town even worth being interested in.

Daryl didn't hear a car pull up into the shop, but he heard the mumbling outside from where he sat in the breakroom — chewing on some of Dean's leftover pizza that was bordering on stale.

"Dixon, get your ass out here for a second, would you?" the old man yelled, banging on the thin wall that separated them with his fist.

Daryl cursed below his breath, throwing the rest of his food into the trash and dusting off his hands over his jeans. He stepped out into the shop, and was met by an unfamiliar face — looking over at him curiously.

He suddenly felt unexplainably nervous, and dropped his head down to his feet as though it were a reflex he didn't know he had.

"This is your guy," he heard Dean say, before letting out one of his usual chesty coughs.

The man smoked a pack a day too much — and that was coming from Daryl.

"Owner of that bike you've been eyeing, too," he went on.

That caught Daryl's attention, and he instantly glanced up at the woman in question. She was breath-taking, but she also looked very much out of breath. She seemed as though she had run here, despite the Georgia heat.

"You ride?" he asked, but his gruff voice made it sound like more of a demand.

He grimaced at his own tone, but the woman didn't seem bothered by it in the slightest.

She laughed, and it sounded like nothing he'd ever heard before. "I wish," she said, running her palm along the polished metal and tracing her finger over that shiny logo.

Usually, Daryl would bark at anyone who touched his bike, and Dean seemed as though he expected him to do just that — from the way he raised an eyebrow at the daring woman, too oblivious for her own good.

Except, Daryl stayed quiet.

"Was never allowed within a mile radius of one," she went on, before turning back around to grin at Daryl like it was easy. "My folks were scared I'd take off into the sunset, never to be seen again."

He could relate to that. After all, it was exactly what he and Merle had done as soon as they'd gotten the chance.

"Mhm," he hummed back, before glancing over at the car parked in the middle of the shop. "She's pretty."

It was a steel blue colour — would definitely benefit from a lick of paint, but still pretty nonetheless. The tread looked good on the tyres, and Daryl couldn't see any signs of the rusting those models were prone to. Someone had taken good care of it.

"Excuse me?" the woman asked, and suddenly Daryl was reminded of just how bad he was with words.

He cleared his throat, and ran his hand over the hood.

"Yer car," he explained, "'69 Chevy Camaro?"

Daryl asked, but he already knew the answer.

"Oh yeah, that," she replied, sending him an apologetic look. "It's my grandpa's, so we're going to have to be real discreet about this situation over here."

Daryl raised an eyebrow as she beckoned him to the other side of the car, crouching down near the wheel arch.

"Some bastard left a nail in the road, and I ran straight through the thing like it was a stop sign," she grumbled, pointing out the puncture.

Daryl almost laughed at that — but he was still much too jaded from being caught in the middle of his break.

The woman stood back up and toed the deflated tyre with her boot, scowling at the sight of it.

"I know you're closing soon, but I had to push it half a mile just to get here," she said, and wiped her brow with the back of her hand.

Suddenly, her appearance made sense. Since he'd first laid eyes on her, all she'd done was tug at the collar of her vest, and try to stand in front of one of those poor excuses for a fan. But even then, Daryl couldn't quite believe her story.

"Ain't no way ya pushed that thing 'ere by yerself." The words left his mouth before he could consider them twice.

And the look she shot Daryl in return made him want to take them straight back.

But then, she smiled.

"I'm stronger than I look," she protested, leaning against the hot car. "You can ask the dozen assholes who catcalled me on the way but never offered their help."

This time, Daryl did let out a chuckle.

"Damn lucky y'ain't pass out," he quipped back, "heat's no joke."

She grinned again, and Daryl wondered whether she had an endless supply — or if she'd saved them just for him.

"Tell me about it," the woman teased. "Never liked visiting Georgia because of it."

Then, it all made sense to Daryl — the reason why she intrigued him so much.

"Y'ain't from 'round here, are ya?" he asked, surprising himself.

Usually, he couldn't give a 'rat's ass', as Dean called it, about anyone who stumbled into their shop. Never did they get more than a half-hearted greeting from Daryl, or a grunt as he told them to mind their head on that low door frame (she didn't have that problem). Though today, he seemed oddly talkative.

"Haven't seen ya before," he added.

The woman folded her arms over her chest.

"Would you recognise me if you had?" she asked.

"E'erybody knows e'erybody in this place," he answered. "I'd remember if I saw ya cross the street."

It was partially the truth. Daryl knew most people — but he only bothered to remember a select few.

"Moved here last week," she caved, proving him right. "I'm keeping my grandparents company watching daytime cable and doing grocery runs."

Daryl smirked. "An' runnin' over nails with their car, apparently."

"That, too," she confessed.

It was silent for a few seconds, and Daryl realised that he should probably give her a quote for the job. Though, she interrupted him before he could.

"Listen, your new neighbour would be really grateful if you could cut her a break," she said, eyeing the Camaro like she was considering whether it was even worth the hassle. "The old man's going to kill me if I come home on foot tonight."

Daryl knew what she was asking. The notice in the shop window made it clear that they'd be closing in half an hour; Daryl had been all but ready to flip the sign himself. Before she'd arrived, he'd even dared to think that he could shut early — and possibly get to crack open a cold beer and enjoy the breeze of his porch.

He sighed.

"I'll see what I can do," Daryl mumbled, "but I ain't makin' no promises," he warned — as he caught the way her eyes lit up at his words.

But that was a lie. Daryl knew he wouldn't let himself go home until it was finished.

The woman was utterly gleeful. He watched her smile much too widely for her face, and for a moment Daryl thought that she might even jump at him. But she seemed to catch herself at the last second, and abruptly stopped.

She didn't falter long, though. "Thank you, thank you so much!" she said, excitedly, before pausing to tap at her jean pockets. "I don't have any cash on me for a deposit, but I'm heading to work now."

She looked sheepish as she explained herself.

"I'll come straight back and pay in full," she added, trying her best to convince him.

Daryl narrowed his eyes like he didn't quite understand. Then he did, and he laughed properly.

"Deposit?" he asked, shaking his head. "City girl, here we jus' keep yer vehicle if ya can't pay."

The woman's expression was priceless. She looked as though she couldn't figure out whether he was joking or not, and stared at Daryl with her mouth slightly agape as she debated which it was.

He couldn't watch any longer.

"Where ya workin'?" he asked.

Then, he cursed himself for doing so. Time was ticking on, and he already had to stay overtime because of his inability to say no. Well, usually he had no problem with the word; it just seemed like it was stuck in his throat today.

"Joe's bar," she replied. "It's a few blocks over and-"

"I know Joe's bar," Daryl interrupted.

Everybody knew Joe's. It was the only place around that sold a decent draught beer. He'd been going there since he was a teenager — younger than he should have been, but old enough to know better.

"Me an' my brother go there a lot, but I ain't seen you 'round."

She nodded.

"Only started a few days ago. Hopefully they don't fire me for being late."

Daryl glanced at the clock. It was approaching his closing time and her opening one.

"Ya better get runnin', Camaro," he noted, tapping at his watch that didn't even work. "Rush hour soon."

The woman narrowed her eyes at the nickname. Daryl didn't know her real one yet, and felt like it was too late to ask for it. He'd have to catch a glimpse of Dean's log book later to find out.

"Will do," she replied with a smile. "Thanks again, Dixon."

Though Daryl couldn't quite work out how she knew his name, either.

He watched her scurry about collecting her things, and walked her to the entrance. The sun was starting to set — leaving the sky a pinkish orange that only made him squint the more he looked at it. He held the door open for the woman, and heard Dean snort from the back of the shop. But the way she thanked him made it worth the teasing.

"Take care of that sixties Honda," she winked, "she's a real beauty."

Daryl was surprised that she knew the model of his bike, considering she'd never even ridden one.

"If only ya knew," he mumbled back as he saw her off. "Will take ya for a ride one time if yer willin'."

She stopped in place. Daryl didn't know why he said that. It had just slipped from his mouth like oil from a can.

The woman laughed and rolled her eyes like she didn't believe him.

"That's what they all say."

Then, she started to jog down the street — just like she said she would — and Daryl thought her crazy for even attempting it in this midsummer Georgia weather. That woman had entered the shop like a whirlwind, and when she left Daryl couldn't remember what he'd even been doing before.

Dean cleared his throat and threw a rag at him that he barely managed to catch.

"Keep it in your pants, boy."

Daryl scowled at the man; he knew him better than that. So, he didn't give him the satisfaction of a reply, and instead got started on setting the Camaro up on a jack.

"She's a beauty, I get it," Dean went on, despite his silence. "Her type don't belong in a place like this, that's for damn sure."

Daryl had to agree with him there. He'd gotten a glimpse of his reflection in the wing mirror of her car and grimaced. He had grease on his face, and part of him cursed Dean for not telling him before he'd left the breakroom.

"But you know Mike and Doreen?" the old man asked, and Daryl nodded. "That's their granddaughter."

Daryl furrowed his brow — not realising he'd done it until he caught himself in the glass once again. Mike was a hard man, the type to straighten out any kinks in a person with brute force and that baby boomer spite.

"She may be real pretty, kid, but that one's trouble," Dean noted, confirming his suspicions.

He ignored the way he called him 'kid'. The old man still hadn't grown out of the habit — despite Daryl being well beyond his teenage years now.

"Trouble?" he repeated, like he couldn't quite comprehend the word being associated with someone like that.

Dean chuckled — but it turned into one of those coughs that made Daryl wince.

"Maybe more so than you," he said. "Got kicked out of the military, I heard."

Daryl spat at the floor, and Dean laughed again. They both hated those military dogs who often paraded through their town, looking at them as though they were trash beneath their government-issued boots.

But, if she'd been kicked out then maybe they could find some common ground.

Old man Dean wagged his finger at him, recognising Daryl's no-good expression; he'd become familiar with it by now, from all the times he'd worn it throughout the years.

"So don't go losing your head over her, Dixon," he cautioned, pretending not to know how good Daryl was at throwing caution to the wind.

"And remember to close up before you leave."

But it was too late.

Daryl had already lost his head, and his heart — but he wouldn't know that the latter was missing for a very long time.

You ran the cloth along the oak bar surface, wiping away any sticky beer rings that had been left there.

This is why we have coasters, you sighed.

It had been a slow Tuesday night, but you'd somehow still been roped into working the close. You tried to tell your boss that you were having car troubles, and had plans to stop by the garage on your way home — but he seemed to prioritise his own date over yours.

Well, you wouldn't exactly call giving the local mechanic his cheque a date; usually, you didn't have to pay for those. But you couldn't deny how it had made you feel when he smiled that smile your way — so small that you'd almost missed it — before you took off running out the door.

It gave you whiplash.

Perhaps he was just being friendly. But, then again, he didn't seem like the naturally friendly type. You shook your head, throwing the beer-soaked rag into the sink. You didn't trust that man in the slightest.

That wasn't a new development, really; you didn't trust most men. And, you often found that the ones who made your heart race like that were the worst of them all. He was trouble, that one, and you'd had enough of that to last a lifetime.

You untied the double knot of your apron, and folded it up neatly. There were a few whiskey stains on it — you'd caught a whiff of that top-shelf scent a few times now — but you were already too late to even consider putting it in the wash. Instead, you left it at the end of the bar, and swapped it out for the ring of keys lying there.

It was closing time, and you prepared yourself to run three blocks in the dark. You stepped out into the night, feeling the cool breeze on your cheek as opposed to the midday heat that had been there when your shift started. You flipped the latch and turned the key in the lock until you heard it click.

Then, you held them between your knuckles so that the jagged edge poked out.

"Ya done for the night?" a voice came from the shadows, and your heart dropped.

That brief second lasted a lifetime as the blood rushed to your ears like a strong current through running water, and your grip tightened over those keys. But then, you noticed the reflection in the glass panels of the door — and relaxed.

"Jesus, you scared the shit out of me," you scolded the man, "thought you were a dejected patron tryna jump me or something."

Perhaps he was; you still didn't know any better.

Dixon was leaning against that dingy brick wall, opposite the back door of Joe's Bar. You didn't even know what that other building was — but some sketchy figures usually loomed about it, so you tried to stay clear.

Maybe he didn't get the memo, you thought.

"Tha' happen before?" the man asked back, casually.

Though, the dim street lights overhead illuminated his face, and you caught a glimpse of his serious expression before he let it drop. He held a lit cigarette between his fingers — almost smoked down to the butt already — and it made you wonder just how long he'd been waiting for you.

"Maybe once or twice," you laughed, but it didn't sound as natural as you had intended.

You noticed the man's eyes flicker down towards the keys held between your knuckles, and you quickly slipped them into your jean pocket — hoping that he wouldn't pry. Luckily, he didn't seem like the type to unnecessarily butt into other people's business.

The smoke trailed from his lips and caught the stark light of the street lamp. He almost looked cold — bathed in that bluish tint which made those cigarette fumes seem nearly luminescent.

"You here to make sure I don't run off with your paycheck?" you teased, fishing out the wad of bills from your back pocket.

You waved them at him, and considered how precarious the situation may seem to an onlooker if they happened to pass by. The man looked as though he felt the same, since he quickly glanced over his shoulder down the alleyway — checking to make sure you were alone.

"Don't worry, Dixon, I busted my ass tonight just so I could leave you a nice tip," you said with a smile, handing the money to him.

He took it, slowly, as though he had to remind himself what it was even for.

Then, he let that cigarette butt fall to the floor, and stamped it out with his boot — before dragging it along the concrete until it was nothing but embers.

The man shook his head at you. "'M here on behalf of the welcome committee."

You snorted as you processed his words, and followed him out of that narrow alleyway into the main street.

"Bullshit," you called, "as if-"

You rounded the corner after him, and stopped. He was there, leaning against that pristine sixties Honda bike — spare helmet in hand.

It was parked up on the sidewalk, polished metal glinting in all its glory under those neon lamps. Dixon was almost camouflaged against it — his black leather jacket also speckled with white light. He held out that helmet, as if it were an invitation he was waiting for you to accept.

But he seemed shy — as though acutely aware that it was only an invite, and nothing more. So, you took it, and shook your head as you realised that it wasn't his spare helmet he had offered you; it was his only helmet.

"Said I'd take ya," he murmured, fastening the strap gently under your chin.

It was too big, so the man compensated by tying it tighter until you felt like your jaw was wired shut. But, you just smiled.

"An' I ain't no liar," he said when he was done, and kicked his leg over the bike.

Then, you sped off into the night.

You yelled over the sound of the engine for him to go faster, and laughed as you had to spit out the stray hairs that had blown into your mouth. Your clothes whipped in the wind, too, and you clung to the man in front of you as though you were afraid they might catch the draft, and make you fly away. It was electrifying; your whole body felt like pure static as you rode past shop displays and windows that made your reflections look like hazed blurs.

That whole trip felt like a hazed blur, really, because suddenly you were there.

"Where are we?" you asked, unsure of where 'there' even was. "Why'd we stop?"

You pulled the helmet from your head and cocked your leg over the bike. The man let out a chuckle at the sight of your hair, sticking up from the static — as though lightning might strike at any moment.

"Smoke break," Dixon grumbled, before coaxing out the squashed cardboard packet from his jeans. "You want one?" he asked, offering it to you.

You shook your head; you didn't smoke.

He shrugged in response, cupping his hands to his face to get a flame from his lighter. You left him to it, and turned away from the bike to catch the view.

And what a view it was, indeed.

You hadn't even noticed the sounds of the lapping ocean waves before you saw them. The cliff overlooked the beach below, desolate, with a high tide that drew the shore into you. Your grandmother had told you about this place once, on the phone a few months back as she tried to sell rural Georgia to you.

It wasn't like you were given much of a choice, anyway.

But now that you'd been shipped out here — against your will, no doubt — you had to admit that she'd been partly right. It was breath-taking. Back in the city, a place like this would be littered with beer cans and tacky, disposable barbeques within a week of someone posting about it online. Here, however, it looked untouched.

It was as though the two of you were the first to ever set foot here, on this particular crag that overlooked the waves — leaving your footprints alongside tyre treads for the next pioneers to discover.

You glanced back at Dixon over your shoulder — who was busy trying to look as though he wasn't already looking at you — and smiled.

He was one hell of a welcome committee.

Daryl almost choked on the fumes of his cigarette — letting out a cough that reminded him of the way old man Dean spluttered in the mornings. He really needed to kick that habit, he thought, and snubbed out his cigarette on the ground.

Then, you scowled at him, so he picked the butt back up and stuffed it into his pocket, grimacing at the thought of having to clean it up later.

He had been lying about the smoke break, really, but then he needed to carry out his excuse. Initially, he'd only thought about picking you up from the bar and offering you a ride back to the shop. He hadn't the slightest clue of how that plan had become this.

Somewhere along the way, Daryl might have accidentally taken a wrong turn, and ended up in the most scenic place he would think of. Stupid damn street signs, he cursed, as though he hadn't driven those roads a hundred times before.

Camaro seemed to call him out on his bluff, too, since she turned to face him and immediately shook her head.

"You're lying," she said, as though she were certain, "but the view is extraordinary, so I'll forgive you just this once."

Daryl swallowed thickly, tasting the tobacco that had made his throat so dry. For someone who claimed himself not to be a liar, that was all he seemed to be doing today.

Then, he watched you make your way towards the edge of that cliff, like you couldn't even hear him warning you to be careful. It was like you weren't paying him the slightest attention. Daryl was used to that from women — but somehow, this was different.

You didn't look down on him, nor at him with any hint of prejudice for wearing jeans still coated in oil, and boots he'd had to tape the soles of just to keep them together. In fact, you weren't looking at him at all. You seemed far more concerned with the stars that flickered in the night sky above you, but at the same time grateful towards the man for having brought you to them.

"You treat all your customers like this, Dixon?" you asked him.

He watched you turn around and look at him like you'd only just remembered that he was there. But, then you beamed a smile at him so bright that it put the stars to shame — and made all of your other ones look dim in comparison.

"Y'ain't special," he grumbled, shaking his head. "Jus' given' ya a lift home 'cos Dean told me to."

Though, Dean had left the shop hours ago.

Daryl watched you laugh like you'd caught him out one more time.

"There you go again," you said, teasingly. "Do you ever tell the truth?"

No, he didn't. He always tried to, but oftentimes it never did him any good. The people of this town had already made the assumption that he was a natural born liar. You were the first person to ever make the distinction between his white lies and those other types.

All his life, Daryl had been pigeon-holed into the role of good for nothing redneck, and had only recently graduated to the slightly less stereotyped town mechanic. But that night it was as if someone, for the first time, tried to get a peek at whatever was underneath.

Old man Dean was right. You were trouble — but not for the reason he had said. You were trouble because you seemed entirely unaware of your place in the world, and it made Daryl start to question his own. You seemed nice — perhaps even lovely — but Daryl never trusted those types. He knew you were far too good to be wasting away the early hours of the morning with the likes of him — and it left him wondering what exactly you wanted.

You'd already paid for his services, after all.

"Thank you for letting me see the stars again," you breathed, stretching your neck which ached from staring at the sky. "It's been a while."

Back then, Daryl didn't quite understand what that meant. He'd thought perhaps that you'd been talking about city pollution.

On the way back, Daryl felt you cling onto him tightly as he drove through empty roads, and passed the old, flickering street lights that blinked like camera flashes. But, when his fingers accidentally brushed up against yours, as you both reached for the shop door, you pulled your hand away.

It had only been a random Tuesday — that had eventually rolled into a Wednesday by the time he'd gotten you back into your repaired Camaro — but that was the moment in his life where Daryl felt like he had finally woken up.

But even awake, he often found himself lost in daydreams of the woman who crash landed into his life, and disappeared from it just as quickly as she came.

Daryl followed the trail of debris that had fallen from the sky, as though he were tracking some giant, metal bird. He didn't want to stick around too long, given that the noise had probably attracted every damn walker in the area; he just hoped that he was still far enough away from camp that they wouldn't be drawn there.

He stepped over the hunks of hot wreckage, some of it still ablaze, until he eventually came across something soft and not made of metal.

It was that jaeger. It was dead.

It looked as though it had been struck straight out of the sky. Its feathers lay scattered around it — the white breast now red with blood — and its wing was bent at a crooked angle, broken.

Daryl scowled. If he'd known that it was going to have such a meaningless death, then he would have shot it himself. Though, he still didn't add the bird to his string of dead animals; he thought that it had suffered enough.

He continued onwards through the brush until he stumbled across what he'd been looking for. But even as he saw it with his own eyes, Daryl couldn't quite believe it. Before him was the husk of a downed helicopter, burning in the middle of the forest.

Immediately, he ran to it, tripping over the wreckage as it got thicker and harder to navigate.

Though, there was no pilot inside — only radios and machinery parts that Daryl didn't know the names of. They screeched high frequency sounds as they caught on fire, and it made his ears ring the longer he listened.

So, he turned back.

That was when he saw it — them — a few meters away. His stomach dropped. Guess that's the pilot, he thought, looking up at the body tangled in the trees.

He'd never seen a parachute in real life before — only ever in the movies. He'd also never understood how that flimsy material could stop someone from plummeting to their death.

Well, in this case it hadn't.

The pilot was dangling from one of the branches, all caught up in those wire cables like a fish on a line. The limbs were contorted awkwardly, and Daryl swallowed thickly at the sight of their arm which had definitely been broken — reminding him of that miserable jaeger's wing.

He'd been all but ready to turn around and leave. The smell of burning rubber and the white noise from those radios would probably keep him up for the next few nights, but there was nothing he could do about that.

He'd been all but ready to turn around and leave, but then the body spoke to him.

"Dixon?" he heard it gasp.

And Daryl wondered just how many impossible things he might encounter today.

The voice startled him, and he almost stumbled over his own foot in return. Walkers couldn't speak, and they surely wouldn't know his name, either. Then, he caught the slightest movement, and recognised a jacket much too familiar. It had been his, after all, before he'd given it to you.

The pilot groaned, and Daryl recognised that tone of voice, too. He quickly fumbled about for his pocket knife, not even stopping to consider how the hell he'd be able to cut you down.

He couldn't even comprehend how you were alive-

"How's it hanging?" the voice spluttered.

-and how you'd kept that same god awful sense of humour.

Let me know if you want to be added/removed from the tags!

Feedback is always welcomed; I love hearing what you all think - so feel free to comment, send in an ask, or just message me if you want to chat!

Also, here is my buy me a coffee! If you enjoy my writing, tips are always appreciated. Thank you for reading!

A/N I’ve tried so hard to post this, sorry for all the technical difficulties...

[dash-n-step]

You could argue the rpgs are kinda cheating cause you know, rpgmaker games are as prevalent as VNs, especially back in the day, but neither here nor there. Speaking of back in the day, there was also stuff like Hammerkind, and that Jane cooking game. Also would like to hear some of your fanventure reccomendations, besides VE or Kittyquest. Nothing towards Kittyquest, thats more me already guessing it from the blog banner and description.

heheheheh yeah it's no surprise that I'd recommend Kittyquest, I've had half a mind to blaze a post I made about it, that's how much I think people should read it, like even taking away my davepeta bias (they don't even show up at that often lmao) it's just a much more fun look into a post canon homestuck, with the world its built.

and while it's neither here nor there, I think it's a matter of the era/fandom. Like homestuck fans aren't going towards visual novels because they're any "easier" (the accessibility of tools especially for people who just want to write and draw does help of course), it's because it directly melds well with the format of comics/flashes/adventure games that the series itself runs on, and pesterquest/friendsims normalized it. It's like how if you go back you'll find a whole bunch of [x]stuck AUs and concepts and whatever, because back then people literally just did whatever because it was an active and chaotic fandom, for better and for worse.

For MSPFAs, again I don't spend as much as I'd like to in reading them and haven't really caught up and I already have a huge backlog when it comes to other stuff, but some that I've kept tabs on are, some of these aren't that active though:

(you've opened the floodgates anon, I didn't expect this post to get this long)

Martyrdom (last update: May 30th, 2022) , which is about the midnight crew finding some weird dudes stepping on their turf and trying to deal with them.

Homestuck (last update: April 21st, 2022), an mspfa that starts off where somehow Jade is teleported to the start of the comic, and there's something about OCs and there's a lot of earthbound music and I thought it was neat with how it changes things up

OH FUCK I forgot, Oasisquest (last update: September 16, 2021), it hasn't updated in a while but it's an mspfa that I think is based off the creators' roleplaying, so there's a new planet, mostly fantrolls and the designs are good

Oh and of course Act 8 (Last Update: April 16, 2021), because everybody has to have at least one "the ending of homestuck underwhelmed me, we can totally fix it" mspfa comic to follow. I don't remember too much but it does some neat stuff with Gamzee, Aradia and Tavros get a neat meat up, and Davepeta does some cool stuff here and there, so you know I'm down, even if it hasn't updated in like a year

OH FUCK also Deltastuck (last update: April 13, 2022), it's almost exactly what you'd expect form the name, but it's UNDERTALE characters trying to use sburb to get out of the underground, I haven't checked it out in a while since it had to stop to make a big flash update, but that's actually done now so it's somewhat still going

and uh, I think I'll end this off with a really old one, Nightfall (discontinued), which I haven't even finished but it interests me in that it's so clearly written before certain things in the comic that it almost feels like a time capsule.

It's basically centered around vrisjohn and it's post canon but in the way that I guess people just assumed that when the kids were done with the game and made a new universe they'd do normal kids stuff again and be in a normal americana setting while the trolls fuck off to their own planet, except suddenly Vriska shows up and has to hide out at John's place because humans don't know about aliens.

And of course the stakes get randomly high with some kind of magic alien ninja or something, I never got that far to understand but it was interesting to find, and while the creator doesn't plan on finishing it, they've basically adapted it into an original work, Xenologia (last update: June 25th, 2022) that apparently is still hosted on MSPFA and has multiple chapters out

we don't talk 'bout alt mewniverse no no no, we dont' talk 'bout alt mewniverse~

Also while we're down here, I've never actually read Vast Error. A part of me thinks it's funnier not to read it, so I can look at it in the same confusion as people who've never read homestuck probably looks at posts about it.

[yanderenightmare]

How suspicious do you think our yandere BNHA boys would get when their darlings get hit with the stockholders syndrome too soon?

yandere ! BNHA headcannons

EARLY STOCKHOLM SYNDROME

goodiebag WARNINGS: yandere-themes, DUBCON/NONCON elements, abuse, profanity, kidnapping, Stockholm syndrome, manipulation, mind control

TIP-JAR

BAKUGO KATSUKI - KACHAN

Katsuki is full of himself.

However, he is insecure and therefor highly unstable with his temper. And because of this he has a very hard time understanding how his darling is able to thoughtlessly curl up on his chest as though he isn’t a ticking time bomb.

He’s very suspicious to say the least.

He doesn’t know whether he wants to confront her about it or not, or whether he maybe should confront her about it, for her sake. He doesn’t exactly think it’s healthy for her to be smiling so sweetly at him, when he has the power to burn her to a crisp and the fact that he’s regrettably shown countless times that he is very much capable of acting on his temperance.

He feels as though they skipped some important part in her readjustment, and because it’s all built on an unstable unfinished and rushed structure, that it will all crumble and fall to ruble around him.

But, the feeling of incompletion is hard to give any attention when she snuggles so softly into his side, small adorable snores indicating how she’s truly and indiscreetly completely comfortable.

TODOROKI SHOTO

He knows her loving attitude is genuine, and welcomes it all with open arms.

He bares little to no reservation for caution whatsoever.

He rather celebrates the fact the she is finally as devoted to him as he is to her. His heart sweltering on the account that they can now both drown in bliss by each other again and again with as little resistance as possible.

He never once finds her clingy needy nature any suspicious, knowing it all to be genuine since that’s the only destination you'll find yourself when you’ve been locked in the same room with a person who brings you to your unraveling again and again.

And he's isolated her from everything and everyone except himself, forcing her to reach that blissed-out state again and agin, leaving her with him and only him to latch onto both while reaching her max and when coming crashing back down again.

It only takes a few days of pure and utter worship to make someone forget who they are and forgive who they’re with.

After all, humans are intimate creatures, not made for solidarity.

MIDORIYA IZUKU - DEKU

Izuku’s a good teacher.

He knows he is once his darling starts greeting him at the door like he taught her.

In fact, he’s such a good teacher it's hard to tell when it all started becoming so very heartfelt. Giving him his jacket whence leaving for work in the morning, having stopped eyeing the door so yearningly and instead keeping eyes locked on him, smile bright and present on her face.

The yearning is still there, he can tell, however her focus has shifted.

Compliments and sweet sentiments come to her lips like second nature now.

She’s constantly looking for his approval and he’d be lying if he said it didn’t make him want to skip patrol and stay right there with her, giving her all the praise he could muster and watch her take it all so humbly, grateful and so very happy to have pleased him.

DABI - TODOROKI TOUYA

It was expected, however no less appreciated.

He knew his darling would fall into his little trap. She was bound to crack under his game of good cop and bad cop sooner or later.

Fear and pain are such great tools, but so is cooing and snuggling, and they work best together when creating that adorable chaotic confusion that makes his darling so lenient in fear of punishment and grateful for every lick of mercy he has to offer.

She’s so rigid without him, unstable, sporadic, confused, so utterly lost and afraid and unable to stop crying.

And well... dependence isn’t that far away from love, at least not in his mind.

Besides, feeling her crawl up beside him in bed, limbs shaking as small smooth hands wrap around and touch ever so softly on his scarred flesh, feeling needed can almost feel better than feeling loved.

SHIGARAKI TOMURA

He living for it.

Suspicion can go fuck itself for all he cares.

She’s smiling, she’s laughing, she’s even gotten so good at playing console she’s gaining on his records in all his videogames!

He’s never shared that with anyone but meaningless nobodies he convinced were somebodies that pale in comparison when seeing her roar beside him in the fit of winner’s delight.

She’s beautiful, like what he expects the sun to look like, but she must be better because the sun always makes his eyes water and red in irritation.

It really couldn’t be any better. How she runs her fingernails through his silver locks in that motherly tender fashion. Letting him rest his head on her lap or chest listening to the mellow thumps of her heartbeat, it sounding so calm and comfortable despite his presence on top of her. It’s a good reassurance.

TAKAMI KEIGO - HAWKS

It was suspicious which is why he had his guard up.

However, his other instincts told him she was being truthful in her shift in behaviour. And he’d be lying if he said the change wasn’t pleasant.

She was always throwing broken dinner plates at him before, snarling and growling and screaming and roaring like some inhuman beast, feral energy all being concentrated in nasty comments or biting and scratching and clawing and kicking and fighting, fighting, fighting.

Until… nasty comments turned a different type of nasty, the biting was accompanied by kisses, scratching and clawing was done to hold onto him instead of pushing him away, kicking turned into wrapping her legs around him.

They still fought, brutally, viscously, ferally, yet the fight had become so very carnal all of a sudden.

SHINSO HITOSHI

He had no need to be skeptical, he'd enforced her honesty from the get-go, embedding the command into her brain over and over until he knew it stuck, her being unable to tell him even the slightest lie.

It makes her affection that much sweeter.

When he asks her if she wants anything, knowing how she’s unable to hold back because he’s made it so, how she just has to spill her guts, all her little secrets flooding from her mouth about all the depraved things she has grown so used to and become so attached to and wants and needs from him.

How she’ll look at him, biting her lip despite it serving as no help for the oncoming confessions she’s about to shamefully voice.

He knows that it’s far from love still.

He knows how love is cultivated through more than just lust, but the ambition cannot be that far out of his reach when she answers his question when knowing how she's allowing him to play with her like putty in his hands, as though she trusts him or doesn’t care or… wants him to.

CHISAKI KAI - OVERHAUL

If there something Kai hates, it’s lies.

Lies, deceit and dishonesty are all just forms of impurity.

His darling cannot be allowed to lie to him.

She cannot be tainted with that filth and treachery.

But... it’s hard to support his suspicions when at night she snuggles up to him on her own volition, instead of having him drag her into position.

He’s at a loss for what to do. Because, despite his brain telling him it’s too soon for her to be acting like that, his heart melts when she looks up at him with that doe-eyed look, telling him how she missed him today, how she felt lonely without him there, how she wanted nothing more than to help him wash the day off his body and out of his hair, to help him get clean and safe.

It takes time for him to trust her words, yet her smile is just too genuine and her eyes too bright and blinding for him to want to continue pushing her advances away.

TIP-JAR

[sunshineandaisies]

Cabin Fever (Part One)

Cabin Fever Masterlist

Summary: What was meant to be a weekend at the cabin with Peter, Pepper, and Morgan very quickly turned into a weekend alone with your best friend and your recently acknowledged feelings for him thanks to a certain assumption made by your step-mother.

Pairing: College!Peter Parker x Stark!Reader

Words: ~1.6k

Warnings: language, sexual suggestions, angst?, too much overthinking

“So Pepper just called,” you announced, staring at your phone with a confused expression. “Her and Morgan aren’t gonna make the trip up here this weekend.”

Your travel companion popped his head around the door of the open fridge, staring at you with his big chocolate eyes that never failed to send your heart racing. Not that you’d ever tell him that, though. Nope, there was absolutely nothing between you and Peter Parker but good ol’, super platonic friendship. Absolutely zero non-platonic feelings. Nope. Nada.

“They’re not coming?”

You shrugged, tossing your phone onto the couch before you sank down into the cushions beside it. “Nope.”

“Did she say why?” Peter asked as he shut the fridge. 

You bit your lip nervously, your gaze sliding to Peter as he walked around the couch and sat beside you. Pepper had told you why, but you weren’t really sure if sharing that reason was the best course of action. Your step-mom’s reason had been a little presumptive, to say the least. 

“No, not really,” you lied, and you smiled at him reassuringly. “Maybe something came up at work.”

He nodded, but the skeptical look he sent you when he thought you weren’t looking told you that you hadn’t gotten any better at lying to him in the six years since you first met as high school freshmen. But, Peter being Peter, he let it go. He let you have your secrets, just as you let him have his.

The only problem with that was that you inevitably always ended up telling him your secrets, just as he always told you his.

Peter spoke up beside you, pulling you from your thoughts. “So if Pepper and Morgan aren’t coming, what’s our plan for the weekend?” He nervously played with his fingers, and your attention was drawn to the action. What did Peter have to be nervous about? “Should we just go home?”

“No!” you said more abruptly than you had intended. You averted your eyes and cleared your throat before turning back to Peter. “No, Pepper would feel bad if we just scraped the weekend altogether. We can still swim and play games and relax. You know, enjoy the first week of our summer break and celebrate surviving finals for another semester.”

The corner of his mouth twitched into the barest hint of a smile. “Yeah,” he agreed. “We should definitely celebrate the end of finals. This semester was kinda the semester from hell, wasn’t it?” 

You huffed. That was an understatement. Both you and Peter were double majoring - him at Columbia, you at your father’s alma mater, MIT - and it was slowly but surely draining the life out of you. Your only saving grace was the few weekends you returned to New York, splitting time between being home with Pepper and Morgan and staying with Peter in his far too small dorm room. Unfortunately, the workload for your courses during the past semester had made it nearly impossible to find a free weekend to go home, and you wanted nothing more than to enjoy a weekend with Peter. 

Pepper seemed to think the same thing, though her reasoning was slightly different than yours.

“At least I’ll get to graduate a semester early,” you answered. You closed your eyes and rested your head against the back of the couch, finally letting the fact that you had zero responsibilities for the next three months sink in. “If it weren’t for that, I definitely wouldn’t have overloaded my schedule like that. Do you think you can overdose on coffee? I think I nearly overdosed on coffee last semester.” 

His responding laughter made your eyes flutter open, and you drank in his appearance - cheeks flushed from the early summer heat, messy hair beginning to curl from the humidity, his muscled arms on full display in his tight t-shirt, and his chapped lips curled into the most adorable smile. You ached to reach out to him, to run a hand through his curls, to drag your fingers over his arms, to press your lips against his. 

You moved away and clasped your hands in your lap. “I, uh- I’m gonna go unpack, I think.”

If Peter noticed your sudden distance and change in demeanor, he didn’t say anything. Instead, he let you go, dragging your suitcase behind you to the bedroom that your dad had set up for you years ago in the hopes that one day he’d get you back after Thanos had turned you to dust alongside Peter. 

Tony got you back, but he never got to see you in the cabin he had built for his family, never got to see you in the room that he had set up just for you.

The first time you came to the cabin with Pepper and Morgan after the Blip, you hadn’t even been able to stay in the room for more than five minutes, and you had ended up sleeping with Morgan in her tiny bed. The only exception to that was the night of your dad’s funeral, when both you and Morgan had crawled into bed with Pepper, anchoring yourself to what little family you had left. 

The second time you came to the cabin with Pepper and Morgan, it had been for a weekend getaway before you left for college, and Peter and May had joined the Stark family. You’d only managed to sleep in your room that weekend because Peter had crawled beneath the blankets with you and held you close after he found you sat against the wall, your eyes bloodshot and wet from your tears. He’d slept with you in your room every weekend you’d spent at the cabin since.

And this weekend would be no different, even though the feelings that you felt for him were very drastically different than they had been all those other times you’d shared your bed with him. You were absolutely sure that sharing your bed with Peter Parker all weekend was slowly, but surely, going to kill you. Even the thought of  laying in bed with him, close enough to touch him, to kiss him was sending your heart racing. 

Fuck, you wanted to kiss him so bad and it confused you so much. He was your best friend, he was nerdy Peter, he was...he was so adorable and- and when did you stop seeing him as just Peter and start seeing him as so, so much more?

“You okay?” 

You jumped, startled. You spun around to face Peter, your eyes wide as they latched onto his concerned expression. You blinked, twisting the material of the sweatshirt that you held in your hands. “Um, yeah.” You cleared your throat and dropped the sweatshirt into your dresser with the rest of your clothes you’d brought along for the weekend. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just kinda...I don’t know. I’ll give you some time to unpack. I’m gonna get some fresh air.”

You slid past him in the doorway before he had a chance to protest, and after grabbing a random bottle of wine from the wine rack, you found yourself sitting on the dock, your shoes beside you on the wooden surface and your feet dragging through the tepid lake water. 

Drinking directly from the bottle, you thought back to the phone call with Pepper earlier in the day that had sent your thoughts haywire in the first place. 

‘You haven’t seen each other in months, Y/N,” she had said. ‘You deserve to have some time together. Alone.’

That in and of itself had been innocent enough. There hadn’t been any suggestive undertone to her words, no incorrect assumptions. It could easily have been interpreted as Pepper urging you to have a relaxing weekend with your best friend.

Except that’s not at all what she had meant, and that became abundantly clear as the call went on. 

‘Just be safe, Y/N. You and Peter are both adults, and I trust you to make good choices. I know your dad would have been over the moon to know how close you and Peter have gotten, but I don’t think he’d be too eager to be a grandpa if he were still around.’ You had nearly choked on your own spit when she said that, and before you were even able to respond she continued, ‘There are condoms under the sink in my bathroom if you didn’t bring your own. Seriously, Y/N, be safe. Enjoy your weekend with Peter.’

You had been too tongue-tied to say anything more than a quick goodbye, and the entire conversation had been playing on repeat in your head ever since. It was torturing you, slowly driving you mad in the same manner that your sudden change in feelings for Peter were driving you mad.

The wooden dock creaked, and without even turning to look, you knew that it was Peter padding down the length of the dock to join you at the end. He was silent as he pulled off his shoes and socks, silent as he sat beside you, silent as he plunged his feet into the water and nudged your foot with his big toe. 

You pressed the wine bottle to your lips and tilted it, drinking deeply and swallowing thickly. “I lied to you earlier,” you admitted. You held the wine bottle out to him in silent offering, and once he took it from your hand you twisted your hands together in your lap nervously. “About why Pepper and Morgan aren’t coming this weekend.”

[iceeckos12]

time travel snippet

little time travel au oneshot. season 5 jon travels back in time to season 1. from the perspectives of tim, martin, and sasha. 3.5k.

i dont think i need to tag anything, but please let me know otherwise.

Tim wakes up that morning, and it’s just like any other day.

Well—no, okay, that’s a bit misleading. Today is his first day working as an archival assistant, so he’s one part nervous, one part that breathless, exhilarated feeling you only get when you’re about to do something unfamiliar that may or may not redefine your life for the foreseeable future. When he says “it’s just like any other day”, he means that he wakes up, and he’s a normal person doing normal people things like eating a healthy breakfast and going to work.

(So, no. In short, he doesn’t realize that today is the day when It happens, that big, life-changing event that you think will Never Happen To You.)

He gets out of bed, stumbles into the bathroom. Washes his face of whatever residue that’d built up during the night, tries to scrape away the evidence of his nightmares, smiles big and bright at the mirror to see how successful his efforts were. He’s betrayed by the traitorous bags beneath his eyes, but that’s okay. Sasha taught him how to wield concealer as a shield whenever his past wore down his armor.

He shoots twin finger guns into his reflection, making soft pew, pew! noises that are almost too-loud in the hush of the bathroom. Then he turns on his heel and walks away, sauntering and humming along with the chorus of Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5.

He gets to the Institute twenty minutes before he’s supposed to—not because he’s trying to impress his boss or whatever (he and Jon have known each other long enough that there’s no point). It’s just, Jon will probably want to make some sort of game-plan before the actual workday starts. 

The poor man had been relieved to an almost comical degree when Tim had said yes, I’ll come with you to the Archives. It’s painfully obvious how out-of-his-depth Jon is with the whole “Head Archivist” thing. Tim’s honestly baffled as to why Elias had singled him out for the position in the first place, considering his lack of qualifications.

But, whatever. It’s fine! Tim and Sasha will be there to help him—although the third assistant is a bit of a problem, considering that they know absolutely nothing about him. There’s no guarantee that this Martin Blackwood won’t report inadequacies or mistakes back to Elias. If that’s the case, Tim and Sasha will have to be Jon’s safety net, which is partially why Tim is hoping to talk to Jon before anyone else gets there.

He also wants to talk to Jon because he just knows the man is probably working himself up over all of this. Maybe reassurances won’t do away with the source of anxiety entirely, but at least it’ll remind Jon that he’s not alone, and that he can count on Tim and Sasha.

As expected, when Tim gets there he can see a sliver of light pouring out from the cracked door of the Head Archivist’s office. He selects a desk and sets his bag on top of it, noting a set of strange gouges in the fake wood with a raised eyebrow, and then an internal shrug. The Institute issued laptop is near the far edge of his desk, and his collection of pictures are strategically placed so that he can see them all clearly.

His eyes linger over the image of him, his mother, and his brother. Their smiles are almost perfect replicas of each other, like someone took a mold of one of their faces and recreated it twice over.

Briefly, he closes his eyes. Then he shakes himself, releases a slow, steadying breath, and goes to check on Jon.

Tim’s not sure what he’s expecting to see when he goes into Jon’s office.

(That’s misleading too, though. He’s not sure if Jon will be visibly calm or upset, if he’ll be on his laptop, if he’ll be picking at the skin around his fingernails, as he so often does when he’s stressed. He is expecting Jon as he is and always has been—a twenty-some year old going on sixty, who wraps his gruff, grumpy demeanor about himself to protect the soft, vulnerable core he likes to pretend doesn’t exist.)

He comes up to the door, and the soft rectangle of light that emanates from beneath the door paints the tips of his shoes gold. “Jon?” he calls softly, rapping his knuckles against the frame. There’s a soft rustling noise—papers maybe? but no audible response, so he shrugs and pushes the door open. “I’m coming in.”

Tim steps inside, a quip instinctively readying itself on his tongue—but then his gaze lands on Jon, and he freezes dead in his tracks.

Even years later, he still vividly, viscerally remembers the moment he saw Danny standing on the stage underneath the Royal Opera House, the way he’d looked...not quite right. The wrongness had been subtle, so much so that it had been unnoticeable upon first glance, upon second glance. The longer Tim had looked though, the more obvious it had become, exposing all the little faults in that almost-perfect recreation of his brother.

Looking at Jon now, it’s the first and only thing he can think of. Because—yes, there’s the long, silver-streaked black hair, there’s the rich brown eyes, there’s the pair of spectacles that make him look far older than he actually is. But that’s where the similarities between the Jon he knows and this Jon end.

Jon’s always been a small man, but his feigned haughtiness makes him seem much bigger than he actually is. Except—except this Jon looks smaller somehow, his shoulders curved protectively inward, like he’s trying to present less of a target. And there’s something about his face, too—his expression is too sharp, too much—

But the worst of it is his eyes. There’s something very wrong with his eyes.

Who the fuck are you, and what have you done with Jon? He doesn’t say it out loud though, just keeps staring at Jon, a heady mix of terror and horror making any sort of reaction impossible.

After a moment Jon’s lips thin, contorted by some distant cousin of displeasure, and he rises to his feet. Tim stumbles instinctively backward, his breath escaping him in a sharp gasp that’s immediately swallowed up by the apathetic stacks of books and papers surrounding them. He’s struck by the fact that if he dies here, it’s unlikely anyone will notice; he’ll become just another set of marks gouged into the desk, willed away with an uneasy shrug.

Jon freezes, lips parting subtly, as though he were about to speak. Tim feels his breath catch in his chest, unable to shake himself out of the clouded stupor his mind has fallen into.

In the end, Jon says nothing. Just releases a long, slow breath of air and sits back down, pushing his chair close to his desk. The motion looks heavy, tired, as though it takes far more energy than it should.

“You—you should go,” Jon rasps, and there’s something off about his voice too, though Tim can’t put his finger on why. He can’t cobble together enough of a train of thought to make sense of any of this, all he can think of is that clown ripping Danny apart—

He stumbles out of Jon’s office, sits down at his desk. Stares down at the cheap, fake wood, at the gouges that have marred the otherwise pristine surface. Puts his head in his hands, and tries to will his heart to stop pounding in his chest.

-0-

Martin’s heard things about Jonathan Sims.

He’s not usually the type to pay attention or encourage gossip, as the vivid memories of his classmates tittering cruelly whenever he walked by still leaves a sour taste in his mouth.The problem with the Institute is that the employees get bored pretty easily. Though most would consider academic research into the esoteric and the paranormal to be fairly interesting, it’s still academic research. And the subject content can get to be a bit...repetitive. There’s only so many gruesome statements you can read without thinking, oh great, more meat.

So the employees gossip a lot, and while Martin usually tries to keep his head down and avoid it, it’s difficult not to overhear some things. And from what little he’s heard, he’s...a bit concerned. Rude and unsociable has frequently been mentioned, as have arrogant and unnecessarily finicky, and worst of all, a bit of a stuck-up know-it-all.

Normally he tries not to put too much stock in office gossip—he’s well aware that the grapevine tends to exaggerate one’s most undesirable traits—but if any of it is true, then he might just be in trouble. It was hard enough being a library employee when his boss wasn’t even paying attention most of the time. If Jon is as exacting as they say, it might be enough to expose the fact that Martin has no idea what the fuck he’s doing. And if that happens, then he might get fired, and he can’t get fired, he needs this job, he can barely keep up with his mum’s medical bills as it is—

Calm down, Martin tells himself firmly, pressing his hand against his sternum, as though that will be enough to quell the rising panic. It’s only your first day. Maybe he’s nice, and we’ll actually be good friends.

(With his luck? Yeah, right.)

The Institute looms in the distance, growing closer with every terrified, grudging footstep. A shiver runs up his spine at the sight of its imposing presence, a dark, ugly blot of a building against the backdrop of the iron grey clouds.

If there’s one thing he’s good at though, it’s keeping his head down and muddling through until he’s able to figure out what is actually expected of him. He can twist and fold himself into whatever role they need him to fill, as he has done so many times in the past. Not easily perhaps, but he has always managed. The alternative is untenable, after all.

So he takes a deep breath, and shoves his panic down as deep as possible. Lifts his head and forces a smile onto his face, like a good attitude will be enough to protect him from his boss’s wrath.

He could really do with a cup of tea.

Martin trudges down the stairs, giving the blank walls, the old-fashioned carpet, a dubious look as he does. The Archives themselves are as he remembers it—he’s been down here a couple of times when Gertrude made a request for something specific, but—

He pauses when he notices a man sitting at one of the desks, his face buried in his hands. His shoulders aren’t shaking and his breathing is even, so Martin doesn’t think that he’s crying? He’s just….sitting there, his stillness so perfect it’s almost inhuman.

“Hello?” Martin calls softly, cautiously, shifting his weight to the balls of his feet.

The man looks up, revealing a very handsome face and brown eyes so dark they may as well be black. His cheeks are dry but his eyes are bright and a little wild, and his mouth is pressed into a small, tight line. He doesn’t speak, just keeps watching, blinking dazedly in Martin’s direction. Martin gets the feeling that this person isn’t entirely there at the moment, like a house in which every room is lit, but there are no people inside.

He swallows and shifts nervously back and forth, trying to decide whether or not to call for some backup. Eventually he sets his bag on the floor and shuffles a bit closer. “Um—are you—is everything okay?”

The man blinks rapidly, some semblance of awareness creeping back into his gaze. He shakes his head slowly, pushes his short, gelled hair back from his head. His hands are trembling. “I’m...yeah, I’m fine. It’s—everything’s, it’s…”

But then his gaze lands on something over Martin’s shoulder, and all the color drains out of his face, his mouth shutting with a painful sounding click. Martin quickly spins around, searching for whatever could’ve scared him so much—

There’s someone standing in the doorway of Gertrude’s office.

There are so many things that one normally takes in upon first meeting another person: their hair, their skin color, all the little wrinkles and marks that give you the briefest insight into their life. Martin looks at posture first, tends to check if a person is intentionally looming, or if they’re making themself smaller.

But all Martin can see are the eyes.

There’s—two of them he thinks, but two is such an arbitrary number when the thing you’re applying it to doesn’t ascribe to human values (he’s not sure how he knows that—how does he know that—?). That horrible, terrible gaze is an unerring arrow, all-encompassing, all-consuming, piercing the deepest corners of his mind. It hurts in some distant, nebulous way he’s not even sure he comprehends—

Then he blinks, and the sheer terror, that feeling of the horrible, violating exposure of everything that he is, abruptly snuffs out. What’s left is just a person, wispy and small, his slight frame fairly drowning in a chunky, cable-knit jumper. He’s leaning against his doorframe, his eyes—two big brown ones, rich and unfathomably sad and more than that, human—drinking Martin in, his lips parted in a soundless gasp.

“Um—” Martin glances over his shoulder, and almost leaps out of his skin when a land falls heavily on his shoulder. The man who’d been sitting in the chair is standing just behind him, a strained but polite smile on his face.

“Hi Jon,” the man says, an undercurrent of a warning in his voice.

Martin glances between the two, his confusion growing with every passing moment. This is not what he was expecting when he first came into work today, and the uncertainty makes him feel strange and off-kilter.

The person in the door swallows once, twice, then straightens, one hand still gripping the doorframe like it’s the only thing keeping him upright. When he speaks, his voice is soft, tentative, a little ragged around the edges. “Tim. It’s, um...it’s good to see you.”

“Martin Blackwood, was it?” Tim continues, injecting a bit of cheer into his voice. It takes Martin a moment to realize that he’s being addressed, and he shoots Jon—this is Jonathan Sims?—an uncertain look before nodding slowly. “We’re happy to have you on the team.”

“O-Oh?” Martin squeaks, then grits his teeth and bodily forces his voice back into its normal range. “I’m—um, I’m happy to be here?”

“Good,” Tim says through a grin that looks more like a grimace, giving Martin’s shoulder a friendly pat. The look he shoots Jon is a dark, mistrustful thing. The look Jon gives him back is fragile, vulnerable, that winds the tension in Tim’s shoulders so tight it has to be painful.

Jon’s gaze flickers to Martin, just for a second—and then he disappears into his office, leaving the door cracked behind him.

Tim and Martin stand there for a second, staring at the door. Tim’s still tense as a bowstring, and his grip on Martin’s shoulder is almost uncomfortable. The air in the Archives feels stuffy and too warm, and there’s a strange prickling sensation on the back of Martin’s neck, like he’s being subjected to close scrutiny.

Then Tim sighs and lets go of Martin’s shoulder, a little of the tension bleeding out of him, and without it he looks small, deflated. He goes back to his desk and sits down, booting up his laptop without a word of explanation to Martin.

Martin stares at the back of Tim’s head for a moment, a number of questions clamoring around in his brain—what the fuck was that? What’s wrong with Jon? Why are you so obviously suspicious of him?—but the words won’t come. Breaking the silence feels...sacrilegious, somehow. Every breath of air sticks against the back of his throat.

In the end, he doesn’t say anything either, just sits at his desk and takes out his Institute-issued laptop. Stares blankly at the screen as the machine slowly, laboriously, comes to life.

-0-

Sasha’s not entirely sure how to interpret the tense atmosphere that has descended over the Archives.

The first day she’d arrived a couple of minutes before she was supposed to, prepared to follow Jon’s direction and help him adjust as best she could. (Her feelings about Jon’s promotion...didn’t matter. She didn’t like it, but it wasn’t his fault that Elias was an old-fashioned misogynist.)

But when she’d come down the stairs, Tim and the assistant she didn’t know, Martin, had been seated quietly at their desks. They’d both had the same distant, shell-shocked look on their faces, like they’d received some shattering, horrible news. Sasha had sent Tim a confused look, but he either hadn’t noticed it, or hadn’t wanted to explain.

She hadn’t even seen Jon that first day, just received a polite email asking her to start organizing the statements according to the system which he’d devised.

It’s been almost three days, and nothing has changed. Oh sure, they’ve all started organizing the statements as directed. Tim cracks jokes, Martin tiptoes around them and makes copious amounts of tea. That strange tension that makes the hair on the back of her neck stand up, like the world is holding its breath in anticipation, hasn’t faded though. And while she doesn’t know Martin all that well, she knows that something’s still up with Tim. He seems more subdued than usual, keeps sending uncomfortable looks in the direction of Jon’s office—

—which hasn’t been open since that first day. She hasn’t seen Jon at all either, no matter how early she arrives or how late she stays. The only proof she has that he’s still alive is the polite email she periodically receives, detailing some specific task that he wants for them to do.

Even then, his emails are...odd. She’s not sure how she can tell, but they feel...awkward? Stilted? Like he’s only half-aware of what he’s typing, or like he’s only asking them to do things because he feels like he should, not because he has any actual goal in mind.

Normally she’d be frustrated by this, would complain bitterly to Tim about Elias passing over her for someone who obviously doesn’t properly appreciate the position they’ve been given—except that she knows Jon. He’d made a point to explain the situation to her himself, an apologetic twist tucked into the corner of his mouth. More than that, he’d asked her to follow him to the archives, saying that he wanted the two people he trusted most, her and Tim, to come with him.

He respects her too much not to take this job seriously.

The strangeness of the archives is only emphasized by Jon’s complete and utter lack of presence within it, but she doesn’t—she doesn’t buy that. She doesn’t believe that he’d just suddenly decide not to do the job he’d been so anxious to excel at. 

More damning than anything is Tim’s complete, utter silence regarding Jon’s strange behavior, but whatever he knows about it, he isn’t saying anything. Martin is willing to talk, but he seems to be as lost as she is.

“I—that first day, Jon…” Martin shrugs, shooting a nervous glance toward the door leading to the archives. He’s been spending a lot of time hovering in the break room making tea, not that she can blame him. “He—I mean obviously I don’t know him very well, but he seemed...upset?”

“Upset,” Sasha repeats dubiously.

Martin lets out an exhausted sigh and turns away, waving a dismissive hand. “Look, I’m not entirely sure how to explain it. He just—okay, so, bear with me for a second, but he reminded me of this guy who used to live in my neighborhood.”

Sasha backs off, folding her arms and leaning against the counter. “Okay?”

“There was this little old couple that used to live in my neighborhood. They were—they were really sweet! The husband used to give candy to us younger kids. But um���sometimes you’d see him sitting in the rocking chair on his porch, and it was like...he wasn’t entirely there? Like, he’d just sit there for hours, rocking and staring at nothing. That’s—that’s what Jon’s expression reminded me of.”

Martin gets more animated the more he talks, Sasha notes; his hands move in broad, sweeping gestures, his expression twisting into an expression of extreme concentration. The moment he finishes he deflates again, tucking his hands into his armpits self-consciously, a hedgehog curling protectively in on itself.

“So, yeah,” he finishes eloquently.

“Huh,” Sasha says thoughtfully.

She gets back to her desk. Looks over at Tim, who’s studiously working through a box of statements, his mouth set in a neutral, concentrated frown. Takes a deep breath, letting the taste of dust and old papers sit heavy on her tongue.

Then she opens her laptop and starts looking through the catalog of cursed items that are currently being held in Artifact Storage.

(She doesn’t think that she’ll find anything, but—but just in case.)

-0-

They all get the call the next Monday morning: Elias Bouchard was found dead in his office.

[sopxhiea]

Lush

Alfie Solomons X Reader

Summary: An uninvited guest interrupts the dreamy evening and the masks once worn by the infamous girl are nowhere to be seen and Alfie proves that he is no ordinary man.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

“You owe me big time.”

“Everyone keeps telling me you’re the bad guy.”

The room was quiet, nothing but the sound of your shuffling on the cold mattress could be heard. The walls weren’t thin, not like in the boarding house where you could hear every giggle and cry. They were covered with white wallpaper, the expensive kind and the room itself was decorated scarcely.

You wondered if it was his choice to keep it this way.

There was a pile of frustration residing in your lower belly, the kind that came from not getting what you wanted. And you always got what you wanted, especially when it came to men. That’s why it was fun, because you were never the one to give up and they’d always surrender with hands over their head and trembling lips as they begged you for the sweet kiss of release.

But not him.

He was a strange man, you concluded while staring at the ceiling of the room. He was sleeping on the other end of the corridor, or you thought he would be sleeping after he remedied the uncomfortable weight in his trousers. He had been nothing but kind and welcoming to you but you had pushed all of his buttons, and by all you meant every last one.

He’d gotten two more kisses after the ones you had so graciously given him and you had even seen the need for more in his eyes but he had decided that that was for later. He wanted you to be the one to initiate things, like how you’d been the one to reach for his lips the second time. 

He had asked you to kiss him at last, lost yet another round of the dangerous game you were playing with him but you failed to realise that you wanted him too. There was no denying that he was an attractive man and there was this built up tension between the both of you, something that came from playing the game for too long and you realised, after he’d asked for the kiss, that if you didn’t go for the right move, he’d win.

And that had never happened before.

Men were quick to surrender when faced with a deathly little thing like you. You’d smile, whisper things into their ears and they’d ask for things, they’d give you anything you wanted but Alfie had gotten better at the game you had invented. You still had him on the ropes but he was quick at his feet. He actually learned from you.

You realised that maybe you were in the wrong for playing with such a man, a man of his wrath. You had played with dangerous men before and it would be easy to destroy Alfie like you had done to those men but he wasn’t playing the way all of them had played. He still went by the rules but he was able to use your moves against you.

A sigh left your lips and you sat up on the bed. Alfie had insisted that you slept in the guest room, mostly because he knew that he wouldn’t be able to keep his hands to himself if you slept inches away from him. He knew that you’d still visit him in his dreams but sleep was nowhere near for the man across the corridor.

Fifteen minutes like that passed, with you thinking and trying to find new ways to weaken the man and him trying to ignore the fact that the woman he saw in his dreams was in his guest room. The clock was nearing midnight when the first sound came.

It was the sound of a fist hitting the front door.

The house was large but the knocks were so loud that they could be heard from upstairs, including the guest room. You immediately shot up, getting up from the bed in a swift motion and slightly opening the door. The sound echoed through the house again and a minute later, Alfie was walking towards the guest room.

You opened the door even further with nothing but a slip and a thin blanket around your shoulders. He gulped first and his eyes met yours after that, a faint smile on your lips at the reaction but the moment was soon interrupted when the loud knock filled the air.

You saw the gun in his hand. 

“Stay here, pet.” he said in a gruff voice and you nodded, both of you knowing damn well that you wouldn’t just be standing upstairs.

He went downstairs and you followed him a minute later, standing behind one of the walls so that you could still hear what was being said but you weren’t being seen by anyone. 

You heard a familiar voice, one that haunted you every day and night when you were in the boarding house.

It was Annabelle.

She was shouting at Alfie, about how inappropriate the whole thing was. She’s young, she said while shouting at the broad man, she’s not a whore. You chuckled, why did she care anyway? She wanted you to be out of her hair and get married the minute you had stepped in the school so none of what she was saying made sense.

Then it clicked.

Alfie was not a regular man and the school would never let you to go out with someone like him, as per your uncle’s orders for you to find an appropriate bloke to settle down with and Alfie was definitely none of the things your uncle would want for you. You didn’t care for any of what he wanted but that didn’t matter, you were young damsel who couldn’t make big decisions for yourself.

It all happened so fast.

Annabelle walked in, brushing past Alfie and walking directly towards you. You let out a sound of surprise when she found you in your hiding spot behind the wall and you saw the anger behind Alfie’s eyes. Annabelle’s eyes were lit, she felt her blood boiling as she looked at your slightly undressed form and grabbed your arm.

She dragged you towards the front door but Alfie pulled you away from her grasp before you exited his house. He gently moved you behind him and started speaking to Annabelle in a tone that was simply not amused.

“What the fuck do ya’ think, right, yer doin’?” he spoke, looking down at the older woman. She was angry but you didn’t know if it was because of the whole situation or if she was just jealous. You had seen the way she looked at Alfie.

“She’s a kid, Mr. Solomons. She can’t stay at your house.” she said in a shrieking voice as Alfie looked at the woman with a confused expression. 

“Why the fuck not?” he said, in a heartbeat and Annabelle’s ears turned red at that. She was always seen as a figure of authority by other girls but talking to a gangster threw her off.

“She’s unmarried and not even properly dressed!” she said, not really answering the question but rather voicing her own concerns.

You took a step towards the woman but Alfie put his arm in front of you to block your way, your voice was angry but with a calmer approach than hers had as you talked back, something you’d been slapped for before.

“I thought you said I was a kid, not a damsel.” you said and Alfie snickered. Annabelle looked at him first and then you before reaching for you again but Alfie took another step towards her and you realised that fighting her was a mistake.

“Fine. If Y/N wants to stay here so badly, she won’t mind me ringing her uncle.” she said, the tone of threat obvious in her words.

Alfie saw the change in your eyes.

Your uncle was a lot of things but not a kind man. If Annabelle called him again, he’d just marry you off to some wealthy bloke for business profit and call it a day. You knew he’d do it because the last time you’d seen him, he had swore on it. He had a new bride too and you were sure he didn’t want to keep you around.

“I..” you gulped and Alfie’s eyebrows furrowed. “I’ll take my leave, Mr. Solomons.” you spoke, not looking at his eyes and he heard Annabelle’s approving hum and wanted to rip her throat off but decided not to do so, there was something clearly bothering you. “It was a lovely evening, thank you for the invite.” you said, still not meeting his eyes while taking your coat. Your dress was upstairs but it would just have to be this way for now. You couldn’t risk anything.

You just hoped the punishment in the boarding house would be a light one.

Alfie just watched as you got your coat and shot him a fake smile. He was soon reassured as you leaned towards him in the slightest and spoke in a mere whisper. “You owe me big time.”

You got in the car and Annabelle’s voice could still be heard as she shouted at you inside the carriage. 

Alfie prepared to make a visit in the morning to the boarding house and realised that Cyril had awoken due to all the screaming.

-------

It bled for a bit, but then it was fine.

She was quite cruel, you knew that and you had braced everything that was coming your way. She had forced you to clean the kitchen floor where there were no tiles but just rocks, the very back of the space where no one would go. It wasn’t that bad, you thought until your knees started bleeding from the rough texture and you soon realised you had been crying. 

For what, you didn’t know.

It took you most of the night to get the place clean, although by the end of it your slip was filthy. None of the girls made a sound as they watched your red knees move under the moonlight while you walked around the room. It was obvious that you’d cried and the sun was about to come out anyway so you saw no reason to sleep and have Annabelle shout at you again for not waking up on time.

Alfie didn’t sleep that night, still a bit relieved when you spoke to him a cheeky manner before you left but there was a weight behind your words. He didn’t know how they ran the house, only that the girls in it were famous for being proper and good looking. He had seen a couple of your friends scurry around with new lads in their arms last month since they got married and he realised that some of the older girls were out except you and a couple other ones. 

He twisted and turned on the bed until the sun came out and before he knew it, he was out the door with Cyril by his side. He didn’t wait for the doors of the boarding school to open, he knew the girls were up at 7 as usual, something you’d told him some moons ago.

He knocked on the door once, like Annabelle had done, with as much force as he had and the woman jumped in her place while waiting for the girls to get downstairs for tea. She didn’t know who it was, only that it was some trouble and she wasn’t so surprised when she saw Alfie standing in the doorway of the large house with a massive dog on his side.

“Good Morning, Mr. Solomons.” she spoke in a monotone voice, not surprised in the slightest and very annoyed.

“Yeah, it fuckin ‘s.” he said, shaking his head and visibly angry but there was something else in his eyes Annabelle had never seen before. “Where’s Y/N then?” he said, a tone of affection glossing over your name and she squinted immediately.

“Upstairs. I suspect she’ll be asleep at this hour.” she spoke, a tone of dismay in her voice as she eyed the dog. “That can’t be in here.” she spoke towards Cyril and Alfie shot her a look as to say ‘fuck off’.

She had angered him, and badly. 

He was a gangster and Annabelle only had an idea of what he was capable of. Much like anyone, she heard things but who was to say which one was true and which one was just a rumour. She decided, very quickly, that Alfie’s anger was something she was very afraid of and she had made a mistake last night but that it was too late for the regret. All she could do was to cooperate.

“I’ll fetch her.” she said with a plastered smile and walked upstairs.

Annabelle didn’t actually go in to find you but sent one of the helpers to do so. The woman found you with red palms and bloodied knees. It was obvious that you had been crying but the woman didn’t know any better to fix your look a bit before sending you downstairs as all she’d been told was to ‘get you in the guest quarters downstairs right away’ as ordered by Annabelle.

You nodded and wrapped a cardigan around your body, the slip was no longer on you but a lighter dress that still didn’t cover your knees. You figured Annabelle just wanted you to make some tea and read to the younger girls as a punishment, she knew how much you hated doing things that were her job. Your hair was still a bit wet from the shower but you figured there would be no guests around, even if there were Annabelle wouldn’t let you be seen this way.

Much to your surprise, you saw Alfie standing in the guest quarters with Cyril in his hand.

A smile found his lips at first, a small wash of relief going through his body before he took in your full appearance. Swollen eyes and red lips, rings around your pretty eyes and he could see the bruises on your knees, freshly formed. You still looked beautiful, he admitted to himself, but this was a bit of a change.

“What are you doing here?” you spoke, not caring in the slightest about your appearance or the swollen eyes since this was how it was. 

This was where the game was over and he would just leave because no man wanted to see a pretty girl bruised and broken. Those were the rules all the other men played by and you were used to it. The moment the sweet mask of seduction was lifted and you were revealed, they’d flee.

But Alfie was not an ordinary man.

“I’ll fuckin’ kill her.” he said, letting go of Cyril’s leash and walking towards the room where he saw Annabelle go in but you put your hands on his chest before he could lunge forward and he stopped right away.

“It’s alright. Sit down, Mr. Solomons.” you spoke and he eased under your touch. He was still mad so he didn’t sit down but speak his mind instead.

“Cut that Mr. shit ou-” he started speaking, his anger lashing at you but you knew better than to think he was angry at you, or maybe he was but you would play nice. You thought he’d leave anyway, now that he’d seen you.

“We’re still in this house, so I have to keep the formality.” you said in a sweet tone he wasn’t quite expecting.

He saw your knees a bit better when you sat down but you covered them quickly and his eyes shot up to meet yours. You were about to speak but he, as usual, was faster.

“What the fuck happened, lass?” he said and you patted the empty space next to you on the sofa.

“Sit, please.” you said with another smile. He knew you had been crying from your glossy eyes and he was sure if he left you alone, you’d be crying some more.

“She did this to you?! Ya’ just need to fuckin’ tell m-” he started speaking in an angry voice and you were sure Annabelle was listening but it didn’t matter. 

You grabbed his larger hand and pulled him down slightly and spoke again, calm as a bird. “Alfie, sit.”

And he sat down.

“Are ya’ alright?” he spoke in a sweet voice, almost hushed as he leaned closer to you. You gave him a smile, one that didn’t really reach your eyes.

“Yes.” you said, a mere whisper as you looked at his eyes. Cyril rested on your feet, head on your lap as you scratched the back of his ears.

“I’m fuckin’ serious, Y/N. Did she do-” you interrupted him for the countless time but with a gentle voice, he didn’t even realise you were cutting him off as you spoke.

“It’s just how she is with me. I’m used to it so you don’t need to worry.” you spoke.

This was new, all of it.

You weren’t looking at him seductively, you were dressed down and looked so...soft. He was sure he could fall for any version of you but this one made him want to confess all his sins and hug you until he felt you and him fusing into one soul. You didn’t have your guard up, not now that he had seen you this way with the reality shifting.

He promised to pinch himself when he got out, for he thought that this was not like the you he knew. He was not complaining in the slightest.

“I’m sorry about last night.” you said, in a tone he couldn’t quite pin down and he shook his head at your words.

“Nah. That was not yer fuckin’ fault, was it, jus’ the old witch.” he said and looked at your chuckling form, a warmth spreading through his chest at the sight.

“Why is the scary gangster in a school for girls?” you spoke, looking at Cyril as he looked right back at you. Alfie sensed your cheeky tone coming back but he didn’t say anything.

“Just the usual.” he said, looking at you and you met his eyes afterwards.

Maybe this time, the man wouldn’t leave.

“Everyone keeps telling me you’re the bad guy.” you spoke again without looking at him. 

The girls had been talking to you about him. Apparently he was popular amongst the high end brothels around Camden, with the prettiest women they had. Lisa had told you about the time he’d seen a man Alfie had beaten up, said that he looked like he needed to be in the hospital. 

There was also a part of the girls that felt pure envy. He was thrilling to be with, the smell of danger was around when he walked in and every girl, even the poshest ones wanted to have one night with someone at the very opposite side of everything they stood for.

“Ya’ believe them?” he said, hand tugging at his beard as he stared at Cyril and you at him this time. 

He wanted to know, if you thought he was as bad as they said.

A smile found your pretty lips as his words and you chuckled while speaking, his eyes immediately meeting yours at the action. “I know better than that, Mr. Solomons.” you said in a sweet voice and Alfie lit up. He was the brightest thing in the room as you smiled at the man.

“Annabelle wants you to leave.” you said, as a matter of fact.

He chuckled lowly and spoke, annoyed at the mention of her name.

“Yeah I ain’t too fuckin’ fond of her either, pet, am I, but ya’ live ‘ere so..” he said, not quite finishing the sentence but your ears perked up at the last couple of words and you turned to face him.

“So?” you urged him to continue and there was clear amusement in his eyes.

“So I can’t exactly avoid her, can I. Gotta see the pretty lass.” he said while watching you nod.

“Is the big scary gangster afraid of an old lady?” you said in a mocking voice and he spoke up immediately.

“She ain’t jus’ a regular fuckin’ old witch, now, is she. She, yeah, is the worst of ‘em, lass.” he spoke and watched you laugh at his silly words. He didn’t even know what he was saying, just that your smile was the prettiest thing he’d seen.

“I need to go read to some girls.” you spoke up after a while, he had been staring at you for a while so you knew he’d heard it.

He nodded, hand resting on his stomach as he looked at you. You turned to him and gave him a smile. “Thank you for the visit.” you spoke in a low voice.

“I’ll come again, yeah?” he said, not sure if you wanted him around after all the trouble he had given you.

“You want to? Or it’ll just be pity visit?” you asked, honestly this time and he saw the stern look in your eyes. You didn’t want to be toyed with at that moment.

“Nah. Purely for my own fuckin’ benefit.” he said, as to say that he would be coming around to see you because he genuinely wanted to.

You nodded and got up, he followed. “Be careful of Annabelle out there.” you said a low voice and he broke out laughing before speaking out himself.

“Yer’ the minx to speak.” you gave him a smile at his words and got out of the room.

As you had suspected, she was waiting at the door for you to get out. You gave her an unamused look before she spoke, her old voice filling your ears and making Alfie want to lash at her but he knew better.

“Y/N, the girls are waiting.” she said and you nodded. There was no emotion left on your face anymore.

“Yes ma’am.” you said and walked away after holding onto Alfie’s finger for a moment as to say that you’d see him later.

“Mr. Solomons-” she started speaking but Alfie cut her off. He was fuming to say the least.

“I will come again, yeah, to fuckin’ see her and If I see one fuckin’ bruise anywhere in her body, ya will fuckin’ pay for it.” he said, face closer to the old woman’s as she nodded frantically. 

“Understood?” he asked, calmer this time and she nodded again. “Good. She ain’t yours to boss around.” he spoke and saw the fear in Annabelle’s eyes double. He would ruin her and do so with pleasure after what she’d done to you.

Ollie soon appeared with a big car in front of the building and Alfie shot Annabelle one last look before getting out of the house, knowing fully well he’d be calling you soon.

-----

“Yes, this is Lisa.” Alfie heard her low voice and thanked his gods that it was not Annabelle.

It had been a slow day, barely the afternoon as he stared at the stack of papers on his desk. He couldn’t seem to get to work today, all he thought about were your red knees and the sad smile you had given him. He wanted to spend more time with you and his mind would not think of anything else.

“Is Y/N there?” he said, voice gruff and he realised he hadn’t drunk water for some time. 

He heard the girl click her tongue. “Can I ask who’s calling, sir?” she said, a bit hesitant as she spoke. Alfie didn’t know who this girl was but it seemed as though she had taken some of Annabelle’s traits and it made his blood boil.

“What the fuck are ya’ on about, girl?” he asked, fuming as his anger slowly took the wheel.

“Well, Y/N is not allowed to speak to anyone but you can leave her a message if you’d like.” she finished in a calm voice.

“Listen, lass..” he spoke, a sigh leaving his lips before his voice could be heard again. “Either get her on the fuckin’ phone or I’ll have the whole placed burned down.” he said, no joking in his tone.

Lisa sighed and then whispered. There was some shuffling on her end before the voice that kept Alfie awake at night could be heard. He visibly calmed when he heard your voice and a faint smile danced on his lips, although he wouldn’t admit it.

“Needed me that much?” you spoke, voice seductive and breathy like usual. You were back to the minx he knew but he liked both versions equally, although this version reminded him of a sin whereas the woman he saw in the morning was nothing but purity in his eyes.

What a dangerous little thing, he thought.

“’ello, lass.” he said, in the tone that you knew well. His voice was dripping with affection as he spoke.

You smiled and Lisa gasped at the action before earning a small smack on the forearm. You would usually not want to talk to any lads you were speaking or act superficial but she had seen the smile, genuine and as bright as the sun. You continued speaking in the voice he knew well.

The game was back on.

“Hello, Alfie.” there was a small pause, like he was savouring the moment so you took the turn to speak again. “You gotta make it quick, sir, or you’ll get me in trouble again.”

you said, emphasising the sir part and Alfie saw blank for a second and knew that he wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight. Not if he took the matters into his own hands. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, pants suddenly too tight as he gulped and spoke.

“What are ya’ doing at 8 pm?” he asked, the specific hour making you chuckle before you spoke. He wanted to take you out and you wouldn’t say no.

“I’ll wear something pretty.” you said in a heartbeat and he smiled, a little warmth spread through his chest as he spoke through small chuckled.

This man had killed someone with his bare hands but he was chuckling with you.

“You should wear something pretty too.” you said and earned even a bigger chuckle, he was smiling like an idiot in his office and Ollie was convinced, as he looked through the windows of the office, that Alfie had either gone mad or he was in love.

Or both.

“I’ll wear the prettiest thing I own, lass.” he said, amusement evident in his voice and it earned a small chuckle from you and Lisa’s eyes widened even more.

“I promise to do just the same.” you said, a smile on your lips as you waited for him to speak but he didn’t.

This was comfortable, the silence. He knew you were there and you knew he was there. It felt...reassuring. But you had to end the call of Annabelle’s wrath would find you once again. “I’ll see you at 8, Mr. Solomons.” you said, breathy voice making him imagine things and he grunted at the tightness in his pants but his voice was calm and gathered when he spoke.

“See ya’ soon, luv.”

And you realised,  for the first time, that maybe this man wouldn’t leave but the game was not over yet. 

It felt like it had just begun.

-------

Tagging: @clairecrive  @parkbearum @sourirez  @vetseras @mollybegger-blog @babylooneytoonz @peakascum @fuseburner @r-rose08 @innerpaperexpertcloud @caffinated-tree @cathartichaoss  @ihavefandomsssss​ @thatchickwiththecamera @sugarcoated-lame  

a/n: You guys are all so sweet, i love all the messages on the chapters so thank you!!  i really do hope you liked this part. Let me know what you thought, please! I think things will get heated quite soon :)

[maxwell-grant]

Might I please jump in with the suggestion that, while making Superman a Pulp Hero can be a little tricky, making LEX LUTHOR a Pulp Hero would be peculiarly easy? (In fact making him a Pulp Hero without making major alterations to his fundamental character might be far more difficult - given how much of a self centred jerk the man is).

Funny you mention that because, while I haven't read the comic enough to really speak much of it, that kinda seems to be the basic premise of Chris Roberson's Edison Rex, a comic about a supervillain who has to step in as Earth's protector after defeating his superhero enemy, with the titular character being a Lex Luthor-analogue who looks like Doc Savage with Thomas Edison's haircut.

In fact, the idea of Thomas Edison as a protagonist is not even a unique one, not when one of the earliest examples of dime novel sci-fi was named after him. Just as popular in it's heyday and irredeemably reprehensible as the man itself even. If you want to imagine how Lex Luthor looks like as a pulp hero, all you need is to look at the genre called "Edisonade", starting in the 1870s, and you'll see why you wouldn't even need to make that many substantial changes to Luthor's fundamental character if you were to try to pass him off as a dime novel sci-fi protagonist. Not just because pulp supervillains already starred in stories and magazines as is, but because Edisonade as a genre is already built to accomodate characters like him.

The term "edisonade" or "Edisonade" – which is derived from Thomas Alva Edison in the same way that "Robinsonade" is derived from the hero of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe – can be understood to describe any story dating from the late nineteenth century onward and featuring a young US male inventor hero who ingeniously extricates himself from tight spots and who, by so doing, saves himself from defeat and corruption, and his friends and nation from foreign oppressors.

The Invention by which he typically accomplishes this feat is not, however, simply a Weapon, though it will almost certainly prove to be invincible against the foe, and may also make the hero's fortune; it is also a means of Transportation – for the edisonade is not only about saving the country (or planet) through personal spunk and native wit, it is also about lighting out for the Territory.

Afterwards, once the hero has penetrated that virgin strand, he will find yet a further use for his invention: it will serve as a certificate of ownership, for the new Territory will probably be "empty" except for "natives". Magically, the barefoot boy with cheek of tan will discover that he has been made CEO of a compliant world; for a a revelatory set of maxims can be discerned fuelling the entrepreneurial engine of the edisonade: the conviction that to fix is to patent: that to exploit is to own - Sci-Fi Encyclopedia's entry on Edisonade

The Edisonade, coined by critic John Clute after the Robinsonade, can be defined simply enough: it is a story in which a young American male invents a form of transportation and uses it to travel to uncivilized parts of America or the world, enriches himself, and punishes the enemies of the United States, whether domestic (Native Americans) or foreign.

The Edisonades were almost entirely an American creation and appeared in dime novels as serials and as complete novels. They were the single largest category of dime novel science fiction and were the direct ancestors not only of 20th century boys’ fiction characters like Tom Swift but also one of the fathers of early 20th century science fiction, especially in the pulps. And the Edisonades were among the most morally reprehensible works of fiction of the 19th century, on a par with the dime novels the Confederacy published to glorify slavery - Jess Nevins's article on Tom Edison Jr

Fun for the whole family!

Granted (and thankfully), Edisonades as a specific genre died down in popularity following the end of dime novel, although you can very easily see how their influence lingered on much of sci-fi as we know it. It makes for a rather interesting coincidence even that, in the turn of the century, as the dime novels and the Edisonades died down in popularity and the pulp magazines proper started to take their place in American culture, the Mad Scientist began to arise in popularity as a stock villain to the point you can make a drinking game out of reading pulp novels where the kind professor with a weird invention turns out to be a cut-throat master villain.

The Mad Scientist as an archetype, which is what Luthor started as, actually seems pretty much non-existant prior to the 1890s (the term seems to have only caught on somewhere after 1893 following the World's Fair Columbian Exposition) and only really started taking shape in the 1900/1910s following the influence of German Expressionism villains and characters like Fu Manchu (far from the first yellow peril mad scientist, but definitely the most popular) and the myriad of pulp villain, even pulp villain magazines, named after some form of "Doctor" (Doctor Death, Doctor Satan, Doctor X, etc)

I'm not particularly fond of Arch-Capitalist Luthor and I'm not gonna be the billionth guy online to talk about the relevance of that take on Luthor, because my preferred take on Luthor is more on the Emperor Scientist / Ubermensch Arch-Asshole, the kind that's not so much a stock villain archetype because he doesn't have to be, because "Lex Luthor" has practically become it's own archetype, you know it when you see it. I would prefer to emphasize a Luthor who's got more in common with pulp sci-fi supervillains who starred in their own stories, but the stories themselves had no delusions about what the characters were. And I think Luthor can make one hell of a protagonist in this regard.

In another place, under different circumstances, this man might have been a Caesar, a Napoleon, a Hitler, or an Archimedes, a Michelangelo, a da Vinci. A Gautama, a Hammurabi, Gandhi. But in this place, at this time, he was more. Superman made him more.

As an artist saw objects as an amalgam of shapes, as a writer looked upon life as a series of incidents from which plots and characters could be constructed, Lex Luthor's mind divided the Universe into a finite number of mathematical units.

The time he had spent in jail so far this year was three months of thirty days each, three weeks, six days, two hours, and sixteen minutes. This included four weeks, one day, and three hours in solitary confinement during which time he could do nothing more useful than count seconds and scrupulously retain his sanity.

There were other super-criminal geniuses in the world; he had met some of them, dealt with them on occasion. They were chairmen of great corporations, grand masters of martial arts disciplines, heads of departments in executive branches of governments, princes, presidents, prelates, and a saint or two. Unlike Luthor, these men and women chose to retain their respectability. They had trouble coping with honesty.

Luthor was not motivated by a desire for money, or power, or beautiful women, or even freedom. In solitary Luthor decided that his motivation was beyond even the love or hate or whatever it was he had for humanity. It was consuming desire for godhood, fired by the unreasonable conviction that such a thing was somehow possible.

He began by being an honest man. He was a criminal and said so. - The Last Son of Krypton, Chapter 12

[tlbodine]

The Horror Genius of Five Nights At Freddy’s

I’ve been playing FNAF: Help Wanted VR on my Oculus Quest lately (a birthday present to myself -- I know I’m late to that party!) and it’s reignited in me my old love of this series. I know Scott Cawthon’s politics aren’t great, but I don’t think there’s any malice in his heart beyond usual Christian conservative nonsense -- and I think he stepped down as graciously and magnanimously as possible when confronted about it. Time will judge Scott Cawthon’s politics, and that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I want to talk about what makes these games so damn special, from a horror, design, and marketing perspective. I think there’s really SO MUCH to be learned from studying these games and the wider influence they’ve had as intellectual property. 

What Is FNAF? 

In case you’ve somehow been living under a rock for the last seven years, Five Nights At Freddy’s (hereafter, FNAF) is a horror franchise spanning 17 games (10 main games + some spinoffs and troll games, we’ll get to that), 27 books, a movie deal, and a couple live-action attractions. 

But before it exploded into that kind of tremendous IP, it started out as a single indie pont-and-click game created entirely by one dude, Scott Cawthon. Cawthon had developed other games in the past without much fame or success, including some Christian children’s entertainment. He was working as a cashier at Dollar General and making games in his spare time -- and most of those games got panned. 

So he tried making something different. 

After being criticized that the characters in one of his children’s games looked like soulless, creepy animatronics, Cawthon had his lightbulb moment and created a horror game centered on....creepy animatronics! 

The rest, as they say, is history. 

The Genius of FNAF’s Horror Elements

In the first FNAF game, you play as a night security guard at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a sort of ersatz Chuck-E-Cheese establishment. The animatronics are on free-roaming mode at night, but you don’t want to let them find you in your security room so you have to watch them move through the building on security camera monitors. If they get too close, you can slam your security room doors closed. But be careful, because this restaurant operates on a shoestring budget, and the power will go off if you keep the doors closed too long or flicker the lights too often. And once the lights go out, you’re helpless against the animatronics in the dark. 

Guiding you through your gameplay is a fellow employee, Phone Guy, who calls you each night with some helpful advice. Phone Guy is voiced by Cawthon himself, and listening to his tapes gives you some hints of the game’s underlying story as well as telling you how to play. A few newspaper clippings and other bits of scrap material help to fill in more details of the story. 

Over the next set of games, the story would be further developed, with each new game introducing new mechanics and variations on the theme -- in one, you don a mask to slip past the notice of animatronics; in another, you have to play sound cues to lure an animatronic away from you. By the fourth game, the setup was changed completely, now featuring a child with a flashlight hiding from the monsters outside his door -- nightmarish versions of the beloved child-friendly mascots. The mechanics change just enough between variations to keep things fresh while maintaining a consistent brand. 

There are so many things these games do well from a storytelling and horror perspective: 

Jump Scares: It’s easy to shrug these games off for relying heavily on jump scares, and they absolutely do have a lot of them. But they’re used strategically. In most games, the jump scares are a punishment (a controlled shock, if you will) -- if you play the game perfectly, you’ll never be jump-scared. This is an important design choice that a lot of other horror games don’t follow. 

Atmospheric Dread: These games absolutely deliver horror and tension through every element of design -- some more than others, admittedly. But a combination of sound cues, the overall texture and aesthetic of the world, the “things move when you’re not looking at them” mechanic, all of it works together to create a feeling of unease and paranoia. 

Paranoia: As in most survival horror games, you’re at a disadvantage. You can’t move or defend yourself, really -- all you can do is watch. And so watch you do. Except it’s a false sense of security, because flicking lights and checking cameras uses up precious resources, putting you at greater risk. So you have to balance your compulsive need to check, double-check, and make sure...with methodical resource conservation. The best way to survive these games is to remain calm and focused. It’s a brilliant design choice. 

Visceral Horror: The monster design of the animatronics is absolutely delightful, and there’s a whole range of them to choose from. The sheer size and weight of the creatures, the way they move and position themselves, their grunginess, the deadness of their eyes, the quantity and prominence of their teeth. They are simultaneously adorable and horrifying. 

Implicit Horror: One of the greatest strengths to FNAF as a franchise is that it never wears its story on its sleeve. Instead of outright telling you what’s going on, the story is delivered in bits and pieces that you have to put together yourself -- creating a puzzle for an engaged player to think about and theorize over and consider long after the game is done. But more than that, the nature of the horror itself is such that it becomes increasingly upsetting the more you think on it. The implications of what’s going on in the game world -- that there are decaying bodies tucked away inside mascots that continue to perform for children, that a man dressed in a costume is luring kids away into a private room to kill them, and so forth -- are the epitome of fridge horror. 

The FNAF lore does admittedly start to become fairly ridiculous and convoluted as the franchise wears on. But even ret-conned material manages to be pretty interesting in its own right (and there is nothing in the world keeping you from playing the first four games, or even the first six, and pretending none of the rest exist). 

Another thing I really appreciate about the FNAF franchise is that it’s quite funny, in a way that complements and underscores the horror rather than detracting from it. It’s something a lot of other properties utterly fail to do. 

The Genius of Scott Cawthon’s Marketing 

OK, so FNAF utilizes a multi-prong attack for creating horror and implements it well -- big deal. Why did it explode into a massive IP sensation when other indie horror games that are just as well-made barely made a blip on the radar? 

Well! That’s where the real genius comes in. This game was built and marketed in a way to maximize its franchisability. 

First, the story utilizes instantly identifiable, simple but effective character designs, and then generates more and more instantly identifiable unique characters with each iteration. Having a wealth of characters and clever, unique designs basically paves the way for merchandise and fan-works. (That they’re anthropomorphic animal designs also probably helped -- because that taps into the furry fandom as well without completely alienating non-furries). 

Speaking of fan-work, Scott Cawthon has always been very supportive of fandom, only taking action when people would try to profit off knock-off games and that sort of thing -- basically bad-faith copies. But as far as I know he’s always been super chill with fan-created content, even going so far as to engage directly with the fandom. Which brings me to....

These games were practically designed for streaming, and he took care to deliver them into the hands of influential streamers. Because the games are heavy on jump-scares and scale in difficulty (even including extra-challenging modes after the core game is beaten) they are extremely fun to watch people play. They’re short enough to be easily finished over the duration of a long stream, and they’re episodic -- lending themselves perfectly to a YouTube Lets Play format. One Night = One Video, and now the streamer has weeks of content from your game (but viewers can jump in at any time without really missing much). 

The games are kid-friendly but also genuinely frightening. Because the most disturbing parts of the game’s lore are hinted at rather than made explicit, younger players can easily engage with the game on a more basic surface level, and others can go as deep into the lore as they feel comfortable. There is no blood and gore and violence or even any explicitly stated death in the main game; all of the murder and death is portrayed obliquely by way of 8-bit mini games and tangential references. Making this game terrifying but accessible to youngsters, and then marketing it directly to younger viewers through popular streamers (and later, merchandising deals) is genius -- because it creates a very broad potential audience, and kids tend to spend 100% of their money (birthdays, allowances, etc.) and are most likely to tell their friends about this super scary game, etc. etc.

By creating a puzzle box of lore, and then interacting directly with the fandom -- dropping hints, trolling, essentially creating an ARG of his own lore through his website, in-game easter eggs, and tie-in materials -- Cawthon created a mystery for fandom to solve. And fans LOVE endlessly speculating over convoluted theories. 

Cawthon released these games FAST. He dropped FNAF 2 within months of the first game’s release, and kept up a pace of 1-2 games a year ever since. This steady output ensured the games never dropped out of public consciousness -- and introducing new puzzle pieces for the lore-hungry fans to pore over helped keep the discussion going. 

I think MatPat and The Game Theorists owe a tremendous amount of their own huge success to this game. I think Markiplier does, too, and other big streamers and YouTubers. It’s been fascinating watching the symbiotic relationship between these games and the people who make content about these games. Obviously that’s true for a lot of fandom -- but FNAF feels so special because it really did start so small. It’s a true rags-to-riches sleeper hit and luck absolutely played a role in its growth, but skill is a big part too. 

Take-Aways For Creatives 

I want to be very clear here: I do not think that every piece of media needs to be “IP,” franchisable, an extended universe, or a multimedia sensation. I think there is plenty to be said for creating art of all types, and sometimes that means a standalone story with a small audience. 

But if you do want a chance at real break-out, run-away success and forging a media empire of your own, I think there are some take-aways to be learned from the success of FNAF: 

Persistence. Scott Cawthon studied animation and game-design in the 1990s and released his first game in 2002. He released a bunch of stuff afterward. None of it stuck. It took 12 years to hit on the winning formula, and then another several years of incredibly hard work to push out more titles and stoke the fires before it really became a sensation. Wherever you’re at on your creative journey, don’t give up. You never know when your next thing will be The Thing that breaks you out. 

If you want to sell a lot of something, you have to make it widely appealing to a bunch of people. This means keeping your concept simple to understand (”security guard wards off creepy killer animatronics at a pizza parlor”) and appealing to as wide a segment of the market as you can (ie, a horror story that appeals to both kids and adults). The more hyper-specific your audience, the harder it’s gonna be to find them and the fewer copies of your thing you’ll be selling. 

Know your shit and put your best work out there. I think there’s an impulse to feel like “well, nobody reads this anyway, so why does it matter if it’s no good” (I certainly have fallen into that on multiple occasions) but that’s the wrong way to think about it. You never know when and where your break will come. Put your best work out there and keep on polishing your craft with better and better stuff because eventually one of those things you chuck out there is going to be The Thing. 

Figure out where your target audience hangs out, and who influences them, and then get your thing in the hands of those influencers. Streaming and YouTube were the secret to FNAF’s success. Maybe yours will be BookTube, or Instagram, or a secret cabal of free librarians. I don’t know. But you should try your best to figure out who would like the thing that you’re making, and then figure out how to reach those people, and put all of your energy into that instead of shotgun-blasting your marketing all willy nilly. 

You don’t have to put the whole story on the page. Audiences love puzzles. Fans love mysteries. You can actually leave a lot more unanswered than you think. There’s some value in keeping secrets and leaving things for others to fill in. Remember -- your art is only partly yours. The sandbox belongs to others to play in, too, and you have to let them do that. 

If in doubt, appealing to furries never hurts. 

Do I take all of this advice myself? Not by a long shot. But it’s definitely a lot to think about. 

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go beat The Curse of Dreadbear. 

[sugarmaplewings-fics]

Not All Treasure is Silver and Gold (Part One)

Pairing: Pirate!Bakugou x mermaid!reader

Warnings: Ehh, this portion is gender neutral but from here on out the reader is referred to as female. This does work as a stand alone story, though. Otherwise no warnings from this one.

{Pt. 1} {Pt. 2} {Pt. 3} {Pt. 4}

Author's Note:

Sooo, I know I said I probably wouldn't have this out for another while, buuuttt, I didn't have anything for today and this one was just staring at me 🥺. I don't quite have a concrete plan for the full thing, and there's no guarantees for when part two is going to come out. Also I might draw something like last time to use as a banner. The one that's down there is a placeholder.

Anyhoo, I hope you enjoy this! I've been wanting to write this story for almost a year now, and I finally have the chance! If you'd like to be part of the taglist for this story, please message me!

I think that's it. Love you!!

-Sugar

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A shadow slid across the ocean floor.

Basking in the warmth of the sun, it truly made for an unwelcome interruption. You'd been partaking in a nap only moments prior, mind slowly shifting through half-baked thoughts as the sun shone down onto the sand beneath you. Prompted by the change of brightness and temperature, you blinked your eyes open, rolling over to your back with a lethargic stretch of your arms. Squinting, you frowned up at the surface rippling a considerable distance above you.

There you saw it, some strange shape making its way over the water above. It seemed to be some kind of brownish color, wide and tapered to a point at each end.

Your annoyance faded as curiosity struck you. You didn’t think you’d ever seen anything like it before. You studied it from your vantage point on the ocean floor even as the sunlight reappeared on your relaxed body. It wasn’t as though you were doing anything important right now, you figured. Maybe it was something worth investigating, at least for a short time.

Rousing yourself from the sand, you flicked your tail to propel yourself up in the direction of the object.

You poked your head out of the water, body bobbing up and down with the motions of the waves. You blinked, bringing a hand out of the water in an attempt to shield your vision from the blinding sun. How did anything live up here? It felt as though your eyes were going to dry up and incinerate to nothing.

There it was, the strange object that had cast such a shadow. It was even bigger above water. Mahogany planks shaped it into that odd form, making it float on the ocean, cutting through waves as though they were nothing. Large masts seemed to sprout up from the center like kelp in a forest, sporting billowing white cloths rippling in the air currents.

Ah, yes, it was a boat, and an impressive one at that. You suddenly remembered seeing the ones just like this that couldn’t float anymore, having swum past the ruined, swollen wood during your time in this part of the sea. They were ominous, sitting still on the ocean floor, carrying a dark, somber aura about them as they laid dead where they’d never move again.

But this ship was every meaning of the word alive, shining in the midday sun and skimming dutifully over the bright blue water. Its size might have looked intimidating, but the thing itself was also very intriguing.

Naturally, you swam closer.

The thing was fast, but luckily, so were you. You dived back down, your powerful tail bringing you a few body lengths up to the submerged bottom of the ship. Popping out of the water again, you looked all the way up its side.

Now that you were closer, you thought you heard something. The sounds were new to you, similar to whalesong. But this was deeper, choppier, and somehow harsher. You frowned in the direction of the noises. What was on this boat?

You circled it underwater—careful not to get too close—coming back up a few times to get another look from a different angle.

You had to admit, it carried an odd beauty about it. Something like this must have been built, but the craftsmanship was so intricate, and it was massive . . . .

You sprung up above water again some ways away from it. Perhaps this thing wasn’t as exciting as you’d initially thought. It was a pain to keep up with and the noises coming from it kept hurting your ears.

Just as you turned to leave, a movement caught your eye. There it was, a flash of gold just at the side of the ship. It looked vaguely . . . familiar.

You went closer again to get a better look, and it was then that you met a pair of golden eyes, looking much like those of your people of the sea.

The figure startled as soon as he saw you, blinking and squinting in your direction. He made more of those strange chattering sounds you’d kept hearing, looking behind him and frantically pointing at you with his outstretched hand.

Rude, you thought, but what was a merman doing all the way up there?

A second head appeared next to the first, this one with vibrant, spiky red hair. You experimentally waved at them in greeting, wondering why you couldn’t understand them. Maybe they were from a different ocean you'd never seen.

They both leaned over the side. It looked like they were trying to communicate something to you, but whatever it was, you didn’t get it.

The red haired one turned and left, but was quick to come back with a weird circular object. It was attached to a rope and had an open circle in the middle, just big enough to put the top third of your body through.

To your mild surprise, he tossed it over the side at you, and it landed with surprising accuracy only a tail length away. You swam over to it, picking it up out of the water. It was oddly light—which probably explained why it floated so easily on the waves—and was made out of some strange material.

You glanced dubiously back up at the faces on the side of the ship. They were looking at you with . . . distress? What was this thing? Was it some kind of gift? What were you supposed to do with it? You couldn’t hold it down under the waves, so how were you supposed to bring it back underwater with you?

Either way, you thought it would be rude to decline. You grabbed the rope that was tied to it. It looked as though they were still holding on to the other end. You really wouldn’t be able to take it anywhere if it was still attached to the ship.

You grabbed the rope and tugged. They held onto it. Frustrated, you tugged again. Looking up at their faces, you matched their expressions of confusion. What were you missing here?

Perhaps they were only trying to show it to you. You decided to follow through with your initial idea of putting it around the upper portion of your body. You lifted it over your head—you fit through it okay, at least—and soon it reached the submerged base of your tail.

You floated there for a second. Was this all it was good for? Kind of useless if you asked yourself. Again, you made up your mind to leave. You had better things to do than play silly games with the weirdos in the sky.

Before you could slip back out under the object, you felt yourself being pulled closer to the boat. Now what were they doing?

You frowned up the side again, but this time you couldn’t really see them. They must have stepped back further onto the boat. Intrigued, you let them pull you along with them. You got closer and closer to the side, and finally the rope connecting you to the other end slanted completely vertical. You adjusted yourself so you wouldn’t slide out. Perhaps they were trying to bring you up so they could meet you. You weren’t sure what they’d gain by that, seeing as you couldn’t understand them. Heck, they probably wouldn’t be able to understand you either. But you were still curious. What did the boat look like from up there? It wasn’t all that interesting from the underside, but maybe if you were able to see it from the top . . . .

The two strangers began to haul you out of the water. It was a little scary, you had to admit. Slowly, your body was extracted from the water. Waves slapped against your tail ever lower, and eventually you were fully suspended in midair. You clung tightly to the rope. Glancing back at the sea below, you realized it was a long way down, and the higher you went, the less you were comfortable with the idea of falling.

You'd never been all the way out of the water like this, and it almost felt as though you were flying like those seabirds you'd see living on islands. Except this wasn't as fun. You were meant to swim in the water, not get dragged through the air.

Finally you saw the rim of the ship, and you picked up on the grunting and labored breaths from the two weirdlings you’d seen earlier. You reached up and grabbed onto the side, hoisting your body up. Then you saw them.

These weren’t quite the mermen you were used to. The things that were pulling you up had legs.

You stared at them for a moment, watching fascinated as they walked towards you. Tearing your eyes away from their tailless, split bodies, you glanced back at their faces. Why did they look so concerned? Did they always look like that?

The blond one was the first to reach you. He was quick to grab your hand to help you over the railing, chattering something at you. You let him pull your body up a little higher, and then he froze. To your surprise, he let go of your hand, dropping your bodyweight and causing you to pitch forward. You slid gracelessly to the dry floor of the ship like some kind of overgrown eel, fins and tail meeting the floor of the boat with a wet thud.

You spluttered, annoyed, curling your scaled appendage closer into yourself. “What is this?!” you finally asked.

The blond one had run back to the redhead, pointing frantically and clearly panicked. The red haired one also looked shaken, but otherwise seemed somewhat more collected as he studied you.

“Whatever,” you mumbled, sliding the flotation object off of yourself. “I don’t want this thing anyway.”

You glanced around, taking in the ship up close. It was pretty cool, but in hindsight, it probably wasn’t worth the whole fiasco you’d gone through to get here. The floor was mostly bare, give or take a few stacked boxes here and there. You recognized a net hanging from a pole, one of which you’d seen countless before. Was this where they came from?

“Those things are dangerous,” you said, pointing at it. “I’ve had to cut a lot of animals out of them.”

It was then that the red haired one stepped closer to you. You drew back just a bit, suspicious.

Examining him, you took in the mismatched rings that adorned his ears, and the billowy off-white covering he wore over his chest. The front was open, exposing the tanned skin of his torso. Darker brown fabric covered his lower half, tucked into clunky coverings at the very bottom. Another strip of cloth was tied around his head, making his vibrant hair stick up in odd directions.

He crouched down so you wouldn’t have to crane your neck up to look at him. He tried to say something to you again, but this time his voice wasn’t so loud. It was still foreign to your ears, but it was low and smooth.

You gave him an apologetic expression. “Listen,” you said. “This was fun and all, but I should probably get going.”

You turned and tried to slide yourself closer to the side you’d come from. Much to your annoyance, your tail hindered your movements. You were used to the grace of the water, but now you felt heavy and clunky. Scowling, you tried to pull yourself to the railing with your arms, but nothing was cooperating with you. The boat swayed with the motion of the waves down below, and as soon as you figured you’d made progress, you’d have to fight even harder against the force pulling you back.

You felt something touch your tail, and you whipped around with a threatening hiss, baring your teeth. It was the redhead again, and apparently he’d been the first to notice the rope that had gotten tangled around the fins and scales of your tail. Maybe he was trying to help, but he was touching your tail. You could do it yourself.

Jerking the lower portion of your appendage, you were able to smack him away with your fins. Feelings hurt, he stepped back.

You grabbed at the rope, cursing the fact that you’d ever gotten up from your nap in the first place as you struggled to untangle yourself from the device that had brought you up here. You wondered how you had gotten stuck so bad as you tugged at the coarse material. Seriously, you were so done with this today. You vowed to never go up to another boat again in your life if you could only get off this one—

And then you saw him.

The blond must have left a while ago but now you saw who he’d come back with. It was another being like the other two. He was blond like the first one, but his hair was shorter, spikier, and reminded you of the pale yellow of the sun. He was bigger than the other blond, but smaller than the redhead. You didn’t think you’d ever seen a face so handsome, even among the mermen back where you lived. He bore a scowl on his face, similar to the one you’d been sporting seconds earlier. Strength and authority rolled off him in waves, not only in the way he carried himself but also in the respect he garnered from the others around him.

He was tall, he was hot, and now you were just staring.

The sexy weirdling grumbled something, and you honestly weren’t sure to whom it was intended for until he stepped forward. You were slower to pull away as he approached, almost drawn to him in a strange way.

He knelt in front of you, pulling out a sharp object from a hidden pouch on his hip. Your heart fluttered in momentary fear as he brought it closer to your tail, but soon you saw the way he reached for the rope. Without scarcely touching your scales, he pulled on the material and sliced through it, cutting you free in a few fluid motions. You were caught up in watching him work, silently in awe as his rough hands delicately moved over your body.

Soon, you were able to move again, but before you could, he straightened and lifted your body from the floor. You gasped, clutching at his broad shoulders as you were once again suspended in midair. But this time you felt secure; his arms supporting the weight of your body. He met your eyes for a split second, and you became lost in the pools of orangey-red. They were deep, and bright, and you felt as though you could gaze into them forever.

Then you were hauled above the railing and tossed over the side.

Weightless, you fell back to the sea from which you came. It was surreal, watching his pale face grow smaller and smaller as wind rushed around you and gravity pulled you further away.

No, you thought, still in a daze. You wanted to stay with him, to keep looking at him, to know his name—

But all too quick, your back hit the cold water of the sea, skin stinging from the impact. With an impressive splash, you sank down again to the place you called home.

You didn’t know how to feel now, watching from below as the ship surged on without you. You were astonished and confused, lost and frozen in the deep blue world that surrounded you.

It was then that you vowed to see him again, no matter what.

You were warm—a little giddy—and you were determined.

You were in love.

…

To be continued . . . .

[Part Two]

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