#of utter devotion that makes me want to chew plaster

[menlove]

once again just proving to myself that I don't dislike straight couples in fiction, the man just has to be ride or die ready to commit murder or suicide for the woman. he has to be pathetic. he has to be soaking wet and get on his knees at LEAST once begging for her affection and/or forgiveness.

[solnishkawrites]

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Fanfic -- Basilisk/Uno

summary: Uno, a down-on-his-luck rookie Freedomer, is asked to perform a funeral service by an ex-Monolithian with a terrifying gaze.

Uno sat in a corner on the Freedom side of Yanov Station, slowly chewing a piece of jerky. It was as tough as shoeleather and didn’t taste much better, and the salt stung the raw flesh of his split lip. He was chewing on the left side of his mouth even though the effort of chewing was making it sore, because the right side was even sorer as well as swelling beneath a bruise left by a bandit’s fist. His supplies now consisted of the food in his hand and a bottle of water sitting next to his foot. Everything else had been taken.

Uno stared down at the dirty floor in front of him, trying to think of a way to un-fuck his life. A solution presented itself in the form of a pair of boots coming to stand in front him. He looked up, saw Basilisk staring down at him with his arms folded across his chest, and immediately changed his mind.

“…Hi,” Uno said, his eyes darting to the door behind the ex-Monolithian’s legs before he could stop himself. Basilisk didn’t react; he was probably used to other stalkers eying the exit when he approached them.

“Can you do a funeral service?”

Uno coughed on his jerky, then managed to recover himself. “For, uh, for who?” he asked hoarsely.

“Havoc.”

Uno had a few vague memories of a red-haired member of Basilisk’s little band of ex-Monolithians, one who crooned songs to his gun as he cleaned it and cradled it against his chest when he slept—like a child with a favorite toy, a talisman against the horrors of the dark.

“I’m sorry,” he lied.

Basilisk’s expression didn’t change. “You won’t do the funeral?”

“Wha… no, no, I meant—I’m sorry for your loss.”

Basilisk blinked, which was rare enough to be worth mentioning. His eyes had earned him his name: they were a very bright green, and had a piercing quality that nobody in Yanov Station could tolerate for more than a few seconds at a time. To look Basilisk in the eye was to get the feeling that he was figuring out a dozen different ways to kill you as well as reading your mind.

Uno looked at the space next to the ex-Monolithian’s ear while waiting for a response. Eventually, Basilisk spoke: “The body is outside.”

He turned and left. Uno grabbed his water bottle, stuffed the jerky into his pocket, and followed.

What was left of Havoc was lying next to one of the train cars outside of the station. A pair of blind dogs were gnawing at it. Basilisk drew the pistol at his hip and killed one, and the other yelped in terror and ran away. He holstered the pistol, unslung his assault rifle, and tossed it to Uno. The rookie Freedomer caught it awkwardly.

“Keep watch while I dig,” Basilisk ordered. He picked up a shovel lying next to the corpse.

Uno was still looking at the assault rifle. “What is this?”

“SG 550.”

“What does that mean?”

“Means it’s a good gun. Keep watch, rookie.”

“Right, right.” Uno held the rifle gingerly. It was a tool and therefore meant to be used—but it was also a type of gun he had only seen a few times before, and was probably worth his life if it somehow broke into pieces in his hands. After a few more seconds of anxious staring he managed to tear his gaze away and start scanning the hilly, irradiated terrain surrounding them.

Basilisk dug. It was a hot day, the sky a cloudless blue and the sun a white-hot hammer against the tired, dry anvil of the earth. There was no wind. Flies whined and buzzed around Havoc’s corpse, which was already rotting and stank to high Heaven. Uno leaned against the rusted side of a train car, watching a mirage shimmer against the horizon. The loudest sound was the shovel biting down into the dirt and Basilisk’s heavy breathing. His face was red from exertion, and sweat had plastered his hair to his head and ran down his face. He had taken off his pack, but had kept his heavy Kevlar armor on.

Eventually, Uno couldn’t stand to it any longer. “Hey,” he said, making Basilisk look up. “Take a break.” He tossed him the water bottle.

Basilisk caught it, uncapped it, and drank deeply. Uno watched as a trickle of water spilled out of the corner of his mouth and ran down his neck, vanishing below the collar of his shirt. When the bottle was empty the ex-Monolithian held it for a moment, looking down at it before looking back up at Uno.

“You gave me your water.”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Why?”

“Because… you looked thirsty?”

Basilisk kept looking at him. Uno was sweating now from more than just the heat of the day, and he made the mistake of meeting the ex-Monolithian’s eyes—and was trapped.

He drowned in a sea of pitiless green as the whine of the cicadas became louder and louder around him. He drowned, hypnotized, held immobile the way the eyes of a snake might paralyze a bird.

He’s going to kill me, Uno thought, at the same time that Basilisk said something.

Uno flinched and came back to himself.

“What?” he croaked.

“I will repay you,” Basilisk repeated.

Uno nodded dazedly and looked away, gripping the assault rifle tighter. He stared towards the horizon without really seeing anything, breathing shallowly and letting the heat of the day sink back into him. The ice that had somehow crawled up his spine to twist around his heart melted. He heard cloth rustling, and then the reassuring noise of the ex-Monolithian digging. When Uno’s heart-rate returned to normal he chanced a look at Basilisk.

His Kevlar armor was lying next to his discarded Freedom jacket and blue-and-white striped undershirt, and without his usual, bulky clothing he was… very fit. From neck to wrists Basilisk was pale and untouched by the sun, his arms and shoulders ropily muscular and the faint lines of abdominal muscles crossing his stomach. But there was a starkness to his collarbones and a thinness in his fingers that spoke of hunger, too, and far too many scars.

He looked down at the assault rifle that Basilisk had given him, then up at the ex-Monolithian’s unarmored torso. Then back to the rifle.

“You’re not going to shoot me,” Basilisk said without looking up. He continued to dig, then walked slowly around the grave while looking down into it.

“How do you know that?”

“You’re not a killer.”

Uno opened his mouth to reply, but there was a rustling from the underbrush surrounding them. The blind dog had come back. It slunk closer, growling softly, and Uno reacted without thinking. He stooped, picking up a fist-sized stone from the dirt at his feet, and lobbed it with all his might towards the dog. The stone struck its muzzle and the dog fled, yelping in pain with blood on its nose and lips.

“I gave you that gun for a reason,” Basilisk said.

“I didn’t want to waste your ammo,” Uno replied, which was at least partially the truth.

Basilisk grunted, dug out a few more shovelfuls of dirt, then appeared to be satisfied. “It’s done,” he said, turning his horrific stare on the rookie Freedomer again. “Say the words,” he commanded.

“Which ones?” Uno asked.

“Any. Just… say them. Havoc liked to listen to that Dutyer preacher. Say some words about God.”

“I… I don’t know religious words in Ukrainian.” Uno knew some. He knew that God was Boha and angel was anhel, but that was about it. He didn’t know the verb for to pray.

Basilisk looked at him for a moment, then shrugged. “Say them in your native tongue.”

“Okay,” Uno said. He took a deep breath and looked away, up to the blue of the sky, and thought of his grandmother in Zamora praying the rosary. She did that every morning and evening, even as the cancer that ultimately killed her made her hands shake like leaves in the wind. Uno had hated it. Why bother? God hadn’t cured her, despite her faith and her goodness. God had let her die. God had let Havoc die, too, who was Basilisk’s only friend. Now Basilisk was alone and Uno was alone too, and Basilisk wanted him to ‘say some words about God’, that bastard, that utter bastard.

“Okay,” Uno said again. He walked the two steps to Basilisk and took the ex-Monolithian’s hands, feeling the warmth of his skin and the calluses on his fingers. He folded them together gently in a praying position, held them there for a moment, and then let go.

“Padre Nuestro,” Uno began, folding his own hands, “que estás en el cielo. Santificado sea tu nombre.” He thought of Zamora baking under the summer sun, just as the Zone did, of the closed coffin containing his grandmother’s skeletal, tumor-ridden body being lowered into the grave around which too few mourners gathered. He thought of Havoc, unhinged and violent but as devoted to Basilisk as a knight to his lord, soon to be buried in a dirt hole around which two dirty, probably cancerous men stood.

 “Venga tu reino. Hágase tu voluntad en la tierra como en el cielo. Danos hoy nuestro pan de cada día.” Beside him, Basilisk breathed quietly, his hands still folded.

“Perdona nuestras ofensas, como también nosotros perdonamos a los que nos ofenden. No nos dejes caer en tentación y líbranos del mal. Amen.”

Uno took a deep, shuddering breath and opened his eyes. Basilisk was already moving, kneeling down to cradle Havoc’s body against his chest and carry him into the grave. He curled the ex-Monolithian’s body in on itself, arranging his limbs as though Havoc was sleeping, then stepped out of the grave and began shoveling dirt into the grave. Slowly, Havoc’s body was entombed.

Numbly, Uno gathered two mostly-straight branches and tied them into a cross with a bit of string, driving it into the soft earth at the head of Havoc’s grave. Basilisk nodded approval, then looked up at the rookie Freedomer.

“Your words were good,” he said.

“Thanks,” Uno said. He licked his split lip, forced himself to look into Basilisk’s eyes—and didn’t drown. He handed the SG 550 back.

Basilisk shouldered the gun and turned back towards Yanov Station. “I have food for you, and some other things.”

“What things?”

“Things you need. Now come on, rookie.”

Uno followed him.

[aion-rsa]

Cyberpunk 2077 Review Roundup

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Cyberpunk 2077 is arguably the most highly-anticipated game of 2020, and after several delays and other controversies, it’s finally here. Fans will be able to get their hands on CD Projekt Red’s new RPG on Dec. 10 (unless you pre-ordered from Best Buy). Ahead of the global launch, here’s what critics are saying about the game so far:

Andrew Reiner, Game Informer:

“Cyberpunk 2077 is a work of awe-inspiring ambition, dazzling with its massive scale and creative vision. The world of Night City is a metropolis of futuristic art, stealing your eye with stunning neon-lit architecture and streets filled with citizens made of flesh and metal. Night City is an open world that immediately pulls you in and keeps you engaged with its dark narrative, meaningful player choice, and overwhelming amount of side content.”

Score: 9/10

Kallie Plagge, Gamespot:

“It also bears a mention: Cyberpunk 2077 is phenomenally buggy. I played a pre-release build that was updated during the review period, and there’s a day-one patch planned as well, but the scale of technical issues is too large to reasonably expect immediate fixes. I encountered some kind of bug on every mission I went on, from more common, funnier ones like characters randomly T-posing to several complete crashes. I didn’t notice much of an improvement after the update, either. In a very late-game, very important fight, the game froze on me–twice. I ended up taking a break out of frustration before attempting, and finally succeeding, the third time.

These bugs, more than any game I’ve played in years, took me out of the experience often. Non-interactable items like cardboard boxes will explode when you interact with something next to them; UI elements will stay on-screen long after they’re meant to, which is only solved by reloading a save; characters will interrupt themselves during proper dialogue sequences by repeating a throwaway line they’d say in the overworld, seriously disrupting key moments; I died once and, upon reloading my last save, found my hacking ability no longer worked, forcing me to roll back to an autosave 10 minutes prior. The list is extensive.

Score: 7/10

James Davenport, PC Gamer:

“I found it moving and life-affirming in the final moments, even in the face of near certain death and a relentless onslaught of bugs. I suppose it’s an appropriate thematic throughline though: Cyberpunk 2077 is a game about V coming apart at the seams, in a city coming apart at the seams, in a game coming apart at the seams. Play it in a few months.”

Score: 78/100

Tom Marks, IGN:

“Cyberpunk 2077 kicks you into its beautiful and dazzlingly dense cityscape with few restrictions. It offers a staggering amount of choice in how to build your character, approach quests, and confront enemies, and your decisions can have a tangible and natural-feeling impact on both the world around you and the stories of the people who inhabit it. Those stories can be emotional, funny, dark, exciting, and sometimes all of those things at once. The main quest may be shorter than expected when taken on its own and it’s not always clear what you need to do to make meaningful changes to its finale, but the multitude of side quests available almost from the start can have a surprisingly powerful effect on the options you have when you get there. It’s a shame that frustratingly frequent bugs can occasionally kill an otherwise well-set mood, but Cyberpunk 2077’s impressively flexible design makes it a truly remarkable RPG.”

Score: 9/10

James Billcliffe, VG24/7:

“In the midst of such intense anticipation and scrutiny, it’s easy to get carried away with what Cyberpunk 2077 could have been. The final experience might be more familiar than many predicted, with plenty of elements that aren’t perfect, but it’s dripping with detail and engaging stories. With so much to see and do, Cyberpunk 2077 is the kind of RPG where you blink and hours go by, which is just what we need to finish off 2020.”

Score: 5/5

Carolyn Petit, Polygon:

“One of my fears about Cyberpunk 2077 was that it was going to be so cynical and nihilistic that playing it would be like wallowing in grim hopelessness, that the cheapness of human life in the game’s world would be mirrored by the game itself. But that’s not the case. It’s easy to lose the human thread in the overwhelming glut of stuff Cyberpunk 2077 puts on your plate, with your map plastered with crimes you can violently “neutralize” for a reward from the police, and fixers constantly sending you text messages about underdeveloped one-off jobs you can take on to earn a bit of extra cash. But the humanity is there, if you look for it.

“And that humanity is the saving grace of this alluring yet uneven and deeply flawed game. I can’t deny that Night City wowed me with its scale, its verticality, and its sense of history. But I wish I could see people like me on its streets as something more than objects. I wish that the game’s politics were more radical. Yes, I know I shouldn’t look to a colossal game that was itself produced under exploitative labor conditions to lead the charge of anticapitalist liberation, but I wish the sparks of Johnny Silverhand’s ideological rage got to burn brighter, that Cyberpunk 2077 felt more interested in envisioning new futures than in reminiscing over bygone glories. Neither its gameplay nor its narrative can imagine the bold possibilities that I find so central to the best of cyberpunk. But what it does offer is visions of people trying to make do and get by in a world that’s trying to eat them alive, and sometimes those people get by with a little help from their friends. It’s not the revolution I hoped for, but it’s something.”

Riley MacLeod, Kotaku:

“I haven’t fallen in love with playing Cyberpunk 2077, but I haven’t loathed it either. Some moments have been exciting or moving, while others have just felt like stuff to do. I’m middle-of-the-road on it so far—having fun in spots, left wanting the game to be more like what made The Witcher 3 great in others. The game itself wants so badly for you to think it’s cool, that it’s the cutting edge of graphics and game design, that it talks about edgy topics like body modification, corporate power, and the internet. It tries too hard, stuffing itself with a tangle of complicated roleplaying game systems; with so many cyberpunk tropes, plots, and slang; with neon and holograms and so many in-game ads, most of them for sex; with car chases and hacking and corporate espionage and double-crossing powerful people; with a world where the human body is made obsolete with money and technology, while also chewed up and spat out for the sake of capital. There’s an admirable diversity of races, sexualities, genders, and body types, but they feel like a veneer. It’s not a politically progressive game: these identities are all in service of the game’s vision of the cyberpunk future, one that can feel implausible and alienating but also has hints of the world we live in today.

Chris Tapsell, Eurogamer:

“It’s still early on for me, I should say – after 30 hours I was still, no doubt to the horror of many with vanishing spare time, just finding my feet – but much of that focus is placed on Cyberpunk‘s central story, which has so far been a welcome surprise. Beneath the noise – and Cyberpunk is truly cacophonous – there is a lingering thread of tenderness to it. I’ve opted to play V as a woman, with a ‘Corpo’ background, and she’s been voiced impeccably by Cherami Leigh and written with some skill. There’s real tenderness here, real vulnerability – a lot of “this city’ll chew you up and spit you out” stuff, sure, but there’s a waver to the tough talk, and from more than just V. Cyberpunk‘s story so far is one of fear, the surface of it plated in chrome and angst and body horror gore, but still built on a core of humanity. It’s more than I expected, and more than we’ve been taught to expect, frankly, by the brashness of the marketing, the pitching of Night City as this great, submissive, ultra-hedonist playground. Night City is a vile swamp, in actual fact, and Cyberpunk‘s characters are drowning in it. It is, so far, more than just a synthwave skin on another puerile open world.”

Rob Zacny, VICE:

“Cyberpunk 2077 is a game of the past and its forgotten futures. Its setting is a pastiche that was overtaken by history and technology. It is a piece of software that is a throwback to PC gaming of the 1990s and early 2000s in every possible way, and its aesthetic and narrative sensibilities of a teenage boy’s bedroom in the 1980s. Yet its lavish and utterly sincere devotion to its influences recalls what has made these dated visions so alluring and enduring. Cyberpunk is too tacky and graceless to be cool, but it’s very big, and very loud, and sometimes that’s all it takes to be awesome.”

Brad Chacos, PCWorld:

“Even if the main narrative somehow stumbles at the finish line, it wouldn’t take away from that sublime core gameplay experience. After a dozen hours, I haven’t come close to exhausting the available activities in just the first of Night City’s six districts and surrounding Badlands. No matter what happens with V, I can’t wait to discover all of Night City’s secrets. I’m in love.”

Richard Scott Jones, PCGamesN:

“Retroactive trigger warning about ‘politics in games’ for whoever cares about such things, by the way, but if that’s you, then you’d best steer clear of Cyberpunk 2077 if you stand by your claimed convictions. This is one of the most explicitly politically charged games ever made – Mike Pondsmith designed the tabletop game upon which it’s based as a “cautionary tale,” and after the killing of George Floyd back in June, reiterated that his universe is “a warning, not an aspiration“. Anyone who insists it’s pure, meaningless escapism is hopelessly deluded.

“Even if such sentiments are uttered in sincere good faith, I think it’s a tragic diminishment of our medium to insist that it shouldn’t tackle politics. Cyberpunk 2077 might not push quite as many boundaries in game design as a landmark release could, but if it can convince more people that games can and should take a position on issues of substance rather than peddle mindless thrills, that’ll be a worthy legacy.”

Stay tuned for Den of Geek’s review of Cyberpunk 2077 next week!

The post Cyberpunk 2077 Review Roundup appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3lRMjRF