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apparitionism · 1 year ago

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Tabled 6

“Change the vocabulary!” Myka has just exclaimed in a hotel room in an airport in Chicago, in a full-throated effort to bring Helena around to her newly realized way of thinking, here in this story occasioned by @barbarawar ’s months-ago @b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange request regarding what would have happened if Myka and Helena had had their Boone-proposed coffee. Much has ensued since then: meetings poor and poorer, rendering hopes faint and fainter, leaving potentials squandered and... squandereder? Seeing to it that emotional moves make sense is always challenging, I find. People want to make sense to themselves, want to make sense of themselves, and someone as thinky as Myka would, I imagine, double-want that. But while we all contain multitudes, we tend to bumble through situations as unfull representations of those multitudes: weird gotta-keep-moving sharks desperate to present consistency. I too keep moving: trying to land this thing, even as it fights against the stick, remaining *this far* above ground. Apologies as always, my strung-along giftee. See part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5 for the convoluted way we got here.

Tabled 6

“What?” Helena says, but it’s not her usual “what”; she’s obviously flummoxed, and her echo of Myka’s characteristic bafflement is precious. Preposterous, but precious.

Myka had hoped for some spark of recognition at her transformation of “change the rules,” but the confusion... it might be better. Sweeter. She tries not to make too much meaning out of this chime of similarity, even as she wants to pull that soft, bewildered “what” from the air and cradle it.

“I was trying to be clever,” she says. “Never mind that. And never mind fixing it, because we can do something else.”

“Repair it?” Helena says: a cautious, skeptical—and, yes, still baffled—synonym proffer.

Don’t laugh, Myka instructs herself, but faced with the idea that Helena really might think they’re playing a word game, it’s hard to follow her own order. “Never mind that too,” she says, a chuckle bubbling in her throat. “Because never mind. Because that’s it. Because you know what we actually can do?”

Helena raises her hands up, high, obviously in question, but really for all the world as if she were indeed being held at gunpoint.

This is not ending as it began, Myka tells the universe. Not as it began, or any other way.

She chambers the only bullet she has, aiming it right at Helena’s heart.

She pulls the trigger with a smile: “Ignore it.”

Hands still high, Helena opens her mouth slightly, and she squints, as if Myka has morphed into a dangerously unidentifiable animal.

Yes, Myka thinks, wildly, trying to live up to that wariness, I’ve been genetically engineered right here in this island of a hotel room! A Warehouse agent crossed with a yawper who has her very own plans! Amorphous ones, but! This infusion of abandon—Moreau power?—gives her the strength to hold Helena’s gaze.

The standoff lasts until Helena gets her language working again. “That recommendation is... entirely specious,” she says. “And you sound uncharacteristically overwrought.”

It’s a wobbly pair of objections. Myka draws even more strength from Helena’s lack of conviction. “What if it is? What if I am?”

“I don’t believe the slate can be wiped clean,” Helena says, a little more firmly. “Nor do you.”

So you do think we know each other. “I’m not saying it can. I’m saying I know it’s dirty, and so do you. I’m saying we ignore it.”

Helena’s face, from her “what” until now, has been a study in something Myka honestly never expected to see from her: full (fully wrong-footed) incomprehension. Myka doesn’t blame her, for she’s finding herself pretty incomprehensible, but she presses on. “You were ready to ignore my Boone-changed opinion of you. Weren’t you. When you hoped I’d know I was the someone else.”

After a pause: “That was then,” Helena says, her resentment at Myka for having worked her way to that truth—and for having articulated it—very clear.

“Oh, not anymore?” Myka pushes. “Even though now we both know I was that someone, and that there wasn’t a Giselle?”

“That was then,” Helena repeats.

Wait... “There’s a Giselle now?” Myka can’t process it, if it’s so. If it’s so, she will have to let Helena leave, then bury her face in one of the expensive pillows from this room’s unignorable bed and scream.

Another head-toss, the most dramatic one thus far, accompanies Helena’s next words. “I’m of a mind to say yes. But pursuant to my previously articulated policy, I’ll tell the truth: there isn’t, but there could be. In the future. I agreed to meet with you today to ensure you wouldn’t mistake yourself over Pete, but I have no intention of stepping into a similarly mistaken place. I’ve done my best to let this go.”

Myka can’t accept any of those words. “Ignore that too,” she says. She would like to point out that that whole litany was pretty rich, coming from Ms. To-Continue-to-Speak-Together, but instead she zeroes in on what seems the clearest contradiction. “But if you’re letting this go, why do you care about me mistaking myself over Pete?”

“Why did you care about me mistaking myself in Boone?” Helena counters, sour.

The response is uncharacteristically incompetent, particularly because Helena already knows the answer. “I could repeat something somebody once told me, about not walking away from what she called ‘your truth,’” Myka says, with what she hopes is a “that was then” fillip. “But I won’t. What I’ll really say is, I asked you first.” She allows herself a half-breath to marvel at how unusual it is for her to have this much of the upper hand.

“I could say the same thing.” Helena is visibly struggling not to acknowledge Myka’s advantage, but she collapses, saying, “The former, not the latter. I didn’t ask you first,” her devotion to accuracy (or so Myka reads it) defeating her. “Nevertheless I could repeat the something somebody once told you. As the why.”

Myka continues to press. “But isn’t repetition boring? You hate being boring.” She hopes this observation might visit upon Helena that kick of so we do know each other: “I bet you threw your coffee on me just so I wouldn’t walk away thinking how dull you’d been.”

“That was not the reason,” Helena says, but with a press of lips that suggests a ripple of otherwise.

Here, Myka shouldn’t press. “Then what was the reason.”

“You were being recalcitrant, and you know it,” Helena says.

“And what are you being now?” Myka asks, as laconically—as lean-back, as Helena-esque—as she can.

That question causes Helena to scowl and move energy into her hands, extending and then bending her fingers; though she doesn’t quite form them into fists, her intent is clear: she wants to deck Myka. It’s glorious. Please, do it, Myka urges internally, so we can get this all out in the physical open.

But Helena resets her face and waves her hands, the flutter of fingers dispelling the energy and its threat. “Realistic,” she says, prim.

Quit acting like me, Myka would tell her, but for the fallout. What she says is, “I wish I still had this coffee,” pointing at the table, the tragic cup-ceremony of which probably now deserves replaying as farce. Or was it farce the first time? No surprise, really, that they would skip-jump their way over the natural course of history.

“Yes, because stains solve problems,” Helena sarcastics.

Maybe; maybe not. Nevertheless, Myka says what’s true: “You seemed to think they would. And anyway, they redound to your benefit.” Helena greets this with a completely reasonable additional “what,” but Myka blows past it with, “Maybe because you ignore them? Anyway, this one here”—she gestures to the now-dry coffee-map on her shirt (it looks like no country, and she’s disappointed to be unable to name it as “this Brazil” or “this Azerbaijan”)—“kept me from walking away when you thought I shouldn’t.”

“A delaying tactic,” Helena says, offering only bored disdain, as if the very idea of it had been in the end inconsequential.

Keep pushing. “How long was that delay supposed to last, anyway?”

Helena doesn’t have an answer; Myka knows it because she begins to pace. She starts, of course, at the doorway, then walks past the bed, over to the window, and back again: bed then doorway, doorway then bed, bed then window, back and forth—six times, Myka counts—before she leans her back against the door, crosses her arms over her chest, and says, “Why are you tempting me this way? Why this way? What’s changed? In this room, in the few breaths since resignation and coffee, what’s changed?” It’s a fret.

“Well, what’s changed for you?” Myka asks, with no fret at all for once in her life. “More breaths since, but why did authority let you out of Boone-prison?”

Helena’s face produces an inscrutable scowl-smile hybrid. She thrusts herself away from the door, walks to the bed, rubs her hands together. Re-gathering energy? “I suppose I could offer a long-winded explanation about having been given to understand that the balance of safety and threat had shifted. But instead, to quote: ‘What I’ll really say is, I asked you first.’”

“Well played,” Myka admits. In return, she’s gifted with the little acknowledging bow of head she loves. (Loves—yes.) It draws her physically closer, that head-bow: only a few shuffling inches, but enough that she can answer, more quietly, “What’s changed is I saw a future. And I saw how much I’m willing to ignore to have it.”

“I do not understand your morality,” Helena says. This time, she sounds a note of wonder rather than censure.

So much recursion in what they say, think, feel, do—once, then back again, and then again. Maybe they’re bound to get something right, if they try everything over and over? This particular repetition-with-variation seems a little better than usual, tragedy repeated not as farce but as fairy tale... or, no: Warehouse tale. Because for better or worse, there’s no escaping the Warehouse, the curse but also blessing of wonder. She and Helena are here together today only because of the Warehouse—that necessary condition of their meeting and connection.

Myka could dilate forever upon fate and purpose, but “ignore it” must be her mantra now, her grounding principle. For better or worse... for better and worse. The true moral of any Warehouse tale.

“I don’t understand anybody’s morality,” she says, “especially not mine or yours. I’m not trying to. I’m ignoring that too.”

But what she can’t ignore—not now, not anymore—is the way in which their bodies have, so gradually, continued to near, with Helena slowly mirroring Myka’s movements, these little distance-closing developments. So small is the gap between them now, the displacement it would take to touch surely must be measured by time, not distance.

And yet she hesitates, for this raise of hand must speak correctly: not want, but offer.

Slow. Stretch that time, turn it back into space.

She does that, moving as slowly as she can. More slowly than she ever has.

Helena doesn’t retreat.

Minimalist increments... yet their yield is immense: Myka’s right hand meets Helena’s left, and their fingers link and twist, palms not pressed but near.

It is their first genuinely mutual touch since Boone.

“I will be blunt,” Helena says, soft, burred by the contact. “I need you to... just say.”

Blunt. This knife of request—indeed unsharp—meets Myka’s fears, at first bending against them, yet still bearing threat. The force of it makes her glance away, and again she’s drawn to the clock. All she can find to articulate is, “I missed my flight.”

It could have been a way of saying, but Myka didn’t mean it like that, and Helena knows it: she raises an eyebrow. The leavening takes away the knife, and it gives Myka leave to lighten too, to postulate, “Maybe we’re constitutionally incapable. Of the saying. Or maybe it’s just me? Okay, not maybe—probably. Is that a dealbreaker?”

Now Helena cocks her head, completing the gesture with a lifting twist of chin. It calls of early, early: Helena handcuffed in a chair, Myka foolishly imagining she knew how all the ensuing moments would go—then being flung up to meet the ceiling.

The book would have known that would happen, but Myka didn’t. Hasn’t. Flights, crashes. Over and over, each as unpredictable as every other. Which will Helena choose to inflict now?

“Have we agreed to a deal?” Helena asks. The question isn’t coy. “Ignoring may be a way forward, but historically, you do seem to presuppose the existence of agreements that you fail to inform me I’m a party to. That you then accuse me of violating.”

So: an objection, but one grounded in their shared history. A flight and a crash. “That is an uncomfortably accurate description of what I do,” Myka admits. “Let me start again. I missed my flight. Did you?”

“Miss your flight? Yes.” More leavening: unfunny joking, words for the sake of them. To continue to speak together... of course this has been what Myka wished too. Of course she would listen to Helena saying words about anything.

Not anything, her Boone-and-Giselle-haunted memory reminds her...

“But that was not the issue under discussion,” Helena continues. A providential interruption.

“Right. Dealbreaker. Saying. Inability.” Why are you vamping? What is the impediment? The answer is immediate: You are the impediment. “Change the vocabulary” was a nice idea, but one word was never going to be enough. “Look,” she begins, determined now to do better, “I—”

Helena tightens her fingers’ grasp against Myka’s. It’s a very different way of getting things out in the physical open. “Wanting you warps all I do,” she whispers. The words, the grasp: both are saying. Out in the open.

More even than the oh-so-welcome grasp, the words mean everything to Myka. And their meaning is itself everything—everything that matters—so she steals them and says them back: “Wanting you warps all I do.” It’s mind-clearingly correct. The relief of at last having an accurate description of the past half-decade: it hits her like that slug she’d perversely hoped Helena might deliver.

But having used Helena’s words, however perfect, while coming up with none of her own pains her, so she feels she has to modify, “Warps. And warped, but not in any of the ways that might have helped. I can’t apologize enough for how I got it all so wrong.”

Helena’s tilt of head gentles. Her chin drops. “Someone has recently recommended, rather eloquently, ignoring such things.” She smiles. “You are terrible at following your own prescription.”

Helpless to object, Myka says, “That can’t come as a surprise.”

“A surprise? No. Perhaps an obstacle.”

“Would you... surmount it?”

Helena says, “For you...”

Myka fears she hears a lift of question. “That’s what I meant. Would you?”

“As stated: for you.”

The certainty is... transporting. Nevertheless, “I don’t know how this will work,” Myka admits. “If this will work.”

“Nor do I,” Helena says, yet her admission is a balm.

So much remains to be negotiated. So fragile this semi-resolution between their hands.

Then: “I’m so tired,” Helena says, actual rather than despondent, and Myka is ready to agree that yes, she is tired too, that everything that’s taken place in this room has taxed her to her limits, but Helena follows that admission with, “Will you lie down with me?”

Myka tenses. Her immediate, insistent bodily approval of the idea jangles against her just-as-immediate worry over where such a request—and such approval—might lead.

No doubt feeling that stiffening via their still-joined hands, Helena says, “For rest. Rest, in privacy, and nothing more.”

Myka believes her. She doesn’t trust herself, for her self is a serial liar with terrible impulse control, but she believes Helena.

Who is also a serial liar, one with similarly terrible impulse control, but saying “no” to this person who has so lately spoken of want and warp, this person whose hands continue to grip hers, is not an option.

Thus in a hotel room in an airport in Chicago, Myka lies down on a bed, and Helena lies beside her. They shift their bodies awkwardly, then less so, as they find a fit: Myka on her back, Helena on Myka’s left side, curled like punctuation around everything they’ve suffered.

From a position moments ago unimaginable, Myka finds room to ask, “What are you doing?”

“What? Nothing,” Helena says, as if Myka has made an accusation. She stills the slight, slight stroke her fingers have begun to apply to Myka’s hair.

More unfunny comedy. “I don’t mean with your hand. I mean, every day. In your life.”

“Oh,” Helena says. The stroke resumes. “Waiting.”

“You said you hadn’t stopped living.”

“That is not what I said.”

“If you could press pause on the semantics.” It’s true that Myka could—should—quote with greater accuracy, given that she knows exactly what Helena said. But Helena knows that Myka knows exactly what Helena said, and while continuing to speak together is the weirdly frustrating joy it is, they should really try to get somewhere.

Helena sighs; the sound contains a put-upon “fine.” She says, “I pretend to have expertise in several areas, including forensic analysis, for which pretensions I’m paid absurd amounts of money.”

“Ends before means?” Myka asks, a tiny joke.

“My own fabulism is unsurpassed.”

That’s probably a joke too, but thinking back on her own vast course of lies, Myka finds it important to counterclaim, “I’m not sure that’s true.”

“Does competition truly matter at this late date? A win in this category is dubious—sinful, even—but today I’m inclined to concede your victory in anything you like.”

So she understood Myka was talking about herself; is that pleasing or disturbing? In any case, Myka does know the concession as a surprise: “You are?”

“Today. For here we are, at rest. Salvaged. By you.”

“But only because you wrecked my shirt,” Myka reminds her.

They’ve been wrecked, over and over, with stained shirts only the most recent, small detritus. Yet here they are, salvaged, washed up on some unfamiliar shore... this island of a hotel room: no Moreau; instead, uncharted.

Would that it were an island, one they could make their home.

“Only because,” Helena echoes. “Only because you were being recalcitrant... but we can’t carry such recursion back ab ovo.”

“Or we can,” Myka says with a hiccupy laugh, momentarily captured by the possibility, seeing it as a burrowing-in, a we-got-here-and-this-is-how affirmation.

“This from the woman whose mantra would be ‘ignore it’?”

“Game show,” Myka goes on, the laugh persisting; there’s no escaping the beautiful fact—she might have imagined it would be true but now it’s a fact—that lying with Helena wrapped around her makes her giddy. “Whoever buzzes in with the preceding turning point the fastest gets...”

“What?”

“I was about to say ‘a point,’ but that sounds weird. A point for a point?”

Helena’s cheek flexes against Myka’s, in what Myka suspects is her I-don’t-quite-understand squint. “A point for a point... surely that should be the name of the program? But I’m not conversant with game shows.”

“You are a little. Whammies.”

Another flex of cheek. “The current argot for being affected by an artifact?”

She’s right. But. “It’s from a game show. The coinage... it’s Pete’s.” Myka wishes she could have forever avoided introducing him into the conversation, the room, the problem. But in the end this hotel room isn’t an island.

Helena nods. The movement is an acknowledgement of what Myka has done—but it’s also yet another blessed slide of her skin against Myka’s. “What will you tell him?” Helena asks, and Myka can face the question only sideways, through the warmth of the slide.

Lying in bed is unquestionably better than sitting at a table. Myka nevertheless feels an incipient lie forming, a dodge to push off difficulty: I don’t know, she could tell Helena, and maybe that lie of omission would suffice, here as they lie in a comfort Myka has already disturbed more than enough.

However. The truth is she’ll tell him whatever she has to, to get herself free. To make him let go. So that’s what she says to Helena: “Whatever it takes.”

To her shock, the out-loud saying wallops her with a vision of a still different future, one stark and Warehouse-less. The view is empty: of purpose, of feeling. A disaster. “What happens if I burn it all down?” she asks. Her heartbeat speeds; her blood floods fearful.

“As you should have in Boone?” Helena responds, with acid; then, “Sorry. Momentarily failed to follow the ‘ignore’ prescription myself.” She raises herself on an elbow and looks down at Myka. It’s a new, breathtaking view, one that Myka feels her prior lack of as acute deprivation.

Into that negative space, Helena says, “If you burn it all down, then you and I will rise from the ashes.”

Every word is clear as still water.

Purpose: Myka and Helena, rising. Not empty of feeling; rather, replete. That reward would elevate.

“Is that what you want?” Helena asks. “To burn it down?”

“Yes.” Myka can say it; it’s true, if the rise is the result. And yet she can’t uncommit her professional self so easily and entirely. “But also no. And I have to tell him something.”

“‘Ignore’ is a powerful word,” Helena observes.

“I don’t think that will work,” Myka says, for she can hear his escalating “but why” iterations as clearly as if she were herself the Ladies’ Oracle of the uncanny book. “I’ll have to explain. That I was wrong?” she tries, but that’s too small. “That I’m always wrong and he should have known that?”

“Really? Then you must be wrong about me as well.”

“Don’t use my overgeneralizing words against me,” Myka says. She touches Helena’s temple, intending it as a rebuke.

It lands instead as a caress, against which Helena leans and nestles. “Aren’t I using them against me?” she asks, low and amused.

Myka says, because she can’t not, because the words are desperate to be said, “This. I want this.” Joking, disputing, speaking, bodies together (and so much more of bodies together): all of this.

“Me using your words against myself? I see why you would.” Helena smiles against Myka’s neck, then raises herself up again, her expression changing over. “But thank you. For saying.” She follows this by reclining, nestling closer still.

The words, and the movement, are warming, but leaning all the way in would lead down a path too tantalizing. “You’re welcome,” Myka says, but she follows it with, “When we leave this room. What will you do?” she asks, because this is something she doesn’t know but might now learn, no book required. Just a Helena.

But there’s no “just” about Helena, and particularly not when she’s gazing up at Myka, sweet yet flinty, and that look tempers her answer. “Wait,” she says, differently than she said “waiting”; now the task rings of burden and freedom both. Waiting for something, rather than waiting, without predicate.

However, that predicate: Myka is the one who must act. “I’m sorry,” she says.

“I’m accustomed.”

The little shrug of resignation that accompanies those words: Myka feels it small against her shoulder, but its implications make it seem a larger shudder. Helena has waited through so much—decades of punishments, and Myka should not make her suffer anything even vaguely similar. She’s about to say “I’ll hurry,” even with no idea of what that would look like, but she’s preempted by Helena saying, into her ear, “But please hurry.” A breath of telepathic direction.

So. Now she must.

Yet that direction requires changing not the rules, nor even the vocabulary, but the speed with which the future is ushered near. It’s a daunting prospect.

Daunting but necessary, if Myka is to blunder satisfactorily. “I will,” she says. But what is necessary isn’t sufficient, not if the goal is to bring about the truly desired future. “Once I’ve done... that. What comes next?”

Helena shifts her position again, un-nestling herself from Myka’s neck, her head still on the bed but reared back a bit, looking up, and Myka tilts her head to look down. She’s often had to angle down, just that bit, to look into Helena’s eyes, but this prone person is a dramatically differently enjoyable inflection of the standing version.

As she appreciates the view, she receives Helena’s answer: “You should text me.”

So strange to hear that voice say that sentence. But relief dizzies Myka, even as she’s reclining and looking, for she realizes it’s just strange; Helena saying it doesn’t make her seem a stranger.

“And then we should meet for coffee,” Helena adds—lightly, but not throwaway.

“Or save the world?” Myka says, trying for the besting echo. Trying to overwrite the words said in Boone.

“And save the world,” Helena says. “Our world.”

The modified callback is pointed and just right; it overrides both Boone and Myka’s attempt. Myka shakes her head and says, “I’m no match for you.”

“Counterpoint: you are the match for me.”

How can it be true that Helena is saying these words? Ever, but more so here, on this day, the one Myka intended to end with the end, this day, that is instead ending with a beginning.

Not enough of a beginning, though, and Myka wants to make that clear—that, and her regret at its clear, clear, clear, yet absolutely necessary insufficiency. She says, “I want to kiss you more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life.” Helena doesn’t move; she has to know what’s coming next, and Myka delivers it: “But I can’t.”

Helena sighs. “I do not understand your morality.”

Third time the charm—the Helena-knows-it charm.

She might as well know it, because who is Myka, really, to recognize and hold to some bright line? But to start now would entail a foundational lie—“I’m free”—one that would infect all that came after.

You could ignore that too...

Animals, animals. Of course they would advocate for the body getting what it wants, regardless of consequences.

But the dismissal of obligation, though it might seem easy now, can’t help but make realizing the future more strenuous. Myka should not increase the burden. Thus in the end, despite the pain of want, she has to get herself out from under the bodily lie she so desperately and foolishly told—she has to do that before she can give herself leave to know the bodily truth. It may be just as desperate and foolish, if differently so, but she wants, wants, wants to know it.

“Like I said, I don’t either,” she says, to ward off, for what she hopes will this time not seem forever, Helena’s charm. So as to think herself as far away as possible from the basic physical reality that a tiny turn of her head could “accidentally” join their lips, she turns the opposite way and tells the ceiling, “I have to rebook my flights now.”

“To set the future in motion,” Helena says. Agreement, but aggrieved.

Myka smiles at both of those, allowing herself a minimal turn back toward Helena. She’s a far better sight than the ceiling. “You do know something about that.”

Helena breathes out, probably in more-aggrieved affirmation, and she makes no move to sit up. Is it possible to be aggressively still?

Helena’s answer is an impressive yes.

Myka allows herself a dispensation, as she did when she watched Helena approach in the airport, so many hours ago: twenty more breaths before she takes the get-up initiative, as Helena very clearly intends to force her to do. So she breathes. Very. Very. Slowly. Inhale: beat... beat... for as many beats as she can manage. Hold, for the same: an the number is not small. Exhale again as many, then again, hold. That’s one. Inhale. Hold. Exhale. Hold. Two.

Eighteen more of these with Helena warm against her; it isn’t how she ever imagined heaven, or its earthly approximation, but here it is.

For now.

Right as she reaches inhale thirteen: “Are you asleep?” Helena whispers.

“Sssh. I’m counting.”

Helena doesn’t ask “what.” She stays still, now solid and present only, until Myka reaches the pause after her twentieth exhale.

Disengagement is difficult.

After, they busy themselves with phones and booking. Myka situates herself at the desk, while Helena reclines on the bed: these stations they might have taken if they had done nothing but inhabit this room as travelers, travelers now bored before departing.

Helena finishes before Myka does, at which point her reclining becomes reclining, a grandiose occupying of space. A new Helena aspect, and Myka would never have seen it, never if not for salvage, wrecking, recalcitrance... back and back and back. How they got here.

“I don’t want to leave,” she tells that new grandiosity.

Helena stretches, arms up then sweeping wide, as if making a snow angel. Then she props herself up on her elbows. She moves both her hands, a finger-flutter suggesting that whatever statement she about to issue is obvious. And it is: “Then we’ll stay forever.”

For a brief counterfactual burst of cosmology, Myka believes they could. But this time Helena is the one to rise and dismiss the possibility, although she does it with still more ostentation: “And yet this room is entirely inappropriate as anyone’s final resting place.”

Myka loves every muscled, meaningful emphasis. From inside that love, she pities her earlier-today self, the one who thought she could have lived without the continued possibility of this.

Well. She could have lived. But it wouldn’t have been living.

For all their need to speak together, their final minutes in the room are silent, as if refraining from using that small duration of their privacy to the purpose they set, they might be able to bank it. Against some unprivate, nonspeaking future.

As they reenter the unprivate hallway and head toward the far greater unprivate spaces of transit, Myka says, “That coffee was expensive.”

“Worth every penny.” The and you know it is inescapable.

Inescapable and true.

Helena’s flight is scheduled to leave well before (the first of) Myka’s is—New York is so much easier to reach than anyplace named Dakota.

“Not The Dakota,” Helena says when Myka shares this gloomy observation with her, as they wait for the tram to the terminals.

Myka doesn’t know whether to groan or congratulate her on the reference. She settles for a sincere “Touché,” then asks, “Should I come to your gate with you? To... sit?” She’s thinking on sitting together. Sitting together. What people see when they look.

“Should you?” Helena asks back, with an eyebrow.

“No,” Myka has to concede. “I’d want to kiss you goodbye.”

“Anyone looking would expect you to kiss me, and/or me to kiss you. Goodbye or otherwise. But you’ve made it clear that isn’t in the offing until we can fulfill everyone’s expectations.”

“Everyone’s?”

“Ours and those of fortunate observers.”

“Of course you’d think they’re fortunate,” Myka says; she hears and feels affection—distinct from want—in her voice. Affection has been gone for so long between them... she welcomes its old-friend tenderness, gently yet insistently shouldering its way through all that must be ignored.

More eyebrow, differently inflected. “Of course they are fortunate. You underestimate our beauty but, more significantly, your own.”

Such a compliment is unassimilable right now, so Myka counters with, “But not yours. I don’t underestimate yours.”

Helena leans backward. “Your saying such things is why you should not come with me to my gate,” she says, and Myka reads the lean as speaking commensurately about what is unassimilable. “Because I want you to come with me,” Helena goes on, to Myka’s delight, “and then to board the flight with me.”

“Burning it all down,” Myka notes.

“Which you don’t want to do,” Helena notes back.

“But I will if I have to.”

Helena now offers a wrinkle of brow. “There is almost always a better way. You showed me that.”

The wrinkle doesn’t belong, so Myka tries to smooth it by saying, with a lightness, “You were going to freeze it all down. Totally different.”

“In any event the way found then was better... and, I must say, better than shooting you in the head.” Helena says this dry, joking back, yet also a little stunned, probably at the idea that Myka would joke in the first place.

Myka answers that surprise with, “I’m pretty happy you thought so.”

Helena doesn’t move, but she says—tight, as if dampening some vibration—“Your understatement is rhetorically effective. In that I now want to kiss you more than I ever thought I could again be capable of wanting.”

This should be simple. Grab her right now and never let her go. But nothing is as simple as it should be, so Myka says, “I’ll bear that understatement thing in mind.”

“I suspect I’m weak for a wide array of rhetorical techniques. When deployed by you.”

The bubbling of possibility is... irresistible. “I’ll make a study,” Myka says, exerting great effort to keep herself under control. “Maybe litotes next.”

“Not ineffective, you may find.”

They are tuned tight to each other now. In public, but speaking privately. If they can keep this alignment... they’ve had it before, lost it, got it back. Myka lets herself dissolve into one final dispensation: the blissful idea that they will always get it back.

Are there any words to describe what she is, other than “in love”? If so, she doesn’t want to know them.

She also doesn’t want to watch Helena walk away. She’s mourned such walks too often. So they clasp hands one more time, then let go; Helena turns away, and Myka, after enjoying the movement of Helena’s hair the turn occasions—that swirl of fluid promise—does too.

****

At the Sioux Falls airport—which Myka, hating its provincial familiarity, always greets with an internal but why do I have to know this place whine—she wants nothing more than to roll off the plane and into the car she’d parked in the absurdly small lot so many hours or days ago, thence rolling on to the B&B and into some state that might, if she’s lucky, resemble sleep.

What she wants is not what she gets.

Mrs. Frederic is standing by the security exit.

TBC

#bering and wells #Warehouse 13 #fanfic #Tabled #B&W holiday gift exchange #part 6 #barbarawar #I tried so hard to make it end here #but no dice #I can't apologize enough for getting tangled in the complications #(it occurs to me that maybe there's an artifact in that hotel room making it all so wordy)#(okay not really)#(but this thing might've worked better if M and H had had to deal with a coffeemaker that brewed up a djinn or something instead)#(could've sent the story into territory too unserious though)#(which seems like it would have been cheaty)

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tuliptiger · 10 months ago

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If you LIKE TOTK that's fine I don't need to tell you that, you don't need me to tell you that. I don't care or mind if people like things I don't but I also know sometimes it's hard to see people giving criticism towards things you like. I digress.

As a fan of BOTW, having experienced it first, I will say it's obviously impacted how I view TOTK. If TOTK came out with no history of BOTW it might have been a different story I honestly don't know. There are a lot of things I like about TOTK but they're mostly flavor and don't actually like matter ie they could've not existed in favor of major changes to make TOTK and BOTW more cohesive.

Things I like about TOTK:

-More unique horses, upgrading horses, more horse colors

-More enemies and a variety of enemies.

-More outfits for Link. Super fun and super creative on these ones. Love em!

-The IDEA, and almost idea ALONE, the depths and the sky islands. Didn't love how they played out

-Monster raid battles, they are fun! Once again, don't love how they played out though. I feel mostly neutral about them if not somewhat positive about them. Wish they wouldn't have put one right in front of Fort Hateno.

-Intractable dragons! Love the elemental dragon upgrade.

-Idea of a customizable house and the variety of parts you can put into the house plot.

-The ability to grab almost everything although I truly did not mind that being limited to just metal objects. I liked the restriction and felt it appropriately challenging. It could've just been an upgrade later in the game of magnesis. Ultrahand is FINE like I said. Have the ability to move normal boulders is nice but ultimately unnecessary. They built a game when you can move a boulder through game mechanics and physics and it was FUN.

-Anyway, Ultrahand was fine. I liked being able to move the horse carts.

-THE HORSE CARRIAGES and towing stuff that was 💯🤌♥️ a beautiful addition

-The idea of repairing things in Hyrule but ultimately a lackluster use and follow through in this too. Repairing the bridge to the rito village was super fun to me.

-The flora and fauna additions that WERE THERE.

-Caves!

-Bulbul frogs

-How inventory items have use now but! Once again once again there is a common theme here, I don't love how they actually implemented it. Not EVERY item needed a use tbh. It didn't, we didn't need that ability. It is wild to go back to BOTW and notice you can't throw items but not having to navigate that item menu is a fucking blessing. Throwing items and attaching them to arrows etc is super fun though.

-Some of the new missions were super fun

-Monster hit list missions!!!! Personal taste maybe but I looooove most hunting missions.

-Zelda and Dragon Zelda ngl that shit was cool but like exclusively that fact and nothing else related to that. No story line stuff or the ending or anything else

-BOSSES AND BOSS FIGHTS! AND and and refightable boss fights because ngl they DID go off with the boss fights. Really cool use of how large the game is plus the physics of the game.

-Wellssssss loved the wells

Ok!!! Not a comprehensive list but! I DO like things about TOTK. Am I still a hater yes absolutely I fucking hate like 80% of that game and things surrounding it. I really really do but there were some really pleasant things about it too. Just not enough to appease me for the things that in my opinion sucked ass and were intentionally bad decisions.

#totk #botw #words

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panie-wanie-dean-bean · 2 months ago

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Alright folks, it’s that time again, I’m back on my Obey Me bullshit

This time though I’ve been thinking about Obey Me’s cannon story, and more specifically, how much I think it could be improved on. Now listen! I’m not saying Obey Me’s story is god awful or anything, I’m just saying that there are some issues, big and small, that I have noticed, repeatedly

And unfortunately for everyone, one thing that drives me more than anything else in this world, is spite. If I see something and think “Even I could do that better” my god I will do that fucking thing. Whether or not it’s actually better than the original is up to your own preferences obviously, but I like making art for myself and my brain

However, seeing as when I started writing a true “Obey Me Re-written” project I got as far as when you leave RAD after just being kidnapped and then lost steam, I knew I had to approach this differently. My current theory as to why that happened is because the way I write outlines is so bare bones it’s like if you story boarded a ten minute animation by fully illustrating one key frame for each minute. In other words, fucking badly

So here’s my new idea. I will be writing out main story beats for this re-written project as if I were making head cannon posts. This will get the ideas out into the world and help me plan shit out for if I ever decide to take a crack at properly writing the bitch. The story will still be written in second person, like everything I do, and each post should be about a chapter’s worth of story stuff

But yeah, for all the normal people that’s the end of this post. I hope you have a lovely day and that you’ll maybe wanna read the re-written posts as they come out? No pressure tho. However, for you sick fucks who actually care about the gripes I have with Obey Me’s story and what I intend to change then you can click that little Keep Reading thingy right below this text. But I warn you. It’s a doozy

Alright, first off let's address the obvious. Obey me is a free mobile game whose original language is Japanese. That might not sound like much but that one sentence explains three minor problems I have with Obey Me’s story, The pacing, The word choice, And the sanitization

The pacing is obvious, you unlock small bits of the story by playing the game and beating mini games. For the app to work the way it does the story has to be able to divide into these little chunks. But since I’m not confined by app structure my story will not have those odd chunks, allowing it to, hopefully, flow a little better

The word choice is a very nit picky thing that gets to me personally. Since the game has gone through a small game of telephone before us english only nerds can read the damn thing some things are just going to be lost or misused after translation. Since english is my first and only language I don’t have to deal with any of that in my version

And the sanitization! Again, Obey Me is a free mobile game, which means it needs to be advertiser friendly, which means The Avatar Of Lust is demoted to Avatar of Flirting and Vanity. My demons will cuss, fuck, and GASP…hold hands with y/n. Lol, seriously though, plot wise it’ll take a bit to get to fucking just because once you say fucking’s allowed you’re not getting out of bed for at least a week due to your demons swarming you, but I might write some stuff on the side that’s a little later in the time line for fun

Another small gripe I have is The Train Mystery. If you know, you know. That one will probably take some time but by Dia’s sweet ass I will make that a proper mystery

Also, not really a gripe but a change. Luke will not be in my story. He’s a cute kid, don’t get me wrong, but I’m a lusty bitch who wants a harem/poly story so no kids allowed. He’s off baking the whole time, he’s busy

A bigger issue I have with the story is that, no one has strong opinions on each other? Like, maybe for a lesson they do, but it’s never really brought up after that. And sometimes established opinions are tossed out the window to make the plot of the week happen. None of that, my boys have feelings about each other damn it! And if you’re wondering if any of those feelings will be slightly romantic or sexual. I’ll never tell :3 (Yes, the answer is yes)

Another big change I’m making is that the y/n will not be related to Lilith. They’re just a human with lataint magical abilities that only wake up in a big way once they start making pacts with demons. It’s not that them being kinda related squicks me out or anything, what did I just say above this paragraph? No, it’s just how fucking weird they handle it? Like, Obey Me can not decide if it wants the y/n to be exactly like Lilith and the brothers see them as her but like reincarnated or something, or if it wants to forget about Lilith entirely to side step the whole “You’re just like my dead sister, let’s make out about it” thing. Cowards

The final thing I will be changing (that I remember anyhow) is the lifeless y/n. Don’t get me wrong, the Obey Me y/n does have a few personality traits that stand out (Mainly being kind, chaotic, and a little dumb in some spots) but my y/n’s are characters in their own rights and this one will be no different (They have some anger problems :3)

But yeah, if you took the time to read all this, thank you! I can’t promise how quickly I’ll make re-written posts but I’m excited about the idea. Since I’ll be laying out all the story and character beats out so openly anyway feel free to ask even spoiler-esq questions if you’d like, I don’t expect any but the invitation is always there. I hope you have a wonderful day/night, bye bye :D

#Obey Me #OM rewritten #OMRW

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1moreff-creator · 4 months ago

Note

Not related to DRDT, But I saw in your pinned post you like FNAF. If you haven't answered this before, which FNAF game is your favorite? Or who is your favorite animatronic/character? I like fnaf1 foxy :)

Yee FNAF! I might not talk about it here much, but it is the fixation that Always Comes Back for me, so I’m glad to have an excuse to ramble about it :D

Favorite game is a bit complicated because I haven’t played all of them (my computer couldn’t handle the FLAF demo it is not running Security Breach), but depending on the day, it’s one of FNAF 1, Sister Location or Help Wanted.

FNAF 1 gets a ton of nostalgia points, the atmosphere is immaculate, and the little story it has is fantastic, though without as much complexity as later entries.

Sister Location is horrible on the replayability department… except I count the Custom Night DLC as part of the game, and that’s pretty fun. The game itself is fine on a first play through, has pretty good atmosphere, and (in my opinion) beats FNAF 1 in terms of self-contained story, themes and narrative weight, wider lore and character building. Night 5 is (in my opinion) one of the best written segments of any FNAF game, both Real and Fake ending.

Help Wanted also beats FNAF 1 in terms of self-contained story (those tapes are genuinely an awesome evolution of the Phone Guy concept), and the introduction of Vanny is genuinely captivating (regardless of how much they fumbled her in later entries), but it also added certain elements to the overall plot that I don’t quite like the ramifications of (even if I tend to ignore the “in-universe games” debacle, I dislike what it represents for theorizing). In gameplay it’s generally better than SL, but it’s not as charming as FNAF 1. Though I feel my opinion of it would change if I could actually play it in VR, but alas, that is not my situation.

It’s hard for me to pick between those, frankly. Probably Sister Location though, I just like the characters too much…

What shit I forgot Into the Pit. Yeah no it’s Into the Pit probably. Even accounting for recency bias the game’s insanely peak lol. Still gonna leave those other three there, for posterity xD

Speaking of liking SL characters; Baby and Puppet are my favorite animatronics, though admittedly that’s more of an extension of my favorite characters being Charlie and Elizabeth (that order). Btw, FNAF 1 Foxy is a very good and solid pick, I respect it :D

I genuinely think Baby in Sister Location has an argument for best written character of the entire franchise bar maybe Movie Mike, and I am willing to defend that take. A ruthless killer born of horrible circumstances, yet compassionate at heart (see: the very fact she chose to form Ennard instead of leaving with Michael’s body on her own, “the scooper only hurts for a moment” line), in her eyes betrayed by those she saved because of being… well, a child.

Shame her character got absolutely assassinated in FFPS. Unless she was trying to manipulate William. I know it’s not ever even remotely suggested, but I genuinely would have no (serious) complaints about Baby’s character if that’s what she was going for in the “I will make you proud” speech.

As for Puppet, old fan favorite for a reason. It was always a standout of the cast, which obviously meant I loved them, and the exploration of its personality in UCN in particular is pretty cool. To be clear, my enjoyment of Charlie as a character is based on highly specific interpretations of certain lines, but when literally 90% of the story is up to interpretation, I feel that’s not too surprising.

In particular, taking Charlie as a deeply regretful person, who realized how badly she fucked up by reviving the children only after dozens of night guards had been killed and they’d already been trapped for years, with possibly hundreds of deaths on her hands, just trying to make things right again. And, just, so, fucking, tired, by the time Lefty happens (see: Lefty UCN lines). And don’t even get me started on the angst potential of being tortured by her supposedly loving father in the Bear Torture Contraption, the mistakes of her past haunting her because Henry sees her as the bloodthirsty night guard killer that no longer exists (see: she doesn’t attack Michael in FNAF 3), and hearing that he wants to “save her now” as she burns half-alive. Etcetera.

Again, hyperspecific. But I like it, so.

For the sake of completionism:

My favorite Silver Eyes character is probably Elizabeth/Adult Charlie/Baby (why is this character so hard to refer to).

Favorite Frights character is probably Eleanor. She’s just so sassy and girlfailure and somewhat intriguing she’s fantastic (or, at least, better than other Frights characters in my books).

Favorite Steel Wool Era character is Gregory if he dropped the elevator and probably Vanessa if he didn’t (I wonder what that says about me lol).

Favorite Mega Cat games character is Oswald (not that many to pick from tbf).

Favorite movie character is Mike. Just a really amazing spin on the already solid basis of Michael Afton.

Favorite Interactive Novels character is Ralph (is it cheating if I mainly like him cuz he’s Phone Guy?).

And… do I really not like any character from Tales? I don’t remember almost any of the stories very well, but I guess if I’d liked the characters enough, I’d remember them.

Since I don’t care about Edwin for now, I guess the Mimic is the only real option, but I’m not the biggest fan. I have hope Secret of the Mimic will sway me to actually caring about the guy, though! I’m already enjoying what we have of Jackie, because in case it wasn’t obvious by the fact I picked Eleanor over Jake or Larson, I kinda enjoy the fucked up clown women quite a bit! Mimic will never be Ennard, but he can get close, and there’s worse things to be than worse-Ennard.

Thanks a lot for the ask! I might have been wanting to write about FNAF more than I’d realized lol.

#fnaf #ask #reminder to ask me about any interest listed on my intro post if you want!#i have to update that lol

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arcplaysgames · 2 years ago

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Oh Teddie. Buddy. I saw how you sucked face with Kanji, you can't fool me.

Rise, do you..... not..... have a gaydar? Rise, do you not know? What else don't you know, like, do you not know about Chie and Yukiko? Oh, girl. Are you our token straight? I think she might be.

Also, I don't thing i can find the caps, but Rise constantly negs Kanji in combat. She can't seem to have a chill interaction with him. It's funny but also a bit aggravating. Like, can you kids play nice?

What am I saying, of course not. These kids are incapable of it lmao.

This dumb fucker hurled himself in on purpose knowing we'd bail him out, I just know it. If smug was a motorcycle, he's a fucking Knievel.

Naoto's little corner of TV land is a secret laboratory out of some Man From UNCLE classic spy stuff.

It has, without a doubt, the worst exploration music in the game so far. Jesus christ.

ALSO TEDDIE IS... IN A CHEERLEADER UNIFORM. okay. sure. I got cool clothes for everyone. I like Kanji in the Tatsumi Textiles work clothes, and Reverie is dressed as an ouendan member! OSU! goddamn i love those games.

Cuties. Everyone is adorable.

ALSO CHIE CAN DROP BY MID-BATTLE TO SLAM HER SCOOTER INTO AN ENEMY AND KNOCK THEM OUT OF THE MATCH? Amazing.

oh my LORD.

Naoto's Shadow is kind of amazing. One, the VA performance is great, swinging between a very sad child constantly on the verge of tears to a VERY over the top theatric rendition of a mad scientist. The oversized floppy sleeves are a fabulous touch on the physical design. This one is something special compared to all the others.

pops gum loudly

This bit is very good.

Admittedly, it's very interesting to reach Naoto and his shadow after hearing about the whole thing secondhand for, at this point, over a decade. I'm not going to bring anything new to the topic and, frankly, I'm waiting to see how Naoto's social link plays out to get a full read on what's going on here.

Because, obviously, surface level read of the whole this is more than moderately disappointing. The gender essentialism and the repeated idea that you cannot change your gender is more than a little eye-roll-inducing. And it chafes pretty badly against Kanji's entire SLink, which I finished after this dungeon and will recap later but does revolve around eschewing the simplicity of labels.

I'm kind of struggling to pin down why I'm not that mad at this handling. Part of it is obviously that I've set my expectations low for Persona as a whole so that I can have a lot of pleasant surprises when it exceeds those expectations.

But also, the entire Naoto thing is a very sticky situation. Because I think that the Western audience for these games doesn't understand the gravity and density of the sexism in Japanese society. And I'm not an expert in this! But lets say that I do know a thing or two from a friend who does understand it. And it suuuuuucks. Naoto is entirely right to be torn up about this duality.

The people he works with would 100% absolutely no question discard his opinions if they saw him as a girl. Yep. I fully believe that and the weight of that anxiety on Naoto is crushing, clearly moving him to tears. But on the other hand, presenting as a man to avoid that pitfall, the other anxiety of "mimicking those same men" and having to justify their bullfuckery is also incredibly heavy.

Naoto has no clean solution. And if we posit that his reason for being a guy is rooted in that fear, that's... a bad reason to go fulltime Guy Mode. When you opt into your gender, it should be out of love for the thing, in my opinion. There should be something like relief in "yes, I am this gender!"

I don't see that here. But, on the flipside, as soon as this fight is over...

I could reach through the screen and slap you, Rise. This stung me like hearing someone getting misgendered. It fucking SUCKS. Not just everyone swapping to "she" but the feminine diminutives, that's genuinely hard to hear and I personally hate it.

Anyway, back up.

I love this moment from our other team member who thinks a LOT about gender. Kanji being like "listen, just let this shit play out so Naoto has the healing process we all got too, we'll handle the battle part." LIKE!!!!! Fuckin'.... queer solidarity means saying yes, you will beat the shit out of the superpowered facade of a friend's gender demons. THAT'S what it means, baby!

ah shit out of images again brb

#p4 #persona liveblog

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idiotic-b-gilson · 2 years ago

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Do you remember when I made a poll? Well I do! And I want to talk about it finally (it's gonna be a long one)

On Sunday, April 23, 2023 I asked tumblr a question: when, in their opinion, was Asriel Dreemurr going to make his first appearance in Toby Fox's Deltarune (other than any potential flashbacks, which Chapter 2 showed us can happen). I've always personally felt that his potential appearance is one of the most important things that the game is building up to (plus he's my favorite Undertale character), so I wanted to gauge the UTDR community's opinion on when (or if) they thought it was going to happen

After leaving the poll open for a week and advertising it on Discord and DeviantArt (for free, if I wanted to throw money at it I would've just blazed it) I got 85 votes + my own 86th (and I also got two new mutuals from it. Shoutout to @eggylad and @ranpulsar, follow them too). The options I presented were:

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

A potential epilogue chapter after Chapter 7

I think Asriel is dead in Deltarune

I think he's alive, but he won't make a live appearance in the game

(show results)

(There is an obvious weakness in the poll, in that it doesn't have an "Other" option. For some reason I was genuinely convinced back then that I'd covered every possible option, but looking back I was probably wrong, as, for example, whether or not he arrives might depend on what ending we get. Feel free to suggest other alternatives)

From day 2 of the poll I wanted to write an analysis of the results, and try and figure out what people who voted for each option thought. I didn't ask anyone about why they voted the way that they did, not even my mutuals, so obviously that's another weakness. But it's also an excuse for me to theorize on Deltarune, and if I'm wrong as to why you voted the way that you did, feel free to correct me

I'm gonna ignore the (show results) option in my analysis, which I hope everyone will understand. I also hope the 7 people who chose it won't mind either. Aside from that, the results break down as follows:

Chapter 3: 4 votes

Chapter 4: 12 votes

Chapter 5: 8 votes (9 if you count my vote)

Chapter 6: 6 votes

Chapter 7: 32 votes

Epilogue: 4 votes

Dead: 4 votes

Alive no show: 8 votes

As we can see, the vast majority of people agree with the broad assumption that Goatbro will appear in-game at some point, though they disagree when

Most seem to think that he'll only first show up in Chapter 7 - and I can see why, for a long time I subscribed to that idea too. After all, Toriel says in Chapter 1 that he's coming home "next week." As long as the game sticks to having each chapter be a consecutive day, Chapter 7 would be just about right time for Asriel's return (same logic extends to the epilogue option, but we don't even know if there will be one, plus the way I phrased the question further helped 7's case, more on that later). Simple. However, I have since come to disagree with this whole theory

Chapters 3-5 being released together as a singular, paid package (hence my name for it: The Paid Package) indicates to me that they will constitute a "Deltarune proper" of sorts, and Chapters 6 and 7 will be the epilogue to provide final closure for the game. More specifically, I believe that The Paid Package will give us An Ending to keep us engaged in the 2-3 year wait, providing some closure to some things, but also building anticipation for the True Ending. A better way to phrase it would be a comparison to Undertale where, when you do a True Pacifist run, you first get a Neutral Ending (The Paid Package), and then play through extra content to unlock the path's true ending (Chapters 6&7)

This of course largely depends on what role Toby wants Asriel to play in Deltarune once he shows up, but I think there is so much about him that could be explored, about his personality, how he might've changed in college, about his relationship with Dess, and so on. I think Toby would want to introduce him sooner rather than later, so he has the time to do all this, and the final two chapters will probably be about stopping The Roaring, so they might have a more urgent feel to them, focusing less on character exploration and more on solving the big crisis. Not that there won't be any character exploration there, just that it'll not be a priority. And for that reason Toby might want to insert Asriel before Chapter 7, so that we get to know him better before he (probably) has to help us stop The Roaring

Which brings me to the Chapter 4 and 5 options, both of which (I think) rely on logic similar to what I described above to conclude that Asriel will feature for the first time in Deltrarune in the Paid Package Ending, although with slight differences enabled by my exact phrasing of the question, and I quote:

Dialogue spoken by him without his body or face being shown count

This is because when I made the poll I imagined that Asriel would make a brief appearance at the Chapter 5's ending cliffhanger, setting him up as a participant of Chapter 6's Dark World adventure, and I wanted for that to make it clear that that would count as Asriel being introduced in Chapter 5. And to me personally it seems that the Chapter 4 voters thought in much a similar way, but a chapter earlier. In other words, they thought that the Dark World adventure with Asriel will be in Chapter 5 rather than 6. And I'm just, incredibly furious that I didn't see that line of reasoning when setting up the poll (or rather, was furious when I wrote this post's original draft back in early May). I only included Chapters 3 and 4 in the poll for completeness' sake, and me not seeing that under my logic Chapter 4 makes just as much, if not more sense than Chapter 5 was a major source of anger for me about the poll. And I think in hindsight, the instant-gratification-seeking part of me would make me vote for Asriel appearing a chapter earlier than I originally voted for

As for Chapter 6, I imagine that the 6 people that voted for it worked under a similar cliffhanger assumption that I described above, and that Chapter 7 would see Asriel in the Dark World for the first time, but if I'm wrong feel free to correct me

The epilogue option, as I said, seems to rely on similar logic as to what I described about voting for Chapter 7, buy 1. not knowing if it'll even exist, and 2. the whole cliffhanger assumption probably led most people considering it to vote for Chapter 7 instead in the end

The Chapter 3 votes got me completely stumped though. Since there were only 4 of them, the only explaination I've got is "trolls and misclicks" but that's probably unfair. Still, I don't see any other logic, so I would appreciate feedback on this

And that brings me to the last two options: Asriel is dead, and Asriel is alive but won't show up. The latter got 8 votes, which indicates to me that it's a relatively serious idea, if less so than him showing up after all. But I can see a kind of logic that would lead to such conclusion, sort of. Kris' arc in Deltarune is probably in no small part about letting go, accepting change (which may incidentally tie into Undertale's message?), and Asriel failing to show up, be it because he's dead, or because other circumstances prevented him, might help with reinforcing that change? Although on the other hand, it would mean that Toby failed to deliver proper payoff to something he set up all the way back in Chapter 1, and has been feeding into with Chapter 2, fueling the intrigue of what happened to Asriel. If he doesn't show up due to a contrivance, I don't think it would make for a very satisfying conclusion to the story, unless handled very carefully. There's also the option that while we don't see Asriel come back to Hometown, it's heavily indicated that is happens off-screen just after the game's end. But I think that would be the worst of both worlds, and Toby wouldn't do this to us

As for Asriel being dead... my first reflex is to say that Toby wouldn't lie to us in such a majorly plot-relevant way. He said Asriel's coming back, and we've got no reason to think he's lying about this. Any potential clues that might say otherwise may well point to there being something more about Asriel, but surely the intent is not to contradict what was said earlier in clear text. Except, there's a good chance that Toby did lie to us in a majorly plot-relevant way. Not about Asriel, we have no way of knowing that, but about choice. After setting up in Chapter 1 that our choices don't matter, in Chapter 2 he did a complete 180 and gave us the Weird Route, with a radically different course and ending to the Normal one. And even if Snowgrave's description as "Fatal" turns out to have been hyperbolic and Berdly's fine actually (which I don't believe, but it is possible), there's still a ton of other, minor choices that still have a lasting impact on the world, such as what NPCs we can bring over to the Castle Town. So, do our choices in Deltarune matter or not? And if Toby did lie to us there, could he lie to us again? I personally think that there is a non-zero chance that, if Deltarune will have two (or more) endings, the one resulting from doing all the Weird Routes might see us, the player force Kris to kill Asriel (or force Kris to force a teammate to do it) But it is way to early to tell, and for now, as long as consensus among the Lighteners appears to be that Asriel is coming back, I'm trusting them

It bears mentioning that I never actually interacted much with the "Asriel is dead" theory, so I don't know all the evidence for it, so this is more of a gut instinct what I just said

But besides. Asriel is waaaaaaaay more interesting alive than dead. So much more potential to tell stories with him in the Deltarune universe. Would Toby really let all that potential go to waste? No. It's his big passion project, the game that he always wanted to make, and the best video game of the 2020s (yes, I'm calling it now. No video game that's better than Deltarune will come out this decade). Asriel is alive because it makes for a better story

So, what do you think? What was the actual reason you voted one way or the other? Do my theories make sense to you? Please engage with me i beg you

#long post #asriel dreemurr #asriel #gilson originals #poll analysis #deltarune #utdr #utdr-analysis #cw death mention

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conhivemindcent · 2 months ago

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I’m back. For now.

Long story short: my grandad died and I got introspective about my relationship with tumblr and perfectionism.

Long story long: under the cut

The truth is that I like tumblr. I realise over the past week ish that I’ve been absent is that, I like using tumblr. I just don’t like how performative I feel on the site.

It feels like I can’t share my opinions or someone will be disappointed in me, or hate at and yell at me. And it feels so much more real of a threat on tumblr than any other site. Be correct, or fuck you. In everything.

Ive seen people fight for issues much bigger than them. And often I’ve seen them fall through, not out of lack of trying but rather because bigger people won’t listen. In the real world. And that’s a problem. But they won’t listen to them. Or me. Or anyone. So why bother?

Well, obviously you should bother. I mean, change comes from the people. But when my grandad was dying, I realised that I needed to fight my own fears to help myself.

I saw him a little before his death. He looked comfortable. Just old. In the car ride back, my dad said he was glad I visited him. That was the last time I saw him. He died this morning.

I’m not saying this to drum up sympathy, but rather I realised: I couldn’t have done that if I was mentally drained from feeling performative on Tumblr. I wouldn’t have seen my grandad before his death if it weren’t for a fucking social media site.

And I’m not just blaming tumblr or its users, I know deep down it was my own fears. But it’s still weird knowing that ultimately, getting off tumblr was what caused it.

And that ultimately… I do like tumblr. Just not the culture.

I needed to fight for myself that time. And I realised that what I dislike the most about tumblr is that I feel like I need to be fighting fucking everything. And that nothing is good enough and the world is backwards and you will die tomorrow and we will be glad because fuck you you’re not good enough. And we won’t care until you kill your self at which point we’ll be the victims. But the mourners must be aware you are a horrible person deep down.

Idk that’s exhausting.

I’ve always been a perfectionist. It’s my nature. And being on tumblr as a perfectionist really sucks. So screw it.

I’m imperfect. Not in a YIIK “you are imperfect and that’s ok, stay that way” or in a Persona 4 “you are imperfect, accept it with the knowledge you will be perfect one day”. But in a “you are imperfect, and will never be perfect, but realise that even if you’re imperfect you can still do good and improve. You are nuanced, and will never be 100% who you want to be, and that’s ok” way.

Did I butcher the meaning of two video games I have never played? Yes.

Do I care? Honestly? No.

I don’t want to not care, I just want to make sure I can be able to fight for myself. And I’m now realising that maybe Tumblr isn’t the best place to be.

But man… I’ve missed it. The silly gay people on my phone. Not the discourse and real world politics, fuck that.

Honestly if trump wins I might just delete it because I know Americans will be screaming at each other. And even if he doesn’t I might take a hiatus because fuck if I’m getting involved in American politics, please let me ignore them for now I’m fucking British you’re own your own bud (but also like, sorry but I didn’t colonise you, please know that, yes we have spices, I literally work in a grocery store and sell them to people, yes I will yell at people this fact).

Uh yea. I guess I’m back. For like two days. I’ve got homework to do and bereavements to benefit from. Because fuck, if my grandad’s dead may as well benefit.

I do miss him, don’t get me wrong. I just, I guess I’ve had the time to mourn before his death cause I knew it was coming, and I talked with an irl friend about it. Conversation went well, we talked about trans rights in Mario games and how Luaisy is such a bi for bi couple. Good times.

I don’t have an ending. I guess, if you’re a perfectionist tumblr is not brilliant of a website? But I’m back cause damn, I like tumblr at the end of the day. Definitely a B tier website.

Bluesky’s better /hj

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themomsandthecity · 4 months ago

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Toddler Parents Everywhere Are Dreading the End of Daylight Saving Time

While I realize that daylight saving time (DST) might have been necessary once upon a time, whoever invented it clearly didn't have to deal with keeping a baby or toddler on a sleep schedule. Just when I get my son all acclimated to a strict bed time, the clocks decide to shake everything up. Sure, eventually they get the hang of things, but let's be real, it's not without a trip on the struggle bus first. It doesn't matter whether we're springing forward or falling back, my toddler will find a way to subsist on the tiniest amount of sleep possible. What is normally mommy's special evening time for a glass of wine and bad TV suddenly becomes a wave of toddler energy that swallows me whole because, according to my son, "If the sun is up, I can be up, too." Uh, no, kid, you can't. Thanks to DST, our usual nighttime routine of bath, book, and bed was upended last year. Suddenly, I was chasing a half-naked toddler through the house as he demanded to know why he couldn't go play outside. Frustrated, I didn't want to wait for him to acclimate, so I did what most parents would do: I lied. I spent the next few days trying to convince him that the sun, even though it's still shining away, is really sleepy and is also getting ready for bed. I told him that Mr. Sun was exhausted from a long day and needed his rest. I thought I was so slick, but somehow, me trying to tell him that the sun had feelings and opinions didn't change his mind. He's smarter than I sometimes give him credit for, and he just stared at me with a look that basically said, "Really, mom? Did you seriously just try that on me?" So, I went for a different, arguably worse, tactic. That's right. When lying clearly didn't work, I tried bribery. It may have gotten him to calm down and get into bed, but it did not make him get to sleep any faster. He spent that hour in his bed, tossing and turning, and mumbling loudly to his stuffed animals. If he knew how to curse, he probably would have been giving me (and the still bright sun) a piece of his mind through his bedroom walls. Obviously trying to con or lie to my son to encourage acclimation was not the way to go. There was no shortcut. In about a week, things were back to normal, meaning he was getting the sleep he needed, and I was getting my alone time. Instead of complaining about DST and trying to force him into a new schedule too quickly, I was neglecting the simple idea that what he really needed was time. You can't force someone to be tired (believe me, I tried), so as much as it pains me every year, it's more of a waiting game than anything else. Hopefully this year, with a little more understanding under his belt, he'll get that just because the sun is up, doesn't mean he gets to stay up, too. If he doesn't, I'm not above covering every window in our house with cardboard. I've tried everything else. Related: Sleep Training Doesn't Always Mean Crying It Out; Here Are 4 Other MD-Approved Methods --- Laurel Niedospialis a former PS contributor. --- https://www.popsugar.com/family/What-Daylight-Saving-Time-Like-Parents-44643370?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr

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vilevexedvixen · 8 months ago

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Like OG Fallout? Play Pathologic!

I've been a fan of various things for literal decades now, but not really participated in any fandom communities until literally this year. I've just been making cosplays, watching videos, drawing fanart and writing fan theories / fiction in my own time. So the very heated aspects of fandom flew me by until now ^^' I do completely get the more angry fellow FNV fans for what Bethesda has done to Fallout (regarding all entries after FNV), and some of the aspects I see people praising most about OG Fallout and FNV are mainly the roleplaying, writing, and bleak setting / vibe.

And to that I can't help but go "Have you heard of our Lord and Saviour Icepick Lodge?"

Pathologic classic HD and Pathologic 2 are the closest games (in my opinion) that capture the same aspects of OG Fallout and FNV the more angry fans feel they've lost.

You play as one of three healers in an isolated Russian town ravaged by plague. This is going to be more of a ramble of me gushing about various aspects of the game, so I've included a less popular review (love this guy's stuff) to more concisely discuss the game in a more structured way and give an accurate picture of gameplay (which I only really discuss in terms of combat, which is frankly a really small part of it compared to the resource and survival stat management, semi-present fast-travel (at a cost, which changes as circumstances get worse and forces the player to choose between loss of time, energy, money, or risk of infection, when deciding how to get from a to b by forcing players to only fast travel between certain points if they have the right resources, or walk through infected or ransacked districts).

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Never before have I sympathised so much with a certified twat (The Bachelor), or been so genuinely excited to discover my character's bf-turned-bitter enemy isn't dead but finally taking a nap.

Admittedly, Classic HD is more linear but that doesn't detract from the story for me, but I definitely think 2 actualises the player freedom classic HD pretended to have.

Also both soundtracks are bangers, but quite different (tribal electronica versus shamanistic horror).

An aspect of gameplay that took a hot minute to learn but is very engaging is the hobo economy bartering system, which subtly changes as time goes by. Different resources such as medicine (which are obviously used up a lot in a plague) become more scarce and expensive. As people get more desperate for essentials like food, they start trading more valuable items like jewellery for it. Kids want seemingly valueless things like marbles and nuts for very valuable items (food and meds - yeah, besides the pharmacies, children carry the most drugs and knives; take that as you will). Inflation goes through the roof, money is no longer accepted in some shops later on. The economy is extremely dynamic, but not overly difficult to navigate so forces the player to adapt alongside it. You can never be certain what resources will be accessible the next day, which further makes when and where you decide to use what resources you have on others an engaging moral and practical decision. Unscripted, might I add!

Leading players to act like this when rare things like Schmowder (a near-fatal cure to the plague) show up by chance:

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And if you don't stay on top of your stats and resources (which is very easy to do) you end up in binds like this:

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The diagnostic and treatment system is also fairly intuitive, in that there are humor-specific tinctures, and others that can be used to treat two different humors. The more resources you use trying to diagnose where the infection has settled, the more pain you'll caused the patient, which you can lower (to prevent death) by using vials or morphine. Accurate diagnosis is important to avoid wasting resources by using the wrong antibiotics (which is less effective). You can't be in two places at once, so every patient you treat is a drain on time and resources you could be using somewhere else. Sometimes it's better to let a patient be if the risk of death is too high for your treatment to have a worthwhile impact on their chances for survival.

Given how stretched thin your time and resources always are, even if the opportunity for tender downtime catching up with old friends arises it is all to easy to pass up because you're too busy. A cruel reality most people face these days irl. What's more, if you happen to die before deciding to go to this meetup, there is a chance that Mark Immortal will tie your character's hands behind their back which then prevents you from being able to hug you friends when you meet them.

Oh yeah, forgot to say but death has permanent consequences across all saves so reloading to before you died doesn't undo any penalty Mark curses you with unless you start a whole new run. Early on, you may be asked to help with a task which ends up not helping in the way expected (to help solve Burakh's father's murder or to help cure the plague) but does act as a small tutorial on how to listen / look for herbs you can use in remedies. You still feel irritated that a child wasted your time / was just playing with you, at least initially, so you learn to really consider what's worth chasing up and what might be a waste of time / red herring when deciding what trails in your mind map task menu to chase up. Especially since if you don't pursue them, they WILL happen without you and the consequences of your intervention or not remain uncertain until they crop back up in unexpected ways.

Admitedly, the endings in 2 are binary (though what you do in the wider world and story do effect the ending / what happens to specific characters) which I found very disappointing, especially given how much less effort it takes to do one over the other, like the game is encouraging you to pick the diurnal ending. The game is also a bit janky, but no moreso than FNV. Combat is not satisfying mechanically, especially if you opt for using guns, though that's kind of the point. You're a doctor (admittedly Artemy was a military medic, so he has some combat training, but still). Though sometimes it can seem (but isn't) unavoidable in the early game when you're public enemy number one. The combat feels like if OV Fallout's combat was in first person.

There aren't technically "factions" per se, but rather bodies of power in the town the approach both its running and the crisis at hand from different angles. To be honest, I completely sidestepped the Saborovs for my first two playthroughs entirely. Bad Grief says I'm a fool to try and clear my name to the man who effectively runs the police force? Sure! Unless you take interest in investigating your father's death, or frequently save babies (long story), I didn't cross their path except in the town hall meeting. Which is a shame, but honestly the other families interested me more. The Kains have a lot going on and are the most philosophically driven family both in their architectural choices and in how they utilize the polyhedron. The Kains and the Olgimskies are more interlinked than the Saborovs are with anyone, especially regarding the town's children and their seperate factions (Notkin's Soul-and-a-halves and Khan's Dogheads, whom you'll likely encounter early on to help settle some gang warfare). In fact the town children functionally operate a seperate society divided between the town and the polyhedron.

I quite like the fact that the Olgymskies (responsible for the town's main / only industry of slaughterhouses, which repeatedly overlap with the older practice of bull worship and sacrifice by The Kin - wait, I haven't even mentioned them yet wtf) aren't just treated as evil robber barons (though Big Vlad absolutely partakes in corruption and prioritising the health of his children over the town / his worker, especially when investigating The Termitary and the circumstances around its closure), but people navigating stopping the spread of plague while still trying to meet the very real problem of food scarcity now that the Town's been effectively cut off from the rest of the world and their lifeline industry has been halted.

Something I really appreciate is that they show the children have agency and act by their own judgement, and that the adults of the town aren't inherently wiser. Early on in the game the leaders of the town main child gangs will go in search of a way to help stop the plague's spread and WILL get infected unless you intervene. They also keep track of the plague's spread, for their own sake but the player can take head of what they learn to plan their routes through the town ahead of time. They also aren't treated like untouchable saints either. Death is very much a reality for EVERY character, no matter how young, both by natural and unnatural causes from the get-go. There are several occasions where the player character will be taught by child characters, such as Sticky, about how to survive in ways they've had to as orphans. I also love how the main child factions have their own distinct philosophies that help (alongside more specific characters that play carer / leadership roles outside of the Doghead and Soul-and-a-half factions, like Capella and Maria Kaina) inform your late-game decisions, since the children are very much the town's future, and how you endorse them will inform how the town operates going forward. I especially love the dogheads, and how they see themselves as not quite fully human yet. Striving for humanity and to be better, such as the utopian future promised by their home The Polyhedron. Meanwhile Notkin's soul-and-a-halves are far more grounded in the here and now, and the fact we need to rely on each other (and our animal companions) to be whole. The two aren't a dichotomy either and work together on a few occasions since, at the end of the day, surviving the plague is a shared goal.

Good luck trying to save everyone! It is genuinely difficult and just deciding who to use resources on and choosing what to use resources for actively effect the story and roleplaying, not just dialogue. Supplies are limited and sometimes it's better to focus on self-preservation just to live another day because it's better others die than the town to go without a doctor. The game mocks and derides players who engage in combat, but you're never barred from it and there are very good reasons to engage in it (obtaining more medical supplies to keep people alive, saving babies from infected buildings, self-defence, protecting people who would otherwise be wrongfully executed, etc.)

I think it's important to seek out the good that still exists in the world rather than stew over the bad. Ironic, I know, given I'm recommending a bleak tragedy of a game / story, but my point that it's good still stands.

So yeah, if you're a disgruntled Fallout fan please give Pathologic (especially Pathologic 2) a shot. I really think you'll like it!

Edit: I keep adding stuff to this post. Originally tried to keep it brief but kept thinking of stuff worth talking about that it's beginning to get bloated ^^'

#fallout nv #fallout new vegas #fallout #pathologic #pathologic 2 #my favourite games #game recommendations #Youtube

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nikuknight · 8 months ago

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Endless Ocean Luminous is here! I can't find any websites where I can post my review without being an actual paid article writer, so I guess I'm posting it here.

First, let me start with some background.

I got the first Endless Ocean game for my 10th birthday back in 2008, and the second one for my 12th birthday in 2010. They were my first real video games, and I loved them dearly. I have been literally dreaming of a third game since finishing the second one, so when I saw the trailer for Endless Ocean Luminous, I preordered the game right away. My dreams were coming true! Surely they can't mess up an Endless Ocean game, right?!

Judging by my tone, you can probably tell that this will not be a kind review.

When you open the game, you get a splash screen while it loads before it goes to the main menu. The main menu has several options, but most importantly it differentiates between story mode, solo dives, and multi-player dives. I went straight to the story mode because that was the best part of the old games and what I was looking forward to.

Which brings me to the first problem: the story mode. It's…VERY basic. Each chapter is atrociously short. Most of the objectives are placed directly in front of you, and once you reach them, you get some dialogue and then the chapter is over. The story itself is shallow. There's a world-ending threat to the ocean that you can solve by scanning fish. It would feel more important if there was more time to build the world and get to know the only two NPCs (one of which is your ai dive guide, while the other is more akin to a dive buddy who's just a recolor of your own model), but there's just not that much focus put on the story mode. In fact, you are required to play the solo or multi-player dives just to progress in the story mode, as each chapter has an unlock requirement of scanning an obscene number of fish. It really feels like the devs were trying to artificially inflate the play time when they did this. Anyway, fish in such numbers can only be found in the non-story dives.

So let's talk about the solo dives, as I have not gotten to play the multi-player dives just yet. If you don't have friends with a copy of the game, solo dives are where the bulk of the game takes place. There's a lot to talk about here, from the missing features from previous games to the new features of this one.

There are three new features: scanning fish, the "ever-changing" map, and the UMLs, or Unique Marine Life.

Scanning the fish was obviously meant as a quality-of-life improvement, but instead just adds to the impersonal feel of the game. In the old games, the player could only focus on one fish at a time. It felt personal and even a bit special. The first game went so far as to make you earn a fish's trust before you discovered its info. In Endless Ocean Luminous, however, you can scan many, many fish at the same time. Scrolling over their name in the list of fish you scanned last will give you its information. You can read through it, but why would you? There's at least 500 fish in the game, and why would you waste your time reading optional information when there's other fish to be scanned? In my opinion, the scanner function is a product of the lack of care from the devs and the increased importance put on the numbers aspect. It's all about the grind.

Meanwhile, the "ever-changing" map is basically just battleship, but it's topographical features instead of ships. The whole dive map is gigantic—big enough to take multiple hours to map the whole thing—with several features plopped into it. These are the battleships, which I will be calling biomes for simplicity. Each biome has a specific selection of fish only one map that might be flipped or rotated and placed multiple times on the same dive map. (To be clear, the biomes are not placed by the player. That is not a feature of this game, and it was never advertised to be.) Unfortunately, most of the biomes are quite small, and there are only enough on the dive map to cover maybe 60% of the map? Which leaves 40% of the map as basically-empty seafloor. Having the "ever changing" map work like this just feel LAZY. And this will not be the last time that word is brought up.

The UMLs are probably the most solid part of Endless Ocean Luminous. They're the legendary creatures of this installment. (Not to be confused with the legendary creatures from the old games, which are now scattered liberally throughout the solo dive maps) There is only one per dive map, though you can make it appear multiple times with enough grinding. To make a UML appear, you have to find fish with "unusual biological signatures." These fish will pixelate when you scan them, along with playing a sudden, jarring sound. The effect never fails to make me jump, and is extremely immersion-breaking. Once you find one of these fish, the rest you need for the UML to appear will be marked on your map. The problem HERE lies in the fact that the part of the map getting marked has to be FILLED IN for the mark to be visible. Again, it takes HOURS to fill in the map, so a lot of the search for these fish is just blindly scanning everything in front of you. The UMLs themselves are pretty neat, at least.

Now for the removed features. The removal of one of these features is a boon, but the rest are removed at a detriment to the game.

The one thing I'm glad they removed is dangerous animals attacking you. It makes sense that they removed it, though, as the way that was implemented in Blue World (Endless Ocean 2) was that getting hurt depleted some of your air. There is no air gauge in Luminous.

As for the removals that negatively impact the game…you can't ride the whales. You can't pet, poke, grab, feed, or whistle at the fish. You CAN have fish follow you, but you actually have to level up that feature now. You can't surface, let alone walk on land. There's no underwater pen. There's no zoom mode (which means no sea slugs!! Biggest L for this game I swear). There's no diving with non-player dive buddies. There's no aquarium. There's no dive-level progression, as you don't have to unlock diving abilities like deep-water diving or night diving. In fact, time of day is meaningless. It might be present, but without being able to surface it's hard to tell since you have a dive light.

The music very rarely plays, and there's no lyrical music that I've encountered at all. It's all new too, which upset me until I heard one track from Blue World and realized that hearing music from the beloved older games in this one? Just made me ANGRY. When you find yourself thinking that a game doesn't deserve to use music from its predecessors, and that the nods to the previous games are actually insults to said previous games (I'm looking at you, old legendary creatures)…well. That's when you know that the devs fucked up.

Overall, the game feels like a lazily designed waste of time, and frankly it's insulting to try to pretend otherwise. This is not an Endless Ocean game. This is the husk of a dead IP. The soul moved on a long time ago.

#endless ocean luminous #endless ocean #technically #game review #niku no

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floofe-trans-doggie · 1 year ago

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Thoughts on the TF2 Zombie Infection update we just got: Overall, pretty good, but I think they leaned too far into the rebalancing in favor of the zombies.

The changes to Engineer and Demoknight were good, really good. Those classes were very oppressive in the original version of the gamemode, and I'm glad they got much-needed nerfs. Engineer stacking is still too strong, but that's a serious problem with the class that the base game hasn't solved, either. Generally I think enough players find Engineer really boring that unless you're up against a really sweaty team or people doing it for the bit, you're not too likely to find more than one or two Engineers on a team, though it does vary from server to server.

The elephant in the room (aside from Heavy, we'll get to him) is, in my opinion, the overall health increase zombies got. I think this was an awful change. The specific mechanic reworkings already helped swing things more in the zombies' favor, and honestly aside from Engineer and Demoknight, who were themselves already decently nerfed in this update, the humans were already at a disadvantage. This change just swings things in favor of the zombies without adding much mechanical depth, and combined with the mechanical changes honestly really hurts the balance of the game.

Zombie Spy's new cloaking ability is a good addition. It doesn't make him too powerful, since you can still see the particle effects on him, but it helps with the Engineer problem since it prevents sentries from targeting him.

Zombie Soldier is overtuned. On open maps such as Woods, he's one of the most played zombie classes now, and he's extremely difficult to avoid without a sentry around to push them back, which if anything just makes Engineer more essential. I think on their own the height increase and timer cooldown on his pounce ability are both perfectly fine, but put together they make him an absolute menace who is impossible to avoid, especially with an extra 15 health, which I really do not think he needed.

Zombie Sniper's changes were mostly good. Being able to damage buildings with his acid spit now is excellent for breaking Engineer strongholds, especially on Atoll, and it's a great way to balance the game without changing his mechanics too much. The acid pool dropped on death, however, isn't the best in my opinion. It only activates on death, so it doesn't add too much depth to the gameplay on the Sniper's end, and in more cramped maps (especially Devastation), it can be required to walk through in order to flee once you've already killed him, which usually deals at least 50 damage, which I don't think is terribly fun to play against. I also think it infringes on Zombie Pyro's gimmick a bit. I don't hate it, but I don't love it.

Zombie Pyro's changes were great. He was really really bad initially with his lower damage and afterburn reliance, and now he has more going for him. Not dropping a health pack on death is a no-brainer that I'm glad they added; it prevents you from just negating his afterburn, the one thing he does, by just picking it up and adds to the post-mortem killer theme he has going on. The fireball igniting people right away is also quite nice; it's not too strong, but it helps a lot since the Gas Passer cloud almost never does anything. He still kinda sucks on maps with a lot of water, though, which is most of them. A swim speed buff might be nice, to sort of reference the Pyroshark playstyle and give him use cases on these maps.

Zombie Heavy is downright overpowered. He's meant to break strongholds with brute force, which is why he's immune to knockback, has a high health pool, and deals a ton of damage. However, he's way overtuned. Sentries already got nerfed this update, so his additional resistances to it from the Battalion's Backup buff, while nice, aren't as necessary, and the remaining damage resistances, when paired with his high health pool, makes him almost impossible to kill alone. That being said, he obviously has a very slow move speed. One Heavy on his own isn't going to do much if you're moving around the map and engaging with the gameplay. However, there aren't class limits (and I don't think they'd be a good solution anyway). If there's a lot of Zombie Heavies, running away really isn't an option anymore, and he's way too strong to fight. Especially on more enclosed maps like Devastation, he's absurdly strong, and not just against Engineer compounds. If anything, the constant threat of Heavies running around (because everyone is using Heavy now that he's far and away the best class on maps without high ground spots he can't reach at all) actually makes people group up more to avoid him because focus fire from a large group is really the only way to take him down without getting picked off by someone else while trying to fight him. Additionally, crit immunity means the mini-crits and full crits obtained by the final few survivors are completely useless against him, so if anyone picks Heavy and you're the last survivor, you have even less of a chance than you already had. He's like the tank from L4D, which was of course the goal with him. Except unlike the tank from L4D, there's no limit on how many of him you can have. Every single zombie can be a tank. It just feels like they didn't consider stacking or team play at all in designing these changes. What's more is that with the changes to Zombie Sniper and Zombie Engineer, he actually isn't as necessary for busting Engineer nests now anyway. Zombie Heavy is the biggest balance issue in the entire mode right now, and I hope they revert the changes to some extent or at least tone it down.

Zombie Engineer's changes were really good. Adding direct damage to the EMP Grenade ability is great; it increases its utility and annihilates mini-sentries. Zombie Engineer is already a pick with the sole utility of destroying Engineer nests, and it's good that they're making him better at that job.

Zombie Scout's changes were honestly unnecessary. Maybe it was just because he was the only one who could keep up with Demoknight, but he was already one of the better choices before. He's far more maneuverable than the regular Scout with his higher speed and triple jump, and I think the changes tipped him from being in a very nice balance of fragility and maneuverability that made him fun and fair to fight to being a bit overtuned in a lot of ways and difficult to deal with. And need I add that since Engineer counters him pretty heavily, making him stronger only further incentivizes more people to play Engineer, which if anything is the biggest thing to avoid in balancing this gamemode.

The only map I want to touch on here is Devastation. This map does not play very well, and it did not take the balance changes well at all. Its tight corridors already catered really well to the zombies, and with the balance tipped heavily in their favor, it's now nearly impossible to survive unless the survivors can camp out the initial few zombies without losing anyone to their ranks at the start, which makes the gameplay on this map very binary and not as fun as the other maps. I can't really judge it too harshly, though, since Zombie Heavy's changes were really overtuned, and the tight corridors and low ceilings of this map really cater to Zombie Heavy already. If he weren't so blatantly overpowered, I think the map might actually play well, albeit being more difficult to survive on than the others.

Oh and I'm glad they fixed the Zombie Demoman bugs. Kinda. I've still seen some invincible Zombie Demomen running around.

Overall, while I do like this update, I think it was too heavy-handed. They laid on the buffs too thick too quickly, and while most buffs on their own would've been fine, all in conjunction they make the gamemode feel unfair most of the time. Still, it's at least interesting, and it definitely is still very fun even if it isn't terribly fair.

And one last thought before I close this out, I just really hope this mode sticks around after Halloween ends. Vscript gamemodes like this are the lifeblood of TF2's future, and I don't say that lightly. Prior to their introduction with VSH in the Summer 2023 update, we hadn't gotten any significant new gameplay mechanics or content since Jungle Inferno with the last batch of balance changes and weapons. Now, we're getting tons of new modes and a lot of new maps like Crasher and Perks with great, unique twists on existing modes. To take Zombie Infection, which is the most fun I've had in years playing this game, and make it limited to one month out of the year, would be the game shooting itself in the foot in terms of reason to keep playing it. Also seriously just give us a community gamemodes tab in the casual map selection menu, it'd make VSH stop cluttering up the misc tab with 4 whole maps and also pave the way for smoothly implementing other unique new modes.

#team fortress 2 #tf2 #zombie infection #tf2 zombie infection

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